Since our family cat died, I’ve been fairly quiet about the fact that, at my three-year-old’s insistence, a large portion of my time has been spent pretending to be a new one. The benefits were that much of that game involved having my hair brushed while I meowed in her lap, the downside was that there were witnesses. I had a name, and that was “Dicketty”.
Oh God I’ll be honest, typing that feels as exposing as allowing the toilet door to slide open on a Virgin train. My skin has been splayed off here, you’re seeing actual muscle. But it’s done now, and delete doesn’t exist in 2018. Plus, it explains why, after sloughing off years of desire for a pet, after the absolute feeling of liberation that came with having a child, and so no longer wanting to own a dog because I felt wrung dry of love and responsibility, we decided to get a kitten. “It’s important for my mental health,” I said earnestly to a lady at the Blue Cross, “because otherwise I might have to keep being a cat forever.”
We visited the kitten at a foster carer’s house, where they warned us: “She’s quite a sassy one.” Which was clearly code for “feral”. This cat can fly. Well, it thinks it can. We decided to fall in love with it. Then I signed a contract promising we wouldn’t let her out of the house until she was neutered (which seemed fairly brutal in the invisible small print, but fine, ignore that) and took her home with a little woollen mouse for her to learn murder on.
We brought her in to meet the child, filming on my phone. And honestly, I don’t want to sound bitter, but I was expecting something a little more Disney about the exchange – that the kid would see the kitten and burst into tears of joy, such emotions that will never be matched on YouTube. Rather than an interested, “Oh, a cat.” She was excited, I think, to have a junior member of staff join the team. But instead of flinging herself upon us with love, she just switched instantly into a weary pet owner, finding in herself the latent voice of a pub landlady who’s actually had it up to here. “Darlin’, not on the table thank you very much!” she screeched at the kitten, as though through a crowd of rowdy Liverpool supporters. “Darlin’ I do. Not. Appreciate. Rudeness.”
And then, just after handing her over to a year of being dressed up like a doll and carried all wrong, I did that terrible thing. I did that terrible thing where a whole life flashes before you, in this case the new cat’s. And I realised that what I was giving my child was a little basket of death. Here you go, love! Death! Adorable, vaccinated, purring death. Death in a collar with a little bell on it, death with green eyes, death that thinks shoelaces are mice.
The effect of having already seen my family’s cat Edie die (a limp, a lump, those were the only times, actually, that she let my daughter cuddle her) is that now my child too assumes the end is always nigh. If the kitten doesn’t come when called for: “Has she died?” When the kitten was sick after eating some stray rice, “Will she die?” Which I’ve been told is the point of a pet for a child, a place to practice grief, but I’m also seeing her weighed down with the same anxiety that sometimes hobbles me, that inevitable problem with love. What a pain.
It’s this that I marvel at to varying degrees when I see parents with more than one child. How? How can you reconcile the threat of a pain like that? Your first child, sure. You have no idea. You didn’t know how it would feel to have your heart become one pink beating wound, how it would feel to love something like this, in a way that leaves you constantly out of breath. And how with that feeling came side effects, the most maddening of which for me is a humming anxiety which manifests itself in the suburban catastrophising of the everyday. A scooter. A kettle. The flu. To know all this and then to go, yeah, more of that please, more babies, more agony, more awful premonitions on a Monday at three, more feelings, seems to me a brave and outrageous feat.
So I am now a cat person. I lost her for two hours last night and went rattling round the house with a noisy bag of Dreamies working out what we’d tell our daughter in the morning. My relief when I found her shut in the wardrobe, despite seeing my favourite dresses now tattered for escape ladders, was physical, I had to sit down for a bit and text people. The kitten is sleeping on my knee as I write, her paw outstretched as if reaching for Instagram likes. At night, she waits until we’re asleep before slipping into the room and wriggling under the duvet, where she’ll nestle neatly into my knee-pit. “She hasn’t come in again has she?” my boyfriend will croak, muffled at 1am. “No no, go back to sleep,” I say, her purrs now as loud as a helicopter ambulance, “You’re dreaming.”
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
