Our cat Puddy (pronounced similar to the word pudding) is 11 years old.  I have written about her before, as she is considered one of the meanest most dangerous cats in the world.  On the outside she looks sweet.  She is a small gray and white cat, and has never been outside other than by accident.  As you may remember, she was declawed in ALL four paws (you cannot declaw her evil and dark soul) and compensates for that over the years by biting, with teeth that I am sure she makes time to sharpen multiple times a day.

What is a complete oddity however is that she loves Ben.  He is young, way too busy for a cat’s preferred environment of lying around contemplating killing something, and yet for the two of them they make it work.  She sleeps with him, hangs with him, and all in ways that reflect far more than just tolerance as no one on God’s good earth has ever been able to tell a cat what to do.

But Puddy does have, or at least had, a problem…….addiction.  For as long as I remember she has been addicted to cat treats, and not in what some might deem “recreational use” but full blown addiction. The cat word “meow” means a variety of things, as they are linguistically not all that diverse, but when she doesn’t get her treats and she meows perhaps 1000 times in a row while following you wherever you go, I am pretty sure there is a problem.  And the first part of recovery is admitting that there is a problem (which she hasn’t yet…..to her it is still OUR problem and she works hard to make it so).

So imagine my worry a few weeks back when I opened the container of treats that Ben handed me and it was empty.  Her dealer is generally Walmart, but it was late and a long way to go to get her a fix, and really I understand I should not enable this kind of behavior.  So out of desperation, I went in and filled the treat container with her regular cat food and prayed that it would work.  Oddly enough it did, it has since then, and it does.  It was never about the addiction.  For 11 years apparently it has all been about the love.

But for 11 years I have come to realize the utter stupidity of my actions.  Treats cost A LOT more than that food I have always had in abundance, and had I figured this out years ago, perhaps Amanda would not have to be thinking about getting that third job.

But that is the world of addiction.  Sometimes we just don’t get it.  But when we do figure it out, things get better.  Puddy is just as happy, I am a lot happier, and it saves us all from having to send her to a daily meeting of CTA.

Goodnight my friends and God Bless!

Tommy+