Memento Rosie: A Dedication in 3 Parts to Rose (formerly known as Nightmare). Part II.

Rose heard a lot of "poor thing" during those first ten years or so. For one thing, it took us (read: my parents) forever to get around to getting her fixed. We lived in an apartment, she was a firmly and no-exceptions-ever indoor cat, and there was really no anti-more-kittens reason to have her fixed. Exceeeeeept.... yeah. She was really loud. And the best part was, in spite of her ______ (insert mixed, confused cat emotion here that probably doesn't involve hatred and thoughts of murder, though it certainly looked like it) towards me, Rose would choose to sing her mournful I-wanna-make-kittens-witchuuuuuu love songs to her nonexistent suitors RIGHT. IN. FRONT. OF. MY. DOOR.

Growing up, for some reason I didn't have a doorknob on the door to my bedroom, so we put a loop of string over the corner to pull it open. Given that there was no doorknob, it would logically follow that there was no latch. Follow that logical conclusion to its end, and you find that when Rose was feeling particularly mournful at her lack of ahem-ahem, she would butt her head against my door hard enough to open it - and then continue her arias in my room. I'm not sure why she had this need to be in my room - possibly she suspected me of hiding eligible tomcats in there, which would explain her general mistrust towards me as not only a human, but a human who under the guise of being her mother was keeping Poor Rose from getting any action.
I don't remember how my parents explained what the hell Poor Rose's problem was, but I remember feeling very very sorry for her. She was so lonely! And she wanted to have kittens! Why shouldn't she have kittens? And so I'd start crying too - partly out of pity for Rose, but really more out of pity for myself, because I wanted to sleeeeeeeeeeep!!!!!!!!!!!

Eventually, she did get fixed. Thank goodness. And no, my parents did not learn their lesson, because it took about 4 rounds of sexy purring and mewling on my darling Kisinka's part (I think she was influenced by Beyoncé, while Rose really got her start in 80's power ballads) for them to do something about it once she entered adolescence and started pining for those handsome beefcake Somerville toms.

When I was 7, my infinitely creative mother and I came up with the idea of having a family newspaper. Like all of our exciting long-term projects (see: Pickwick Portfolio, Marco Polo year, etc.), it lasted until the first stage was over, and then we realized just how much damned work it would be to keep it up. But I wrote a story about saving endangered tigers, and about a guy who made people build him a statue, and I did all the illustrations. My mother wrote an article about the "famous Isis Red Cloud, karate expert", did an interview with me, did all the work to put the newspaper together, and most relevantly, wrote the now-famous article "Cat Mistakes Itself for a Book!". At the ripe old age of 7, I had chosen to "put away childish things" and remove Goodnight Moon, among others, from my very tall bookshelf. That process resulted in there being one cubby on the bottom shelf that stood empty. Rose had not lost sight of her ultimate goal in life, and realized that the success of the Ruin-Isis's-Life program could hinge on her carpe-ing the hell out of this diem. This was now The Best Spot In The House to live in. (Unfortunately, I don't have the picture. It's in the closet at my parents' house, somewhere in the dawn of time before digital photography was invented. But if you look at this, you might get an idea of how amazing this was. Only turn it all upside down, because Rose did not have a predilection for heights. And then turn it on its head, because Rose was infinitely cooler in her insanity than that cat.)

My mother was studying social work at Simmons College at the time, and this article was heavily influenced by her studies. As I live and breathe, she psychoanalyzed Rose's choice of havens, referencing Oliver Sacks' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and suggesting that Miss Nightmare was having an identity crisis, confusing herself with the book There's a Nightmare in My Closet by Mercer Mayer. Being the incredibly amazing mother she is (I mean, come on, did your mom use a creative writing project designed for you as a study session in psychoanalysis for her? I didn't think so), she also advocated treatment options such as placing There's a Nightmare in My Closet next to Rose on the shelf "so that Rose can gradually distinguish between herself and the book" (Traumann 4).

References
Traumann, Elisabeth, and Isis Traumann-Davis. "Cat Mistakes Itself for a Book!" The T-D Globe 1994: 4.

(Yes, I did do a perfect MLA reference for a family newspaper with one issue. You wanna make something of it?).

To be further continued.