Catatonic

I’m tired. Not just that tired-to-your-bones, only-death-can-remove-this tiredness that seems to creep up on you in your ’40s (although I certainly have that, too), but actual ‘I really need a good night’s sleep’ tired. The kind of tiredness you get from staying out really, really late and doing something fun. But of course I haven’t been out really, really late and doing something fun – it’s been so long since I did that I’ve all but forgotten how it feels. No, I have the ‘I’ve been up since 4 a.m. for no good reason’ tiredness.

I don’t usually get a lot of sleep (maybe 5 or 6 hours a night), so I like what little sleep I get to be as uninterrupted as I can make it. So when I drop my Blackberry into the bedside charging cradle it automatically disables all notifications (beeps, vibrates, and the little flashing LED) – with the single exception of phone calls. I figure if someone goes to the trouble of calling me after midnight they must really need to get hold of me. Not even the auto-diallers and cold-callers call at that time, so I’m pretty sure that if my phone rings in the night someone has died, or something of similar magnitude is going down.

So when my phone went off at 4:30 a.m last nighgt. I was awake in a heartbeat, and reaching for it. And my sense of urgency only grew when I saw it was a call from my 14 year old daughter who was supposed to be safely tucked up in bed. In the split second it took me to swipe left to answer, I had already unleashed my inner Liam Neeson, with my mind running through several possible kidnap / sneaking out to see boys / arrest scenarios. But despite her panicked voice on the other end of the line, thankfully none of these proved to be the case. In fact, the phone call was coming from inside the house! From her bedroom, to be exact. Where she was, indeed, tucked up in bed – albeit not ‘safely’.

“Dad! There’s a strange cat on my bed and he won’t get off!”. What? Seriously?? *sigh* I figured out that my eldest son’s cat, Dexter, who usually confines himself to my son’s bedroom, had decided to check out the rest of the house at last and made his way to my daughter’s bedroom, so I went up to her room, prepared to tell her she was being stupid and needed to go back to sleep. But when I switched on the light in her room, there was indeed a strange, brown cat sat in the middle of it, looking very much at home. Never seen it before. No idea where it came from. Regardless, it had to go. I had flashbacks to the time a strange cat came in through the cat-flap in our old house and promptly bit me leaving me with fingers like pork sausages for a week, and decided I needed to get it out as quickly and effectively as possible. Thankfully, this one didn’t put up much of a fight, and I managed to grab it by the scruff of its neck and toss it out the front door without too much trouble. Much to the relief of my daughter who was pretty freaked out by this feline home invasion.

After checking that all of the windows and doors were closed, and even checking the ceiling for holes, I couldn’t figure out how the hell the cat had gotten in, so I gave up and went back to bed. But of course then I was wide awake and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I resigned myself to staring out into the dark, running over possible scenarios under which this cat had managed to sneak in. Up through the drains? By stowing away in a box when we moved house a month ago? Or maybe it was here before we moved in and we just never noticed it until now… Regardless, I was just happy that I had seen the last of it. But then, an hour or so later I was up and getting ready for work, when my daughter walked into my bathroom and announced “Guess who I found. Gepetto!” Uh, what?? Who the hell is Gepetto? “Our new cat! I found him at the end of the road, so I brought him home again, and gave him something to eat.” Noooo!

If I have learned anything over the years, it is that you don’t let a stray cat into your house, you never feed it, and you certainly don’t let your children name it. Otherwise you’re stuck with it for life, and some of those bastards can live to be 18 – so they could be living with you for as long as your kids are, and who wants that? Adopting strays is how my crazy-cat-lady of an ex wife ended up with six cats. Actually it’s how I ended up with six cats, as when she left me she was kind enough to leave me the cats (along with the kids and all the credit card debt. Such a giver…). Over the years I have managed to whittle down the pride by gifting two of them (Morris and Midge) back to her, losing Tiny to feline leukemia, encouraging Archie to live next door and then moving house and not telling him, and tricking Luthifer (sic – it’s a cross between Lucifer and Luthor) – an indoor cat – into going outside and then shutting the door behind him) to a point where we only have one (the aforementioned Dexter). And I’m not about to start stockpiling them again by taking in some mangy stray from the neighborhood. So I told my daughter in no uncertain terms she had to let it loose again and NEVER let it back in. I may as well have just slit its throat in front of her for the look she gave me – apparently the fear and trauma of a couple of hours previously had given way to benevolence and compassion toward all living things. Oh well. At least the other two kids still like me.

But then around midday, at work, as I’m fighting to keep my eyes open, my eldest calls me: “Hey, have you seen my new cat? I can’t find him anywhere.” *groan* So it turns out that he had found this stray cat outside a friend’s house (so why couldn’t the friend have taken it in?) and decided to bring it home and feed it. And then thought it would be fun to drop it in my daughter’s room, and then close all the other doors so the cat had nowhere else to go. Nice. Needless to say, he was also pissed off at me when I told him that I had kicked it out (not literally…although I was tempted), so now I’m down to only one of my kids still liking me. And still only one cat, so I guess that balances out. Now if I can only manage to get an early night tonight and sleep through the sound of my daughter’s tears at losing her “closest friend and favorite pet, poor little Gepetto”, maybe I’ll feel re-energized, and can go back to just waiting for death to relieve me of this super-ingrained tiredness…