What My Cat Taught Me About Bouncing Back

Abstract

Less than an hour after my ex-husband and I told our two daughters that we were separating, I had promised my then seven-year-old that I would get them a pet. "How about that?" I said into the backseat of the car, where she was crying with her head on her older sister's arm. I was taking them for ice cream, and also trying to get out of the house that no longer felt like mine. The crying stopped. My daughter's face stilled. The three of us started to talk about dogs versus cats, rabbits versus hamsters. Thank God, I thought. I'd come up with a pleasing idea to follow the announcement of a terrible truth. I was the Girl Scout of divorce, marching everyone along a new trail to the future. I know those woods ahead look scary, I was, in effect, saying, but we will find wildflowers and berries! You will have two houses, I'd declared to the girls earlier, but those two houses will make one home. In my half of the home, which I was already imagining, the three of us would watch BBC shows, grow a vegetable garden with a lot of mint and—it had been decided by the time we reached the ice-cream shop—have a cat.