How I Became a Cat Lady
By Terri Rimmer I’ve been diagnosed many things but the nickname I hate the most - “Crazy Cat Lady,” - is not one of them, though my neighbors would beg to differ. Oddly enough when I was in my 20s and writing for a small town newspaper, The Camden County Tribune, they published a column I wrote about what different lives my sister and I lead. She’s a therapist and I was the creative type, she was a neatnik and I was messy. But I also addressed the fear that I would one day grow up and be like the crazy cat lady who lived across the street from my mom and step dad at the time. Now this woman was not a Crazy Cat Lady. She was unmarried, morbidly obese, worked, single, and had two cats. But in that neighborhood there were no feral cats. You might run across a stray once in a blue moon and if one had darkened her garage door she probably would’ve fed it but no one in the 80s would’ve said a word. It was a different time. My fear of becoming the Crazy Cat Lady woun