On cats and comfort

This letter was supposed to be about tulips and cats, but…

The tulips are still languishing in the shed. They need attention, but then so do a lot of other things. We have two November birthdays to observe and then there will be Christmas. These birthdays have existed in my life now for over a decade, and yet I am still blindsided by them. Something inside my head absolutely refuses to contemplate Christmas until these birthdays are behind me, the same something that tells me I must start wrapping presents now, and organising decorations, so that Christmas can be all calm and twinkly and look like a Boden advert. It’s so silly how much I long to be that woman, and how intensely I know that I don’t have it in me to be her. This video appeared on my social media feed recently, and, well, it’s me.

I have been trying to declutter and organise my life for years…YEARS I tell you, and although I’ve made inroads, I never actually manage it. Does anyone really ever manage it? I think it’s probably feasible once a nest is empty…? I remember when Marie Kondo’s book exploded onto the scene and everyone was madly throwing everything away. I got her book and read it greedily, cover to cover, and I remember thinking that this woman must be unwell. (I’m sure she’s totally fine, but I think it was the thing about the shampoo in her shower, and the fact that she would have to dry the bottle after use, and also the throwing away of books…and I felt very very uneasy for her. I get it. I adore and covet the idea of having a perfectly organised space, but I also have the experience to know it’s not a one-and-done thing. You actually have to re-train your brain, and that takes time and effort and ugh I don’t want to so just go away please and thank you.

Being tidy and perfect is lovely and good, but if you have to become someone else in order to achieve it then maybe don’t go all in? Someone very wonderful and kind and very much loved died very suddenly recently, leaving everyone completely floored and baffled. Hug your people tightly. Tell them you love them on a busy, hectic, messy Monday morning. Everything can change on a dime.

Cats know. Like most domesticated animals, they are attuned somewhat to the thoughts and feelings of those who share their living space. I have always been a cat lover. My parents got a cat when I was about six years old and I remember thinking that the love I felt for this animal eclipsed any other love I had ever felt. A fierce, roaring obsession that had me squeezing the poor thing and making it stay within my grasp at all times, so that eventually it capitulated and just let me carry it around with me at all times, like a baby. I was thoroughly allergic to it; I had a constant blocked nose and streaming eyes for years because I would bury my face in that cat and sleep with it and I LOVED it so passionately.

Then after I left university I got a dog, and I realise looking back that this dog (a pug) was simply a cat substitute. I also realise now that I got the dog partly because I was swayed by cat predjudice. I was in my twenties and ‘cat lady’ wasn’t something I wanted to project. I wish I could tell you that when I was young I didn’t care about stuff like that, but it would be an outrageous lie. Image was everything. Everything. I wasn’t secure enough in myself not to care. I empathise entirely with the drive of most young people to ‘fit in’. I get frustrated when I witness them blindly following harmful trends, or spouting views that clearly aren’t their own, but I know how incredibly rare it is to swim upstream at that age. It took me so very, horribly, boringly long to stop caring.

‘Cat lady’ then, with all its connotations… is now totally fine. Don’t care. Despite their reputation, cats are just as affectionate and loving as dogs. They are just more independent, and much less interested in your feelings about them, and this mirrors entirely the change that happens (perhaps especially for women), in middle age; I think we become less dog, and more cat.

So during the whole Covid era, at the time when I had most decidedly left my shoal, turned around and started swimming the other way, I decided to get us a cat. And the day after I conceived this plan, with zero idea of how to execute it, a picture popped up on my social media of an exquisite ginger kitten looking for a home. I messaged, and a couple of weeks later we had Beauty and she transformed our family dynamic. When we bickered (and there was a ton of that happening over the various lockdowns) Beauty gave us a common positive focus. She became a sort of ground zero for love, a foundation stone from which we could re-build after every disagreement, argument or conflict. A perfect distraction when things got fraught, a source of laughter when there were tears, and deep, deep peace for whomever she chose to sit upon and purr. We all (even the smallest) bought in to the idea of being utterly and totally enslaved by her charms, and we revelled consciously in our complete subjugation to her. In short, Beauty was like a divine intervention.

Then she had kittens.

We are townies; I have only ever witnessed my own children’s births, and obviously I was at the wrong end to get a good view. I’m pretty sure Rotter had his eyes squeezed tightly shut during each of those too. But we all witnessed those kittens being born. Beauty chose to give birth on my son’s bed. I understand why - he is decidedly less hectic than the rest of us; I can see why she felt it was the safest place. We all sat there agog and watched her push out five babies, one after the other - each one accompanied by a simple ‘meow’. We watched her clean each one up perfectly and then finally, daintily demolish her own placenta until you’d never have known what had taken place. We had prepared a box for her, with a heated mat and all the trimmings, which she roundly rejected and instead carried all her babies into a dark corner under a chair at the end of the bed, whereupon she set about performing ‘Mother’ perfectly and without a hitch.

I spent days in that room staring at the marvel of this new mother, (who had never been told how to do any of it), bring up her babies and teach them everything completely instinctively. No doula, no books, no mother of her own.

Look, I know I’m not a cat, but I learned stuff - big stuff - from watching her. I learned that nobody knows better than you how to raise your own children. I learned that the instincts we have are generally good ones, if only we will listen to them. I learned to trust myself when something (the bed someone else has made for me in which to bring up my young?) doesn’t feel right.

We kept two kittens, and now have three cats, and more love and obsession is poured their way. They are a pack, and absolute so-and-sos most of the time. They are all excellent mousers, and my Rotter sometimes looks at them and gets the uneasy feeling that they are just waiting for him to die so they can eat him - (I absolutely agree with this assessment). He is also convinced that our cats - all cats - are living a double life; one here with us, and the other in another dimension somewhere, that they are waiting for us to discover, and that this is the reason they sometimes look at us with such ineffable disdain.

I’m not so sure, but I do know that if one of them sits on my knee, I am out of action until it gets up. Bladder be damned, go away whoever knocks at the door…school pickup can wait…what an absolute honour.

Cats know; they know when things are a bit sad, or wrong. They will come and weave around your ankles, as if trying to soothe you. They will go to the bed of a disheartened or anxious child, and be there at their feet all night. And they will lie outstretched in a sunbeam looking regal and majestic and like the most beautiful thing in the entire world, and they will catch you staring at them and blink slowly, and stretch out a paw, as if to say, I know, I know, I am beautiful, this sunbeam is good, and all is well…all is well.

Thank you very much for reading. Please do heart this if you’ve enjoyed it, and even better, share it with anyone who you think will appreciate it, and do please tell me whether you think agree with me that cats are divine.

Back soon with something about moss and twigs I think

x Laetitia