Love Lessons from My Mean Kitty
By Jessica Brodie
Have you ever had a pet who’s so sweet with you and yet with everyone else is a monster?
I’ve had a lot of cats in my life, but my kitty Leia has been branded “evil” by most everyone I know. They call her “psycho kitty,” “Jekyll and Hyde,” you get the picture. But with me, Leia is simply adorable. I’m “her human,” and I feed her and somehow instinctively understand her, and we have a great relationship. We communicate well, mutually ignore each other, snuggle side-by-side in relative independence, and consequently have a beautiful relationship. She lets me pet her, and she’ll even pet me sometimes, usually by rubbing herself against me, which I suppose you could say is technically petting her … but I digress.
But with everyone else, let’s just say there’s been a lot of bloodshed. Literally. Recently when I was out of town, my always-kind mom agreed to come over and check on Leia and feed her once a day. She dutifully fed her, brought her a cat toy, and then made the apparently colossal mistake of sitting down on the stairs. That’s when Leia came up right behind my mom, pounced on her, and tried to tear her face off. She actually got her claw momentarily stuck in my poor mom‘s cheek. My mom sent me pictures to prove this. “I didn’t do anything!” Mom wailed. “All I did was sit down and she attacked me!”
Yet when I came home, Leia was an angelic, perfectly behaved snuggle cat. Go figure.
All of my kids say Leia gives them the little flirty blinky eyes inviting them to come over and pet her, and the second they reach out their hands to touch her, swat. Teachers have even questioned why they have claw marks all over their hands.
I try to tell my kids Leia has ironclad personal space boundaries and really doesn’t like people touching them. She just isn’t terribly friendly. She has trust issues. I’m not sure why this is, because she’s only known love since the very beginning of her life. I know this because she was a tiny kitten when we got her, born to a stray-cat mother whom our friends took in and fostered through birthing a litter of babies before getting spayed and adopting out to someone else, and they always only showed her love also. It’s just how Leia is. She’s a difficult, challenging, unfriendly cat who is extraordinarily choosy about who she deigns to give love.
Still, I adore Leia in spite of the fact that she harms other people I love. My heart is filled with compassion for her. I try to understand why she feels the way she feels, and I respect that.
What I realized recently is that despite how we can convince others we are “good” people and lovable and friendly, we are all every bit as much a Jekyll and Hyde psycho-kitty deep down. We can be mean, abrasive, and biting even to the people we care about the most. We have unfounded trust issues, and we are constantly on guard. We push others away. We hurt each other, sometimes unintentionally, but still, we hurt them just the same.
Yet God loves us in spite of this. He created us and knows our heart, He knows why we are the way we are, and not only does He love us anyway but He has given every single one of us a path to eternity in the form of His son, Jesus Christ, if only we choose to accept that gift.
We appreciate this for ourselves. We are thankful. Yet sometimes when it comes to the other difficult people in our lives, our hearts can be so hardened toward them. Instead of respecting and understanding that a person might have reasons for being unfriendly and abrasive, we take their unfriendliness personally. We see their difficulty as a personal attack or a rejection. We choose to hold this against them, choose to hold a grudge, choose to reject them and hold them at arm’s length.
Think about the difficult people in your life. Is this a relative or an old friend who is cutting with her words or actions? Is this someone who doesn’t have a filter and says whatever is on his mind, often being offensive? Is this someone who is so fearful of the “other” that they behave in racist sexist or other hateful ways?
Is this perhaps a nasty neighbor or hostile coworker? A person with an addiction or severe mental illness that impacts not only their perspective but their behavior toward other human beings?
Maybe this is someone who doesn’t bathe regularly or wears what we might consider to be offensive and off-putting clothing, “scary-looking” tattoos, or slogans on T-shirts that we perceive to be combative or just plain wrong?
As we approach the holidays, it’s not only possible but rather likely we’re going to come into contact with people we don’t always see eye to eye with, much less like. Perhaps these are people who’ve been downright mean to us in the past, insulting, toxic. While we do not need to subject ourselves to their wrath, it’s important to remember that in spite of all this, God still loves them and sees past their armor to the soul they are inside. They still have worth and value, and even if we cannot have a relationship with them, God does
And if we look a little deeper at ourselves, how much different are we from them, really? We might not say some of the things they say in public but do we hold some of those opinions in our heart of hearts? We might not wear the “offensive” clothing or put signs in our yard or bumper stickers on our car that say what they say, but are there places in our own heart that are just as prideful, judgmental, or filled with hate and fear?
God loves us just as much as he loves them. God is hurt by our sins just as much as theirs.
You don’t have to allow a toxic or difficult person to harm you verbally or psychologically. But there are ways you can still love them. You can pray for them, you can choose to forgive them, you can provide for them, and you can love those in their life who somehow manage to look past or not be affected by them.
You can love them in spite of whatever it is, knowing that God loves them and us as well.
I still love my mean kitty, even though she’s mean to those I love. If you have a mean kitty in your life, I hope this speaks to your heart and inspires you to love, too … in spite of it all.
