loving a cat!
lauren i wish you could read this
I adopted Lauren half a year ago in March. The two of us drove the 30 minutes from her foster house in Silver Spring back to D.C. — me, sweating through a poorly chosen long-sleeved dress, and her, zipped inside a carrier that I’d buckled into the passenger seat. She cried and wailed and pawed furiously at the zipper, and I cried because she was crying and wailing and pawing furiously at the zipper, and because, already in the first five minutes of being her mom, I’d proven myself to be an insufficient one, incapable of comfort. A failure! I cooed it’s okay, Lauren over and over, but her name felt weird in my mouth when I said it, like an awkward box I wasn’t sure how to carry, despite having said “I’m adopting a cat, her name is Lauren” to literally anyone I interacted with in the weeks prior. (I’ve also, obviously, said the name Lauren on many occasions in reference to humans I know named Lauren.) I played her “Graceland Too,” hoping the lines I would do anything you want me to would seep through to her cat psyche, somehow convince her that I, this complete stranger, really would do anything she wanted me to. But she just cried and cried, and I almost rear-ended someone, twice.
(A warning ahead of future disclaimers: I’m about to make a wholly inappropriate and in many ways inaccurate comparison – a gigantic, GOP-argument-against-D.C.-statehood-sized leap – between cat parenthood and actual parenthood. I’m aware of the holes in this! I asked my mom as I was writing if she found it offensive, and she just texted back, “No, everyone wants someone to love them back.” Do with that what you will.)
Because I was alive and on Twitter over the past two years, I’d sat through the seemingly unending episodes of Parenting Discourse, dutifully ingesting the tidbits of each viral life span, from the initial Take, to the exponential growth of More Takes, to the eventual Final Word Atlantic Article. (Should you starve your nine-year-old if she can’t figure out a can opener? Who has it worse during the pandemic – the parents or the child-free? Should you have kids? Yes, but only if you want to. Not to mention the…schools of it all.) I read about what it’s like not to have a baby – but your baby – before you become yourself, and perhaps most memorably, I read about that mom who, although she loves him a lot, does not like playing with her kid. I thought about the moms who want to bottle the smell of their baby’s head, and the moms who look at their infant and wonder why they haven’t fallen in love with them yet. I read about all of the ways you’re supposed to and not supposed to decide to become a parent, and then all of the ways you’re supposed to or not supposed to be one. And as is natural, I guess, for someone who has entertained the possibility of parenthood as more of an abstract desire in my future, an event that would just happen one day, I tossed around hypothetical questions for myself and my hypothetical, maybe-one-day baby. Am I motherly? What does that even mean? What if I don’t like my kid? What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t want to eat their toes and bury my nose in their belly button and drink up their dribble? What if I’m not the person that can make them FEEL BETTER, the one thing I’ve always dreamt about being for some tiny thing — the person that makes it all okay!?!?
That’s all to say: maybe I was a bit (irrationally!) preoccupied with parenthood and the identity gained and lost in motherhood (self-indulgence!) when I adopted Lauren. (An obvious but necessary disclaimer: I was INSANE, absolutely bonkers, for applying any of these questions about parenting a kid to cat adoption. I didn’t have to worry about raising Lauren to be kind and empathetic. I didn’t need to afford diapers and formula and doctor’s appointments, or wonder how I’d instill in her humility and confidence and good self-esteem. Thank god! Could you imagine! LOL) But I worried in the days leading up to taking her home, and especially in the car, as she screamed and cried and wished to be anywhere but in the passenger seat next to me, that I’d be…bad at this. Selfishly, I worried she wouldn’t be my cat, she’d just be a cat, one that happened to live with me and pooped in a pink box in my dining room. I worried her name might always feel weird in my mouth, that I’d always be struggling to fit my arms around an awkward box. We’d forever be strangers to one another, the both of us coexisting without ever knowing each other, as much as one can get to know a cat. I’d be the mom wondering why I haven’t bonded immediately with my kid, wishing I was the one that wanted to bottle the smell of her head.
This is the part where it feels like I should introduce some sort of lesson I learned in response to all of that, those questions and anxieties, six months into having Lauren. But I still have all of those same questions and anxieties, because Lauren is a cat, not a human, and absolving the anxiety of becoming a cat’s mom won’t absolve any of the future anxieties I’d expect to have if I were to become a human’s mom. I harbor the same what-ifs and doubts about motherhood, maybe even more so after Lauren — constantly asking myself if I’m doing it right, if she’s happy, what it means when she isn’t waiting at the door when I come home. All of those preoccupations I tossed around before meeting her are still there, but now they’re colored in with this very particular happiness that comes with loving a little creature who can’t tell you she loves you back.
After a few days of knowing her, I posted a picture of her sleeping on my f*nsta (I know it’s 2022), and wrote: “i think i kinda understand what parents mean when they say their heart wasn’t really complete until they had kids. lauren is the extra 3 minutes my baking heart needed in the oven. without those extra three minutes it was fine – edible and yummy and cooked enough. but WITH those extra three minutes…the perfect form! delectable! couldn’t imagine it any better! i hope she’s so happy here with me and that she wants for nothing!” Then, hedging a bit, I commented back to myself “ok note: seeing as i do want children, lauren is the extra 3 minutes but maybe my heart really needs like 10 minutes because i’m sure when kids come along i’ll realize that my whole self wasn’t actually whole w/o them!”
I was being a bit dramatic, for sure. (And I hope for my future-maybe-one-day kid’s sake that I cringe reading this back and regret writing any of it at all!) But in a way I can’t really find the right, nice words to describe, my heart did feel something unrecognizable when I looked at her. Not that it had “completed,” or I was a different person, or that I even felt as though Lauren wasn’t a stranger anymore — but more like my heart had leveled up somehow, unlocked a greyed out box, earned a new badge. My misplaced parental anxieties, fueled by reading too many internet takes, repackaged themselves into this specific and new (to me) feeling. I love a lot of humans — my friends, my family — more deeply than I love Lauren. Or maybe I just love Lauren differently.
Love is a big thing to wrap your brain around, but I think if I’ve given and received platonic love, or unconditional love, or communal love, then whatever I felt — and still feel — when I look at Lauren might be something like…nurturing love? Where because of the singularity of the relationship itself, one living thing depending solely on you to keep it living — and also because you just love them so much — you’ll always be worried that they’re not loved enough.
Author Susan Orlean thinks a lot about animals. (I, admittedly, first came to know her in July 2020, when, while visiting her neighbor’s new colt, she drank a not insignificant amount of wine and ended up creating one of the brighter internet moments that year. It began beautifully with a one-word tweet: “Drunk.” Her series of typo-riddled, @ sign heavy, sporadically capitalized posts is truly something to behold.)
Her most recent book, On Animals, is a collection of essays she’s written over the years about the relationship between humans and animals, both domestic and wild.
“I think I’ll always have animals and I think I’ll always write about them,” reads the book’s landing page on her website. (I haven’t read it, it’s on hold at DCPL.) “Their unknowability challenges me. Our affection for them intrigues me.”
I can know a lot of things about Lauren. I do know, with an unmatched degree of affection, a lot of things about her, to the point where if I think too much about them I’ll get all teary. I know that she plops down — she does not lay down. I know the way her little butt waddles up the steps, unevenly paced. I know her chirps from her meows from her cries. I know that she likes being a part of things, and hanging out in spaces that are more like in-betweens — hallways, staircases, doorways. I know she smells like old piano keys somtimes, and like a worn-in couch cushion other times. I know how her belly moves with her breath when I (usually to her annoyance) hold her to my chest, or when she (so f*cking sweetly!!) curls herself into the little spoon position against my shoulder in the morning.
But to some degree, she will always be unknowable. The fear I had when I first adopted her, that she’d always be a stranger, wasn’t completely unfounded. In a lot of ways she still is! I think she’d probably say the same about me if she could speak. I can stare at her, observe her, worry about her, write about her, spend all of my time trying to know why she is the way she is, but I can’t ever really know. It’s a weird predicament as a human isn’t it!? It seems like when we love someone (human) deeply, we’re naturally inclined to try and figure them out, examine all of the bits at the core of them. And if we’re lucky enough, once we do, the love expands and grows and takes new shapes, even if (or maybe because) we’ve seen the unsavory parts at their center. They become more real and less in our head the more we discover about them, good and bad. I can never do that, fully, with Lauren. And yet sometimes I think I love her so much, so uniquely that it physcially makes my chest tight!!
I don’t know if I’m a good cat parent, or even an okay one. I make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes when I’m lazy I don’t play with her, even when she really wants to. I’ve forgotten to refill her food bowl before I’ve left the house. I’ve rushed out the door without saying goodbye to her dozens of times. I’ve identified a lot of selfishness in myself since having her that I know I seriously need to remedy before I meet my future-maybe-one-day kid. And I know adopting Lauren was a decision mostly (totally) made for me, so that I can feel needed and less alone.
The anxiety from the car ride six months ago still lingers around in my head, exacerbated when Lauren doesn’t sleep with me for two nights in a row, or when I don’t know how to get her to stop crying, or when she walks right by me like I don’t exist. I still don’t know if “motherly” or “nurturing” are words I’d use to describe myself, despite loving Lauren in both of those ways. I still don’t know if I’ll be the mom who sees a stranger in her newborn baby, or if I’ll be the one who wants to eat their toes and bury my nose in their belly button and drink up their dribble. And although I do very frequently find myself sticking my nose into her back, or her forehead, or the side of her neck and taking in a big sniff, I don’t think being Lauren’s mom will ever give me an answer to those questions.
But her name doesn’t feel awkward in my mouth anymore. I’m learning how to make her Feel Better (carrier and car situations withstanding). I know her as much as she lets me know her, and I suppose I should thank her for that. She is a tiny, curious, energetic, and adorable creature who will never understand the contours of the ways I feel about her, yet I feel all of it, all of the time, very accutely! And I’ll never know how she feels about me, no matter how long I spend staring at her tennis-ball-sized head willing some words out of her mouth. We both sort of live in this blissful ignorance of one another’s interiority, but it’s not for a lack of love. And maybe that’s just what having a cat is.
Also, cleaning the litter box.
Thanks for reading my incredibly melodramatic take on cat parenthood! I will probably delete this in two months because it feels naive and A Bit Much. xoxo.