I truly discovered how my kids’ thinking differed when I found our missing cat dead in the crawl space under the kitchen floor.
My three daughters ranged in age from four to eleven. My son, my youngest child, was still in the -will eat anything of the floor whether it moves or not unless it is green -stage.
The cat had once been a sweet kitten that matured into a sweet old puss. An unassuming, undemanding tabby that grew up with my children. Her name was Ouzo. Cannot for the life of me remember why we named her that. My kids called her Wuz or Wuzzle. Wuzzle was subjected to non-malicious tail pulling, strangle holds, kisses AND bites, and, as my girls made the developmental evolution from pretend sibling play to performances that required audience Wuzzle also endured numerous costume changes as well. All with minimal struggle, claws in check.
Wuz went missing one day. We lived on a farm so we were not immediately concerned. Our cats were all predator pusses and for me a two day disappearance meant they were bored with Purina Cat Chow and were looking to augment their diets with something that would struggle.
But Wuzzle did not come back. The kids were worried, then really sad and then accepting. She was a very old cat after all.
About six months after Wuz disappeared our family decided that we’d rather not shiver through another winter in an uninsulated house. This meant digging out the crawl space under the kitchen (with about a third of a meter clearance; I was much thinner then) pouring concrete and installing a vapour barrier and insulation.
The first day in the dark and dirt under the house I found Wuzzle. Dead. Desiccated and pretty much two dimensional. I came out and up to deliver the news.
“I found Ouzo,” I said. “She is underneath the kitchen. She is dead. I think she was really old and tired and needed a quiet place to die.”
Well. My daughters needed no prompting in terms of plans of action. I did not even make the four steps to the kitchen sink to take off my gloves when daughter number two said, “Let’s bring Wuzzle up and have a proper burial.”
Daughter number one said, “No. Can we just leave her there in peace? Where she wanted to die?
“Can we put Wuz in a pot and boil everything off her bones and keep her skeleton?” said daughter number three. (Disturbing to think where she got that idea.)
And youngest child, my son, “Can we have ice cream?”
That may be the first time I really saw it. My children, all four raised with the same parenting philosophy, albeit dwindling parenting intensity, were astonishingly different in personality and temperament. That was the moment it was clear why one size fit anything and everything would never work for my family. My children then and are now completely different from one another in terms of spirituality, pragmatism, attachment, all forms of curiosity and much more.
That lesson served me well. There is nothing homogeneous in the way people view the world.
Getting to know people and understanding their particular lenses and filters has helped me in many situations. For example, supporting a woman in her last month of pregnancy who is feeling ambivalence and not the joy and anticipation that our society broadcasts as normal.
In business it serves to figure out what motivates a decision maker. Trailblazing? Accountability? And then it is possible to meet them where they are at and move forward together.
My children now have very different careers in professions that were vaguely foreshadowed decades ago about by Wuzzle the cat corpse.
But I accept, though, that there may be some universal constants. Like ice cream.
Corporate Midwife 