ADAIR LARA -- When Children Turn Into Cats
ADAIR LARA
Thursday, March 28, 1996
copyright 1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1996/03/28/DD54240.DTL
I JUST REALIZED THAT while children are dogs,
loyal and affectionate, teenagers are cats.
It's so easy to be the owner of a dog. You feed it,
train it, boss it around and it puts its head on your
knee and gazes at you as if you were a Rembrandt
painting. It follows you around, chews the dust
covers off the Great Literature series if you stay too
long at the party and bounds inside with enthusiasm
when you call it in from the yard.
Then, one day around age 13, your adoring little
puppy turns into a big old cat. When you tell it to
come inside, it looks amazed, as if wondering who
died and made you emperor.
Instead of dogging your footsteps, it disappears.
You won't see it again until it gets hungry, when it
pauses on its sprint through the kitchen long enough
to turn its nose up at whatever you're serving. When
you reach out to ruffle its head, in that old
affectionate gesture, it twists away from you, then
gives you a blank stare, as if trying to remember
where it has seen you before.
It sometimes conks out right after breakfast. It might
steel itself to the communication necessary to get the
back door opened or the car keys handed to it, but
even that amount of dependence is disagreeable to
it now.
Stunned, more than a little hurt, you have two
choices. The first -- and the one chosen by many
parents -- is that you can continue to behave like a
dog owner. After all, your heart still swells when
you look at your dog, you still want its company,
and naturally when you tell it to stop digging up the
rose bushes, you still expect it to obey you, pronto.
IT PAYS NO attention now, of course, being a cat.
So you toss it onto the back porch, telling it it can
stay there and think about things, mister, and it
glares at you, not deigning to reply. It wants you to
recognize that it has a new nature now, and it must
feel independent or it will die.
You, not realizing that the dog is now a cat, think
something must be desperately wrong with it. It
seems so anti-social, so distant, so sort of
depressed. It won't go on family outings.
Since you're the one who raised it, taught it to fetch
and stay and sit on command, naturally you assume
that whatever is wrong with it is something you did,
or left undone. Flooded with guilt and fear, you
redouble your efforts to make your pet behave.
Only now, you're dealing with a cat, so everything
that worked before now produces exactly the
opposite of the desired result. Call it, and it runs
away. Tell it to sit, and it jumps on the counter. The
more you go toward it, wringing your hands, the
more it moves away.
Your second choice is to do the necessary reading,
and learn to behave like a cat owner. Put a dish of
food near the door, and let it come to you. If you
must issue commands, find out what it wants to do,
and command it to do it.
BUT REMEMBER THAT a cat needs affection,
too, and your help. Sit still, and it will come,seeking
that warm, comforting lap it has not entirely
forgotten. Be there to open the door for it.
Realize that all dog owners go through this, and few
find it easy. My glance used to travel from my cat
Mike looking regal and aloof on the fence to a
foolish German shepherd on the sidewalk across the
street, jumping for joy simply because he was
getting to go outside. Now I miss the little boy who
insisted I watch ``Full House'' with him, and who
has now sealed him into a bedroom with a stereo
and TV. The little girl who wrote me mash notes
and is now peeling rubber in the driveway.
The only consolation is that if you do it right, let
them go, be cool as a cat yourself, one day they will
walk into the kitchen and give you a big kiss and
say, you've been on your feet all day, let me get
those dishes for you -- and you'll realize they're
dogs again.
copyright 1999 San Francisco Chronicle