One Mother To Another(Tammy Ruggles) One Mother To Another
By Tammy Ruggles


She was our old short-hair cat named Tabby, black with tortoise-colored flecks of tan and yellow. She always seemed to be around on the farm where I grew up, aloof as some cats seem to be. Independent. A loner. Mostly tending to the litters of kittens she had year after year. She wasn’t a warm cat. Not one to cuddle or purr. Half-wild. She watched us play from a distance. Maybe a tree branch, hayloft, or windowsill.

She would always birth her kittens in the cool reaches of my grandparents’ dark cellar. Back behind the jars of canned fruit and vegetables, far away from curious child hands. She was a good mother, always feeding and cleaning them, holding them close to her between her paws.

She never seemed to be eager to go inside the farmhouse, even when the door was open while my grandmother was cooking or cleaning.

Years passed, and we children grew. From paper dolls to getting dolled up. From playhouses to real houses. Disney to Disco.

Boys in tight jeans and loud cars would come into the driveway to pick us up. I married one of them, Dennis, and we put a mobile home on the farm. We talked about having a child. Our child. Would our little one be a loud and boisterous boy, or a soft and perfumed little girl?

My nesting instinct had me puttering about the trailer fixing up a nursery, while Dennis assembled a swing set in the back yard.

We even picked out a name that both of us liked: Ari for a girl, and Trevan for a boy.

But there was a problem, one day while I was hanging curtains in the nursery. Seized by terrible cramps and sudden bleeding, I screamed Denny’s name. He rushed me to the hospital, where my worst nightmare came true: We had a miscarriage.

Denny kept his pain to himself, and didn’t quite know how to comfort his broken-hearted wife. I fell to pieces, and all he could do was take me home, where I retreated to my bed to cry for days and days.

Family and friends came by to offer kindness and prayers, but it didn’t help. I wanted to feel the hurt. I needed to grieve. Why would God give us a baby and then take it away?

So many days passed by, I lost count. Barely ate. Barely got out of the bed. Denny would stand in the yard and gaze at the lonely swing set. He wanted me to get up and start living again. He was beginning to worry.

“We can have another baby“, he said. “Ari and Trevan would want us to. We need to go on.”

I was almost mute in my grief. If a miscarriage hurts this much, I would never survive the loss of an older child.

And then one afternoon I woke to find Tabby in the bed with me, keeping her distance as usual on the edge of the bed. It was strange seeing her here. She wasn’t a house cat, and definitely not a lap cat, or even a loving cat toward humans. Her life was chasing mice and raising kittens. And she was an old cat now, a little old lady.

Why was she here?

And then it slowly dawned on me.

Kittens.

Her babies.

My baby.

I started to cry, and pulled her close to me, and to my surprise, she came with a purr and a sorrowful meow.

“You’ve lost a baby too, haven’t you?” I sniffed into her fur.

Was she giving me sympathy, one mother to another?
I called for Denny, and he smiled when he saw Tabby in the bed with me. He held me close for the hundredth time, and this time when he asked me to come and eat supper at the table with him, I did.

But Tabby didn’t follow. She went her old woman way, aloof and uninvolved as ever.


The End

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