Signs to get out of an abusive relationship

My friend told me how she was lying in bed with her boyfriend, caressing his back, and he was making all the sounds to let her know he was enjoying himself. Then he turned around and scratched her face, got up, and walked away.

My friend told me how she didn’t mind because she loved her boyfriend’s fierce independence. She didn’t want a man like other men, who would just let her caress them or even return the caress with a peck.

Okay. It wasn’t her boyfriend. It was her cat. But I had to mislead you to help you understand that cats are consummate assholes. People who think cats are good pets don’t need cats, they need therapy.

Pet husbandry is weird enough without all the relational pitfalls of walking on eggshells around your abusive boyfriend, I mean, pet.

It is mind-blowing enough that our ancestors looked at wild animals and thought, “You are kind of cute and looked like you wouldn’t mind if we flipped your evolutionary purpose on its head and turned you into a docile indoor pet. Wouldn’t you mind being turned into a life toy? You can wait for me alone in a corner of the living room until I go home. In exchange, I will give you a miniature peanut butter treat, a walk around the block, and an itchy blanket to sleep in. I do expect you to alleviate the burden of my emotional wounds and existential angst by letting me pet your designer hypoallergenic hair.”

So we took wild dogs and wild cats and started breeding them until they couldn’t survive without us in the wild. Neither would they want to. Can’t you blame them? Summers are getting really warm with climate change and political correctness. It is better to be indoors with Alexa climate control, Netflix, and a raw diet consisting of meats from animals our pets would’ve never had access to in the wild.

Of course, we didn’t stop there. Now, along with dogs and cats, we also have fishes, snakes, salamanders, lizards, parakeets, parrots, pigmy goats, potbellied pigs, hamsters, guinea pigs, and gerbils (which, if you don’t have a cage for, you can put them inside of you to provide them with a halfway home.)

It won’t be long before we have toy cows, pet giraffes, and designer elephants.

Some people even have ferrets as pets. Ferrets!! The less famous cousin of weasels, badgers, and skunks!

I dated a girl once who had a pet ferret. Ferrets are illegal in California, but laws don’t apply when it comes to owning cute pets considered by your state as extremely aggressive to humans and native wildlife.

And they are aggressive. They are vicious little bloodsuckers. Her ferret bit me at least twice. I can’t remember how many times it bit her. She had it coming since she kept dressing him in San Diego Chargers paraphernalia which included a tiny ferret helmet, and the Chargers are a historically inconsistent franchise.

I can’t also remember the ferret’s name, so I’m just going to call it “Annie’s ferret,” which, I promise you, is not a euphemism for a vagina with teeth. I mean it; my ex’s name was Annie, and she had a ferret.

That ferret almost killed me once. I picked up Annie in my Mitsubishi Lancer, and she decided to bring the ferret along for a drive. Annie’s Ferret decided it was going to be cute to roam around the car and finally hide under my brake pedal. If I would’ve brake, I would’ve killed the ferret. 

I knew then I needed a way out of that relationship, and I couldn’t be the guy who killed the ferret and also broke up with the ferret’s owner. So I coasted on the highway without stopping until I could safely pull the ferret from underneath the pedal while driving and handed it over to my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend.

I don’t speak publicly about my dislike of cats. Somehow society has come to equate a dislike of cats with a dislike for women as if a firm grasp of reality and understanding of the true personality of cats is a DSM-V criterion of misogyny.

On the one hand, these are creatures that love you one minute; they hate you the next; they look at you like you’ve made all the wrong choices in life and expect you to feed them without getting anything in return.

And on the other hand, you have cats.

Who so clearly despise humans but have grown accustomed to the conveniences of modern life like scratch posts, lasers, and anal gland expressions.

Maybe my dislike for cats came from my mom’s fears. The word toxoplasmosis was always paired with cat whenever she spoke about them. I don’t think she liked them that much either.

But my mom had a lot of fears, and as part of my own growth, I have had to cancel all of them and go into the world to develop fears of my own. So I pet-sat for some cats and only then understood that not all of my mom’s fears are unfounded.

For every two pets I gave these cats, they would scratch me once in return. Once this cycle was completed twice, the scratch would be replaced with a bite.

When I told my wife about this, she asked me, “Well, how were you petting him?” Which is a typical case of accusing the victim. This is the equivalent of asking a woman, “What were you wearing?” when she tells you she was groped on the train on her way to work at seven in the morning while wearing her lady power suit.

One of my objectives as a dad is to transfer to my girls as little as possible of all my weird shit. So when I see stray cats on the street coming towards us, I don’t immediately jump and shout, “Stay away from us, devil creature!!”

I let my kids form their opinions. I don’t let them pet cats we don’t know, but I let them coo or talk to them. I bite my tongue at what I want to say, which is, “Cats suck!!! Let’s go back to pretending this pile of rocks, mud, and sticks is a crème brûlée.”

The other day I took my oldest to a patch of grass by our house so she could run around and kick a soccer ball. A black and white cat kept coming back to play with us. I let my daughter say hi, but I didn’t want her touching the cat because it had no tags or anything. She named the cat Spaghetti Spaghetti. I suggested we name it Mr. Paschetti.

We then headed to our community’s tennis court to kick the ball there. My daughterstarted playing under the fabric on the chain link fence. Mr. Paschetti approached her.

I didn’t think anything of it because I didn’t think the cat would approach enough for my daughter to pet him. But my daughter found a way to pet the cat, and the cat found a way to scratch my daughter’s face. 

Okay, that’s not completely accurate. 

The cat found a way through the chain link fence to scratch the inside of my daughter’s nose. When she came running up to me crying, I didn’t see any scratches on her face, and it was only until I saw her nose bleeding that I realized what had happened.

I walked my daughter home because it was time for dinner and not because I wanted to get away from Mr. Beelzebub.

At home, she could witness the contrast between heartless animals and our overly anxious chihuahua “Papaya,” who is thrilled to see her the moment she walks through the door, waits to play with her, and jumps around from the excitement of seeing her again.

I clean my daughter’s scratch to make sure she doesn’t get toxoplasmosis — whatever the hell that terminal illness is. I stopped myself from giving her a lecture about how not okay that cat’s behavior was. I choose instead to shower her with love and respond to her hugs and kisses in kind and not with scratches, bites, and hisses.

I’m hoping that by modeling this behavior, then she can have healthy relationships with other humans and will abstain from the dysfunctionality of owning a psychopathic cat.