Catfished By Laura J. Oliver

This is a story of being catfished—you know, when you think you’re getting to know an attractive person online with a successful career, who may even have their family name on a wing at the hospital, only you’re actually corresponding with a troll in a third world country emptying your bank account.

And although this is also a story reminiscent of the first rule of writing: “Nothing is as it appears,” I want you to know from the outset I’m not as naïve as I look.

Okay, that’s a lie

But I do know that no matter how many Instagram requests I receive, that’s not the real Liam Neeson who wants to follow me, or the real Keanu Reeves who wants to be my friend.

Because that would be just silly.

Really silly…

(This is where you say, “It’s not them! Move on!”)

So, the ad said, “Small, sweet, gray kitten, free to good home.” I suppose it was our first foray into being pet owners –the precursor to being parents. We made an appointment with the family running the ad and drove out to Cape St. Claire to meet our new offspring. “I love you already,” I thought as we drove to their neighborhood. “Even more so if you are the runt of the litter.” I was born to champion the disadvantaged.

We sat on the plaid sofa in the living room of a middle-class split-level while the patriarch of a somewhat strange clan retrieved the animal advertised. But what came sauntering down the hall in this house full of liars was no sweet gray kitten. It was an enormous striped alley cat with a gun-slinger swagger. This cat was packing heat. Wearing shades and an attitude. Mr. Oliver and I looked at each other and then back at the ringer like we were in the twilight zone. How could what we were expecting be so different from what we found? Where was the disconnect between the ad for the sweet gray kitten and well, Cujo?

But we had come to get a cat—and we were going to leave with a cat. I did not know yet that I’m not good at shifting gears—at letting go of what I am anticipating to embrace a new reality.

So we took this thug home, optimistically naming her “Sweetcakes,” and Cakers was immediately in charge. We were afraid. Very afraid.

She insisted on sleeping at the foot of our bed, the problem being that if either of us moved one bare foot, even an inch, she dove onto the covers, grabbed whatever moved with her claws, fell on her side, legs thrumming, and sunk needle-sharp teeth through the comforter into bare skin till you screamed.

We lay as still as death, trying not to even twitch, but it was inevitable—one of us would move a leg followed by a shriek in the dark and a competitive scramble for safe space under the covers. As reality dawned that she wasn’t going to acclimate – we were slow learners –we decided to banish her by closing the door to the bedroom. But that just made her sit on striped haunches out in the hall and howl.

We lived in Navy Housing, where thin walls between units meant she was keeping others awake, but the hollow interior doors left about an inch of open space at the bottom, so newly inspired, she hunkered down on her side in the hall and stuck huge, hairy arms like salad tongs under the door clawing at the air trying to latch onto us. We’d sit up in bed transfixed, staring at the disembodied forearms like we were watching a horror movie—The Thing was in the hall! The Thing might get under the door at any moment. I have to admit it was a little exciting.

During the day, she caught mice to play with. She’d take them out into the yard and throw them so high in the air even she didn’t see where they landed. And when we got a second cat, a sweet, small, low-IQ stray we named Henry (let’s have another baby, the dopey couple said, the first one didn’t work out so well), she repeatedly sauntered over to the sofa where he lay sleeping, leaped up and sat on him as if he didn’t exist, usually settling down complacently on his dumb little head.

And then we got pregnant. Like—how bad could having a baby be, we said? At least we won’t be afraid of it.

.I’d like to say I’m quicker now to relinquish what I am hoping for when what I find is something different. But I’m not.

I expected to dance, to become an astronomer, a physicist, a healer, to write a bestseller by the age of 30.

I expected to be a better daughter than I was, to live in one house my whole adult life with a white picket fence and a rose trellis—where the family gathered for parental wisdom and homemade baked bread.

I intended to be a perfect mother.

Can you imagine that naivete, Liam Neeson?

Are you shaking your head, Keanu Reeves?

It’s just that it feels as if the possibility of doing better is still an option when so many expectations have been realized. I did have a house with a white picket fence and rose trellis for a time. I never became an astronomer, but I study the stars. I didn’t write a bestseller, but I did publish a book that I wrote from the heart. I didn’t become a physicist, but I am a student of the cosmos, the search for the beginning, and aren’t we all healers?

If time is an illusion unlived potential is, too –reality is still in play–the ending of your story hasn’t been written yet.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.