The Vine: November 3, 2009
Hi,
I have scoured the internet and your site for the past few hours over an etiquette dilemma that’s just fallen into my lap.
Backstory: My mom is an only child.She has three adult cousins on her dad’s side. To protect the guilty I’m just gonna call them One, Two, and Three.Three is my Godmother.
About 10 years ago, my grandmother died.She had apparently been covering up a lot of my grandfather’s health issues, including but not limited to some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s. After she passed he moved in with us, and then into assisted living (my parents weren’t comfortable with him being alone in the house). He had a myriad of health conditions including hips that were fused outside of their sockets and it was hard to walk.He would get panicky and call people.Three got sick of the calls and started prank-calling him and generally, for lack of a better word, was being a twat.
When he passed away there was a SIGNIFICANT amount of money that came to my mom and dad, and a large trust fund was set up for me.Three was pissed because she got nothing. In the years following she left my parents and myself out of events for her daughters, ranging from baptisms, graduation parties, birthdays and first communions. My parents aren’t bad guests and give very good gifts.
Well, One’s daughter is getting married in a few weeks.Originally the wedding was supposed to take place last year, around the time of my wedding.(We invited all of One, Two, and Three’s families, even though I didn’t want Three there.)My parents ran into Three’s husband and said something about the wedding.He avoided eye contact and said “who knows if this is even going to happen!”
Later my parents ran into One, Two, and Three’s father at a wake, and as they were leaving made mention of seeing him at the wedding.He laughed and said yeah.My parents spoke to me, and I stated that I had spoken to her on Facebook and she’s been posting updates about the wedding planning.My parents thought nothing of it and assumed they would be getting their invite.
Flash forward to Three weeks ago.My husband and I get our invite.Knowing what a giant pain in the ass it is when people don’t RSVP in a timely fashion, I called my parents and let them know I got it, and mailed back the RSVP that we would be attending.
My parents hadn’t gotten theirs, but assumed, maybe it had gone to their previous address or it got lost.My mother followed up with One, who stated that daughter was doing a lot of the planning with Aunt Three (daughter’s mom is dead). One stated that daughter is having a small wedding and didn’t want a lot of older people there (my parents are in their fifties, it’s not like they are octogenarians).
Herein lies the dilemma.My parents said if they were told up front before all the invites went out about the small wedding they would have been okay with it.However, they weren’t and because of this my parents are pissed.But they have stated that if I choose to go, there will be no ill will about this and they will not hold it against me.They stated that we RSVPed before all of this went down, and we’re grown-ups and can make these decisions on ourown.They also stated that if we choose not to go, they will cover for us (we are going to CA for our anniversary) and will say we missed our flight or something.
I’m not particularly close to this side of the family, as they have all sort of always been this way, believing that my grandparents owed them (and they were quite generous) but never felt they had to give anything back.I rarely see them except at weddings and funerals.
Part of me wants to go and make obnoxious comments the whole time about how completely tacky the whole thing is. Part of me wants to go so can punch Three in the face and explain to her what a fuckwad she is.Part of me wants to go just to keep the peace.Part of me wants to bail out of loyalty to my parents, and part of me says, “YAY 200 bucks I don’t have to spend on a gift!”
What do I do.I know how pissed I was when a couple of people who RSVPed didn’t show at my wedding.Do I bow out gracefully, fake a missed flight, or call and say I’d rather chew my own arm off then attend a wedding of someone who can’t figure out the etiquette?
Emily Post would cut a bitch over this!
Dear Cut,
Perhaps, but she wouldn’t do it at the wedding itself.You RSVPed in the affirmative; therefore, you should attend, if you can manage not to make the event about your grievances with Three, or with her malign influence over One’s daughter.Not that you don’t have reason to despise her, but this occasion is not the time to confront her.Nor would confronting her do much good in the first place, in my opinion; this individual believes that prank-calling an ailing senior is appropriate.You’re speaking different languages.
If you don’t think you can hold your tongue/temper, or you feel that One’s comments about the rationale for not inviting your parents make it impossible for you to attend in good faith, then you should feign a last-minute illness — or better yet, withdraw your RSVP now, without specifying why.”I’m terribly sorry; I will no longer be able to attend.”I don’t generally recommend going back on an RSVP, because it’s a pain in the ass for the host, but what’s to be gained from your presence, by anyone?You don’t like them; they apparently have no respect for you or your parents; you’d be happier doing something else, and they’d probably rather invite some-one else, so in this case, I’d send a short, vague note stating that you can’t make it after all.
Going to the wedding and picking a fight will accomplish nothing, except to bring you down to their level. Either go, keep your mouth shut, leave as early as you politely can, and vow not to spend any more social time with these people; or bail, but if you bail, do it now.Doing it now gives them time to fill your places; it also sends a message, and while that message likely won’t get through, it’s better than fisticuffs.
Dear Sarah,
I only came across this Vine entry from 2004 today (the Lonely with Kittens one), but I wish I’d read it at the start of this year. My story’s pretty close that one, except without the married, but with four-plus years of long distance relationship, and the long-distance aspect being about to come to a close. So much for my dreams of living in that country — something I’d first been trying to get excited about, and finally truly was excited about to the core.
I have been having a field day reading through old Vines, and I think I might need your advice. It’s not about a specific situation, not anymore anyway, but suffice to say I have had a rough year and I need a bit of help coming to terms with it (having your boyfriend of four years replace you without warning that there was ever anything wrong, but taking six weeks and some cheating, while berating you for not trusting him to just hang with this female now-girlfriend, to do it, and add a bit of attempted suicide by your sister, and welcome to Suckfest 2009).
I’ve had a bit of luck since, and I am trying really hard to make the best of, well, life in general. I decided to take a hike, literally, and go traveling for a while, and met a really lovely boy who I ended up traveling with and going out with for about two months of pretty much spending all day every day together. It was very un-flingy and very relationshippy even though it only lasted a short time, and the closeness freaked me out at first but was a huge comfort eventually.
Given that my relationship before that, the one that ended so horribly, was long-distance for long stretches of time and ended just before we could finally be together, and given that this boy was also not from my country, about to go off to college (I’ve just finished) and much younger than me, and given that ultimately, we were probably each other’s medicine for that time, but not wholly compatible, we are now “friends.”
I say “friends” because I am sentimental as hell and seem to continue to need him to like me in a very unhealthy way, even though I don’t actually want to be in a relationship with him. Sort of. At the time, and I know this damn well but it is easy to forget when I’m feeling all lonely and unloved, there were things he did that would make me all cagey or annoyed. I’m not even that attracted to him in 2D.
What I am trying to say is — he is a great guy, which is why I fell for him big time in 3D, but the relationship was not perfect and he is probably not the one for me. I know this. There will be other guys who’ll be that lovely to me, I’m not crying myself to sleep at night because I can’t have him. That said, he was so sweet to me, Sars, and he took such great care to mend a fractured heart that I miss that. Still not quite The Problem, though.
You see, while he treated me like a queen while we were together (talk about a lovely eye-opener: “Wait, you mean boyfriends can be this lovely, even if you’re a mess?!”), he is kind of shitty at keeping in touch now that we are no longer in the same place. This is what I’m writing to you about.
The relationship is obviously a thing of the past. My lingering mushy feelings have been discussed between the two of us, and he’s been nice but clear about it, the topic’s done, we know that friends is the only rational option here. As time goes by (we’re talking months here), he is keeping in touch less and less, and it stings. He’s not AWOL, he will generally respond if I start an IM conversation, he will comment on Facebook occasionally… He’s not blowing me off, but he’s not showing any initiative either. I have trouble not taking it personally, however, since it immediately triggers “See! Abandonment yet again! Weighed and found too light!” and then I feel like shit. This is not something I want to continue doing.
With the help of some fantastic friends, I have come to the conclusion that he and I just have different ideas of what it means to stay friends over distance. My idea is probably a little off, but I wasn’t the one to come up with the friends business in the first place, nor the “let’s go and meet up for x event in the fall!” plans. He’s always seemed an honest, genuine kind of guy, though, and I think he means these things when he says them, but given his propensity to LIVE IN THE MOMENT with capitals (and he’d have to, he’s not had a great year either and this seems to be the way he deals with it), it turns out that I might just have to take them with a grain of salt and reduce my expectations. I need to stop taking his lack of effort into keeping in touch personally. (Right? Except, then he sends me a birthday present out of the blue and I’m all…dude, I was just about to take your hint!)
Here’s where I need your help. You often talk about accepting things are a certain way even if they make no fucking sense, or adjusting expectations, or not caring what other people think. This is possibly the most abstract question ever, but how do I do that, in practical terms? How do you get over things, how do you accept things aren’t the way you thought they were and would like them to be?
There are obviously a lot of things this past year that I have had to give up. I’m not going to live in Other Country, or with Ex-Boyfriend, or be close friends with Lovely Boy. I understand that part of it is getting stuck into daily life and stopping the eternal mulling-it-over process, but how do I teach myself not to base my opinion of myself on how other people treat me? How do I learn not to assume people dislike me/think I’m not as awesome as they thought previously/am a bit of a bore? How do I accept that certain people might be asses after all, especially if I’ve liked them a lot before?
I have always been extremely sentimental, and I crave to learn how to just let things go. It’s not that I’m this uptight with every friend that’s not replied to my email within x number of days. I know people get busy, I know how to chill out. This particular situation is different because, well, 1. this guy used to tell me he loved me, and it’s OK that he doesn’t anymore but I’d like for him to at least like me, and 2. I probably built my renewed sense of security and OK-ness on him.
I have thought of therapy, but I won’t be able to for another couple of months for various reasons.
So, in short — until I can go and see someone professional, how does one bend the mind like Uri Geller does a spoon? There might be a few other questions in there, so feel free to comment as you see fit. I need a bucketful of What Would Sars Do cause I just don’t want to feel so crappy anymore.
Want To Lose Weight? Suckfest 2009 Comes In Shocking Strawberry And Vile Vanilla Flavors!
Dear Fest,
First, you have to give yourself a break.You’ve had a hard year; a lot of big things didn’t turn out like you’d hoped, or went wrong.Break-ups take time to process, it doesn’t happen overnight, and caring is not a problem in and of itself.It makes you human.So, for starters, accept that you’ll have some bad days with it, but know that those days will end.
As far as Lovely Guy specifically goes, you know, he’s going off to university and starting a whole new phase of his life.It really isn’t personal; there’s a lot going on for him right now, and he’s not going to be making as much time for people from the past.It happens.
The other issue here is that “friends” is not realistic for you right now.You have all these emotions surrounding him, many of which have nothing to do with him, and trying to figure out What He Wants or How He Feels About You is adding drama and not providing resolution.And again, you have to let yourself off the hook for getting into a rut in that regard, because that happens too, but it’s not about whether it’s “good” or “right” — it’s not working.It’s not helpful.It’s time to do something else.
And that “something else” is to suspend contact with him for 90 days.You can tell him you’re doing this because you need some time to get your head straight, or you can just do it, but it wants doing.Delete him from your phone and email, remove him from your Facebook friends, do not open any mail or packages he sends.The situation as is makes you unhappy, and the only thing in it you can change is your own behavior, so force yourself to stop taking the friendship’s temperature to gauge his approval every five minutes.It will feel unnatural and lonely, but then, so does the current set-up.This has a much better chance of letting you move on.
And the friendship may not survive.That’s okay.If it doesn’t, it’s probably to do with weird timing on both your parts; that’s okay too.Sometimes things don’t work out and it’s nobody’s fault.Other times, it is somebody’s fault but it’s for the best all around.
The thing to remember for you, I think, is that it’s hard to tell what all this means from here, because you haven’t gotten far enough past it yet — and yes, you do need to accept that certain things have turned out badly and to start moving on.But let’s distinguish between “behaving as though this is the reality, because it is” and “being blithely okay with it every second.”Should you put Lovely Boy out of your way for three months?Yes.Should you never think about him or give a shit once that three months has begun?Good luck with that.
Forcing the heart to dance with the head is not easy, and you have no perspective right now.It’ll come.You got disappointed and cheated on, and you’ve become more concerned than you’d like to be about the approval of others.It’ll pass.But stop beating yourself up for how you’ve handled all of this, first and foremost.The rest follows that.
Hey Sars,
My question is less about the cat and more about me. For some reason, the stupid cat loves to chill with my husband during the day and plague me with his entire 18-pound bulk at night. I don’t sleep well in general, and a heavy furry thing on my legs doesn’t help.
What’s worse is that he purrs like a motorboat for no discernable reason, so loud and so long that it not only wakes me up but keeps me from falling asleep again at 3 AM. Banning him from the bedroom is not an option as he will then knock on the door and whine LOUDLY the entire night. I’ve tried.
So why I have I put up with the lack of sleep for three years? My husband adores the cat. He also sleeps like a log, so he doesn’t quite understand how hard it’s been for me. We also had a second cat, a wee little fluffball who was my cuddle buddy, so I could forgive my husband’s unhealthy attachment to the demon cat.
However, we recently got our own place and left my little girl back at my parents’ house, where she took to the indoor/outdoor lifestyle like she was born to be wild. I decided it would be cruel to enclose her in a small apartment, and one pet is cheaper than two at our new apartment.
But now that I’m without feline companionship and my husband is still sleeping through my sleepless nights, I’m at a breaking point. No pets is cheaper than one, and while I understand my husband’s attachment to the cat — the motorboat purring helped him through a traumatic event at the beginning of our co-habitation — I’m ready to send him away. The cat, not the husband.
We can’t trade him for our girl cat, as the demon has a serious personality conflict with my parents’ cat, and I have the scars on my arm to prove it. We could easily send him to my uncle’s farm (no, really), where he would also adapt to an indoor/outdoor lifestyle with several other cats and dogs. However, I’m fairly sure the demon cat would hate it. And here is my real question.
After three years, what responsibility do I have to make the cat happy? He was 6 years old when I inherited him from friends. For the first 18 months, I had job with flexible hours so the sleep thing didn’t hit as hard. I understand that having a pet is a lifetime commitment, and I hate the thought of putting the cat in a situation that is foreign to him simply to make my life easier. But it’s getting harder to catch up on sleep on the weekends, and I do feel that my happiness is more important than the cat’s.
Do I have a right to boot the cat knowing that he’ll be taken care of but possibly miserable? Or am I a horrible person who should never have cats or children for even considering it?
Needs a nap
Dear Nap,
Banning him from the bedroom is not an option as he will then knock on the door and whine LOUDLY the entire night. I’ve tried.
Try again.Get a packet of earplugs — the pricier kind rock musicians use.Explain to your husband that the lack of sleep is making you crazy, and you need him to understand that, while you love the demon cat and you appreciate their friendship, you’ve got to make a change, at least temporarily, for the sake of your sanity.Put the earplugs in, give your husband his pair, turn on a white noise machine or a fan or something, and shut the door on the cat and leave it shut, all night.
It will take a week or two for him to figure out that knocking and whining won’t work, but most cats do figure it out; you just can’t break down and open the door at 4:30 AM to shut him up, because then what the demon cat figures out is that knocking and whining do work if he does it long enough.A lot of times, what pet owners mean by “I tried to correct X behavior” is “I tried twice and it didn’t work.”You have to give it longer than that.
If you can’t tolerate his crying at the door, then shut him in the bathroom, or find some other way to retrain him, but there isn’t a straight line between “my cat has an annoying behavior” and “my cat can’t live here.”Breaking him of certain irritating habits is a short-term investment of aggro in the long-term peace of the household, and it’s part of what you sign up for when you get a pet.
You can call your vet to see if s/he has any suggestions, too — tiring him out by playing with him before bedtime; setting up a cat bed with one of your sweatshirts in it; judicious dispensation of catnip — but you haven’t given the cat a chance to learn a new way of doing things yet.
Tags: boys (and girls) cats etiquette
When we first got my cat, she was a whiny hyperactive little thing at night. Kept me and my boyfriend up for hours, drove us crazy, gave us headaches. Locking her out of the room resulted in the same problem that Nap is describing, with the whining and pawing at the door.
So, in the interest of sanity (and the fact that I hate hate hate earplugs haaaate), we rigged up a typical broke college student solution. We got a couple of old towels, some cord (iirc, it was old shoelaces tied together), and basically covered the lower half of the door in soft fabric. It took some jerry-rigging, it wasn’t pretty, but it worked. We couldn’t hear the cat clawing while she was learning that she can’t come in the bedroom, and after two or three weeks, she took to chilling out on the couch.
Cats are creatures of habit– mine flips out if I keep her out of the bathroom when I wake up in the morning– but they can be trained to change. Just give it time. And consider padding the door.
Earplugs, ftw! My girl used to think that waking me up every night at 4am was perfectly acceptable. Earplugs (just regular kind worked for me) + a fan on + her kicked out of the room everytime she did it = problem solved after about two weeks. Every now and then she will try it again and we have to go through it all again. Somedays the yelling gets so loud that she gets locked in the bathroom after being locked out of the bedroom doesn’t work. Two doors closed doors away plus earplugs does the trick no matter how loud she is. She also ‘gets it’ real fast when that happens.
And I don’t feel bad about it because, hey, who needs sleep so I can work and keep little miss happy with kibble and catnip? She can suffer the indignity of being banished to the bathroom every now and then and so can demon cat.
My roommate’s cat (a 20-pounder) used to slam himself up against my bedroom door at night (even though roommate’s bedroom door was wide open, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have anyone to sleep with). I covered the bottom part of the door in tinfoil. He hated being up against the tinfoil. Now he almost never does it anymore (even though I’ve taken the tinfoil down, since it looked pretty dreadful), and when he does he’s totally half-assing it – not enough to wake me up, barely enough to keep me awake and he never keeps it up for long.
It occurs to me that another way to deal with it might be to put a baby gate outside your door. My (untested) theory is that that way he can slam himself against the baby gate all he wants, but it won’t make much noise inside the room because he’s not hitting the door itself. Of course, this only works if your bedroom door opens into the bedroom. And you might fall over the baby gate in the middle of the night and break something. So maybe you should try the towel thing or the tinfoil thing first.
Oh, NAP! First, earplugs, definitely. Secondly: your demoncat NEEDS A BUDDY! Your cuddle cat is happy where she is, fine, but your other cat has gone from having another of his own kind to BEING ALONE. And while there are animals that are used to being alone, by and large, it’s healthier for them to have companion animals – especially companion animals of their own species. Yes, even if they brawl. It will keep them both entertained – preferably, outside of your bedroom door.
Re: Cut.
A wedding is no time or place to settle scores. Period. If you go (and I’m with Sars here – a graceful bow-out now is probably the way I’d choose), behave like a grown-up. Wish the newlyweds a happy future –and mean it — and give the rest of them a polite Vaya con Dios.
You’re letting too much other stuff get in the way here. Not that your complaints aren’t valid, but they’re not the point of somebody else’s wedding. Compartmentalization is your friend.
Fest’s letter looks to me like a rumination run wild. Besides giving herself the break Sars recommends, she might want to check into some cognitive therapy techniques to break herself of the habit of letting stray thoughts of Lovely Guy spiral into a Neverending Cogitation of Suckfest.
Secondly: your demoncat NEEDS A BUDDY!
That’s probably true generally; it may not solve her problem specifically. I am currently having to readjust Little Joe (also 18 pounds, also purrs so loudly he chokes himself at times) to the concept of not bathing right next to my head at night, because it takes for-goddamn-ever and he makes these sickening srrkkll srrkkll sounds…and he is the buddy acquired to de-neurotify the Hobe. Not that that didn’t work; it did, kind of. But it created a whole set of other problems, the “solution” to which is that I sleep on the couch and let them have the bed. Lame.
Cat-veat emptor, is all I’m sayin’.
@Cut — I’m wondering if the invitation to you and your husband was a weird backhanded way of insulting your parents. Just from my own perspective, it seems bizarre to invite a not-so-close second cousin to a “small wedding,” unless you’re also inviting that whole branch of extended family. Inviting you, but not them, strikes me as a passive-aggressive way to single out your parents and tell them that They Are Not Welcome.
I could be reading too much into this, it could be that the bride and groom really are trying to keep the guest list “young” for some reason, and they think you and your husband are great and they genuinely want you there. If you think the wedding will be fun, you should go. But if you’re not at all close to the bride and groom, and you feel like your presence is being used by Three and/or One to send a message to your parents, you might be happier just calling them and saying, “I’m sorry, but it turns out we won’t be able to make it,” and sending the couple a set of glasses or something. Yeah, it’s an etiquette faux pas to back out on an RSVP, but I think it’s a bigger etiquette faux pas to use your wedding invitations to be deliberately rude to someone. (It sort of reminds me of a sixth-grader passing out party invitations in class to everyone except the one kid she doesn’t like. “Oh, sorry, Kelly. Everyone’s invited, just not YOU.”)
Cat-caused sleep deprivation can be horrible. Particularly when your spouse doesn’t have the same issues. Lying wide awake at 3, 3:14, 3:41, 4, etc, while your spouse snores away beside you is unbearable.
Our 3 cats have one shot at waking us (well, me) up in the night for a cuddle. Or tub water ’cause, well, now that you’re up and you have to go to the bathroom, some water in the tub would be great – Thanks!! After that, its time for ‘The Shunning’. The first few times I did that, there was a loud and prolonged protest from the other side of the bedroom door. That was stopped relatively quickly by a couple of judicious squirts with the spray bottle. Not that it helped because finding dark coloured cats in the dark, without my glasses…is amusing in the light of day. Not at 4am.
At one point in the training (like, day 2), ‘tho, they’d sit outside the door, wailing and complaining, and by the time I got to the door to ‘shoot’ they’d skeddadeled and I was left standing in my nighty, making futile phhht noises to an empty hall. They still do that on mornings when they’ve run out of crunchers, or like Autiger23’s cat, figure that I may have forgotten what the routine was.
Yes, I had a couple of poor night’s sleep while they learned the routine, but now they’re tolerate it. Following shunning, we get at least 2 good hours of rest. The loudest complainer now waits until the beeper on the coffee machine goes off to resume the complaining. But, that’s when we’re supposed to be getting up, anyhow, and its more annoying than the alarm, so I feel that its a service he provides to me! And, a shunning usually guarantees a string of nights where there’s little problem. Although, I admit, that if I get up to use the bathroom in the night, I hold a premptory shunning!
When my husband and I moved in together he implemented a no pets in the bedroom at night rule (his dog, my cat). It does take a period of adjustment and we had the luxury of being able to shut them in the other room, away from the bedroom, and both of them accepted it.
The thing was, until that happened I hadn’t even noticed how much the cat was disruppting my sleep, from waking me up to be fed or let out to in summer when I was only using a sheet, deciding at 3am that my ankles were a foreign intruder who must pounced on. Oh and the combing my hair with his claws thing. And the time he just stuck his paw in my glass of water beside my bed and flicked water on my face.
Having him out of the bedroom was a huge improvement on my life and that’s with me not registering what a disruption he was. You’re obviously suffering a lot more, so once he’s trained to deal with not sleeping with you, you will sleep so well it will give you a new lease on life. Keep that thought in your head.
Plus, it’s good practice if you ever have a baby and you’re trying to establish a self-settling sleep routine, which makes for two weeks of putting baby to bed, giving a pat and leaving the room, getting two steps before baby cries, turning around and giving another pat, getting two steps further the next night and eventually you can just put her down, giver her a pat and leave the room and be the envy of parents who still have to rock a 1 year old to sleep in very sore arms.
And the time he just stuck his paw in my glass of water beside my bed and flicked water on my face.
“The TIME,” singular? What miracle feline is this?
Nap,
I used the baby gate suggestion proposed by Kyle, and it works perfectly. Make sure you get one of the plastic ones rather than the wood. The wood ones rattle too much.
Good luck!
I just saw this today, and want a t-shirt: “Cats are a puzzle that has no solution.”
That said, I totally concur with plugging the ears and hanging in there. Also, some foam weatherstrip on the door will do wonders to stop that door-rattling-because-the-cat’s-bouncing-it sound. I used to have a door that rattled in the breeze from my window and a foam strip stopped that quick and cheap.
From my recent experience with midnight meowing, I’d suggest two things: make sure your hubby is 100% on board… because it won’t help if he lets kitty in during the wee hours every morning. Second, be on the watch for new issues, like “missing” the litterbox. Cats that are pissed off, might just piss *on* your floor and other undesirable surfaces. I’ve been there. Hopefully kitty will just get the message and go sleep on the damn couch already.
My prediction is that things will come around if you persist. Good luck, and hopefully you won’t find Kitty hanging around with new friends that have screwdrivers and opposeable thumbs!
Sars, it isn’t THIS miracle feline, that’s for sure:
http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat#p/u/1/I1qHVVbYG8Y
http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat#p/u/0/uOHvZjiDANg
No, I cannot Tinyurl – but it’s TWO new Simon’s Cat films!
Curiously, neither involves Go Away Cat, I’m Trying To Sleep – which is the film on continuous loop at my humble casa. Every night. All night. And I’m a problem sleeper, at best (not that I ever get it – the best, that is). And my rotten #1 son has a NEW trick! – knocking everything off the table until I wake up. And spray him with water. And he runs away. And does it again.
Thanks so much for the advice to Fest. Having broken up with a guy I still have feelings for and trying to stay “friends,” I needed to hear the three-month rule come from someone else’s mouth than my friends’. 90 days start today.
Little Joe (also 18 pounds, also purrs so loudly he chokes himself at times)
I might be the only one, but I find the above invokes a hilarious image:
“Hrrrrrrrmmmmmmm. Hrrrrrrr. Hrrrrrrrrr.. ghk! RRrrrrrrrr … What? I meant to do that! Kekf.”
Little Joe is the hapless one who was all “My tongue feels like a foot” when you moved, right?
I also didn’t realize what poor sleep I was getting until I got my cat a bed. I got it for her when I had my mom cat-sit for 3 weeks. Mom refused to let Izzie sleep with her and instead managed to convince her to use it (over the course of 2 of those weeks). I think she put the bed on her lap while she was watching tv and then let my cat voluntarily crawl into it (she’s a lap-lover). Eventually Izzie decided she liked the bed. Ever since then, she sleeps in the bed (on my bed) and leaves me alone at night. May not work for such an extreme case as yours, but it’s a thought.
Also, Kyle mentioned putting tinfoil on the bottom of the door to keep him from hitting it – I think they also don’t like the feel of double-sided tape (if it doesn’t wreck the door).
Fest – I am/have been dealing with a slightly similar situation and it may not help to hear it but The Lovely Boy over whom I occasionally moon broke up with me in 1992. Yes. Last century. But… I was 17! And had been through some crazy crap for which he was My Rock! And then… he dumped me!
Ohhhhkay. Spent years (and I do mean YEARS) after the breakup writing him long letters and generally spewing crazy all over the place in his direction – no wonder he fled! Thank goodness the internet wasn’t as everywhere as it is now or he probably would have gotten a restraining order against me and I would have totally deserved it.
Thanks to the miracle of technology, we have been able to reconnect as adults and [kind of] laugh about what crazy kids we were. I still think “aw, what if?” and I do occasionally wonder if his occasional cryptic Facebook comments are supposed to Mean Something, but my point is that TIME AND DISTANCE were very helpful in getting over it and getting past it and not making him the Ashley Wilkes to my Scarlett O’Hara anymore.
You’ve had a rough year. But you’re still getting out of bed every morning and getting it done. Time and distance will help. It’s not the fastest solution, but it’s the most effective.
Another trick regarding locking kitties out of the bedroom is taping tinfoil to the bottom half of the door. Most cats don’t like the feel of the tinfoil and won’t scratch it. With the crying, if it got bad and penetrated the earplugs, I would open the door a crack and squirt him with a water bottle.
Trust me, patience is key, but cats will learn. Both of mine learned pretty quickly–they had to be locked out because three am was tag time with me as home base. And my boyfriend’s cats have learned as well now that me and my pets have moved in. But it can take a week or two. Think of it this way, you’re not sleeping right now anyway, may as well spend a few weeks retraining the cat.
@Sars: Solent Green probably stopped putting a glass of water on the bedside table after “the time”.
I have a little six-pound snuggle buddy (Liza) who has decided of late to switch from sleeping alongside my ribcage (aw!) to sleeping on top of my head. Once perched there she somehow converts to dark matter and weighs about four tons. And instead of making delightful purring noises she grooms herself. For hours at a time. I have tried pointing out to her that she has all damn day to lick herself while I am at work, to no avail.
Booting the kitties from the bedroom never crossed my mind but I fear it is the only solution. Either that or I will develop a new form of neck-up yoga so that I can deal. Sleepy Sphynx-asana.
I don’t know about Soylent Green, but after my cat did that once, I moved the water glass.
We had this exact same issue in reverse. I can sleep through anything, the husband, not so much. Especially not a cat who is smart enough when locked out to figure out that the door handle opens the door and would run down the hallway, launch herself at the door handle, hang on for a bit, and then slide, loudly, with claws, down the door.
Solution? Noise maker for the husband (the plain white noise ones not the ocean-y ones work for him) and scat-mat for the cat – google it, petsmart carries them. The scat mat sounds cruel at first – its a plastic sheet with a battery that essentially gives the cat a static shock if she steps on it. We put it right outside the bedroom door, and boom, problem solved. And seriously, cats are smart. My vet recommended this, and the cat touched it one time before she figured out to stay away. Best $30 we ever spent. The cat will sit outside the door right behind the mat until we open the door in the morning. She seems fine with this – especially since we bought her a big floofy bed.
My kitty is an angel kitty who curls up right next to me and sleeps though the night. Also, if my hands hurt for some reason, I can stretch it out and she will curl up on it and do the silent purr thing until she massages out the cramp. (I have not figured out how to move this technology to my back).
I agree with the behavior modification attempts, but I kind of have a selfish inquiry as to how you can target a specific behavior, rather than total banishment from the bedroom. One of my large boys loves to sleep on my pillow; which, fine. Actually, I kind of love it. Until he starts pawing my head and CHEWING my hair. Ugh. Horrible. If I kick him out everytime he does that, will he really connect it with that behavior? Because I don’t actually want the boys banned from bedroom. Only when they are naughty. But perhaps I can’t have it both ways?
RE: Fest
I heartily agree with Sars’ 90 day cut-off. In my experience, when I find myself overly invested in what an ex thinks about me/how often he contacts me, etc, I realize I am… not over it, and need time. I’d advise to give yourself that time.
I feel kind of like a cold-hearted bitch, but letters like that last one are one of the reasons I don’t think I’ll ever have pets! (There’s also the severe allergy thing.)
Re: Fest
While you can’t see a therapist, please take the advice of mine: “Base your happiness on factors YOU can control, not on factors that require other people to step in line.”
I just ended a four-year relationship. It was a relatively civil breakup–there was no cheating, no deceit, and we kept the anger under control–and so he kept trying to be friends, inviting me to movies, to dinner, to come see the apartment he moved into after moving out of the one we shared. The day he moved out he hugged me at the door.
His view is that I’m really important to him as a person and he doesn’t want to lose me as a person. I respect that, I feel that, I feel the same way. It’s just not realistic right now. He was my best friend, but right now it pains me to think about him, or look him in the eye. Even though I miss him incredibly, I have to pretend that he doesn’t exist, at least for the next few months, because if I don’t I keep hoping he’ll see reason and come back to me.
No man is so lovely that it’s worth torturing yourself just to have him in your life. Maybe after the 90 days Sars prescribes you’ll feel good enough about yourself to let him back in. Right now, he’s doing you more harm than good. A broken leg heals, but first you have to put on a cast on it, and then you have to quit walking on it.
Nap – I’m a light sleeper who shares a bed with a heavy sleeper/snorer, a heavy lump of a cat who insists on sleeping as close as possible to me and a smaller cat who insists on sleeping on top of me; so I get why you’re looking at these options. But really, you owe it to the cat to try a few more things.
Something that has worked for me in the past is putting a cat bed on the bedside table. This makes the cat feel like their still a part of the slumber party but doesn’t compromise your leg room. If you place it on hubby’s side of the bed, he can get the full effect of the purring while it’s a little quieter on your side. If the purring is still a problem, you need to retrain your cat to not sleep in the bedroom. The suggestions of padding the door or using tin foil are great. I’d pair these with a product like Feliway, which is really handy for calming down during the retraining process. A few drops of Rescue Remedy in drinking water (cats and yours) probably wouldn’t go astray either.
One of my cats, ever since she was a kitten, is too hyper and needy to sleep in the bedroom at night, because inevitably she’ll knock my bedside table onto my head to wake me up (I tend to be a heavy sleeper). I lived in a place with shoddy doors that she could just headbutt open, even when they were locked. I had to use pet gates and barricades to keep her out at night, and even then she cried and carried on all night and tore things up trying to get past the barriers. I put up with it for years because I figured it was just the price I had to pay for her, and like I said, I’m a heavy sleeper, so once I got to sleep I didn’t have to deal with it until morning (note that this was years of me ignoring her, which didn’t change her behavior one bit).
But then my husband moved in, and he’s a terribly light sleeper, and he simply could not take it. He tried, bless him, but after about 6 months I could tell he was getting really close to a “me or the cat” place. That’s when we broke down and got a crate to put her in at night (we had a tiny efficiency apartment – there were no rooms to shut her in, and putting her in the bathroom meant that everything on the counters and the shower curtain ended up on the floor by morning, plus her yowling from there was still too loud to let Husband get any sleep, even with earplugs). It’s a roomy crate, big enough for a medium-sized dog, and there’s plenty of room in there for her plus a small litter box (we started out putting food in there, too, but she was pretty obese, and we realized it was a good opportunity to restrict her diet; she’s happily normal-sized now that she can’t stress-eat her way through the night).
It’s a pain in the butt to clean, but she took to it much better than we thought she would. We could put it at the opposite end of our apartment, far enough from the bedroom that her constant yowling didn’t bother us as much, but the thing is, eventually the yowling stopped, and she got to where she goes in voluntarily and is very territorial of HER crate with the other cats. I think she actually feels safe in there.
We’ve moved to a house since then, but we still crate her at night, and we’re all much happier for it. It was a $35 solution that improved our home life a hundred percent.
Chiming in on the cat issue: We tried locking our cat out of the bedroom, but she also whined, cried, and clawed the door trying to get in. So, what we trained her instead was that she was allowed in the room (quietly) but NOT on the bed. We have a bench at the end of the bed that she was allowed on, but not the bed. We began by reading in bed for about a half an hour before lights out. If she tried to get up on the bed, we would say “NO!” and put her either on the floor or on the bench. We continued this after lights out. If she began making noise, she would be out of the room. After 1 week, she knew (and 3 years later still obeys) that she is allowed in the room, not allowed on the bed, and needs to stay quiet. For her, I think part of it was that she wants to be where her “people” are, so being shut out was distressing. But for me, I couldn’t sleep with her on the bed, moving around, etc. This solution worked for all of us. Good luck!
And the time he just stuck his paw in my glass of water beside my bed and flicked water on my face.
“The TIME,” singular? What miracle feline is this?
No kidding. With mine, the smart cat just drinks out of the glass. The stupid one sticks his paw into the glass, but is too dumb to realize he has to pull it back up again, and tries to remove it by pulling his paw back toward him, thus dumping the glass. I can’t have beside cups with water in the bedroom without it ending in disaster.
Soylent Green, you really got me thinking, because I, too, have a 18 pounder who insists on sleeping between my knees, and another who likes to be next to my head, and they do often wake me in the night or start whining in the morning for food. I’m often tired, and I’m now wondering if I wouldn’t be sleeping much better with the cats banished. I’ve halfheartedly tried a few times, but the whining and scratching was usually too much to bear. You guys have shown me how it could be done, so I might have to go for it. Thanks!
Hey, Fest.
Aside from Sars’ excellent advice, one thing you might try to do is creating for yourself some new categories of relationships. Right now you seem to be waffling between ON and OFF, and it’s frustrating you. He doesn’t write for a while and it stings; he sends you a present and you’re back in.
As you get old-like-me, you start to develop distant, or occasional friends. These are people that you still feel a deep (or at least nostalgic) affection for, but you don’t see or expect to see or hear from very often. Contact is sporadic; occasionally you get a card or letter or they pass through town and you have dinner together. And then you don’t hear from them for a few months or even years, and *it’s okay*. If the expectation is for little contact, then every contact becomes a delightful surprise. Like you, I’m sentimental, and it took me a while to realize that cutting loose does not necessarily mean losing someone forever.
But follow Sars’ advice first.
I’m also a fan of Soylent Green’s no pets in the bedroom policy. I have the same policy for my dogs. Though honestly, they still wake us up because they want to go outside to pee in the morning. But it’s nice to have a pet free zone. And we have trained them not go into the bedroom so we don’t even need a baby fence anymore.
Hee. I don’t have a cat, but I cat-sit pretty regularly for a friend, and I have woken up a time or two to the incredibly unsettling sensation of the cat dragging its claw sloooooowly and lightly across a my skin.
It feels like waking up next to a feline serial killer.
Cat-veat emptor, is all I’m sayin’.
Heh. I second that. We got the second cat so the first cat would stop being a neurotic cat, but as my husband always says “he always will be a special needs cat”, and having a second cat around has not abated the neurotic behavior, it has simply modified it.
It used to be he would sit his 13 lbs. frame on my armpit at 4 AM every morning. Now he cries for his “sister” to come and spend time with him at the foot of the bed at 4 AM in the morning. He used to want to sleep next to me whenever I was awake and not upright, but now instead prefers to watch the other cat take a nap near me, while giving both of us the stare. You know, the one that says he could join in if he wanted to, but he’s actually too proud to do so (but as soon as the grey cat moves, he sidles up to me and rubs himself on me as if to mark “Mine. Mommy mine. Do not touch. This means you, other cat! I thought we agreed mommy was mine, and you could have dad. Since you forgot, I am letting you know”).
The other cat too could come in with his or her own set of quirks. For the first year we had our grey kitty, the older one just would not allow her on our bed unless he deemed it okay, and she was not to fraternize with the humans. Once he stopped caring what she did at night, she decided to make up for not being allowed on the bed by sitting between my and my husband’s heads and purring loudly like a motorboat. I felt like routinely saying “I get it that you’re so happy you could burst, but do you mind? I really need to sleep”, except that then she’d probably welcome the excuse to lick my face clean.
I just had to suck it up and become something I never thought I would be: a sound sleeper. You just start by pretending to be asleep no matter what the cat does. Eventually, that becomes ingrained, and you find that you just skip the pretending part and go with the just being asleep part. Then, if you should happen to wake up with a cat’s butt in your face, or to a faint whiff of tuna breath a couple of inches from your nose, you just tell yourself that’s just your cat’s special way to say “I love you”.
FYI, Nap, I think cats always pick the person who moves around the bed least to sleep on, so if you don’t like where cat picked, just move around in your “sleep” until kitty decides that maybe he might just find a more comfortable spot on your husband’s side of the bed.
@Nap-I’m another advocate for the pet bed solution. My two cats have deserted me voluntarily for them. Mine each have their own heated pet mat which I just put their blankets over (easy to keep clean then). They are in the corner of my bedroom and both cats have decided they are SO much better than sleeping with their inferior human.
Both were VERY insistent on sleeping with me at bedtime so I’m still a bit surprised how this has come about. My theory about this sudden turn about is that because the pads are heated, they are warm and reassuring which is most likely why they liked sleeping with me-I was simply an organic hot water bottle! The heated mats/blankets also don’t move. Once again, unlike their inferior human.
This was not the reason I got the heated pet mats (both got very ill, one had to have an operation, so was recommended while recovering) but gee, the side-effect has been rather nice. I think they also like having their own space in all honesty. They return to ‘their’ beds whenever they want. Their behaviour reminds me of kids who ‘graduate’ from cots to big beds. I get a kick out of their ‘I’m a big girl now Mum, thankyou very much’ attitudes.
Oh, the heated pet mats I got weren’t terribly expensive and run on virtually no wattage. Surprisingly very very low running cost/power consumption. It’s one of the advantages of using the ‘pet’ specific ones with the safety stuff that comes with it.
Good luck, there have been some great suggestions here. I hope your demon cat becomes less demonic and that you get some much deserved deep, uninterrupted sleep.
Oh boy, do I ever know about The Cat Who Bangs on the Door! If the door is shut, Kitty bangs on it so she can come in. If it’s open, girl is meowing at the corners, jumping on the bed, and making a general nuisance of herself. She doesn’t do this when I’m up – why when I’m getting my precious sleep!? The remarkably easy and cheap solution in my place? It was too quiet, too calm. I leave the TV on for her – the volume level just above mute – and immediately she knocked all the crappy kitty behaviour off. Cold turkey. The TV is just outside my bedroom door – I can’t hear it, and I’m over the lights flicking effect. Though it certainly wouldn’t matter, I leave it on BBC News. I kind of enjoy the idea that she spends the night brushing up on her current affairs.
Good luck!
Dear commenters, thanks so much for the great advice. The problem seems to have solved itself for the moment – demon cat is happy on the new living room couch or in the doorway to the bathroom (possibly the most random specific place he could have picked). Thank you all for offering practical solutions to show me how ridiculous I was being about an easily retrained behavior.
Since I wrote that letter, I have realized that I was anxious about all of the big life changes (just married August, moved into the new place, busy season at work) and focusing on the cat as something I could change to help me feel in control. Even with the cat out of the bedroom, I’m sleeping less well than my normal not-well, so it’s clearly not just the fault of the feline.
I’m thrilled to be armed with several techniques in case the big guy starts trouble again. I don’t mind him being in the bedroom, so I’ll start the spray bottle when he gets on the bed, and shut him out after the second offense. I do tend to get up to hit the bathroom during the night, which was another reason I didn’t think just shutting him out would work, but after all these testimonials, and with my husband’s help, I’ll definitely keep working on it. I guess he is pretty cute when he’s not interrupting my sleep. (I’ll leave you to decide if I mean the husband or the cat.)
There can be a happy medium between PITA cats on the bed and total banishment (from house or room). I’m well practiced at this, I have 9 cats.
Personally I sleep better WITH a cat or two than without, but even so they can get annoying. The foot-jumpers, the hair-kneaders, the inappropriate groomers all get a dose of either flailing feet and/or a very unceremonious dump onto the floor. I don’t mean flinging them, but I’m not particularly gentle about it either.
Watch two cats together when one is irritating the hell out of the other. They don’t say “pretty please will you step back out of my space?” It’s a THWAP! or two or three. Make your point, make it sharp and fast and **be consistent**. Sleeping on your head is never ok, jumping on feet is never ok Calm quiet behavior gets them a warm place to sleep, obnoxious stuff gets them shoved to the floor and hissed at (yes, I hiss, tho it’s a Tsst! sound really).
They can be taught, (and I love the idea of padding the door!) it just takes time, some patience and consistency.
Cut – I kind of disagree with Sars on this one, but only on one point – I wouldn’t attend the wedding. Of course, I personally hate weddings, so that might be why I’m biased on that point. But I do agree with Sars that there’s no point in attending just to make snarky comments (no matter how true they might be :)).
Whatever you do, it’s nice to know that you and your parents were kind to your poor grandfather, and it’s also nice to know that you received such a pleasant reward (not that anybody should be rewarded for taking care of family, but that’s always a nice thing to have!).
Nap – lord, your post reminded me what a doormat I am when it comes to my cats. The Beast bathes by my head whenever I sleep, Cloudy curls up on my legs, Stormy wanders around commenting periodically on nothing… and I simply accept that my sleep is fractured.
When my cats have run their course on earth, my next pet will be a dog. :)
My husband and I have a giant, mutant Golden Retriever who weighs in the neighborhood of 130 lbs. (he is not fat, he’s a freak), and he starts off the night in bed with us. Since we got our Tempur-Pedic, though, we don’t feel him, except if he steps on us when he invariably leaves the bed to sleep on the floor on my husband’s side. He’s never howled in his waking life, but sometimes he howls in his sleep.
RE Fest: My son makes a point of staying friends with girls after they break up. I’ve stated that I don’t always think it’s a good idea – fine to be friends later, but don’t try having dinner a week after a breakup. He’s an adult (he’s 25, I’m 46), so it’s his business. You and the boy are long-distance anyway, so a 90-day moratorium is an easy thing to do. Listen to Sars, she’s smart.
Lovely lovely citizens of the Nation of Tomato,
Fest here. Thank you for your comments – I can’t believe how gentle and nice you’ve been (Sars included). I was convinced I’d get a stern talking to, but you’ve all been nothing but helpful.
I’ve been feeling so bad about feeling bad, and I can’t tell you how lovely it is to hear that it’s just part of the process and that I’m not some crazily sentimental freak of nature.
As for the 90 days, they sort of started a little while after I sent the letter to Sars. I haven’t deleted him off Facebook, just hidden him, but I try really hard not to peek (and find myself hardly tempted to these days), and I don’t interact with him in any way. Unfriending him would be a bit of a statement, just ignoring it and letting it go seems to be working. This was triggered by a bit of assholery on his part that was understandable, but made me realise that the situation wasn’t worth all the anguish and frustration. I’m letting it go for at least three months and I like it so far.
I’d respond to every comment one-by-one, but my comment would end up as long as my letter! That’s some great advice right there, though, and I’m going to print it all out and read it whenever I get down.
Thank you so much.
Stormy, your kit sounds like a reincarnation of my greatly beloved Smikey Cat. Smike (and his bro Byshe) never were allowed in the bedroom in their lives, but after B left us I opened the door and Smikester was about the sweetest kid ever. he’d sleep with his head IN MY HAND on the pillow next to me (single days …), and he never ever bothered me. He would also sometimes nap on my back when I was napping, which was marvelously good for the back. And when he kneaded there I knew he was the Best Cat in the History of the World. Gads I miss that little guy.
Now I have the Best Doggie in the Whole Wide Ever. She used to sleep on guard between me and the bedroom door; even with her tungsten head, my tripping on her several times in the night was good enough to convince her the nice squishy bed I’d tucked in a dormer corner for her was pretty appealing. Nothing is more relaxing than the sound of a dog snoring away in the corner, and she is only rarely ever allowed on the bed – where she knows that her corner is “passenger side, at the foot”. If my Far Away Man ever comes home, he’s not allowed to be a pain in her ass on those rare occasions, either. She is that good. (She does sometimes bark in her sleep, but it’s a pretty quiet version of her usual full-bodied/deep-chested vocalizing …)
@fest: “Here’s where I need your help. You often talk about accepting things are a certain way even if they make no fucking sense, or adjusting expectations, or not caring what other people think. This is possibly the most abstract question ever, but how do I do that, in practical terms? How do you get over things, how do you accept things aren’t the way you thought they were and would like them to be?”
This broke my heart. You will be okay. From your letter, you come across as a smart and wonderful person.
Re. training cats to do new things — for what it’s worth, I always remember what a vet told my then-roommate about his cat (when the vet wanted him to start kitty-tooth-brushing a major Demon Cat). Basically, the advice was that if you want to train a cat into a new routine, you have to keep doing it for about a month, for it to stick.
While I didn’t keep track exactly, that’s probably about how long it took me to train my cat to turn “oh, so you have to come into the bathroom and sit on the sink while I’m showering?” into “okay then, that’s going to be getting-brushed time”. She didn’t like it at first, but once that became the non-negotiable after-shower routine, she got used to it, and expects it now.
Also, just one question re. the answer given to Cut: I didn’t realize that an RSVP was supposed to be such a sacred bond? Or is that just for big, formally arranged events like weddings? My initial reaction to that was that it shouldn’t be considered a bad move to write back to the couple now and say “I’m sorry, we won’t be able to make it after all”; that is, to change the nature of the RSVP. I can see how that WOULD be bad etiquette very close to the event (unless of course there was a genuine emergency, in which case, no bad). But as has been noted in other Vine answers regarding wedding attendance, don’t most brides have a B-list of who they’ll invite should some of their A-list not be able to make it? Changing an RSVP to no, if done sufficiently in advance, should give them that option.
(I’m totally in agreement about not going to the wedding in order to perpetuate the family grievances. That just doesn’t belong at a wedding. But then, I’m also more generally in favor of, family or not, declining a wedding invite if you just aren’t feeling it. And it sounds like, even without this situation, you don’t feel that close to them?)
@Tabernacle – I’m not going to lie, I totally had eyes brimming with tears when I read your comment. I hope you’re right about me. Thank you! :)
@Cut – I agree that the invite sounds awfully passive-aggressive…”We’ll invite a distant cousin to send a message to the parents.” Feh. Quite frankly, if these people – meaning the entire cadre of One, Two and Three – aren’t part of your life, why waste time worrying about them? Why invest time in them at all? Maybe I misread your note, but it sounded to me like these people were simply distant obligations at this point. If that’s so, why go the wedding? Stop interacting occasionally with people who only raise your ire?
I agree, however, that you should send a polite but non-specific note backing out of your RSVP now. No need to tart it up. Just say that you won’t be able to attend, thank you for inviting me. Then just leave them be. Far, far less aggro in the long run. At least that’s been my experience.
@Holly: RSVPs are commitments which make a BIG difference to hosts. Many people don’t bother with them atall, which makes planning any event an extreme chore/sport. Please don’t ever treat them lightly, it’s not merely rude, but can be a very real financial and social inconvenience. If you’ve committed someone else’s resources to your own entertainment, altering your plans still leaves those resources expended.
I’ve gotten very goopy over this kitty question – and insufferable too, yes.
Cats, it seems, are incredibly adaptable creatures. People think not, but that’s more people’s untrainability it appers.
Smike was diabetic in his final years – and, bless his wee bones, he seemed to understand very quickly that there was some kind of connection between my needling him in the neck every single day, and the fact that after we started the process he began to regain healthy weight, and became happy and healthy and energetic again. His response to a daily NEEDLE IN THE SCRUFF was to SHRUG a little bit, like “Ma, aw okay.” I’m telling y’all: best cat ever. Cute, too. I want to go home RIGHT NOW and pet his peaceful little grave – not because I’m sad, but because I’m so lucky.
Pets really are one of the crowning joys of life. Making my dog wag her floppy old tail, now, is good for anything that ails me. Anything.
I was moved by the intelligence, depth of feeling, guileless honesty and curiosity, and even humor in your letter [“(Right? Except, then he sends me a birthday present out of the blue and I’m all…dude, I was just about to take your hint!)”]; soldier on! Good things will come.
Fest — 3 months might not be long enough, I understand some people can get over a broken heart in that time frame but it’s not one size fits all. Be prepared to take more time for yourself. And it’s perfectly OK to decide the friendship isn’t healthy for you and you’re better off without him in your life.
Cats — Someone on the rec.pets.cats newsgroup (this was years ago, in the mid ’90s) set up a switch by her bedside that allowed her to turn on the vacuum cleaner, which was situated right next to the closed door. When the cats started clawing and knocking she’d flip on the vacuum cleaner and they’d scatter. I don’t recall how long it took her to train the cats, but it worked. YMMV of course, some cats don’t mind the vacuum noise. :)
@Fest: 90 days is a minimum, seriously. It could take a lot longer, and if it does, be gentle with yourself. Some of us need a long time to heal, and that’s OK.
I think the trick is that you’re ready to re-engage after you STOP caring what his FB status says, or whether he’ll call. Do you know what I mean? Be patient, it’ll come.