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When doing the right thing hurts others.
Oct. 29th, 2011 01:14 pmI feel like a bitch right now.
I fostered a pregnant cat a few months ago. The kittens, all four of them, are happy and healthy and old enough to be adopted out to their (hopefully) forever-homes. There's only one problem with this.
My mother wants one.
My mother is, shall we say, not the most responsible person I have come across. She has, while trying to leave my father, come back to this city, gotten a job, made plans, and then run away with my father without telling anybody, deliberately hiding from those who try to contact her so that she doesn't have to face her responsibilities. I am one of the people she hid from. Multiple times. I considered myself lucky when she sent me an email full of lies about why she was leaving again, because at least then she acknowledged that she was leaving.
I once got cats, when she was living with me. She and I agreed to care for them together. She insisted, because she didn't want them in her room at night and because she refused to sleep with her bedroom door closed, that they be locked in the bathroom each night when she went to bed. She eventually got tired of having to care for them and told me to find them a new home.
I have them back now, of course. She no longer lives with me, and no longer has any say in what happens to them.
But now she wants one of the kittens. While it isn't solely my decision, I told her that I didn't recommend it. She's on unemployment right now and doesn't have a job. She lives in a shared apartment that she wants to leave soon in favour of getting her own apartment, and people rent that other room quite often, and the cat she wants is more shy than the others and isn't as cuddly. Her landlord doesn't allow cats, either, but she planned to beg him for one and say that she would stay there on a long-term basis so he would have guaranteed income from her if he'd only let her adopt.
I told her my reasons for discouraging this desire of hers. I phrased it as politely and diplomatically as I could, and she said that she'd abandon the idea for now, but I feel awful about what I did and said. I feel like I crushed her dream, like I might have made her cry. I know it was the right thing to do, not just for her sake but for the sake of the kitten she wanted to adopt, but knowing that I very likely hurt her makes me want to curl up and cry, until all my frustration and guilt is gone. But it doesn't go away so easily. From experience, that guilt will stay with me for months, maybe longer, far beyond what's necessary or even logical for me to feel it.
In many ways, I wish that she wasn't such a foolish and irresponsible woman. Then I might have been glad to help her adopt a kitten of her own, and I would be able to stay in contact with something I have helped raise since birth. But that dream can't be realized here, and in order to protect everybody involved, I had to be hurtful and say that which I didn't want to have to say.
I know that doing the right thing can be hard sometimes. I only wish it didn't have to hurt so very much.
I fostered a pregnant cat a few months ago. The kittens, all four of them, are happy and healthy and old enough to be adopted out to their (hopefully) forever-homes. There's only one problem with this.
My mother wants one.
My mother is, shall we say, not the most responsible person I have come across. She has, while trying to leave my father, come back to this city, gotten a job, made plans, and then run away with my father without telling anybody, deliberately hiding from those who try to contact her so that she doesn't have to face her responsibilities. I am one of the people she hid from. Multiple times. I considered myself lucky when she sent me an email full of lies about why she was leaving again, because at least then she acknowledged that she was leaving.
I once got cats, when she was living with me. She and I agreed to care for them together. She insisted, because she didn't want them in her room at night and because she refused to sleep with her bedroom door closed, that they be locked in the bathroom each night when she went to bed. She eventually got tired of having to care for them and told me to find them a new home.
I have them back now, of course. She no longer lives with me, and no longer has any say in what happens to them.
But now she wants one of the kittens. While it isn't solely my decision, I told her that I didn't recommend it. She's on unemployment right now and doesn't have a job. She lives in a shared apartment that she wants to leave soon in favour of getting her own apartment, and people rent that other room quite often, and the cat she wants is more shy than the others and isn't as cuddly. Her landlord doesn't allow cats, either, but she planned to beg him for one and say that she would stay there on a long-term basis so he would have guaranteed income from her if he'd only let her adopt.
I told her my reasons for discouraging this desire of hers. I phrased it as politely and diplomatically as I could, and she said that she'd abandon the idea for now, but I feel awful about what I did and said. I feel like I crushed her dream, like I might have made her cry. I know it was the right thing to do, not just for her sake but for the sake of the kitten she wanted to adopt, but knowing that I very likely hurt her makes me want to curl up and cry, until all my frustration and guilt is gone. But it doesn't go away so easily. From experience, that guilt will stay with me for months, maybe longer, far beyond what's necessary or even logical for me to feel it.
In many ways, I wish that she wasn't such a foolish and irresponsible woman. Then I might have been glad to help her adopt a kitten of her own, and I would be able to stay in contact with something I have helped raise since birth. But that dream can't be realized here, and in order to protect everybody involved, I had to be hurtful and say that which I didn't want to have to say.
I know that doing the right thing can be hard sometimes. I only wish it didn't have to hurt so very much.