Birthday Girl!!

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember the series of photos I took of my house in Bay St. Louis in early November, after the church group from Kansas had started the gutting process and all of my possessions were piled up outside, waiting to be hauled away to the dump. As I was walking around the debris, taking pictures and seeing if there was anything I could salvage, I looked down and saw a little gray 35mm film canister with an undeveloped roll of film inside. I thought I knew what the photos were and was hoping I was right. Later in the month, before I left Baton Rouge for the West Coast, I had the pictures developed, and here is what they showed.

(Make sure to click on the pictures for close-up views.)

That's my girl Tink, having just given birth to her first (and only) litter in a box in my living room. (I've talked before about how she came to live with me, already pregnant at the time although I didn't figure that out for a few weeks.)

There were 3 babies in the litter, two boys and one girl. The girl was the first out. It's a good thing she was the smallest, because as I discussed in the post linked to above, she stepped out backwards; the first thing I saw was this tiny hind paw coming out. The second kitten was a boy, who was delivered in normal position, and the third baby was a breech birth. The two boys were pretty big.

The kittens didn't let me know what their names were going to be until they were a couple of months old. By that time, there were only two of them, because the little boy born last died when he was three weeks old. One night, around 4 AM, I woke up and heard one of the cats making a cry of distress. When I went into the room where they had their little "nest", the third-born was dragging himself around by his front legs; his little hind legs weren't working  anymore. I'll never know for sure, but I had noticed the night before that Tink was playing roughly with the kittens; she's got very strong legs; and I think that while playing, she kicked him a little too hard and broke his spine.

This is still hard to write about, and it's actually the reason I never got that roll of film developed. After he died, I didn't have the heart to look at the pictures. Then a couple of years later, when the remaining kittens were 3 years old, the other boy (a magnificent and sweet cat named Leonardo) died of a urinary infection. So it is a little difficult to look at these photos of them right after birth.

Kitten pile!!!

Willow ended up on the bottom of this pile, beneath her brothers. That's her head pointing downward at the bottom of the picture. (I decided a long time ago that the third-born kitten would have been named Sammy if he had lived.)

I had read up on how cats deliver their babies (it's called "queening", and the mother cat is referred to as the "queen"), but I knew that this was Tink's first litter; she was only about six months old at the time. So I was a little concerned that things would go OK. I remember thinking to myself, it doesn't matter if you or Tink don't "know" how to do it, these babies are going to be born; the life force knows what to do and birth will happen.

(Interestingly, I felt the same way a few months later when my 17-year-old cat, William, died of old age. I observed his dying process as another kind of "birthing" process, another kind of labor. There is a natural force behind it, and it knows how to do itself.)

On Friday, April 7, 2000, about 6 PM, Tink climbed up onto the sofa in the living room where I was sitting and started to lick herself; her water had broken, and she apparently had decided that the sofa was a great place to have her babies. Not!!! Childbirth is messy. I had already gotten a big cardboard box ready, and that's where her babies were born, within the space of 1 1/2 hours.

Tink nursed her babies until they were five months old. (By that time, they were eating solid food, so I don't know how much milk she was still producing.)

That's Willow's head and face you can see at the left.

Happy Birthday to you, 
Happy Birthday to you, 
Happy Birthday, sweet Willow, 
Happy Birthday to you!!
 … and many more 

Comments

[marlaine]

awww...the pictures are very adorable
i'm sorry this is still so hard for you...death is so painful
thanks for sharing these memories
xo

[Kitty]

Thanks. I've come back to this post and looked at the photos a lot during the past few days. It's been difficult, but healing, too (and, I have a feeling, not just about the cats.) *sigh*