Whether you're looking for ongoing bookkeeping support, help getting caught up, or someone to help you better understand your numbers, I work with entrepreneurs and small business owners to create greater financial clarity and confidence. →Learn More About Bookkeeping ServicesThere Are No Cats In America
There are no cats in America.
So I’m old. Not Mitch McConnell old, but I remember a kids’ movie from the 1980s titled An American Tale. Maybe you’re old like me and remember it. Maybe you don’t.
Anyway, there’s this song titled “There Are No Cats In America.” This song was running through my brain as we were getting ready to leave for Spain. The way my brain was using the memory of this song was to remind me that nowhere is perfect, but a new home can be better than the old one despite it’s challenges.
It kinda became a mantra.
I would learn new information about Spain, or have new information about what obstacles we needed to clear to get here, and there would be cartoon mice singing
“There are no cats in America!”
Taxes are different in Spain. I might end up paying more in taxes in Spain than in the US. And still have to pay some to the US.
There are no cats in America!
The housing market in Barcelona is hyper competitive and it might be really hard to get an apartment.
There are no cats in America!
Spanish bureaucracy? You guessed it…
There are no cats in America!
This shortcut my brain created isn’t perfect and we’ll get into it.
But it was serving the purpose that I needed it to. Moving to a new country is scary. There are so many unknowns. And if you go the route that we went, you arrive without even knowing if you get the residence visa or not. I swear I spent the first two months here on the verge of a panic attack. The fate of my child, our cats and my business were all depending on this working out.
As I write this, the visa is still uncertain.
I just spent the last few weeks rushing to get everything together for the application. (I didn’t intentionally wait until the last minute; it’s a whole thing.) The process leading up to it was hard, stressful and exhausting. I had a lot of support from my clients. They really stepped up and prepaid for services so that I could have extra cash flow to cover costs. I am incredibly grateful to them for their help. And I learned from it to trust my clients.
The meaning I started to ascribe to this song.
To me, it became a song about how there might be struggles about the journey that I’m undergoing, but it’s going to be better than where I started. That the problems I faced in the US (metaphorical cats), aren’t going to be where I’m going. We all know that no matter where we go, there are problems. And sometimes those same problems we faced in the place we started will follow us to our new home. But the determination that it will be different, be better than it was, still exists.
And that is the biggest thing about my current experience as an immigrant. I moved my family (including my literal cats) to Spain for a better life. And I’m determined that things are going to be better here.
There were big things that I left behind in the US.
They were scary. I felt that they threatened my family’s wellbeing and pursuit of happiness. Those things still exist and my fears regarding the US still exist. This is what the song from the movie was talking about. These things were the cats, the ones that I was reminding myself that wouldn’t exist in Spain. (The irony is not lost on me.)
An American Tale, for those that haven’t seen it, is an animated movie about a family of mice that leave their home in Russia to build a new life in the US. It’s one of the countless immigrant stories that were fed my generation as we were growing up. Europeans in the late 1800s fled to the US to escape political unrest, pogroms and poverty.
The cats in the movie were metaphors for very dangerous leaders that prey on those without power. This is what the mice in the movie were fleeing. It’s kind of an ingenious way of making some big and scary concepts easy for kids to digest. It also kind of makes it easy to take the struggles of those refugees for granted.
And while I’ve taken to using the song almost flippantly, I do honestly believe there are less cats in Spain. At least the metaphorical ones. (I added to the population by bringing the non-metaphorical kind of cats.)
Quick note: This scene in the movie doesn’t quite meet modern standards we place on our media. The character designs on the mice leaned into stereotypes about certain cultures. I maintain that the overall message is good, but I wanted to make sure that I acknowledged this.
Additional quick note: The next line in the song is “and the streets are paved with cheese.” This is obviously not true in the literal sense, but the really good cheese is easily accessible here and that makes my heart happy.
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