About overlords
Call me a crazy cat lady all you want. It is true, and I have been a crazy cat lady for over four decades now. Life with felines is like a D/s relationship set to master and slave, 24/7, with you as the slave. Cat-lovers out there know this basic truth about their relationships with their feline overlords: You aren’t in charge, and you never will be.
Here is how you know you have been enslaved by your feline overlords:
1. The first thing you look for in the supermarket is cat food, cat litter, and more toys for the overlords. This will always come before the laundry and cleaning supplies, people food, and toiletries for the humans. Always.
2. Cat treats are embedded in the household budget. Your treats are not.
3. When you clean the house, you do so with cat access to all areas top of mind. Sanitation concerns are focused on ensuring the cats’ health and well-being, along with yours.
4. When you rearrange furniture, you do this in such a way as to allow maximum spread space for the felines, well away from where human feet tread, especially when you own a black overlord and have a dark parquet floor.
5. Your laundry baskets have covers. This is for cat safety, not the preservation of your wardrobe. Bast forbid that you inadvertently launder the overlords with your underwear.
6. You have refrigerator locks. Because the overlords know how to open the damn thing.
7. Your desk is their desk before it is your desk. Thou shalt never work at your cat’s desk if they sleep upon it. Ditto for your work chair, which they quite naturally appropriate for their own mission-critical lounging purposes.
8. You have a super king size bed, and only sleep on 1/5 of the mattress surface. That bed is the cat bed, and the overlords suffer your presence upon it only so you may survive to serve them.
9. Your cats get fed before you do. Slaves never eat before the overlords. Get used to it.
10. The bathroom is their bathroom. Thou shalt not bathe if the overlords sleep in the shower stall. They still haven’t forgiven you for peeing in the water bowl, and you will do well to mind that they get to sleep in the shower as atonement for this transgression.
All that said, do I mind having this kind of relationship with my six indoor and two outdoor cats? No. I am in charge of everything else, you see: I work to put food on the table and pay the bills, like everyone else. I am a mother, and a professional who has to always maintain the demeanor that I know precisely what comes next at any given time — even when I don’t.
Living with cats gives me the opportunity to let go of the steering wheel every now and then, and let the overlords take charge. If I do a good enough job of being their slave, they keep my feet warm while I write, and while I sleep. They permit me the fun of fishing for cats with their teaser toys, which they bring to me imperiously each mid-afternoon and pre-dawn, if I am still awake. They watch over me when I sleep and hiss away any other creatures who may bother their sleeping slave. If the creature is a rodent or an insect, they kill it for daring to come close to their slave.
All told, this relationship of ours is a damn good deal.
