Did I Miss My Calling?

Hi, Jeanette is here again. Over the past week we’ve had a lot of drama in our house—pet drama to be exact. In the process I discovered that I might have missed my calling.

The saga began when my cat, Lucia ran away from home. My husband felt so bad, knowing how much I missed my little friend that, when she’d been gone for ten days and hope of her return seemed lost, he adopted another kitty for me as a birthday gift. Lucia came home that night. Several days later both cats were sick, supposedly from a kitty cold of some kind. Both ended up on antibiotics but Lucia was clearly the sickest. The vet finally decided that they had completely different things and that Lucia’s might have come out during her time on the road. So I have spent the past week and a half nursing sick cats back to health.

When I talked to my mom about giving them their medicine and coaxing them to eat she said, “I think you found a new career. Maybe you should have been a vet. Does the clinic where you took them need an assistant?”

I actually caught myself entertaining the idea. I have seen the animal lover in me surface through all this. Vet assistants probably make more money than I do and I haven’t heard a lot of rejection tales coming from animal doctors. I would never be without something to cuddle. And hey, I could still write. At the end of the day I’d have many a drippy pet story, complete with tearful death scenes, miraculous recoveries, and grateful owners who remember their vet (me) in the wills. But as cool as this seemed in my mind I knew I wouldn’t go for it. No matter how tough and painful the writing life gets I still can’t picture myself doing anything else. All that this alternate career searching revealed was that I have not missed my calling at all. This is a pretty great if not always fun one.

I can’t promise that I won’t write one or two drippy pet stories though.