Author: Raspberry Cat

Loss and gain can affect us so profoundly that we temporarily forget who we really are.  We tend to fixate on something nominal because dealing with a blow to our core is too painful.  When we lost Cat, not only did I lose a family member, but I felt I lost part of my identity.  We were a family of 5 – she being the 5th – and then suddenly, we were a family of four.

Cat did not start out as part of my identity.  It probably took me a good 5 or 6 years to accept her place at the table – literally.  But part of her remains in me – that part which led me to adopt two new Bengals, one last year and one early this year.  I had never really identified myself as a Bengal-Cat-Person.  I have had many boonie cats of questionable lineage.  Now, it seems, I have a preference.

It was a hard decision to open our home to new pets.  There was great debate between my son who missed Cat and wanted a new presence in the house, and my son who felt adopting a new cat would betray Cat’s memory.

My colleague and I were talking today about how another colleague of ours, a social worker I guess you would call her, works incredibly hard—tirelessly—for her clients, and yet gets paid very little.  She is literally out there saving lives every day.  It made me think about how a lot of our public servants are underpaid…teachers absolutely, but also police officers, nonprofit employees, and legal aid attorneys.  It was a running joke at my old legal aid law firm that the attorneys qualified to sign up for the same public benefits they were assisting their clients with.  This also made me think about the traditionally undervalued stay-at-home mom.

I stopped in the middle of my conversation with my colleague.  “What do we value?”  Is it widgets?  Do we value making widgets?  Do we not value some things simply because they are less tangible than others?  I thought about what we consider to be valuable – “valuables”—jewelry, cash, gold, rare art, fancy cars, expensive electronics…  All these things have a commonality: they are expensive.  They cost a lot of money to purchase.  Therefore it would seem that we value things based on how much money they cost us to acquire.  People don’t take out insurance policies on shampoo bottles because they are less “valuable,” i.e., they cost less money to replace.