I will never forget when I went to visit my older sister in North Carolina after she’d had her first baby. She was not only four years older than me; she started the whole marriage and family thing a decade younger than I did. So I was still quite young and not at all thinking about babies.
Of course, the first question I asked her when she picked me up at the airport was, “How are the cats?”
“Oh, cats,” she said. “Cats are just starter kids.”
Hunh?
Before I had children, cats were my only givers of unconditional love. I got two cats, siblings, with my then-boyfriend right after we graduated from college. I loved those two little beings so completely. When I travelled, I missed their touch. My boyfriend and I talked about them more than we talked about each other. Eventually, my relationship with them outlasted the boyfriend.
Until I moved to Santa Cruz, I lived in different places almost every year. Apartments changed, jobs changed, cities changed, but my cats were always there.
Then I got married, and then I had a baby.
My sister was right that my relationship with my cats changed. When the children were babies, I certainly paid less attention to them than before. But I appreciated their simplicity and predictability after a day with a baby or toddler. Sometimes it was hard to make the baby happy, but it was never hard to make Widget happy.
We like to say that Mr. Ruffie taught our son the meaning of the word gentle, and Widget taught our daughter. By coincidence, each of my college cats died about the same time in our children’s lives. Mr. Ruffie, an orange boy, died when our son was two. It took him a very long time to go. By the time I realized that it was not fair to keep him around, his sister had started to hiss at him and refused to go near him. His death was heart-wrenching.
Widget was healthy for four more years. She adored the babies — she’d cry when they cried, sit on my lap when they nursed. Then suddenly she started to go downhill. I learned from my last experience. I brought her in to the vet, who offered to run tests. No, I said, it’s her time to go.
The way I knew is that she’d become unable to get to the litter box in time, so I couldn’t have her in bed with me. If Widget couldn’t sleep with me, she had lost her reason for being. That last night she cried through the bathroom door all night. And I cried on the other side of the door.
After Mr. Ruffie died, we got two little black fluffy kittens to amuse Widget. She was not amused. Neither was I. I’d changed since I got those two kittens in college. I didn’t want to be woken up at night by someone needling my toes. I didn’t want to make room for two more fuzzy creatures in bed. So the new cats got to spend each night in the garage. They seemed fine with it.
When people asked about my cats, I would talk endlessly, as always, about my wonderful Widget as long as she was around. But the new cats were just cats. My sister was right.
Then the kids started to grow more independent. I got to sit down a bit more, rather than ending my days in a constant rush of what I hadn’t gotten done when there was a toddler rampaging through the house. My kids became more emotionally intense. The difficulty of having a baby in the house seemed nothing compared to the emotional draining of a difficult child.
And there, waiting for me, were the cats. They are Nisene and Maxine, fluffy love units. As if waiting till I actually paid them some attention, they gained personalities. I realized that cat personalities are not like human ones — they don’t necessarily inject themselves into the scene. You have to stop and notice them.
Maxine is the sweetest cat on earth, no great shakes in the brain department. Nisene is the murderer of rats and the avid lap unit. They have been joined by Mauen, who was my son’s consolation prize for having a very difficult toddler in the house who took up too much of his parents’ attention. Mauen is a half-orange boy, with a lovely white belly. Of the three, he’s the most attached to us.
But I love them all. My love for my kids is also unconditional, but it’s complicated by their having opinions. Yes, my cats have opinions, but I don’t have to negotiate with them so much. Their type of love is easier to negotiate.
Sometimes after a long day of parenting, easy love is what I need. They aren’t starter kids after all — they’re the antidote to kids. Unconditional, fluffy love units.
