Ahh, the Little Man.  A few weeks ago, he hurt his right back hip pretty badly.  Who knows how, he gets into all sorts of mischief.  Anyway, the cutie was gimping around the house, a source of mirth, wonder, and sadness.  Why?  Well, sometimes, he would be in so much pain that he thought something else was causing it (a ghost maybe – we need Ghostbusters!), and, in his mind, thought that if he hissed at the offender that the pain would go away.  Sadly, it didn’t.

So we decided that a little indoor R & R was just what he needed to heal his wound.  The problem was that after a couple of days, he really wanted to go outside, pleading at the back door, scratching at the glass, or otherwise laying in prostrations that made it easy for him to trip us and exit.  So, thinking, golly, if he wants to go out this badly, he can’t be in that much pain, we let him go.

We were wrong.  The gimp got worse and he hissed at the invisible entity more and more.  Lesson learned.  He could not go outside, no matter how much he pleaded or tried to trip us on the way out the door.  It took ten agonizing days of him meowing his little heart out, and me cuddling him as I left, giving him variations on these words of encouragement:

“Your body is healing Little Man.  You’ve got to stay inside until you quit hissing at yourself.”

“I know this feels like punishment Doodie, but Mama loves you and wants you to get better, so no matter how much you meow, you cannot go outside.”

“A few more days of inside time and you’ll be right as rain my sweet boy.”

The funny thing was, as this cat healing was going on, I was going through my own struggle with my cleanse.  Boy did I want some sugar!  Gimme! Gimme!  So I made some rice pudding with coconut milk and added sorghum and brown rice syrups to sweeten it because this wasn’t cheating.  It wasn’t cane sugar.

You bet I ate that pudding up, gobble, gobble, gobble, and, like Milo being let out too soon, I got sick.  I felt like the guy in the Alka-Seltzer commercial, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”  My tummy went topsy-turvy and I wished and I wished that I hadn’t eaten it.

Then I looked at Milo, curled up at my feet, and realized that it was like the first time I let him out.  Message received.  So, not surprisingly, I’m talking to myself now:

“Your body is healing, Colleen.  You can’t have those sweets until you are all better.  Even then, just a little.”

“I know this feels like punishment sometimes, but I want to feel better, so now matter how much I want a sweet, I cannot have one.”

“In four more weeks, you’ll be right as rain.  Then you can have a little sugar.”

I guess it is just one of those times of grace.  The Little Man got hurt so he could teach me about my own healing.  Thanks, Boo, Mama loves you, too.