{"id":709,"date":"2018-05-02T00:50:05","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T00:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/?p=709"},"modified":"2018-05-02T00:50:05","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T00:50:05","slug":"the-five-stages-of-cat-ownership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/archives\/709","title":{"rendered":"The Five Stages of Cat Ownership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You\u2019ve probably heard about the <em>Five Stages of Grief<\/em>\u2014denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance\u2014a roadmap, of sorts, to the emotional turmoil people go through during serious illness or loss. Well, I\u2019m here to tell you that the Five Stages of Grief apply to <em>way<\/em> more situations than their creator\u2014psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross\u2014ever imagined. Just for starters, I think the Five Stages explains perfectly what happens\u2014and, here, I speak from personal experience\u2014when someone adopts cats\u2026<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Denial:<\/strong> Cats are low-maintenance, they don\u2019t need to be walked, I won\u2019t have to clean up poop in the yard, and these ones are old, so they\u2019ll sleep while I\u2019m working. This is going to be great!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Anger:<\/strong> What the <em>hell<\/em>? Why do cats <em>always<\/em> barf in the middle of the night\u2014and <em>always<\/em> right beside my bed? And how much can cats actually shed? Shouldn\u2019t they be bald by now? And the kitty litter\u2026oh, the kitty litter\u2026does it explode out of the litter box all by itself, or are these damned cats using an immersion blender to hurl the stuff all over the basement?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Bargaining:<\/strong> Dear God, I feel like I\u2019m living with three mini-Chewbaccas. If you could just stop all the shedding and puking for one week\u2014just one week\u2014I\u2019ll give up wine. Okay, maybe not wine. I\u2019ll give up chocolate. Okay, not chocolate. But please make the fur tornado stop.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Depression:<\/strong> Why do I even bother getting pets? One cat is so hyper he keeps tripping me on the stairs, the second one looks frail and anorexic, the third one is so fat and lazy he\u2019s left a permanent dent in the couch. <em>And they eat the same diet.<\/em> I\u2019m a terrible pet owner. I should have just burned my money and thrown gravel around the basement.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Acceptance:<\/strong> Well, at least I don\u2019t have to walk a dog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You\u2019ve probably heard about the Five Stages of Grief\u2014denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance\u2014a roadmap, of sorts, to the emotional turmoil people go through during serious illness or loss. Well, I\u2019m here to tell you that the Five Stages of Grief apply to way more situations than their creator\u2014psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross\u2014ever imagined. Just for starters, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}