The Birds and the Bees

It was the spring of my fifth grade year when my mother decided that the best way to teach her daughter about the birds and the bees was to let me watch our cats Ritzy and Bones try to get our cat Maya pregnant. 

Have you ever stopped to think about how exciting it is to watch a female cat in heat?  Same here!  Isn’t it mesmerizing, how they stick their asses in the air and growl amorously?  Despite the fact that was wildly romantic to witness cats straddling each other while screeching and growling, I had to question my mother’s resolve.  Was this what love was like?  If it was, there was no way I was giving her grandchildren. 

In the end, it was our strapping young stud, Bones, who got the job done.  Or at least that’s my decisive conclusion.  Bones was gray.  The kittens came out gray.  That’s evidence enough for me.

Ritzy was our overweight orange tabby and brother to Bones, and a fine gentleman at that. One of those lazy types, that pick up all the Lyme disease-ridden deer ticks as they roll around, carefree, in the piles of leaves in the woods.  And he smelled too.  But that’s beside the point.  All in all, Ritzy was a good cat, if a little too uncoordinated to, let’s say, “get it in.”

The pregnancy of Maya “Bengal” Chartier was rather uneventful.  I wasn’t sure what was so great about a needy, fat female cat waddling around the house.  She’s still like that, only minus the tiny feline fetuses.  Anyway, near the end of May that year, Maya started following us around all day, meowing constantly, “IMMA CARRYIN BABIES BITCH FEED ME LOVE ME PET MY HEAD OR IMMA GONNA BREAK MY WATER ON YOUR FAVORITE CHAIR.”      

She kept true to her word and went into labor all over my nice reading spot.  How was I to know that even happened with cats?  Do they menstruate?  I don’t think they make tampons for cats.  So why does their water break when they go into labor?

Whatever the case, my mom and I moved our clingy, convulsing cat into a cozy little cardboard box in the closet.  Did I really just use that frightening amount of alliteration in one sentence?  I think I just shuddered in horror more than a cat going through labor contractions.  We watched Maya circle around on the towel, soiling it with her feline pregnancy juices. 

It was magical.

The first kitten out of Maya’s mystical portal of life was punctuated by a loud crack of thunder.  I’m not joshing you here.  The heavens parted and greeted the kitten’s arrival on Earth with a mighty bolt of Zeus’s lightning.  Ask my mom.  It happened.

As mystifying and marvelous as our makeshift delivery room was, I soon tired of the tiny, slimy, wet blobs of cat rolling around on the towel.  My mother and I figured that if a cat in the wild could handle giving birth alone, so could Maya.  So we went to bed.

The next day we had five new adorable kittens.  After whining to my mom endlessly, we kept one.  His full name is “Chocolate Thunder Mousse Chartier.”  My mother and I tirelessly raised the rest of the kittens too, until my mother was satisfied that I had learned enough from the experience.  And so the kittens were sent their separate ways, into the unknown.

Soon after, Bones ran away.  But that’s just fathers for you.