Craggy Hole in My Heart & the Cat Who Fixed it Over the Edge and Back with My Dad, My Cat, and Me

One When my friend Sally called to tell me that I needed a kitten, and fortunately, her cat Pumpkin was pregnant, I said no, absolutely not. I didn't want a pet, I didn't like cats, and I didn't want to love anything that could die before me. I was thirty-three years old, single, and living alone in a house with a garden, three leaky skylights, and a crooked path to a sheltered beach in Santa Cruz, California. After seventeen years of struggling madly with emotional eating, and being as insane as anyone I'd ever met-I'd gained and lost over a thousand pounds-I'd finally crawled out of the compulsion by giving up dieting altogether. More recently, I'd settled at my natural weight, written two books, and begun teaching national workshops about breaking free from emotional eating. But my obsession with food was a walk in the park compared to the chaos that ensued whenever the possibility of love walked into my life. At the time of Sally's call, I was in a "relationship"-I use that term loosely-with Harry-the-Rake, a self-confessed lothario, who alternated between wanting to move in with me and telling me I was too fat. I was convinced that my heart was either on permanent sabbatical or missing some essential ingredients-the ones that allowed normal people to take risks, to discern the bad guys from the good, to say come closer, hold me, go away. And I was wary of opening to anyone or anything that would depend on me to come through. I didn't trust myself to show up. I didn't think I had the capacity for big love. Pumpkin gave birth to two kittens whom Sally immediately named Blanche and June. My mother, visiting from New York at the time, wanted to see them. At two hours old, they looked like wet weasels, and I wasn't impressed. My mother went straight for the white kitten. Take this one, she crooned, as she stroked the slicked-back fur of the shut-eyed rodent, but I wasn't taking anything so fast. A few weeks later, Sally called and said her husband didn't want a white cat, and so Blanche was mine. Usually, I am the one who bosses people around, but Sally was completely sure of herself, absolutely positive that having this pet was a precursor to having a life. So I told her I would take the kitten on one condition: if I didn't like being a cat mother, I could return it in two weeks, like a pair of gloves from Macy's. She agreed. It's not that I'd never had a pet. My grandmother gave me a parakeet named Cookie when I was seven. She rode around the house on my shoulder, sat on the desk while I did homework, and pecked at my eyelashes when I closed my eyes. One day, my brother opened the front door and Cookie flew out of the house. I cried for weeks. I decided then that the next thing I loved was not going to be able to fly away. We settled on goldfish, but the one we called Tallulah got out of the bowl somehow and flipped around the house. My mother and I ran after her with a strainer, but we couldn't catch her, and she died under the brown paisley couch. Then there was a puppy named Cocoa, who pooped in my father's slipper right before he stepped into it one Sunday morning, and by Monday, she had gone to live somewhere else. When she heard that Sally wanted to give me a kitten, my friend Sophie told me her pet story. After her mother died and her husband left her for another woman, she thought she was going crazy-the kind of crazy where a psychotic break was two weeks away. On a particularly rough day, a group of friends tried to make her feel better, but she sensed their fear. The fact that her best friends couldn't be with her sorrow made her feel even more frightened, more alone. Then her dog, Squeak, jumped in her lap and fell asleep. In that moment, she says Squeak saved her life. He cut through the drama, walked directly on the fiber of feelings, and staRoth, Geneen is the author of 'Craggy Hole in My Heart & the Cat Who Fixed it Over the Edge and Back with My Dad, My Cat, and Me', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400050833 and ISBN 1400050839.