GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!

Some people say that every woman, whether she knows it or not, has an instinctive urge to bear children and raise them. The instinct to nurture, I contend, is present (and strong) in both men and women, and lacking in certain men and in certain women. The instinct to bear children is almost by definition female, but I can't believe it's an absolute given. I myself have never looked upon the experience of pregnancy with anything but relief that I haven't had it, am not having it and won't ever have it.

It is nice to play with children. It is nice to hug children. It is nice to talk with children. I suppose it can even be nice to be a child, although it wasn't nice for me. That doesn't mean I should want, more than anything in the world, or even at all, to have one of my very own, 24 hours a day for a couple decades, and on a part-time basis thereafter. It's a lifestyle with which I can't identify and a job for which I feel not only unqualified but antipathetic.

My decision, in 1969, at the age of 17, not to bear children was made early but not lightly, and it was made as a result of the fear of physical pain, but also in conjunction with a determination not to raise children. (I don't want to underplay the fear of physical pain; it played a large part in the decision.) Although it turns out now to have been convenient not to devote my life to progeny, that wasn't my concern. I was an abused child and had read (and believed, and still believe) that abuse is often handed from generation to generation, through conditioning. I understood what I read. I knew that the perpetuation of abuse was no more a given than the instinct to get pregnant. However, I also knew I was an increasingly angry teenager with nowhere to place my anger, and I seriously feared that the normal frustrations of parenthood combined with my existing rage might endanger my hypothetical offspring. Thus I resolved to have none.

Immediately upon resolving not to bear children, I chose eight names for the children I would never have: Reine Meredith, Simon Alexander, Illya Ann, Peter Eli, Astrid Nils, Ross Gabriel, Gemma Giovanna and Jamie Seth. A decade or so later I named a cat Renquist; a character in my still-unfinished novel is named Rose Gemmaline (and I got the Gemmaline from a Philippine girl in one of my high school classes in Japan, who, asked to choose an English name for herself, created Jemaline). That's as close as I've come to using these names.

My first cat, Ohm, wasn't really mine (or anyone's); I plucked her out of a box of kittens being transported across our property (to my father's chagrin) by a small gang of youngsters intent upon finding them homes. A few days later I left her behind and headed for college, three states north. She never became the family cat either, since no one else liked her, and we had four dogs to bully her in what I'm sure they thought was a friendly fashion, so when I came home for school breaks I found her completely cowed and unaccustomed to human handling, much less love. Mom hated cats and never let her in the house (all the pets were kept in the garage, with access to the heated laundry room, but the dogs got trotted in for house time and poor Ohm didn't), but I sneaked her into my bedroom, placed her on my bed and pet her. She would hold very still and stare at me as if wondering when the petting would stop and the abuse begin. I never hit her but I had to wonder: Dad sometimes hit the dogs. Did he hit Ohm too?

In the summer of 1970 I stayed up at school for a remedial math course, taught by the droning and uninformative Mr. Kim (or was it Doctor Kim?) who told the same joke several times during both classes that I actually attended (the first and second): a Hottentot, he said, can only count to three, so if you show him four of something and ask him to count them, he will answer, "Oh, many, many!" It was mildly amusing the first time. It was less so after oh, many, many tellings. It's certainly all I remember of the class apart from showing up for the final test, completely unprepared, having skipped virtually the entire course, and Mr. Kim's saying to me, as I handed in my miserable test paper, "You came sometimes. I give you a C."

The dorms were not air conditioned and it was an especially hot summer. Joni Mitchell's Blue, Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, The Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead and the bootleg version of Buffalo Springfield's 1967 "Bluebird" (much longer than the version on Buffalo Springfield Again) were all released that summer, so I spent a lot of time in my room in the nearly empty dorm, eating beans and/or farina (on which I pretty much subsisted) and listening to the radio, trying frantically and with minimal success to tape "Bluebird." I discovered that Workingman's Dead played regularly would lower the temperature in my dorm room, and acted accordingly. (It still works.) My friend Wendy W., who was in love with a real unrequiting (and abusive) rotter and as a consequence habitually cut cross-hatch patterns into her legs with a razor blade, was also at school for the summer, for reasons which have slipped my mind; she wasn't in Mr. Kim's class (but then again, neither was I, really). She was teaching herself to play the guitar but couldn't sing a note. We found out that if I sang strongly she could be pulled more or less into tune by my voice -- a third above me. (Well, there is a lot to be said for harmony, too.) She introduced me to Phil Ochs. I introduced her to Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young and their various incarnations, including Buffalo Springfield.

I called home a lot. I remember on one occasion fainting to the floor for no particular reason, trying to dial home. It wasn't particularly hot that evening; maybe my peculiar diet (which was more of a budget than a diet) was to blame. Another time when I called home I asked, as usual, how Trixie, my dog, was, and was told, to my shock, that she'd died. Mom said, "We weren't going to tell you until you got home." That shocked me more than Trixie's death. How could I spend the whole summer blithely listening to the radio and not know my dog had died? How did Mom expect me to react at the end of the summer?

One Friday back in elementary school, at the end of the school day, I'd been told to leave by the front doors instead of the back, where my friends and I usually exited. I wasn't told why but found my parents and sister waiting for me in our powder-blue Rambler station wagon. I'd been good, they said, so they had a surprise for me. We drove quite some distance to another town; ours was too small to have an ASPCA. I was told I could choose any dog I wanted. On the way to the kennels the keeper showed us a three-year-old dog who was so shy she hid behind the sofa in the sitting room. The keeper favored this dog and kept her out of the cages. I liked this one. We went through and examined every dog in the kennels but I kept insisting I wanted the shy one in the parlor. "You can have any one you want," my parents explained. "You don't have to pick the first one you see."

"But I want Trixie," I said, so Trixie it was, a shy three-year-old black and white (saddle-pattern) part beagle, part smooth-haired fox terrier instead of a cuddly puppy of some nobler (and more singular) breed. I loved her. My family loved her. I don't even think my father understood why he sometimes hit her. He sometimes hit me, too, for as little reason. When I was 17, I was afraid of finding out that I'd accidentally learned that hitting was something you do to someone you love. I wasn't eager to test my theory on a baby.

When I finally got home at the end of the summer (with little time to spare before the beginning of the fall semester) I was facing the loss of Trixie, while my family had already gotten past the mourning period and bought a new dog, a stud poodle to service our three female poodles. They'd named him Shane, which is a distortion of the Yiddish word for "beautiful." That he was, but he was a stranger, and my dog was gone. Furthermore, he was young and playful, and one of his favorite games was kitten volleyball. (Mom had a funny habit of letting Ohm escape, although she was careful enough with the dogs, so Ohm kept getting herself pregnant and, to Mom's vast disappointment, coming home to give birth. Mom also had the equally humorous habit of forgetting to close the laundry room door, so that Shane had free access to mother and litter. Mom never forgot such things as closing doors at other times; her absentmindedness only applied to the one door and only in the presence of newborn kittens. The kittens weren't very good at volleyball, by the way, since they got to be the ball. I came home at the beginning of kitten volleyball season, and for the next year or so Ohm would slip past Mom, get knocked up, come home, have kittens and watch Shane toss them in the air. I don't know how she managed to have so many litters. I do know that finally she had enough of fun and games and took her newborns one by one and hid them behind the air conditioner. We called the volunteer fire department to come carve a hole through our kitchen wall into the laundry room, where the a.c. was located, and pull the kittens out, dust plaster off of them, rub them back to reasonable warmth, and return them to Ohm, who got to see them slain again the very next day. Newborn kittens are no fun at all; they have no aptitude for volleyball. Curious how that laundry door got left open like that.

Ohm had never been very trusting; now she was paranoid. I did what I could but the odds were against us.

In December 1971 I found, in the little pit under a wire trash can outside my dormitory, a tuxedo kitten who obviously had never played volleyball with a dog. She was yelling her head off, and who could blame her? It was raining, and the pit was soggy. Furthermore, she'd become separated from her mama (later identified as the campus cat, Serena, for whom this mite grew to be a dead ringer). I picked her up, put her inside my coat and roved off to someone else's play rehearsal, having none of my own at the moment. The kitten poked her head between two coat buttons and peeped out at everyone, who made quite a fuss of her. I did have an evening rehearsal so I popped back to the dorm room, deposited the kitten therein, and, secure in the knowledge that my hateful roommate, Evelyn K., would be out overnight, I left for practice.

When I got back to the room, the kitten was gone. Well, she couldn't be gone -- I'd locked the door -- but she was nowhere in sight, and it was a pretty tiny room, maybe one and a half times the size of your office. I wasn't worried. I went about my business, eventually turned out the lights and went to bed. Mere moments later there was a fuzzball sitting on my face, one paw up my nostril and the other on my lips, and a busy little tongue washing my eyelids. I guess she settled down eventually; I awoke with her in my arms.

The next day Evelyn returned. "What's that, a cat?" Good guess, Evelyn. "What's its name?" I admitted I hadn't yet decided, but (perhaps since this kitten was, unlike most of the others I'd met recently, alive) I was thinking of naming her Zoya, after the nurse in Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward ("Zoya" means "life"; of course, naming my first cat Ohm hadn't guaranteed her peace, but that didn't occur to me then). Evelyn wasn't impressed. "Why don't you call her kittycat?" Evelyn had just taken off her shoes and was sitting on her bed, across from mine. Zoya crossed the small space between us and gave Evelyn's toes a succinct swat. Evelyn moved out the next day and I had the room to myself for the whole next semester. Thank you, Zoya!

Alas, Evelyn also tattled. The hall monitor came to inform me that I could not keep a cat in my room. "It's only a week until Christmas break," I pleaded. "I promise I'll take her home with me and leave her there." The monitor was a right good person who later became a pal of mine, and she agreed to turn a blind eye for the week. I took Zoya home and my father fell in love with her just as fast as I had, although my mother was somewhat horrified. Dad took naps with Zoya; she slept on his face, too. He was (as is only appropriate) completely flattered.

I don't know for sure but I don't think my father ever hit Zoya. I wish I could say the same for myself.

Zoya was an exceptionally bright cat (almost as bright as my current oldest, Wafer), and therefore willful. I'd never been in control of anything in my whole life, including my whole life. Even Trixie had really been the family dog. Zoya was, despite my father's fondness for her, my cat, mine alone, and in addition to loving her and protecting her, I controlled her, pretty much the same way I was controlled by those who loved and protected me. I never injured her. I never tortured her. I never kicked her. I smacked her butt if she did something naughty, but I never smacked it hard. The problem was, one smack wasn't enough, and I kind of expected her to be sorry for what she had done, which it is not in the nature of cats to be. (Cats can be sorry, but only if they did something by accident. No one does something naughty by accident; if it was an accident, it wasn't naughty.)

It didn't take me long to figure out what I was doing, and even though I'd predicted it (with regard to children) it shocked the hell out of me. I stopped immediately.

In 1974 I learned of three kittens who needed homes, and placed two of them, keeping the fluffiest, most adorable gray and white one for myself. I'm glad I named her Micky, because when she turned out to be a he (fluffy kittens can be hard to sex) I didn't have to change his name, although I expanded it to Prince Lyov Nicholeivich Myshkin-Feldman, after Dostoevsky's The Idiot. (I'd somehow gotten it into my head that all cats had to have Russian names, and given Zoya the "matronymic" Serenovna, since I didn't know who her father was.) He grew quite large, weighing in at 15 pounds with never an ounce of fat on him, and was for all his 18 years the most laid-back cat I ever met. I could sling him over my shoulder and he'd fall asleep with his upper body drooped down my back. I never hit him, even when he decided to play with my wire-framed glasses, twisting them shapeless, and then, in shame, buried them in his litter box. I never even swatted him when he pissed all over my friend Pattie, by way of laying claim to her. (Pattie had that effect on men of all species.) It wasn't an example of marvelous self-control. I simply never wanted to hit him.

One day my mother and father took a vacation and put their three dogs (Shane having proved a bust) and two cats (Ohm and my sister's stab at cat-ownedness, Cara) in a kennel for the duration. Their account of what happened when they returned is this: the attendants brought out the dogs, then went back and brought out Cara. When asked where Ohm was, they replied, "Oh, gosh, we must have left a window open or something." My parents never questioned or even complained about it. They had never liked Ohm. My take on the story is that my parents told the proprietors and/or attendants to lose Ohm. I fear she ended up with a vivisectionist to put a few coins in someone's pocket.

My cats, past and present, have rules by which they must live. Most of them are of their own creation, and I must live by them too. I provide food, water and shelter. The cat box must be created by me, used by them, changed by me. (Once when I was too ill to do my duties Wafer made a pretty good litter box by himself. He didn't use a box, but all the other elements were there: the newspaper, which he knocked off a shelf, on the bottom, and then the litter, which he got by chewing a hole in the full bag sitting nearby, brushing it with his paw onto the newspaper. On November 8, 1997, I was locked with my cats in a freezing shed with a chair, a blanket and the cat box. They had to share it with me, for there was no toilet.) Cats may not interfere with human feeding time. Cats may not deliberately inflict damage on the human body. Cats may not leave home without permission. I may not leave home for long without permission. Cats must not open the refrigerator door. Cats must not eat socks. If I disobey a rule, the cats may tell me, and in some cases, show me. If they disobey a rule, they get yelled at (briefly) and perhaps swatted on the behind so lightly that in some cases my hand doesn't actually connect with any fur.

Skybar and Wasabi are obedient cats. Wafer is a disobedient cat. He especially likes to open the refrigerator door and eat my socks. None of my cats would ever hurt me on purpose and they go out of their way not to hurt me accidentally. I would never hurt any of my cats on purpose and I go out of my way not to hurt them accidentally.

Affection and downright adoration are exchanged freely without imposition of rules.

Could I do all that with a human child? Undoubtedly. I've babysat. I like kids, though infants scare me a bit. Kids seem to like me too. We all get along great because I don't have to be the one to say they can't have the car or a beanie baby or a pierced navel or whatever it is they want that I don't want them to have, can't give them or for some other reason would withhold. Thing is, the only reason I would want now to have had a kid way back when is so that I would have a grownup son or daughter to take care of me now that I am ill and not so young. That's entirely selfish and no good reason to reproduce. Using up the eight good names is also a pale excuse. As for molding young minds, an activity I find rather repugnant, I spent ten years in Japan trying to get young minds unmolded. I never wanted to teach anyone what to think. I just wanted to teach them to think, and show them the process if (and when) necessary.

I am a selfish person. I didn't use to think I was; I began to realize it in college, when, for example, I acted selfishly with regard to music. I always had to control the music; I would volunteer to be the disc jockey at other people's parties not because I wanted to help out but because I didn't want to have to listen to other people's choices. When I realized I was selfish, I was upset, because I didn't want to think of myself as selfish, but I also didn't want to compromise in my selfishness. (Obviously I have control issues. Oddly, although I've been in therapy before, these issues never came up. In fact I'll be damned if I can remember anything much ever happening in previous therapy. I remember a doctor in Washington, D.C., who conducted a group and, after a few private sessions, stuck me into it, I suspect for his own convenience and profit. He said many times, once to me privately, appropos of nothing, and several times to the group, usually just as left-fieldishly, "The only thing wrong with masturbation is that it's lonely." Perhaps because this homily became as tired as the Hottentot joke and perhaps because of its being non sequitur, I once felt compelled to answer this remark: "That depends on what you expect from masturbation." "True," he admitted, and never hauled out his homily again.) After quite a few years I realized that I had to make choices pertaining to this selfishness of mine. If I couldn't become an unselfish person, then I would have to pick my selfishness just as others pick their battles. I would have to act selflessly sometimes even when I felt selfish, and allow myself to be selfish if no one would be harmed, or at least much harmed. Well, it's hard to know how much harm is "much." To a Hottentot, that's over three, right? Judging physical harm is no problem. As my mom always said, my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins. Judging mental or emotional harm isn't as easy. Obviously calling someone names isn't cool, but how about being picky about which movies to go to? Hell, I'm too selfish even to live with another grownup; how the hell would I handle kids? No, no, cats are my speed.

For much of my adult life, I've had nightmares in which I've just remembered abandoning something, shirking some responsibility to a helpless living creature, who is now suffering and dying because of my neglect. Sometimes it's a kitten or puppy. Sometimes it's an infant. I've forgotten I given birth to it, or adopted it, or in some way assumed responsibility for it. I'm guilty, guilty, guilty and it's too late to make amends. There is never anything in the dream to do with being caught, or being punished. It's just me and my guilt. What can it mean?

You speculate that my nightmares are possibly the expression of my regret over not bearing and/or raising children. It makes sense, and if I were examining someone else's dream the same thing might sound reasonable to me, but I just don't see this regret in myself. Maybe I regret my selfishness, and whatever harm I may have done others because of it (although since realizing that I am selfish, I've been especially careful); the benefits of my selfishness I don't regret. Benefits, you say? Are these not disadvantages? If I weren't selfish, wouldn't I then have had kids and enjoyed them? Well, maybe, but that's like saying too bad I don't like golf, because then I could play golf. Since I don't like golf, I don't want to play golf, and don't miss it, so I don't regret not liking golf! This is a disadvantage neither to me nor to golf, since I have lots of activites to enjoy without golf and golf has lots of fans to admire it without me. We don't miss one another.

Most of my current nightmares involve being chased by persons who mean me deadly harm, and/or dealing with my parents, who, having died, are once more, albeit temporarily, alive and in charge. Sometimes there is a drama going on, in which I may or may not play a part; sometimes an actor is involved (I watch way too much television). Sometimes the details are so bizarre I can't make sense of them, or even recall them for more than a short while, after awakening. Infrequently, but sometimes, the dreams are sexual in nature, sometimes quite pleasant, sometimes with too much intrigue going on in the background. Much more often they involve a futile search for a bathroom, the discovery of an unsuitable one (dirty, no privacy, no vacancy), the attainment of the use of one, suitable or not, but my inability to remove my clothes, or properly use the facility... it goes on and on. I might need a toilet or I might need a shower but the upshot is always the same: interminable frustration. I have these more often than the guilt dreams and less often than the pursuit dreams. So why do the guilt dreams bother me the most?

When I was growing up, I was abused physically and emotionally, and what hurt the most was my feeling of not deserving to be punished. Most of the time I wasn't even sure what I'd done. I didn't believe I was guilty of anything, yet I was constantly being punished. I'd done something I wasn't supposed to (and didn't know it was wrong); I'd neglected something I should've done (and didn't know I was supposed to do). I was told I was brilliant, and that I was stupid, that I was beautiful (which I never believed -- I do have access to mirrors, you know) and that no man would ever love me unless I dolled myself up with makeup and hairspray, that I was right-thinking and that I was insane and should be locked up. While other kids were threatened with being grounded, I was threatened (by my parents, never by a doctor or even involving a doctor) with institutionalization. Even if consciously I know I didn't deserve the abuse, and that it even was abuse, some part of me thinks I deserved it and feels guilty as hell.

Why kittens and puppies (Ohm's slaughtered innocents and tormented, possibly slaughtered self aside)? Why infants? They're all helpless. I'm not just the guilty party; I'm the party making a declaration that it's all over for the helpless, that there is no more hope. All is lost and it's all my fault. Everything I touch is poisoned; world beware. I guess these are dreams of doom, and of course I feel responsible for my own failure, too. How can I get to be almost 50 years old and be in such a hopeless, helpless situation? Why didn't I do something, anything, differently, so that I would be solvent, thin, surrounded by loved ones (preferably not of my own procreation) and doing only things I enjoy doing? I guess I blew it. I blew my life. I made some horrible mistake and look what happened. Guilty, guilty, guilty!

Well, my conscious mind tells me that's hogwash. I didn't decide to become ill, which is at the root of most of my financial problems, and I didn't choose my parents, who at least lit the fuse on most of my emotional problems (as well as educating me to be empathetic, liberal and fair; there have been, are and will be less desirable parents in the world). If I'm selfish, I try hard not to act selfishly; I see people all around me who act only selfishly. I can't be the most awful. Nor, as it was once pointed out to me, can I be the absolute worst-looking troll in the universe. I can't be the unpleasantest, the least lovable. Even Hitler had a lover! (Well okay, they say power is an aphrodisiac. Powerless as I am, I've had lovers too, but I don't have one now, and I can't imagine having one now.) It is not impossible to like me, and it can't be impossible to love me. My cats love me. Erik loved me, even if he stopped being Erik and whoever he became was hateful. My parents loved me, even if they didn't know what love was and were helpless to control their own frustrations, physical problems, bad luck and bad behavior. (In fact they didn't know how to stop controlling things they shouldn't control.) My dreams tell me that my conscious mind is full of hogwash.

Fortunately I don't sleep that much.

I can't write anymore. Wafer just opened the fridge door and now he's eating my socks.

NOTE: This was written while Wafer, Skybar and Wasabi were still alive. Wafer and Skybar died in 2000. Wasabi died on my birthday in 2002. I am, as of this late 2009 update, owned by eleven cats (including six grandkittens) and a dog. I am also engaged to be married to an adult man with whom I live, who does not think of me as a troll and who has taken over cat-litter duties. I'm 57 and a half years old and not pregnant.