The Struggles of Ordinary People

As a cat trapper, I hear it all. People open up to strangers. I feel for the people behind the stories of their lives poured over the phone when they call me hoping I can fix their cat problems or in person when I pick up cats or trap the cats they feed. Often they are searching for acceptance, for love, for forgiveness or just for a listener. I can relate.

A woman called me over the weekend. Her male cat I got neutered a month ago had died suddenly without apparent symptoms.

I asked where she found him. By the food and water dishes, she had said, with his head resting on the water dish. This is a classic distemper death pose. I asked if he had any vomiting or diarrhea beforehand and she said he had not. She doesn't allow him outside. But this is a Heatherdale trailer park tenant, with lots of in and out visitors. Distemper can be carried in on the shoes of visitors.

He'd seemed perfectly normal the night before, following her into the bathroom as usual. She's pregnant, due early September, and has been in bed a lot. She has no job and no money and no husband. She had scrounged up $5 cash and forced it into my hand to help with my expenses. I got the male and three females fixed for her. One female gets out through a screen and comes and goes. She was pregnant. The other cats stay inside, or at least she thinks they do.

She said his back legs became paralized before he died. He showed rapid shallow breathing near his end. I told her it could have been shock caused by internal bleeding caused by poison ingestion or blunt force trauma. I asked if other people had been inside the trailer. There were some children who were there visiting with their mother, she said, and her boyfriend, who seems like a nice guy.

She buried her cat in the yard. The cat also could have had a congenital heart problem and he could have thrown a clot, causing the rear leg paralysis. He also could have been hit by a car. If one cat is coming and going, they all likely do, unbeknownst to her.

I told her to watch her other cats carefully. Females would be more prone to disease, like distemper, following a spay, because the immune response required to heal is much greater than with a neuter. Therefore, because it was the male who suddenly died, unfortunately, I do believe her cat suffered a terrible end following traumatic injury, whether accidental (hit by car) or purposeful.

I will be helping a convenience store worker fix her many cats. She has quite a history. She finally bought a house with her daughter, but is struggling to make the payments. She's not even breaking even, getting deeper and deeper into debt. She's looking for a second job, but she's over 50 and keeps getting turned down.

The job she has pays minimum, then with gas to work and back, doesn't help a lot. She gets paid twice monthly and it takes more than one of her two checks to just pay her half of the mortgage. That leaves utilities, car payments, food, insurance etc. left. They've had electric shut off at least once recently and she said they're behind on every bill.

She bought the house when she had a great paying job at Evanite. She'd moved into a Eugene apartment with her daughter. Her daughter had been homeless off and on, even when pregnant, has some issues. Then she got into housing with a HUD voucher, but her young sons then burned down the house. Now she can't get HUD assistance, for obvious reasons I suppose.

That's why her mother rented the apartment under her name down there. Also, she was trying to hide from an ex, who was stalking her. But they were evicted from there, too, when the owner decided to sell the rental. That's why they decided to buy a house together, she said, because of the instability of renting. They had no power over their own fate.

She did have the good paying job at Evanite. She didn't think paying the mortgage would be a problem. Then Evanite closed that plant. She was retrained in heavy equipment operation but never found a job in that field, although she is still trying.

The daughter's kids, all teens, are trying to find part time jobs now to pay school expenses, like for clothes and supplies. It's hard for them.

The woman grew up with an alcoholic mother. She said she attracted abusive men due to her own lacks and low self-esteem. It's getting worse out there I think. Too many low self-esteem girls and women.

I don't know what problems low self-esteem men exhibit. I wonder if they turn out to be the abusers of this world. I think it's getting worse simply because of multiplication--one couple has several children that they abuse in some manner, who each go on to have many more children, whom they may abuse or neglect who go on to have children.....etc, almost like a female cat can spawn a half million offspring with offspring of offspring in seven years, so can one abusive couple spawn thousands of dysfunctional kids who go on to breed more of same...I don't know what the answer is.

I for the most part, stayed away from men, knowing I have low self-esteem and would not feel I was good enough to be with anybody but a loser type.

I grew up in a family where women were treated like worms to be stomped, like stupid slaves, like kicking bags, like sex objects.

You can't grow up with normal perceptions of yourself in such an environment. You can't grow up feeling valuable or loved. You grow into a life of struggles, of constantly trying to prove you're good enough, an equal, valuable.

I meet women like myself out there everywhere. I wish I could hug them all.

Parenting is the most important job, if it is chosen. If you don't want to work at parenting, if you're going to be a lousy or abusive neglectful parent, don't open your legs or unzip your pants in the first place.

When I was roaming, after just being put into the mental health system, I ended up couching it with a Christian family in Albany. I'd met them when I worked at a nursing home. They had three kids. I sometimes babysat those three kids.

Then a cousin of the husband, who had had drinking problems, came to live with them also. I worried some when I heard the wife glowingly describe how well this man was doing while living there, because the descriptions became more and more like a woman in love.

Then, I came back one night to find the husband sitting mournfully at the kitchen table. "She's gone," he said. "What do you mean--gone?" I asked. She flew out to be with him. He had kicked his cousin out a week before. The cousin flew back to where he came from, the midwest somewhere. Now, the wife had flown back to be with her husband's cousin.

I left the next day. The wife came back a few months later, got on welfare and took the kids. I went back to babysitting them occasionally. I remember the five year old would run out after me when I'd leave, after their mother got home, and throw himself into my arms and beg me to take him with me. It tore at my heart. I had no real home to go to myself. I wanted to take care of him and protect him.

The cousin returned, got a job, and they married. They had three more boys. I only saw them twice more. Both times I was concerned about the boys. The mother yelled at them, but even threatened them in ways I would describe as abusive. She went into a church therapy group about it.

She contacted me recently. I'd not heard from her in years. Two of the first three kids, with the first husband, seem to be ok. The third is in prison in eastern Oregon for sex abuse, but his mother says it was with an older teen, only six or eight years younger than him and that she lied about her age.

Of the three younger boys, one is on the run, she said, from the law, another she calls a "bum", homeless or something, and constantly in trouble and the third is in trouble for allegedly molesting the young son of a woman he was rooming with.

After the original split, her first husband had married a mail order bride from some foreign country. They had later split, she said, but he recently remarried her.

Lots of troubles everywhere. On the outside, if you'd met them, as I did, glowing with religious fervor and on track with the American dream, you might think they were normal as America. But I know now, with age, there's nothing normal out there, not that I've met or seen.

This woman contacted me because her son in prison out in eastern Oregon wants to write to me. I told her that'd be fine.

The last I saw him he was five years old and begging me to take him home with me.