Persistence or ignorance?

If you are a parent, then you know that children sometimes (ok, often), get their days and nights mixed up when they are babies.  Those endless hours when your child is awake needing SOMEthing when the rest of the house is quiet and you are desperate for sleep are excruciating and can seem like there is no light at the end of the tunnel.  You can try to nap when your baby does, but there's not really anything that makes it fun to be up at 3am when you really just want to sleep.  That new baby smell and the soft, sweet snuggles only take you so far.

Why am I writing about this when it's obvious I am not a mother of a new baby, you ask?  Apparently my 15-year-old cat thinks she is a newborn.  Ever since Pumpkin died, Shadow has been annoyingly clingy and desperate for attention.  I understand she is lonely.  He was her buddy for a dozen years.  I miss him too.  But I do not sit up and cry all night long. 

She is driving me crazy.

We have always put the cats in the laundry room at night to sleep.  That is where their bed is, where their food is, and where their bathroom (litter box) is.  This has not changed in all the years we have lived in this house.  Shadow has made it perfectly clear that she does not like to be in there by herself.  AT ALL. 

My bedroom is at the opposite end of the house from the laundry room, and hubby sleeps with a fan on.  Despite that, I can STILL hear her howling.  All.  Night.  Long.

Seriously.  She never stops.  She starts meowing the second we put her in there, and she's still at it when I wake up in the morning.  She doesn't stop until we open the door, and then she follows me around the house meowing until I've paid sufficient attention to her.  Talk about needy.

If it were up to me, I would just go to bed with her happily snoozing in her recliner.  Maybe then the all night performances would quit.  On the other hand, she tends to be more of a pest than anything, so she'd probably keep coming in our room and bugging us.  I keep telling myself that she will calm down, that she'll get used to it, that eventually she will give up.  In this battle of wills, though, my cat may prove to be more stubborn than I am!