there's no "I" in co-dependent

Every night, it is a ménage a trois. There are the sprawling limbs, jockeying for space, overlapping of warm bodies, and the occasional biting and scratching. The problem with this potentially kinky situation is that it is about one person’s battle for limited space against two cats. Any cat owner would tell you that Manifest Destiny and the colonizing of the West is over… in today’s market, the hottest piece of real estate is the few square inches of bed space.

Cats are strange animals. They barely blink an eye at your arrival home. They don’t bring you the paper, they don’t greet you with a smile and a butt that wags ecstatically at the sound of your voice. Unfairly, cats are labeled as cold, calculating creatures and I have had many people tell me that my relationship to these little cats borders on the unhealthy. Frank dislike of my cats thinly disguised as “allergies” prevent them for coming to my home, sly references to them as evil spawn or the more honest attitude, in the words of my lovely but brutally blunt mother at the prospect of harboring my two cats during my year-long research leave, “I don’t give a fuck-shit about your cats”.

Co-dependency… it can be positive, no? For anyone who has friends who have disappeared into relationships, marriages, short-term or long-term flings, you recognize the signs. The comfort of being needed and needing someone, the inside jokes you share, you can finish each other’s sentences, spend hours in the company of this being who makes you feel just a little bit less lonely. My cats, Gabe and Riley, are this for me. While friends move away, relationships form and break away, and family members are usually best seen from a distance, Gabe and Riley are the Jack and Chrissy to my Janet.

Dependence can border on the unhealthy, you can lose yourself in these relationships too. Couples become the equivalent of TomKat or Brangelina, the conjoined twins who have little identity alone, the sum is greater than its parts. These relationships become excuses to avoid closeness in other areas of your life. I’m sorry, I’d stay over but I have to feed the cats in the morning. They miss me, they barf in my bed without me. And yes, they do, trust me.

In Korea, co-dependency reaches a new level in that there is little use of “my” or “I” when referencing relationships. It is “our” family, “our” father, “our” mother, “our” home, even “our” nation and “our” people. During my time there, I found that despite growing up in a somewhat traditional Korean household, the American “I” in me could not understand the Korean “we” around me. Co-dependency strands stretched from male to male so that people’s relationships to one another were referenced on men. For women, the “I” becomes I am this boy’s mother, this man’s wife, this man’s daughter. For single adult women, the “I” is problematic because relationships are grounded on the Y chromosome. For lack of dependents, have I defined my “I’ to my cats?

At what point does mutually dependent become co-dependent? Is there a point where you lose yourself in the “we” of co-dependency? Is it too much to sacrifice a full night’s sleep so that you can share your bed with your cats? I tell myself that this is OK. I need to feel the weight of their bodies on the bed before I can fall asleep. The surround sound of purring envelopes me as they knead my belly, my head, my arms as they lull themselves to sleep. I feel safe and needed in my furry cocoon, reminded of their presence by the irritatingly gentle flick of a tail in my eye.