Her Own Bank Account
What a cat taught me about feeling free
When Christl moved across country to marry me — leaving her life in California for a place where I was the only person she knew — I gave her a bank account.
It was a modest account. She had no money, and I had little. But I had saved to create an account for her with enough — if things did not work out between us — to pay for an economy flight back to California and live for a few months while she got reestablished.
More than anything, I wanted us to marry and for her to stay with me. But I knew her as mature, 34-year-old woman, I loved her free spirit, and we both knew that, realistically speaking, we could live without each other.
I knew there was nothing I could do to keep her with me if she didn’t choose to be there. This had to be a marriage where two free beings freely chose to be together. And that freedom in her would be symbolized by an account she could add to, to create “her money” that she could use without having to ask me.
How did I learn such a thing? I’d like to say it came from deep introspection, or years of therapy, or immersion in feminist thought, or challenging my assumptions about power and control, or a growing maturity. — But it didn’t.
I learned it from petting a cat.
Years earlier, whenever I visited a colleague, her sleek, black cat would take possession of my lap and wait for me to pet her. This was a lovely time for us both. My hands could not stay away from her fur, and I would slowly, thoughtfull stroke the long, rounded landscape of her back, while she gave purrs of approval.
She purred. I stroked. We blended in a rhythm of breathing, touching, while for a few moments cat and man became one, apparently to both our joy.
Then something would change. The cat would make a restless movement, arch slightly against my stroking, twist a little as if she considered running away.
If I kept petting, she became resistant. She showed some teeth. I felt claws come out. A tension electrified her whole body, and, if I kept stroking, she hurled herself off my knees onto the floor, her claws pricking me on the way.
There she sat licking her paws, tail twitching, eyes wary. But she was discontent, I thought. And after pacing a while, inspecting this and that in the furniture, she slowed, softened, and soon jumped back into my lap to be petted again.
On later visits, I petted her to the point where she became restless, then stopped. I let my hand rest on her, and if she was still antsy, I lifted it off. She squirmed a little, bristled a bit, made a small huff, then melted back down into my lap and started purring again.
Then, when I stroked her, she joined me by yielding to it fully again, giving herself completely to the pleasure of being pleasured to a purr by someone who got pleasure in petting her.
This went on a few blissful moments, till the next rebellion. And again, she started bristling, arching, twising, with the hint of a snarl. I stopped petting her again, and waited, while she reestablished something — what, exactly? I think she reestablished that she was not trapped or controlled, she was free to leave.
She was a free cat.
And once she had became a free cat again, she freely chose to settle on my lap and melt into the music of touch and purr.
I had loved Christl first as a friend. I loved her as an artist, a creative being, a real person, someone who made the world more beautiful for being in it — and a free spirit. Long before falling in love, we knew one another as equals.
As we thought about marrying — both of us considered this a lifelong commitment — I wanted to protect that free spirit in her. I wanted her to feel that we were together by choice, freely choosing one another, willingly committed and working out the way to stay together.
I knew that there was nothing I could ever do that would bind her to me, force her stay with me, even if that was something I would do — and it wasn’t. We both had to know that we were together by choice and kept rechoosing to be together.
So when I gave her that little bank account that only she could access, that was my way of telling her that, like the cat, she was a free being and could leave me if she ever needed to.
She never did.
After a marriage that filled 42 years with life, Christl Kaserer Grow died Feb. 15, 2021, three weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 76. Read more about her in “Home Birth, Home Death,” “At the Nude Beach in Vienna,” “Christl’s Resume as a Mom,” “Christl and the Icon Panties.”
