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archmage-ansrit · 3 months

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I had been pondering and debating whether or not to draw attention to this, since it all began during a time when there were being scams of people that don't even have pets asking for money using stolen pet pictures... but now it's not as important and I've had time to process it.

Warning for mentions of death.

November 2023 we lost one of our cats, and then on December it was the second anniversary of the death of our dog.

Both of them were amazing pets for a person that is so quick to feel drained as I am.

So, I feel like I should talk about them. Starting from the very beginning.

This is Lucky. Not particularly imaginative but he is! My brother found him as a kitten, abandoned in a local park; he was really concerned for the kitten, and took him with him. He took the kitten to the vet because there was something strange on one of the eyes - he has a tiny nick ON HIS EYE, but the vet managed to save the eye!

Mom wasn't super-thrilled, but the kitten endeared himself to her enough to keep.

Then, Thomas.

He 100% used to be a housecat. A coworker of my mom's found him in her backyard, limping a little - knowing we had taken in a cat already, she wondered if we wanted to take in another.

Yes. It helped a lot that this cat is gentle and well-behaved. A quick vet visit revealed the leg was just a bit swollen, probably from a bruise. By the second day he responded to the name we gave him, and when presented a collar, he stood still for us to put it on.

Vet calculated, approximately, he was like 4 or 5 years old already.

Then Blacky, the one that just passed last November. And her kittens.

That is Blacky, The Darling (the one with short hair) and Merida. Not included are Babe (I don't have pictures of her that won't make me Doxx myself), and a male kitten we only had for like 2 weeks before someone else adopted him.

My mom picked Blacky up with her kittens included. At first we thought Blacky was young herself, since she was so small.

We only had a little plate for food, so we worried it would be chaotic. The kittens were actually old enough for kibble, and maybe all of them would jump on the plate at the same time.

Kind of! Blacky actually waited for her kittens to eat - we refilled the plate for the kittens that had yet to eat, and only after we refilled the plate a second time did she begin to eat.

Blacky turned out to be older than we thought, probably 6 years, and had really bad teeth from a life in the street. She was easily angered, and distrustful of Thomas (probably because he is a larger cat), she allowed herself to be picked up only briefly, starting to hiss if we held her for too long. We eventually won her over, and she allowed herself to be handled for longer periods of time.

She became larger, as did her kittens. They were malnourished, but now they had food aplenty.

Then came Spot, the troublemaker.

He only has a single brushstroke of white on his head. Cried a lot, very nervous, but loving and cuddly.

Then, Trooper, our dog.

He was a housepet, no doubt. He could shake! He warned us when he needed to go outside.

Literally followed mom home one day.

Really chill dog. He probably was 6 years when we got him. His teeth were horrid. He didn't run or jump too much.

I loved him as much as I could.

Then, Otto.

He is more energetic than the others, and gets into the occasional fight with others.

Trooper would bark at them whenever that happened, helped get some order back.

Trooper was sick, though, we didn't know how much just yet. He loved getting bits of ham, and French fries, and he nuzzled so gently.

He had kidney problems, and even trying to get medications for him we weren't quite on time. He would have difficulty walking, and, in fact, that picture of him is from the last week he was willing to walk long distances.

The walks had been... I think as good for me as they were for him. I got to know more of my neighborhood. I got fresh air more often.

My phone, at the time, was pretty new, and this is the only picture I have of him on it. My mom has more. I used to be reluctant to take pictures, but something compelled me to take the picture.

He eventually would not even stand, and it was during the middle of Christmas break for the vet, so we had to hold on...

We got him to the vet, had him stay the night, but he got real bad over the night. He looked to be in such pain, we had to let him sleep.

And so we went forward.

2023 comes, and Blacky starts having trouble eating. She had lost several teeth because they had gone so bad they needed to be taken out, and now it seemed the last ones were giving her trouble. Feeding her was difficult, but we endured.

She spent more and more time in my room, as she would go there to avoid Spot and Otto's shenanigans. I leave my door closed because of them, so she understood it was a safe place.

She even got to let Thomas near her.

But even cleaning her teeth would not help her mouth issues, she was losing so much weight, so the difficult choice was made to have the rest taken out. It was a risk because she did NOT do well under the anesthesia the few times she had to have something done.

She came back, no longer any teeth left, but she ate her fill - she even got into dry kibble! She must have been so hungry...

But she, indeed, reacted poorly to the anesthesia. She stopped eating and drinking water regularly.

Oh, she held on to life with all she had. We tried getting her to the vet. She got an IV, medication for her kidneys (she was having a special diet for it, too, before she stopped eating).

She looked so much better! She was perhaps a bit grouchy over being held so long, but she needed warmth...

She held on with everything she had, tried to walk...

But in the end, she passed during the night.

Since I was taking care of her so much and so often, and she hung around my room all the time, my mom gave her my last name for the little memorial we got of her.

Financially, my mom took care of things, as she had been the one to take in the cats in the first place - I could not have done so myself. I can barely take care of myself, but with them, it helped me move in order to take care of them.

I feel like I should have done better, even though, realistically, there wasn't much I personally could have done without being a veterinarian.

Here is to pets. They love us as we love them, and some times, the have to leave sooner than expected.

#ansrit post #loss of a pet #cats #dogs #pets #my pets #pet dog #pet cat #Rescued pets #Picking up strays #adopt a dog #adopt a cat #Pet pictures

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dredshirtroberts · 10 months

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Storytime

so last night around midnight my phone text message alert goes off.

it's important to note that I very rarely receive traditional text messages (despite my Text Alert Anxiety kicking back into high gear out of absolutely nowhere right before i told my parents to stop messaging me anymore unless it was something very important). I get a couple promotional ones from my weed store, and my phone company reminds me about my bill via SMS. That's generally it, unless my parents decide to remember me suddenly out of the blue, and again, I've told them to fuck all the way off so the only reason I should receive messages from them is if there is a major family update i need to be kept aware of.

The phone goes off four times very rapidly, which makes me concerned not just because of the phone anxiety but because that never happens. I get maybe one text from the weed store a week - up to twice a day if they have a correction on a promotion they sent out erroneously. The phone company already sent my alert that my bill for this month is ready and reminded me of my due date for paying it (all in one text! very efficient! I'll receive another one about 5 days before it's due just to make sure it gets paid on time, which i appreciate). I had no idea who would be texting me since everyone who knows my number and i speak to regularly would likely have attempted to send me a message on discord first, or otherwise wouldn't need to send a text message because they were in the house with me.

I check my phone - 4 new messages in a group chat between myself, my mother and my sister. Oh shit, it must be super serious then if she sent 4 messages very quickly at midnight when I specifically said she wasn't to contact me unless it was a major family update (implication being Emergency Situation).

I open the group chat.

Something about my parents is that ever since my sister and I moved out, they have begun caring for and speaking about their pet and inanimate objects as if they are People. Now the inanimate objects are specific with duties and also are related to their interests - my father's two new "sons" are his dog and his robot lawn mower both of whom have People Names.

So anyway their wine stopper who they have named a variant of "Bruce" for [a specific but i don't want to doxx myself] reason has been moved to sit astride the spigot on mom's boxed wine. This was so important that the "please do not contact me" message was ignored.

Admittedly it is entirely possible that my father did not communicate the stop-talking order to my mother since i sent it specifically to him but it addressed both of them. Unlikely but possible. I only say unlikely because this is the first time my mother has messaged both myself and my sister and did not sign off to us as "love you girls!" but instead changed it to a more gender neutral "Love you guys!". She's been doing the "Girls" thing since well before i came out but doubled down on it somehow afterwards.

It's also possibly relevant to know that approximately 6 hours beforehand i had finally gone onto my facebook and removed them from my friends because I realized that part of the reason I stopped posting on facebook regularly was because I didn't want them to know about major aspects of my life, and since they were major aspects of my life i couldn't share them on facebook but also that was all i had to share on facebook, so i just stopped. Probably a healthy thing but I'd very much like to feel as though I am the one in control over my social media experience and that includes giving me the option to share my life on a social media site that connects me with other members of my family who I do want to know these things about me. Because they care and support and love me, where my parents do not.

I will say it is VERY unlikely these two things are actually related as neither of my parents is on facebook often enough to notice these things immediately after they happen, but the coincidence was not lost on me. I am also aware that my sister does not, to my knowledge, know about me asking my parents to stop contacting me.

For now I will be ignoring the chat - i do not care about the wine stopper they love more than me, and i am offended that still the only reason she reaches out to me is because she vaguely remembers i exist when she's drunk enough to think moving her wine stopper to a new location is newsworthy. Should contact persist in this capacity, I will send her the exact message I sent my father - if it continues in the group chat I will likely reach out privately with this, but depending on how egregious this gets I will only hesitate a little before bringing this shit out onto main.

Because they're hiding it. They can't be seen to have failed so poorly with their first "little girl" *gagging noises* that "she" no longer wants to speak to them. They might be seen as bigots and they aren't bigots, some of the people they know are....sweet like I am. (my mother's favorite "euphamism" for effeminate men and other homosexual-adjacent folks) They just don't understand why I would want to be a guy, after all I'm so pretty etc. etc. (no compliments when I was trying very hard to be a girl, mind...).

And I am inclined to help them hide it - i don't want to air my dirty laundry in front of the whole family. I am against ruining people's reputations when it doesn't do anything but hurt them - and my parents are heinous but they are human beings and I would not want to humiliate them without due cause. it's the same way I handled the breakup with my big-e Ex. I lost a lot of friends because he had no qualms about dirtying my name, but in the end I'm better off for it because in the end if no one asks for my side of the story, they don't deserve to use it to come to their own conclusion about the situation. Folks picked sides then, folks will pick sides now. And I'm not inclined to being accused of libel or slander about my family simply because no one was there when it was happening, or that it was hidden from them in plain sight.

I'm not at that stage yet, so hopefully I will not have to go the nuclear route on blowing this shit up in order to get my parents to leave me alone.

but they shouldn't hide it - it'll hurt them in the long run. There are people they can talk to about how to deal with it better, and I want them to take advantage of that opportunity to grow and learn and work on themselves.

but they won't. They can't be seen to be less than perfect. So I will hold my cards to my chest, and should they get cocky, I won't be afraid to hit the big red button and throw the whole family into a tailspin.

#my family is so lucky i am not a hateful bastard #i am just a disgruntled shotgun-wedding-child #my parents have no idea how much i protect them from bad judgements from other people #the only folks who know just how poorly they treat me will never have to interact with them by design #and everyone else is family or people i have no connection to that are somehow obligated to talk to my parents #i let them use me as a trophy - a sign of their own success - let them pretend we have a great relationship #but i will nuke all of that if they don't get their shit together

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