Cat herding has been officially recommended as a certified effective skill for entrepreneurial parents everywhere!

I HAVE GREAT NEWS!

Cat herding has been officially recommended as a certified effective skill for entrepreneurial parents everywhere!

If you can swerve and pirouette around six furry bastards all fighting to get inside the house at one time while keeping them from ending up ass-in-the-air in the cat food bin two at a time as you strain your actual muscle pulling them out, then you’ve got what it takes to run your business from home with a house full of kids!

Let me explain…
I’m a dog person.
Always have been.

NOT a cat person.
Never will be.

When we bought the farmhouse this past January, one of the contingencies was to continue on the tradition of feeding the four stray cats that have been coming around for years.

Fast forward 12 months and these “strays” have multiplied to a total of seven, including three new kittens that were born under the house.

Several spay/neuter trips later, and we now have a hoard of cats whose sole mission is to get to the next feeding.

These guys are like a medieval army of savages.

They have nowhere to be, and nothing else to do with their life but eat and crap.

They are quite content to hold you hostage in your own home, surrounding the premises patiently waiting until you run out of food and have to leave the house.

That’s when they attack.

Think about that Star Trek episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” only instead of them being cute, stationary mounds of fur, these assholes are self-propelled fuzzy projectiles launching their bodies in through the crack in the door as soon as you open it.

I have to let my dogs out, which of course is another way of saying that I’m asking for it.

Then next eleventy-billion seconds is running after them through the house, picking them up and kicking them out, only to be bombarded with the last one I just kicked out sneaking back in.

They just keep coming back!

They don’t take no for an answer.

They are allergic to listening to anything that doesn’t shake like bowl of food and will completely ignore you unless you show them you have what they want.

They are literally lamb and rice- flavored fluff ball prostitutes.

And you know what I think?
They KNOW what they’re doing.

I see those Garfield glances.

Half the time, I wonder if they aren’t just conspiring to take me out so they can use me as a step ladder to the Fancy Feast.

But I tolerate them because my daughter loves them.
She raised the three kittens since she first saw them under the house.

Her happiness is greater than my grumpy need to live life not tripping over furry speed bumps and nearly losing a thumb during nightly feedings.

But sometimes it’s Jackie Gleason time.

BANG! ZOOM! TO THE MOON!

Pissing on my brand new tree skirt three days before I smell something not quite right near Aunt Marsha’s gift bag.

Soiling the back of my beautiful antique white electric fireplace I bought just to decorate and never to plug in…..because Florida.

Or taking a lion-sized crap on my blue and sea-foam green paisley print quilted comforter covering the cushion of my bay window and then unceremoniously finding said lion-sized crap when I want to take a relaxing nap on the cushion as the sunlight falls on my face.

They don’t even give you the courtesy of trying to ask you to go outside first.

These are “make shit happen” cats-- literally.

This all got me to thinking…

How many of these cat qualities happen in your own home with your kids running around, bombarding you with a million different questions while you’re trying to work?

And your partner asking you to do seventy-billion things because working from home isn’t a “real” term- not in your friends and family’s eyes anyway.

They don’t get it.
And it’s not your job to make them.

It’s your job to set boundaries for your business.
To stand up for it.
And the value of the work that you do.

“No, little Johnny, you can’t shit on mommy’s white rug and pretend it’s a cute poop emoji.”

“No, little Sarah, you aren’t allowed to interrupt mommy by asking for your fifth PB&J sandwich.”

So, in my case I shut the screen door so they wouldn’t have access to the back door when I needed to open it. That meant I could at least get out of the door and close it, before they got through.

Know what they did?

Opened a hole in the bottom of my screen and got through anyway.

I fear you will have better luck than I conditioning your family to respect your boundaries with work.

The earlier you do it AND the more you enforce it, the easier it will be for them to start the new rule.

But if anyone can point me to the hardware store and nearest SPCA that’d be greeeeaaaat……..