TRANSCRIPT
I would like to tell a story about the subject of trust. Trust meaning, you know, who the other person is. You know that their heart is good, that they’re a compassionate person who has your best interest at heart. And maybe they know that about you too. It happens through a really strong intimate bond.
Well, when I think about my first experience of profound trust, it didn’t happen with another person, but it happened with my first cat. She was a cat who was a stray for probably five, six, seven years of her life. She was missing teeth, she was really skinny, she had scars on her. One of her ears was a little ripped up. I called her Puddi, and I convinced my parents to let me adopt her. She became an indoor outdoor cat. She was allowed to go out, she’d catch mice, but she came back and she lived in our home. And she knew that it was me who had adopted her.
I loved Puddi. Puddi slept in my bed every night. In fact, I lay on my back and Puddi would sleep right on my belly with her face looking right at me. She wanted to know that I was there all night long. Puddi trusted me, and I trusted Puddi.
When crazy things were going on in my family, when my parents were fighting, when my parents were being mean to me, being inappropriate, violating me in all sorts of different ways, when the kids in the neighborhood were cruel and mean, when the teachers were sadistic and nasty, and other kids in school were nasty, Puddi was always there for me, and I was there for Puddi. I loved to pet her and to brush her. I always made sure she had enough food. In fact, I made sure she had too much food.
One of the problems was that Puddi had been starving when we met her, and I think she’d gone through a lot of periods of starvation in her life such that when she lived in our family and there was a lot of food, she dramatically overate and she started getting fat. And I liked that. I was like, “Puddi, you’re allowed to get fat. You’ve lived a tough life, and now you can do what you want.” It’s a little hard for me because she was kind of heavy when she got heavier and heavier, and she was on me.
Well, the story that I’m going to come to that really exemplifies the trust and the bond that I had with Puddi, that Puddi felt toward me, was one night. I think I was about nine years old. This is maybe about a year into us having Puddi. Puddi was sleeping on me. I was sleeping in my bed. The lights were all out, maybe a little moonlight coming in the window. I was lying on my back, and I woke up maybe three o’clock in the morning. Puddi was on me, and I reached out and I pet her, and I felt something on me, and it was wet. I was like, “What in the world is this?”
And then I realized Puddi had either pooped on me or peed on me or thrown up on me. I was like, “Why did she do this?” And I put my hand, my wet hand, to my nose and I smelled it, and it clearly wasn’t cat pee and it wasn’t poop, but it didn’t really smell like vomit either. And I’m like, “What is it?” I had a little light next to my bed, and I turned it on, and I realized it was blood. And I was like, “What is this?” And I panicked. Puddi jumped to the side, and I felt, and there was this lump there. And I was like, “Did she just vomit or poop like bloodied something on me?” And I felt this lump, and it moved. And then I looked at it, and it was a kitten. It was a little kitten with its eyes closed, a little black and white kitten.
And something I realized that completely unbeknownst to me, because Puddi was so fat, she’d been pregnant, and she’d given birth to a kitten literally right on me when I was sleeping. She’d squatted down and given birth right on my chest. And there was this bloody kitten with its eyes closed, and there was Puddi next to me looking at me, and I’m holding her kitten. And I put it down on my belly, and she started licking it. And then I realized, “What do I do?” So I started yelling for my mom, and my mom came into the room, and I was like, “Puddi just had a kitten on me!”
Well, it was a shock. We made a little box for her in a blanket. We put it in this big walk-in closet, and Puddi instantly ran into the box, and we put the kitten in there with her, and she licked the kitten more. And then boom, boom, she popped out two more kittens. And I think, gosh, if I hadn’t made such a fuss, if I’d actually just been a little bit more confident in the trusted bond I had with Puddi, she would have had those two further kittens right on me, probably with me watching.