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II. I was never really an animal person growing up. I was more into books, video games, music. I liked the idea of a pet maybe, but I knew it would be a lot of responsibility, and I knew I was a pretty irresponsible kid. also i think i has this sense thatā¦ āanimals are dumbā? https://t.co/XiqkNWgFkr
feeding my kid at 5am sets off a series of thoughtfeels that brings me back to being 12, being in singaporeās gifted education program, being the only tamil/brown kid around as far as i can remember, and being told that my failure would be a disappointment to my entire community
i used to hang out at the void deck of a friendās place, and sometimes a stray cat would come hang out with us. i developed some fondness for that cat, but it felt sort of superficial. like friendly relations with a shopkeeper, maybe. trivial niceties, pleasant but immaterial
after i got married, one day a neighborhood cat followed us home. i remember thinking, this fella seems really attuned to us. like heās reallyā¦ paying attention to us. i felt compelled to take him in and we quickly developed a real kinship https://t.co/myo5NJUFtl
somehow we ended up with a 2nd cat too. iāve learned so much from them. i learned to be patient, i relearned to be irreverent, i learned to pay attention to their subtle non-verbal cues. turns out pets have this whole universe of subtlety to them i never even perceived as a kid https://t.co/j5W9EHjTUo
my two cats have entirely different personalities, interests, inclinations, moodsā¦ i would never have guessed it as a kid, but I could now probably happily spend years just observing and getting to know cats, studying them, befriending them, getting to know them https://t.co/B5ve7154lQ
but this is not actually a thread about cats, this is a thread about parenting every single thing ive learned from and about my cats applies here too. as a kid i didnt see how babies were interesting or fun. they just seemed like piles of poop and shrieks and responsibility
i now spend hours every day just paying attention to my newborn son, attuning with him, listening to his sounds, watching his face, his gestures, and itās all so fascinating to me. every moment i feel like iām learning something important about himā and by extension, myself
i do still remember what it was like to be relatively uninterested in babies. i think most of it was just that i had more pressing interests. eg when i hit puberty, i temporarily lost interest in books (lifelong passion!) because girls, peers and rock bands were more compelling