What If My Cat Hates My Baby?

Complicated felines

It was the middle of winter, early 2007. George W. Bush was still the president and I was still an aimless young adult working as an insurance salesperson in Chicago, Illinois, one of a few jobs I took because Obamacare didn't exist yet and I didn't know what else to do to earn money. I was 23, and like all 23-year-olds, my brain's frontal lobes were still teenagery mush. I knew better, but I did stupid things anyway: I used tanning beds, I overdrew my bank account, I ordered mojitos during happy hour (bartenders hate that), I was sexually aroused by idiots who I believed I could change, I thought Carrie Bradshaw was a cool role model rather than an oblivious asshole. Long-term decisions and consideration for others weren't my thing. Until I met Diamond.

I'm not sure if Diamond had a rough past, or if she just looked like it. She was undersized for her age. One of her fangs was missing. Her meow was a raspy rrrrowwww. Where most cats have long, graceful letter S tails, Diamond had only a nub. Her cage was not in prime real estate, eye level with the kittens; she was in the bottom row, off in a corner. I asked a volunteer what had happened to her tail. The volunteer shrugged and said "I think tail cancer," which isn't a real thing.

When I picked Diamond up, she wrapped her front paws around my arm and kicked me with her back legs like I was a bird she'd caught and she was trying to break my spine. She bit me using the side of her mouth her fang was missing from. She was the most pathetic cat in the whole shelter. I had to have her.

A few hours later, I sat in my dented-up old car with my dented-up cat in a cardboard carrier on the passenger seat, having a rare think about the long-term implications of a spur-of-the-moment decision. Did I just make a commitment? I had cats growing up, so I knew they could be pretty durable. My grandmother once had a cat that she kept alive and relatively happy until it was in its early 20's. I did some math in my head. If Diamond-- who I'd renamed Eleanor-- lived to be 20, that meant I had, give or take, 18 years with her.

My cat's so old that when I first got her, this was the best photo my phone could take.

It has been 14 and a half years. Eleanor moved from Chicago to New York with me, then from New York to Los Angeles. She learned how to jump onto furniture and windowsills without the aid of a tail; she has gotten herself stuck in every dresser I've owned. She has met all of my boyfriends, liked a couple of them, tolerated some of them, disliked one of them enough to piss all over a pile of his ties. When it was just her and me, she'd sleep in a ball at my feet every night, a familiar little 8 pound ball.

Even though she's adjusted well to all of the relocating, she's a drama queen when it comes to other animals. She briefly had another cat as a roommate, a much-larger male cat who humped pillows. She found him so distasteful that she'd wait next to his litter box when he used it and attack him as he came out of it. At one apartment in Brooklyn, she caught a baby mouse and spent literally months staring at the place where she'd snared her prize, yearning to murder again. There was this brown pigeon that liked to hang out on my fire escape outside of the bedroom window of my last apartment in Manhattan, and I'm pretty sure she considered that exact pigeon her enemy. She'd wait for the pigeon every morning, and when it showed up she'd make chirping sounds at him, sounds cats make because they're practicing breaking a neck.

A little over two years ago, Josh's family took me to Italy with them, and I boarded Eleanor in a kennel for two weeks, and when I came back from that trip, newly engaged and elated, she was sick and smelly from refusing to eat or drink, so dehydrated that she barely responded when I picked her up.

She was so angry that I made her hang out with other cats that she tried to die.

I spent the next two weeks in and out of the vet clinic and feeding her an unholy combination of mashed up baby food, specialized cat food and weight gain gel through a liquid syringe, holding her between my knees in the bathtub as she weakly hissed at me, furious I was trying to keep her alive. I learned how to give her subcutaneous fluids using a giant needle and a bag of medical-grade saline despite being terrified of needles. I kept the lights dim in my bedroom and played Spotify playlists called "healing tones" that were probably compiled to be played for dying humans. She eventually made a full recovery, despite, like I said, trying her very best to perish in order to punish me for making her go to a kennel. I knew she was going to die someday, but I couldn't let it be for such a stupid reason. When she started eating on her own again, I felt like I'd beaten a cat-sized Death in a barfight.

I was apprehensive about how she'd react to our moving in with Josh and his 55-lb dog a few months later. Luca is, like most dogs, an incorrigible suck-up, a try-hard, a teacher's pet. He is as flailing as she is dainty. He cannot stop himself from turning into a bowling ball of love when either of us comes home, or wake up, or even enters a room. He's not aggressive, but he can be, as we'd say in the midwest, a little much.

Luca desperately wants to be friends with Eleanor, Eleanor desperately wants Luca to leave her alone. The dog has learned not to make eye contact with the cat, lest she hiss at him and bring great shame upon him. For awhile, Luca had colonized the end of the bed where Eleanor used to sleep, so Eleanor started sleeping on Josh's pillow, next to his head, and Josh started getting neck problems, so he bought her what can best be described as an Ikea Black Lodge for Cats that now sits on top of his bedside table. Our warring house has reached a state of tenuous peace.

"Worried" isn't the right word, nor is "concerned," but-- I recently started to consider the possibility that, when they meet, my cat might decide that she doesn't like the new baby.

There's a lot of cat slander out there about felines and infants. People used to believe that cats would steal babies' breath. I believe this, like most anti-cat myths, was conjured up by a person who disliked cats because they were too emotionally fragile to handle an animal that treated them with anything short of unbridled adoration. That belief isn't widespread anymore, but a version of it must be; one of the books for expectant fathers I bought to make fun of claimed that it's dangerous to have a cat around a baby because sometimes cats sleep on top of babies and accidentally suffocate them (I did some fact checking on this could not find a single documented modern incident of a cat accidentally suffocating a baby to death. I did, however, find many instances of dogs hurting or killing babies, and of parents accidentally suffocating their own infants through unsafe sleeping practices, and of pillows and blankets suffocating babies. But, sure, cats: bad.) There's also the pervasive myth that cats carry toxoplasmosis, a parasite that's especially dangerous to pregnant women, and thus expectant mothers should get rid of their cats or wear hazmat suits while changing the cat litter. (Emily Oster's book taught me that wasn't true, either.)

So no, I'm not worried about my cat stealing my baby's soul or turning it into a tiny warlock or whatever. I'm more aware that my cat, the creature that has spent more time with me over the last decade and a half than any person, may find the baby annoying. I don't want her to spend the last three to eight years she probably has left feeling like she's been cast aside, or, worse yet, fantasizing about murdering me in my sleep.

As I type this, she's walking back and forth over my keyboard and rubbing her face on the side of my laptop screen in an attempt to get me to give her more food. I wonder if she knows that things are about to change again.

Original Illustration by Jack Dylan