If your day job is the night and weekend business and ours is, at some point you’ll be faced with the social grease fire known as a girl fight. Their popularity with UFC viewers notwithstanding, most girl fights are terrifying, undignified affairs, and if you don’t know how to handle one, it can, like a grease fire, blow up in your face. These sordid scuffles are savage, even on video, and almost always over a guy about whom you wonder, “Really? Over that guy?”
Every so often one of these gender-specific brawls proves more psychological than physical but is no less brutal. Case in point, when Mama Su squared off against Mother Nature over Mr. Pink in a desperate effort to keep the latter from claiming him for her own. Unknown to Su before I posted on Facebook and installed him in the Main House with an IV set-up, she embraced Mr. Pink with a glance toward me that said, “Again?” and went to work.
I introduce all male cats as “very handsome” and given his state at intake, Mr. Pink was anything but. Unfazed, Su welcomed that hairless wretch as she would hunky Louie and spent the evening, alternating between treatment, researching his affliction and retreating him. When Mother Nature leaned in, Mama Su pushed back, and for five hours, the duel of wills continued until the former found an opening and Mr. Pink was gone.
Su wins far more of these battles than she loses, but like every hyper-competitive combatant, she suffers the losses harder than she celebrates the wins. Emotionally spent over a cat she knew less than six hours, Mama Su spent yesterday looking for solace in a kindle of kittens using her as a cat tree. I like to think there’s nothing I can’t defuse with clever phrasing, but in times like this, it’s best to shut up, step back and let the professionals do their job. And if that happens to be a kitten with a heart on her nose, so be it.
