Pets: All Joy and All Fun

(One more, and then I’ll change topics next time. I know, I know, I could talk about animals for hours.)

Ok, I’m being a little facetious with the title of this post. Cleaning up hairballs, scooping litterboxes, and stuffing cats into their carriers for a trip to the vet may not exactly be fun (though you will never hear me complain about it). And suffering the loss of a pet is so devastating that it sometimes makes me wonder why I adopt another.

But as I think about the daily life I have with my pets, I find it a stark contrast to the many articles I have read about the drudgery and unhappiness of parenting, yet another reason I think it is ridiculous for people to stereotype the pets of the childfree as replacement children. In the article “All Joy and No Fun,” the author describes the unpleasant work of raising children and discusses some of the reasons children can put a strain on relationships and people’s happiness. In this article and many others that I have read, people with children describe emotional highs and unrivaled joy that their children bring, and some recognize that these are so monumental that it lessens the unhappy feelings they have for the day-to-day of parenting. It makes the intolerable tolerable.

When I arrive at home, the cats greet me at the door. They eagerly follow me around the house as I put my car keys away, change out of my work clothes, and wash my hands for dinner. I’ll stop to give each one a scratch and will talk to them as I go about my business. It’s pleasant to have them at my heels, even when they insist upon coming into the bathroom with me.

We settle into the couch for some TV in the evening… one cat on my lap, one on the footstool next to me, and one on the coffee table in front of me. They sit quietly most of the time, or maybe one will stand in front of the TV and block our view. My husband and I just laugh.

I sit at my computer for a while to get some work done. Each cat takes a turn sitting on my lap. Sometimes they jump up on the desk and walk across the keyboard. With a smile on my face, I brush them aside and delete the “qqqqqqqqqqqqq1111``” that they have just contributed to whatever I’m working on.

Every moment I spend with them, regardless of what “annoying” thing they may be doing, is nice. In contrast, my parent-friends on facebook use their status updates to gripe about their children doing these very kinds of things.

One of my cats will perch on her back feet and stretch out her arms to be picked up, just like a child. The other day I scooped her up, felt her little arms grasping around my neck and shoulders, felt her soft fur against my face, and listened to her soothing purr. In that moment, it was no exaggeration to say that I experienced absolute euphoria. It reminded me of the extreme highs that I read about parenthood, and I felt like was I was getting away with something… all joy and all fun instead of all joy and no fun. Even if the “high” someone might experience with a child were a thousand times greater than what I was experiencing with this furry critter, I don’t feel the need for something more. And why would I even want to trade regular euphoria and consistent contentment for constant drudgery with only very rare thousand-fold euphoria?

So while my pets are not child substitutes as I explained in my previous post, I see that as an unintended consequence, a happy accident, they can gratify me in ways that children gratify their parents -- but without the high cost.

(P.S. Yes, I realize that this post could also be filed under “crazy cat lady,” haha.)