Hope for Hope
Written by Helen Morrison, President, Board of Directors
Sometimes a kitty comes into the Shelter and they are so terrified that you wonder if they will ever learn to trust, if they will ever break through. It isn’t a feel of the challenge, of somehow winning them over. It is rather that your heart just bleeds for them…knowing how their world has been turned upside down, wondering what has happened in their lives to make them this way, being a little afraid that things won’t change. But if I have learned nothing else in my life, patience is everything, and listening and watching and being open to the messages that come from other beings can lead to miraculous changes.
We have had a number of those changes happen at the Shelter for very scared cats.
Hope is hopefully going to be one of them. Hope came to us in October, having been trapped as a stray in Lyndonville. She was living on the streets with her five kittens.
When we brought her to the Shelter and put her in her intake room, we hardly saw her at all.
We worried that she wasn’t eating or using the litter box. Sometimes, these kitties just shut down…and you hope that within a few days, things start to change.
Hope did begin to eat and use the box…but she was still totally terrified.
We moved her out of her intake room to a small room with an open condo, places to hide, and a tower by the window. Again, no sightings. We were 3 weeks into her being with us.
What would we do if she didn’t come around? Keep being patient, go sit in her room, read, just be a presence. Nothing. And then…a breakthrough….a very tiny one. She began to show herself. She would peek around the corner of the condo; she might cautiously look out of her carrier. She would get up on her tower so she could look out the window.
There is this wonderful time, with a cat like Hope, where you start to see breakthroughs that are more curiosity than fear…of perhaps a mixture of both. And then you hope that the curiosity will win out. And guess what? Most often, it does. It can take weeks, months, even years. But the feeling is like none other…to see a being that is so fearful, so mistrusting…slowly, slowly begin to wonder who you are, and if there might be a whole new, sweet world here.
Definitely, hope for Hope.
There is this wonderful time, with a cat like Hope, where you start to see breakthroughs that are more curiosity than fear…of perhaps a mixture of both. And then you hope that the curiosity will win out. And guess what? Most often, it does. It can take weeks, months, even years. But the feeling is like none other…to see a being that is so fearful, so mistrusting…slowly, slowly begin to wonder who you are, and if there might be a whole new, sweet world here.
Definitely, hope for Hope.