Weddingbee boards

Hi everyone.

a lot of you commented and know the story about what happened when i went to my home town to get my cat this past weekend.  In the end, i got my cat back, but after possibly the termination of a long term friendship.  Full story is here:

http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/my-friend-is-holding-my-cat-hostage

Well, today i received an email from my friend who took care of our car for 4 months.  She attached a letter that was 3 pages long, single spaced.  In it, she explained in detail all the points of her crucial "discussion".  She ended her letter with this:

"We don’t understand Frustrated's behaviour and attitude leading to the upsetting incident on Sunday night.  Part of what was so hurtful was the insinuation that we would ever hold YourCat hostage for payment. All we wanted was to share with you the above, which would have helped to give us some closure, and to do right by YourCat. In fact, YourCat had become such a loved member of our family, and by giving us the opportunity to debrief you on the last few months, you would have been doing us a favour in return. This is what we needed, which is why we would have happily driven YourCat to YourCity next week, in order to facilitate this.

Evidently, neither of you understood our motivations for asking for a bit of extra time with YourCat and with yourselves, but I hope this email will help to clarify.  We don’t understand your unwillingness to sit down with us, as it was so important to us that we share these things about YourCat's care, etc. Because you never made your objections known, when you instead came on Sunday with an aggressive and confrontational attitude towards MyHusband, we were both shocked and confused. After all we have done, we felt it was not a lot to ask.  We don’t understand Frustrated's hostility, nor where you are both coming from.  We are left feeling very bewildered, offended and sad.  We sincerely hope that YourCat is settling into his new home nicely and that all is well."

What upsets me about her letter to me is that she is acting like they are completely innocent - to the point that i am wondering if they are???!!!  I know all of you told me she was crazy, but i can't help but have mixed feelings about everything because we have been friends for so many years.  I was also very angry and emotional the past several days. Now i have calmed down and i wonder if it would have been the end of the world for them to keep the cat 2 more weeks?

The part of her letter I bolded above is what upsets me now.  Because i NEVER said I was unwilling to sit down with them.  As weird as we thought they were for it, we of course were willing to sit down with them - but we didn't feel that should mean we cannot take our cat home until we do!  That is why WE felt insulted and felt that they implied my DH and I cannot care our cat!  Am i wrong to feel or interpret things this way??!  Tell me honestly please!

Also, when i left home last friday, i was under the impression i was picking up my cat that weekend!  Because we had SPOKEN on the phone the week before and decided as such with her!  So, ya, I was quite surprised to receive the first email from her husband on Friday afternoon.  His email was polite, albeit strange, to us.  And so i wrote back in a very polite manner that explained why we still had to take the cat this weekend and this was a big part of what i wrote:

I will be happy to discuss anything with you when I pick up MyCat tomorrow evening and again with YourWife and MyHusband present in two weeks (and of course over the phone, if needed).  Also, when we see you in two weeks, we plan to reimburse you both for any vet bills, special food, etc, just let us know how much we owe you.

Her husband’s reply to my polite email was this.  No more politeness or friendliness anymore, in my opinion – but tell me please if I interpreted this wrong!! :

I really don’t think that is fair for MyWife after everything she’s done.  I really think we need to wait. I can’t give YourCat back while MyWife’s away sorry.  Maybe we can arrange something ourselves. I’m off work for a week in Aug and maybe we can bring her.

That was his entire email. So I was quite put off by it, especially after I felt I had been nice to him in my previous one.  How would YOU react to such an email??  (The part that really irked me is what i put in italics)

So for her to say me now that I was unwilling to sit down with them I feel is unfair!  But at the same time, I wonder if I made too many assumptions about what they were thinking/feeling.  But a lot of the things she said to me on Tuesday I felt implied she thinks we don't know how to care for our cat, including “I thought I would have heard from you more to get details of the vet visits"  "If it was my pet, I would want to know" ...And how she was judgmental about my DH asking about if his cat’s fur had grown back (judgmental because he didn’t ask sooner!).   

So please tell me bees, did I over react?  I am wondering if I am the one who let things get so out of hand….and I feel bad now   :(

Oh and the last thing that happened that I had gotten so upset about - and led to her husband's perceived “hostility” in me on Sunday night - was that her husband said his wife had made him promise the cat would still be there when she got back from her trip and she would be pissed if the cat was not there and he couldn’t deal with that!  Those were his EXACT words and I felt it was incredibly ridiculous, and so yes, I got angry.  Again, did I over react???

Thanks again for your insight, because I really want to resolve this and move on. I just feel so unsettled now. 

thank you everyone - forr reading again an incredibly long post i wrote!  and for your honest replies.  i am asking the hive because i feel i am too caught up in my emotions about the whole thing and i know the bees tell it like it is. i have seen other posts where everyone WILL tell the OP when she IS over reacting.  so i am really looking for blunt honesty here!

@zippylef:  lol, i like what you wrote, but part of me wants to attempt one civil explanation of why i feel the way i do!  Because i can see in their minds they feel they did nothing wrong and they truly do not understand MY behavior.  I want to explain it to them as rationally as possible.  And i want to ask them to try to envision as if they were in my shoes and how they might feel.  After that, if i get no reply, or a defensive reply, i will give up.  I feel like i have to at least try.

@Pinksapphire:  thats what boggles my mind too!  most of her 3 page letter was extensive detail describing our cat's typical behaviors that we are HIGHLY familiar with!  I think she might think that because of the trauma the cat has been through this year (losing her companion, being moved around) that maybe these are new behaviors....but as i read her letter i kept thinking "yes, i know that, she has been like that for 5 years!"   And when i did the history search of facebook messages between her and my DH, my DH told her that my mom had been giving the flea treatments to the cat.  and she responded "oh good"  (this was before April).

@Mrs Grape:  thanks, although i dont see a need to involve authorities here because we do have our cat back. i am just upset because of what she wrote to me and i'm sad by her peception of us and the loss of our friendship over this.

@Annabelle86:  thank you, i thought so too. i just still do not understand the problem with taking home the cat this past weekend and having the "discussion" the next time we see them??  but i wonder if i over reacted and should have just let them so all this would not have blown up like this.

@frustrated:Just wanted to say, don't let that email fool you into thinking that you were wrong and that what they did was not totally insane and irrational. That email sounds like they're insinuatuing that they were sooo level-headed and nothing they did was wrong/cuckoo. They're trying to make it seem like you were the one who acted rude and crazy. Don't fall for it! Don't reply! lol 

I think she is completely crazy! It's not like you don't know how to take care of a cat since you've obvoiusly been in care of it for 5 years.  If they don't like how you take care of your cat oh well! It's your cat not theirs.  It's like someone trying to tell another person how to parent their children.... you don't live with them so but out!

Your friend is ridiculous. They are manipulating you by telling you it's not too much to ask of you to allow them to keep the cat longer so the wife can say a proper good-bye. It's your cat. Yes, they took care of the cat for you, but you also offered to reimburse them. It is not their cat. They get ZERO say in when you pick the cat up and for them to try and guilt you or make you feel like bad pet owners is weird and freaky on their part.

thanks again for all the replies.

@MsJeep23: not to defend her or anything, but her comment about my cat's "new" home is actually correct, since my DH and i just moved into a new place in a new city.

However, i was reading thru her letter again today and i can see how she really is treating the cat as though the cat is a human child, and its very weird.  I think they need to have real children of their own so they can perhaps learn the difference! In her 3 page letter, about 3/4 of a page is devoted to how my cat interacted with her other pets and in her home in general.  The things she told me could/should have been cute stories for when we see each other next.  But she typed it up like it was crucial information we needed to have before we can bring our cat home!  She even prefaced the section with this:

**EDIT, I AM DELETING WHAT I COPIED FROM HER LETTER HERE NAD PARAPHRASING TO HELP ENSURE PRIVACY***  ALTHOUGH I HAVE 4 MINUTES LEFT TO EDIT, SO I WILL DO IT IN A NEW COMMENT ON PAGE 2 - SHOULD FALL AFTER COMMENT 55 OR 56.***

 i see she is overly humanizing the cat, as she believes our cat was making conscious decisions after weighing the pros and cons.  Maybe i am not giving the cat enough credit or something, but i didn't think cats had that ability for higher order thinking!  PLEASE correct me if i am wrong!

@MrsSl82be:  thanks.  i do plan to get around to writing her an email to that effect, and I will include the thing's that Storm0075 suggested I include about her husband blatantly refusing to give me the cat primarily because he was afraid of his wife!