That Look She Gave Me: Peace instead of Polarization

I come up the stairs after a long day of toil. Of labor. Of responsibility. I turn the corner and there she is, sitting on the couch, eyeing me like the scum she thinks I am.

My shoulders slump. My will is broken. My pride is hurt.

“I wouldn’t want to bother you two,” I tell my wife and her cat Meowalicious. In the past, I referred to Meowalicious as our cat. These days that doesn’t feel as accurate. Her cat.

***

How long has my wife Katie been training Meowalicious to love her and hate me? There’s no way of knowing, kind reader. Certainly, Meowalicious has made her move on my one true love. Put her cards on the table. Taken the love of my wife, taken the love of my family, and left me in lonely squalor. Abject suffering. Morose meandering. The adjectives can’t do it justice.

Sure, it is true that when we first brought Meowalcious home, my anxiety was running wild. She meowed incessantly that first week and I may or may not have called the Iowa City Animal Shelter and discussed taking Meowalicious back. Returning her like a sack of damaged goods. Like a busted Nintendo switch controller or a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. And yes, my kind wife Katie might have been the one that took her to the vet, discovered she had a stomach ache, and administered medication as she healed lo those two years ago.

But now things seemed to moved beyond the pale. Which pale? Any pale. This pale and that pale. Meowalicious is stealing my one true love. And I’m left with ornery Theo. An orange cat with an appetite for saturated fats.

Katie gets this:

I get this:

Granted, Theo comes from a long line of ancestors that look like this:

But still, in reality, he looks like this:

And there, I’ve just littered this blog with cat pictures like a crazy cat person. So sue me. But don’t. I’m poor.

***

Can’t we all get along? Can’t we, indeed. Perhaps there is reconciliation still possible. Perhaps there is some way to seek peace instead of destruction. These days, as the stability of the world order collapses, as western democracy is replaced by outright oligarchy, peace seems far-fetched. Still, it might be that Meowalicious and I can mend our differences. Katie and Theo might find common ground. And maybe, just maybe, my marriage of almost 15 years can overcome the polarization brought on by Meowalicious’s fascist feline takeover. Only time will tell.

I’m dream of a day of this:

Instead of a day of this: