YOU are PAWSOME! 75 Reasons Why Your Cats Love You, and Why Loving Them Back Makes You a Better Human (ePub)

#33: YOU LET YOUR CAT FOLLOW YOU INTO THE BATHROOM

I’ve heard some ailurophiles say they have a closer and more intimate relationship with their cat than with their significant other.

If I’m being totally honest, I have to admit that—close as my husband and I are—there are any number of intimate things that my cats, and only my cats, will ever see me do. Some are of the goofy, dancing-around-the-house-in-your-underwear variety that you can’t quite bring yourself to let anybody see. But most take place in that most private of private spaces, the sanctum sanctorum of every household.

I refer, of course, to the bathroom.

There are things I do in the bathroom that my husband has never seen and will never see (if there’s any god at all). It’s not that I worry my husband would love me less if he happened to see me sitting on the toilet or shaving my armpits. (Although seeing me do both simultaneously might take some of the bloom off the rose.)

It’s just that I’d rather engage in these activities without any kind of an audience at all. And for that reason it took me a minute to adjust to having my cats with me in the bathroom—and, furthermore, to having a cat with me in the bathroom at all times, no matter what I happened to be doing.

My Vashti—the second cat I ever adopted—used to sit at my feet and watch with rapt attention as I applied makeup, and her successor, my current cat Fanny, enjoys doing so to this day. My clingy Clayton, unusually for a cat, never needs or wants any time alone, and seems to resent even the implication that I might desire five cat-free minutes in my day. In his old age, my cat Homer used to curl up atop the clothes hamper while I showered, and snooze peacefully in the warmth of the steam. Like an old man taking a shvitz, I would tell my husband.

Perhaps you also have an instinctive desire for strict bathroom privacy. But perhaps you, like me, find yourself wondering, Is there really any good reason to lock my cats out? Especially when it seems to make them so happy to be in here?

And that, as always, is the best and final argument.

How could you bring yourself to deny your cat those small moments of joy she appears to experience when sitting at your feet, looking up at you intently as you masque your face, or curl your eyelashes, or clasp that errant chin hair firmly 'twixt your tweezers and give it a good yank?

And it’s not like there’s anybody else who could sit there watching you do these things and still maintain a glow in their eyes that clearly says, You’re the most fascinating creature on the face of the earth.

PAWSOME!