Do you believe in karma?

When I was a young school going kid still, I was like the typically child with a fascination for small animals. I would pet all the street cats, only to turn my hand up to see it all covered in dirt. I would buy small cans of cat food with my pocket money and feed it the to stray cat that gave birth to kittens under one of the teacher’s table in the classroom.

And there was once, only once, we found a small kitten, my friend and I.

The kitten seem to be sick. So my resourceful friend found out where we could take it to the vet. We went there and then we took it to the SPCA. But by the time we got there, I had gotten it into my not-so-brilliant head that I would adopt the kitten. And so the SPCA staff said I should not bring the kitten in and sent me home.

But I was a young child with no real knowledge of how to go about taking care of a poor young kitten. The kitten did a wonderful job of being cute, taking small steps across our great desert of a floor and mewing piteously. But it didn’t know that it shouldn’t pee or poop on the floor and plonking it on the newspaper, like the book I had borrowed from the library had advised, didn’t work. I was a small child, I had no patience and no real understanding or empathy for the kitten.

At last, after a full day of putting up with everything, my mother lost it when the kitten made a mess on the floor yet again. She took the kitten and returned it probably to some void deck similar to where I had found it originally and that was that. I never saw it again. I was a young child, any resentment was quickly forgotten, although the memory remained.

But why am I talking about a poor abandoned kitten?

We are not Donna’s first family. She was adopted by a schoolgirl when she was a puppy. It seems like a very similar story, it seemed like the schoolgirl never really got her parents’ consent in the first place. And probably like my mother, they tried to put up with it. Eventually, Donna was returned to the shelter. Donna was lucky, she had folks at the shelter who took her in and cared for her unlike that tiny kitten from so many years ago.

We bumped into our neighbour today when we returned from Donna’s pee break. I joked that I was Donna’s servant having to take her down to do her toileting. My neighbour’s answer was that Donna must have done a lot of good deeds in her previous life to find a good home now.

Or maybe, its just my karma and what goes around comes around.

One thing for sure, the decision for making an adoption should not be left in the hands of a schoolchild. Their un-informed parents are most likely not ready for it.

Oh, and my neighbour’s primary school-going son was quick to add, if he had done a lot of good deeds in his previous life, he’d rather be a human than a dog in the next life. Tell that to Donna.