Dear Sars,

So, here’s the deal. I know you’re not a lawyer, but I thought you might have some information since you have so much experience with cats.

My boyfriend Joe and I had been considering getting a cat for about year. Neither of us had ever owned pets before so we were somewhat wary, but Joe decided just to go for it and bought me a kitten for my birthday. I was thrilled and neither of us could wait to bring her home.

One month, and several visits to the pet store, later, we brought Mavis home (she was seven and a half weeks old). The pet store told us she had all of her shots and had been checked out twice by a vet, and although she was small, they thought all she needed was a little TLC.

Being that we were first-time cat owners we had been reading a ton on kitten care (as an aside, kittenrescue.org is a tremendously helpful site).

She seemed to be doing great and Joe and I were head over heels for her. Joe works from home so he was spending virtually every second of the day with her. We had picked her up on a Sunday and by Tuesday things went south. After hanging out with her all evening, she suddenly wasn’t walking correctly and then collapsed in the kitchen and was having bowel movements with blood in the stool. We immediately rushed her to the nearest emergency care facility. By the time we got there she was almost gone. The vet told us she was in severe shock and he would have to move quickly if we wanted to save her.

I was a complete sobbing wreck and Joe was barely holding it together. They gave her fluids and had to give her a transfusion, but when he came back out Mavis was standing on her own and anxious to be rid of the IV. The vet told us she would have to spend the night at the VCA hospital. So, we admitted her to the VCA and although she was doing better her temperature was still down and her chances were about 50/50.

When the vet called the next day she told us that Mavis was doing great and we could pick her up that evening. Although they could not find a definitive reason why she was sick, all her tests were negative and she may have anemia and in all likelihood had been very sick all along.

When we picked her up we were given instructions on making her eat, and if she didn’t to use a syringe with chicken baby food. When they brought her out, though, she was listless like she was when she collapsed. We hoped she would get better when we brought her home; besides, we knew we couldn’t afford to keep her hospitalized for another night.

About an hour after we got home we knew there was no hope. We just tried to comfort her and let her go. So fucking sad.

We spoke to the pet store the next day and told them what happened. They were upset, but refused to even discuss a refund for the purchase. We were too upset to deal with it so we put it aside.

A couple of days later a friend of mine said we should look into pet lemon laws to cover the purchase and vet fees (which came to about $800).

So, my questions are…do we have any recourse to recover these expenses? Should the pet store be held liable for selling us a sick cat? Are there pet lemon laws?

We are doing much better now but are still stinging from the loss. I’m amazed at how quickly we became attached to her. Now everyone is telling us that we should get another cat, but I’m scared. I don’t ever want to go through that shit again. But people are saying it will help us deal better to get another one…what do you think?

Thank you,
Can’t imagine a better little kitty than Mavis

Dear Can’t,

I’ve never heard of a pet lemon law, but you could Google it and see what you find. Alas, unless you have a signed piece of paper guaranteeing that the animal is in good health, it’s probably not worth bothering with. The more important lesson here: Don’t get pets at a pet store. Food, toys, sure. The pets themselves? No. A pet store wants money for the animal, and a check-up by a vet cuts into its profit margin, plus pet store staff usually don’t have clue one about what aisle the catnip is on, much less whether a cat has FIV. I mean, not to malign all pet-store owners here, but most of the time, for anything more evolved than a Sea Monkey you’d better not risk it.

It’s a better idea to ask your local vet if any of her patients have had kittens recently; she can vouch for the environment and the health of the mom, certainly. Or go to a shelter, most of which have on-site vets and a legal requirement to disclose any conditions the cat might have — shelter cats come with their own challenges, sometimes, but it’s good for your karma and many places will throw in the spay/neuter for free just to make sure it gets done.

And yes, I would go ahead and start browsing for another cat. Go down to the local shelter and have a look; grab a tear-off from the vet’s bulletin board and call. But keep in mind that cats do dumb crap that costs money — all cats, all the time. They eat wood and need surgery to take it out, they fall off the tops of doors and break their legs, they get bit in the head by deer and need brain floss (true story…sigh), and it’s nobody’s fault. Well, it’s their fault, but…they’re cats. It sucks that you had to learn that in your first three days of cat ownership, and your next cat experience is probably not going to go quite as tragically as Mavis, but it’s not a Purina commercial every minute. If you can hang with that, go get yourself a kitten and let the games begin.

Dear Sarah —

So. Hey. I’m sure this isn’t the most ground-breaking letter you will receive today, but I hope you can help me out.

I transferred to Big University a little over two years ago. I love it here. I’m doing well in classes, I have friends, et cetera. Life is pretty good.

But I kept quiet about why I left Little College. Just recently I told my best friend (this girl is like the other half of my soul) that I had been raped during my first semester there and couldn’t go back for the second. She was really supportive, wonderful, did everything right. I am still freaking a little and I’m still working on dealing, but now that I’m talking about it I think…I think I can be okay.

Here’s the thing. About nine months ago I was at a little get-together at a friend’s house with a bunch of people I didn’t really know. It ended up being really late and no one who had a car was sober enough to drive home, blah blah blah unplanned-sleepover-cakes.

I’ve always said that, to me, heaven is a big fluffy white bed with everyone you love in it and you can just cuddle and play videogames and eat chocolate-covered popcorn with them all day long. But since what happened, I hadn’t been able to sleep in the same bed with anyone. I couldn’t let other people get that close without feeling trapped or scared.

So the little impromptu sleepover had me very freaked out, especially when the host hauled out a number of mattresses that we patchworked together to make one really big bed on the living room floor. I couldn’t very well freak out and go sleep in the corner, so I settled down next to May, who I knew a little better than I knew anyone else, with as much personal space as I could eke out.

Random fact: The reason I knew May a little better than everyone else is the fact that she’s the village bisexual and I’d come out to her a couple of months earlier and had drunkenly made out with her the night before. But that’s actually fairly immaterial.

The point is, in the middle of the night, I had this nightmare and I freaked out. Sat up in bed, couldn’t figure out where I was, why all these people were in the room with me, couldn’t breathe. I was just…scared. But May woke up, just a little, and said something like, “Don’t worry. You’re safe. Go back to sleep,” before tugging me back down into bed and wrapping her arms around me.

It took me a little while to calm down, but I…I did feel very safe with her.

A lot of stuff has happened since then — I developed this terrible (I now realize misplaced) crush on her and told her about it, and then things were weird for a little while but then they were back to normal and now we’re friends and things are fine.

I just…this is my question. I want to tell her how much that night meant to me, even though she was probably still half-asleep and doesn’t remember comforting me anyway. I want to thank her for what she did, because it was this little momentary kindness that still means the world to me.

I still haven’t found anyone I feel safe sleeping next to. But I know I’ll get there.

So how do I thank May? She doesn’t know about what happened at Little College, and I don’t really want to tell her, but I want her to know that I appreciate what she did.

Sign me,
Grateful to May

Dear Grateful,

If your crush on her is actually gone, I don’t think I see the big deal. Write her a note and tell her that, for various reasons you won’t get into, you really appreciated her comfort that night, even if she doesn’t remember it.

But if you do still have a crush on her, or if you think she’ll think you do, maybe it’s best to just leave it. She did you a kindness; friends do them for each other every day, and acknowledging them when you can is important, but if the time to do so naturally has passed, let it go.

Dear Sars,

I think your advice rocks, and I’m hoping you can help me with a problem. So, I graduate in a couple of months. I think this is wonderful, I’ve worked hard, I’m graduating with honors, and to top it off I’m a “non-traditional student” in that I started my first bachelor’s degree at 24 and I’m married. Husband also thinks this is wonderful, he has been a great support to me and is proud of my accomplishment. I love my mom to death, but she’s a little less enthusiastic.

After high school, for financial reasons mostly, I went to community college to become a nurse. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to do more than that. I guess Mom doesn’t really think a college degree is that important or that I should be making a big deal of it, even though she has her master’s. She bitched the whole time it took her to finish the degree about how ridiculous it was that she had to do it to keep her job as a special education teacher. She’s been lukewarm at best to my happy stories about life at university, and sees my complaints (which I’ve tried to limit for this very reason) as support for her not-really-worth-it theory.

I invited Grandma (Mom’s mom) to come out for graduation, because I haven’t seen her in a while, because she hasn’t visited us in Colorado, and because I wanted to give her the opportunity to make up for not coming to my wedding five years ago. I was really hurt, she’s my only grandparent, and I was her first grandchild to get married. Her excuse was that she was fighting with my mom at the time. They’ve mostly made up since then. Grandma isn’t the nicest or most fun person to be around; she’s opinionated, has a very large martyr complex, and tends not to be satisfied with almost anything anyone ever tries to do for her. However, she is my only living grandparent, and I want to do the right thing. I offered to pay for her plane ticket. She told me she couldn’t be more thrilled that I had invited her, and really wants to visit if it all works out.

The thing is, Grandma usually goes to California around that time of year to spend time with two of her other daughters. So I’m trying to find a multi-destination ticket to keep everything on track. It seems reasonable to me that everyone involved split the cost. Everyone else seems to think that’s reasonable too, so that isn’t the problem. Apparently, although Grandma is excited about the invite, she’s worried about coming to Colorado given Colorado’s notoriously fickle climate. She prefers direct flights, but that’s not an option. Obviously, those aren’t things I can control, so I kinda don’t want to hear about them. I’ll empathize, but I can’t fix it, so I don’t want to waste time worrying about it.

I fussed at my mom the other night about being stressed about all of these little issues which are making it seem like more trouble than it’s worth to have anyone attend my graduation. I think I’m justifiably stressed, I work, I’m married, I’m a full-time student nine weeks away from graduating, and I’m trying to figure out what I should do about graduate school — that’s another letter!

Now, I just went on the most unbelievable guilt trip after reading the email (!) my mom sent. According to her, I’m using events to get people to prove they love me, I haven’t forgiven my mom for not being more involved in my wedding planning (completely not true), and I’m starting to look like a bottomless pit of never-satisfied just like Grandma. I thought we have a pretty good relationship, but I’ve been crying my eyes out after being so unfairly called out by MY OWN MOTHER. BTW, Mom and Grandma obviously don’t have the healthiest relationship, but my mom tries hard to keep things with Grandma as neutral and functional as possible, with mixed results. Is it possible she’s projecting her own mother-daughter issues onto me?

So, now on to the question: do I continue with the plan of having Grandma visit? Do I tell Mom to stuff it? Do I just go to London (fares are wicked cheap right now) to celebrate my graduation instead of trying to have my family together? Am I wrong for thinking in this case it should be a little bit about me, or is that horribly selfish? Tell it like it is, Sars, if I can take it from my mother, I can take it from a perfect stranger.

Thanks for helping,
Don’t want to be third generation putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional”

Dear Third,

I would bet American money that your mom is 1) upset that you invited your grandma, and offered to pay her way, and didn’t do the same for her; 2) afraid that it’s because of the wedding-planning thing, or that you don’t think she loves you enough, which is why she’s turning those accusations around on you (i.e. she feels guilty); 3) envious of/feeling competitive about your successes, and unable to handle that graciously.

In other words, I don’t think she really means any of that stuff, but she put it in play anyway, so now she can suck it. Answer the email and tell her that nothing she’s said is true, but the fact that she did say it is tremendously hurtful, and you resent it, deeply. Do not elaborate, or ask for an apology. Let her chew on that.

Next, call your grandma and tell her that you understand she has doubts about the trip to Colorado, but you need to make the arrangements now; strongly imply that, you know, it’s a gift, you aren’t running Priceline over here, and she will have to take it or leave it within a fortnight or the offer is off the table. If she chooses to leave it, fuck her and your mother in their respective ears and go abroad, because this is one of those “no good deed goes unpunished” situations where, at a certain point, you have to realize that you’re dealing with emotional toddlers and go do your own thing instead.

Dear Sars,

So there’s this boy. But the boy is not the problem, for once. He’s my beloved hunk of Canadian Bacon, or CB for short. The problem is my mother.

My mother started dating my father when she was nineteen. They married when she was twenty-one. She went straight from her parents’ home with her six other siblings to living with my dad. In May 2002, we lost my father to cancer. She is devastated, lost and on her own for the first time in her fifty-seven years.

Enter CB. I fall in love with CB. He falls in love with me. CB lives in Toronto. I live in Texas. I am sick and tired of Texas, having been here for twenty-five of my thirty-one years. I want to live in Toronto, because I want to marry CB, but also because I am restless to be somewhere new and I am growing to love Toronto. Hearing this news, my mother threw a fit. She’s not telling me not to marry CB, she just refuses to entertain the thought that I am moving over a thousand miles away.

According to her, I am abandoning everything and everyone I know to be in a foreign country with people she doesn’t know and even I can’t know very well yet. I will devastate our family by moving so far away. She will never see her future grandchildren, because CB and I will have no money to bring them down to see her and she won’t come to see them because she “doesn’t do cold.” Direct quote. According to her, if CB and I have children and then split up, I will have to leave them in Canada, because I will not be able to retain custody of them and bring them to the U.S. Also, he could turn abusive or become a drunk and she might never know about it, because she’s not there to see. I am leaving behind the country of my birth and have no idea how difficult or expensive it will be to live there. Canadian taxes are higher, too. She concluded one rant with, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because you’re not going. Simple as that.”

In short, she feels that she will lose her daughter if I go to Toronto and one more loss after my father’s death will kill her too. I have pointed out that Toronto is hardly the moon — it’s practically an American city, just with less litter, crime and a few signs written in French. CB has a business there; she said he could just sell it. I called bullshit on that right quick. I point out that I want to move. She says I have no idea how hard relocating is going to be, so how could I know I want this? (???) She tried to bribe us with buying us a house in Houston, a city which we both hate, if only we would move to the States. Every argument and counter-argument I come up with, she has an answer to refute it. And in the end, she keeps asking how I can even think about abandoning her at this time in her life?

I want to ask, how can she think of restraining me? I just got out of a horrible marriage, CB is a wonderful man who loves me more than breathing. I’m 31, my life has been in limbo for the past ten years while I was shackled to my waste-of-skin ex-husband. I have caught a whiff of life and I want to pursue it. I’m leaving, there’s no doubting that, but my question is how do I handle her tears, her arguments, her needling me, her rallying my other family members against my decision? I’m probably not leaving until next September when my apartment lease runs out, mainly because I can’t afford the extra outlay of cash and she has refused to help in any way. So that leaves me with nine more months of this.

Right now, I am listening to her arguments, but treating my decision as final and sticking to, “I understand, Mom, but I want to go. I’m sorry” as the best response, since I’ve run through all my rational rebuttals. Any other suggestions?

The Yellow Rose of…Ontario?

Dear Rose,

Yeah: Stop responding.

She pulls this crap because — sing it with me if you know the words — you let her. You play into it. You try to discuss it with her when, really, it’s not up for discussion; you try to get her permission or her blessing or whatever when, really, it’s not required. Yes, it’s sad that you’ll move so far away. Yes, she’ll feel even lonelier. And yes, she will get over it, because she will have to, because at the end of the day, her loneliness is not her job.

I don’t mean to sound unfeeling here, because I don’t doubt she’s had a hard go of it with your father’s death, but asking you to give up a relationship and a life decision so that she can keep an eye on you is…beyond. Period. Stop treating it like it isn’t; stop treating it at all. The next time she starts in, cut it off, by whatever means necessary — get up from the table, end the phone call, leave the room, whatever. And tell her that’s what you’ll do, from now on. “Mom, I love you and I’ll miss you and I know this is hard for you…but it’s happening, and you will have to find a way to cope. Consider this the last discussion we have on the subject.” Back it up.

She thinks she has a vote because you keep giving her one. Close the booth.

Dear Sars,

I thought that you, Queen of all things Grammar and Word-Usage-Related,
would have an opinion on this malformed (I think) usage that I encounter
often. The annoyance in question: “Will you itch my back?” or similar. I
take that to mean “Will you cause my back to itch?” when what the speaker
intends is “Will you cause my back to stop itching?” or, more simply,
“Will you scratch my back?” So, bottom-line, are “itch” and “scratch”
interchangeable in this context? I eagerly await your verdict.

Kat

Dear Kat,

In their original etymologies, probably not, but I hear it all the time, and I think it’s one of those regional usages or transpositions that isn’t worth getting worked up over. Let’s hit the books…

The 11C does not say that “itch” is synonymous with “scratch.” Metcalf’s How We Talk, which I expected to have a note on it, doesn’t; neither does Garner.

So, yeah, it’s incorrect, but it’s like “let me ride you to the airport” for “let me give you a ride to the airport” — it’s just a usage tic, and I wouldn’t bother correcting people unless it turns up in a piece of formal writing.

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