I don’t think I could ever understand Christine and what her motivation was when she said that in front of me and the pediatrician who came to our house. Our daughter was three months old at the time. Before that we had not been able to have a baby for a long time, we had been trying for over four years. To the point where the doctors said it was because of my wife’s cat. Toxoplasmosis was to blame, and we didn’t always have time to treat it with medication when the fetus died. But finally we had great luck and Christina carried the baby.
The girl was perfectly healthy in the hospital, but when we brought her home, she started choking. As responsible parents, we took her right back to the hospital. She got better there, and the doctors couldn’t find any specific cause until during another attack of shortness of breath at home we called the pediatrician to us. The woman came to the baby and saw her wife’s old cat. He had lived with her since she was young, he was sixteen years old at the time. Christine was very attached to it, that’s why when the doctor said that it was necessary to get rid of the cat for the sake of the child’s health, the wife said flatly no.
– Let’s find another doctor who will cure my daughter, not forcing me to throw away my childhood friend.
It was useless to argue, Christine stood her ground, and when I said that not only the health depends on it, but also the life of our daughter, she turned around and left us, along with her cat. She came back to us seven months later – the cat was gone. All that time I was resentful of her, and we met on “neutral ground” like playgrounds and my mother’s house. After the cat passed away, she immediately expressed a desire to return. It’s been three years and it’s easy for her to pretend that we didn’t have this fight over a pet and she didn’t leave the house to live with her parents to take care of the cat when it was much more important to take care of the baby.
I still can’t believe she was capable of that, even though we saw each other almost every day. It greatly undermined my faith in her and in our marriage. Whenever I tell this story, no one believes it.
“Christina is a great mother, she would never do that,” people mocked us. And I’m not the least bit amused. I wish I could laugh, but I can’t.
