We talk about housing a lot in Australia. Whether you are a homeowner, an aspiring homeowner, a lowly lifelong renter like me or a person who the government is happy to let fall through the cracks, you will hear about it.
There’s interest rates, negative gearing and the struggle between development and nimbys who not only want to buy the ladder and pull it up behind them, but also make sure no other ladders are made available in the surrounding areas.
For my entire life, I have lived in rental properties. As a fully grown adult, I now live in Sydney, where the conditions of rentals, and the prices for those conditions, should be enough to put a boomer off their non-avocado breakfast. You try to live normally, but you know at any moment it could all be yanked out from under you. You could get a random call that your entire share house needs to move out because your landlord’s son failed as a DJ in London and needs to come home to sulk. Or you could get excited when the owner has decided to fix all the things you’ve been asking for for three years, only to discover they are doing it in order to sell.
Housing and access to it is a serious problem, but I want to talk about one of the tiny issues that often gets overlooked in the big discussion. I can’t have a cat.
I am a cis white lesbian, here to say that some stereotypes are true. I love cats. I adore them. It is in my DNA to greet, love, pat and want to have any cat I meet in my home. Occasionally, people on the internet have tried insulting me by calling me a cat lady, and I can’t even correct them even though I don’t have a cat. They are right. It is who I am intrinsically. My natural setting is being the annoying person at a party already showing you cat photos before you can finish saying “Do you have a cat?”. I am also the person likely to ask this. I still show people photos of my old cat Tippi, who was with me during my most stable renting years and gave me the best cat years of my life.
The past eight years or so have been pet empty, my situation never suitable for a cat, and the idea of adding a special layer of difficulty to the already very difficult process of finding a new rental does not appeal. Luckily, I have a technique to tide me over, so I don’t become a crazy catless lady.
I have dubbed this concept Intermittent Pets. Those are other people’s pets: dogs I see daily at the park who become my friends, the weird cat that haunts the back lane or, better yet, cats, fish, once a tortoise, that I can look after while friends are away, giving me some much-needed pet time. Even a short period of Intermittent Pets is enough to send my PET FULFILLOMETER to the top.
In the past handful of years, my girlfriend and I have become a go-to for people who need a couple of queer women to pet-sit while they go on holiday. This is partially because we always live in share houses, and it’s nice to have our own space for a bit, but largely it’s because I want an Intermittent Pet. We have had a wealth of opportunities to cat-sit in particular, because we know a lot of lesbians who travel for work.
I know there are dog people and cat people, a binary I don’t believe in because I also love dogs – but cats rule and I’ll say it every day. It makes me sad when I hear people say they don’t like cats. Usually it’s because they had one or two bad experiences with a cat when they were younger. Not to victim-blame, but it was probably your fault.
I love cat-sitting because I love how different each of their personalities are – their little quirks. You can’t just go in hard and rough with a pat and a treat and expect to win it over like a dog. Sure, it’s great to have that experience sometimes, but I just love that they have their own boundaries, their own way of doing things and their own way of having you do things for them. You have to attune to each cat, demonstrate that you are safe person in a way their particular sensibilities will respond to. People who don’t like cats talk about how they aren’t affectionate or loving, and that can’t be further from the truth. Some cats are immediately loving, getting into a strange lesbian’s lap at the first opportunity. But some need time and that’s OK. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a cat move gradually from wariness to affection and end up purring in your lap.
Someone asked us recently if my girlfriend and I compete over who the cat likes first or the most, but we don’t. We are a team (it’s usually me though), a couple of carers ready to do whatever it takes to look after the cat and win it over before its owners return. It’s not the same as having a permanent cat, but it fills, for a time, the gaping void.
• Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
