So we have a cat: Woofa Butterball Popsicle Asher.

(Not taken today)

We got her at a time when I maybe wasn’t going so well.

When you have a kid with a “thing” sometimes you can be a bit of a mental as you chisel away the entrenched stone of your heart that is made up of all the ridiculous notions of perfection you had, and sculpt yourself a new shape.  One that encompasses the reality of loving the kid you have.  I say “you”, but I mean “me”.  It was ME who was a bit of a mental.  I guess I was working my way through the stages of grief, but not of a loss of something tangible, but of a potential.  A potential life for our daughter that existed only in my imagination.

There was also the sense of loss in knowing that I would have no more children, for I couldn’t, once I knew that we both carried secret mutations on a precise spot on a particular chromosome that when coupled, would make a kid with a thing, one out of every four times.  Again, a loss of potential, a fleeting wisp of an idea of a baby that I allowed only to exist in my peripheral vision.

So when I saw that Ragdoll and her deep blue eyes- kind of like the eyes of a kid I know- I had to have her, even though it wasn’t the best time for me to be looking after another life.

And if you could see that kid with a thing cuddling that cat, pushing it in a pram or touching noses together, you’d probably agree it was a good choice.  Even if you think cats are a bit shit.

Her name was Popsicle when we got her, but we wanted to name her ourselves.  I wanted to call her Johnno or Chairman Miaow.  Liam wanted to call her Fooey Fooey Meow Meow, and Nath didn’t give a toss ‘cos he hates cats.  But Coco wanted to call her Woofa, so of course that is what she was named.

Woofa is the laziest cat in the known world, and usually comes in around 5pm on a big day.  Today she didn’t.  And then tonight she didn’t and then late this evening she didn’t.  And even though I profess not to like that cat, I started to feel sick at the thought of what we might be scraping from David Low Way tomorrow before the kids got up.  I called her one more time tonight before bed, even doing the silly “pusspusspussPUSS” thing that no self respecting cat has ever heeded.

And she came.  She came all wobbly and miaaaoww-ing and strange.  I couldn’t tell immediately what was wrong although I knew it was something.

It’s her eye.  The entire thing is full of blood, so much so that at first when I held my breath and prised the lids open I thought there was no eye, just a dead red socket of eyelessness.  I’ve looked three times and taken a photo and sent it to the vet, and I’m still not convinced that what I’m seeing is her eye.  Her azure is crimson.  I want to quote Lady Macbeth and say “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the blue (sic) one red”.  Or something.  A bit melodramatic, but it’s her eye.  Or not an eye.  I can’t decide and I can’t sleep yet until I look one more time and be sure that someone hasn’t just done a King Lear and an “Out vile jelly” to it, like I first thought.

Seems I’ve read too much Shakespeare and Stephen King (the World’s two greatest storytellers, by the way) for sleep to come easily tonight. (But of course the bloody cat is asleep next to me on the Time Capsule, dreaming the dreams of the innocent.)

I guess you don’t see with your eyes when you dream.

Do you want to see the eye photo? (You know you do)

What are you, lovely readers, Team Dog or Pussy Lover?

…From The Ashers xxx

On the train from the airport to the city, there seemed to be a lot of young children in formal school uniforms, for a Sunday.  Whole families were decked out: children in blazers, hats and ties, adults in what we would wear to a wedding up here on the Queensland Coast.  I guess you would call it semi-formal.  With lots of black.  More black than you ever see in my town.  I thought it a little unusual, but then I’m from UpNorth, and you never know what those crazy Southerners will get up to.

We all got off at the same station, landing us in the middle of the city.  The mood was solemn, but then, it was the city, and we don’t really expect country kindness this far south of our border.  We stepped out of the station, and into a horde of people.  At first I thought it was the crush of the usual Sunday crowd, and bewildered with the motion that swept us along, it took me a moment to realise we had waded into some kind of rally.

The assembled were orderly, and the pace as slow as a funeral march.  Almost as I formed that thought, I heard someone ringing a bell.  Not a festive tinkling.  A knell.  Followed by some kind of chanting.  And it was then that I realised we were in some kind of cortege.  Which explained all the formal black.

Hurriedly we jumped out of the procession, concerned that we were intruding on someone’s grief.

That was when we saw two girls with placards.  Standing silently as the men and women, teenagers and tiny, tiny children streamed by.

The chanting wasn’t for a dead person.  It was for un-persons.  And they weren’t dead.  Not unless you can count a collection of cells that was never born: living, and then when they are no longer supported by a host: dead.

For this requiem was by Bishop Julian Porteous, lamenting, then lamenting and lamenting some more, in this, the March of the Unborn Child.

I was taken aback at how moved I was by this display, but perhaps not in the way that Porteous and his flock intended.  I could feel tears pricking at the backs of my eyeballs, but not in sympathy for the so called unborn “children”, but in mourning for all of the women who have died in Australia due to abortions performed inexpertly and in an unsafe manner.  In regret, for all of the “unwed mothers” in the 1960s and 70s who felt they had no option but to give birth to unwanted children and then adopt them out.  In sadness, that we live in a country where a woman’s body is deemed by some, to be the concern of a third party.  In fear, that a Woman’s right to choose when and if she wants to have a baby, could be taken away.

Should some interloper deem it their business, to decide what a woman can do with her very own body.

I sank to the curb, the strength that I usually possess evaporating from my legs, and watched with the disgusting fascination that some people have for car accidents, as the parade of the self absorbed and the righteous trudged by.  They had their eyes forward, fixed on some point in the distance, like zombies approaching a feed.  At least the adults did.  The children, children from parents who wanted them, tried to lark and play but they had their hands gripped, and restrained to somber, as they approached the cathedral.  For this was not a day of exuberance, or of joy, or of freedom.  This was a day of repression and stifling and silent suffering.

From my curb-side position I watched those gorgeous two with their little signs: NEVER AGAIN and MY BODY, MY CHOICE adorned with pictures of coat-hangers, and I admired their energy and enthusiasm and their virile youth.  I adored them for choosing to be here, in this place of frowning, filling the space with light and love and acceptance.  I admired their cheeky freedom.  My heart smiled and sighed with their bounding potential.

Lightened my heavy heart

And as a woman who is on the other side of the fertility spectrum, I sent them sparkling golden wishes that they would always be so full of life and promise, and that they would always, always have the right to choose.

….From The Ashers xxx