I think of myself as my cat's momma, and often refer to myself that way in her presence. She will just look up at me with that dedicated cat stare, as if to say, "whatever you say, slave." Then she'll go out in the kitchen and demand some tuna from the big white box that lives in there. Her faithful servant will follow her in there like a mindless drone and get her the tuna, which she will then glance at and completely ignore the rest of the day. She doesn't do it because she's hungry but just because it's an expression of her power over me. I may call myself momma, but to her I'm the weird, subservient cat with the thumbs and the can opener. There are other times however, when she really does treat me as if I were a member of her family, though sometimes I think she considers herself the mother. She will watch over me as I bathe... and I know she's wondering why the process requires all that water, when I could just take a nice, tidy tongue bath like a sensible cat. She watches me as I sleep and wakes me if I make a noise. (Snoring can be frightening to a cat. It sounds like you're growling or something.) I think she figures I just had a bad dream and she needs to put a stop to it right away. She watches me while I'm watching TV, because anyone who can stare at the wall for two hours, periodically laughing and reacting in various ways, desperately needs watching over. She watches me when I talk on my cell phone, because disembodied voices come out of that little black rectangle, and that concept is just wrong somehow. It especially bothers her because I talk back to that disembodied voice. I once put the phone close to her ear and the other person on the line said my kitty's name. Her eyes got big, her ears laid flat, and she got up and hustled out of the room. The black box knew her name, and that, my friends, is very wrong.
