On giving away the cat

My capacity for love is unlimited. My capacity for care is not.

The morning after that semi-viral Cut essay about the mom who tried to kill her cat* was published, my friend Auds texted me something like: “Wow, they really made you change a lot of the details in that essay, huh?” 

*To be clear, she did not actually try to kill her cat. She did leave the window open once or twice with the psychic implication that her cat may want to find itself a more hospitable home. I think this is an important distinction!!!

If you haven’t read the essay, the tl;dr is that she was a tired new mom; she loved her cat, but she did not love the weight of having an additional helpless creature to care for. She engaged in some mild cat neglect. The essay meandered a bit, but the gist of it was: am I a bad person for not loving my cat as much as I used to, now that I have a baby? 

I'll be honest—and this must speak to my severe naiveté, the gulf between who I am now and my time as a Person Writing Things for the Internet—I opened the comments genuinely believing I would find a chorus of other moms saying, Yes! Solidarity! It's really hard to care for a house full of dependents! You're not a bad person, you're just exhausted! 

Nein. This woman was pilloried. Some suggested she should not only have her cat removed from her home, but her baby, too, as clearly the distance from "neglected to clean cat's litterbox" to "willfully murdered my child" was perilously short. The New York Mag commenters are not known for being particularly empathetic, but this was vicious. This, I felt in my bones. 

Audrey's text was a joke—I didn't write the essay!—but it was rooted in a truth, which is that after having my kids, I gave away my cat.

looks peaceful. was not.

The short story is that our cat—who was really my cat, was only ever my cat—hated kids. He and I had been together for nearly 10 years, ever since I picked him up from a basement in Queens, the runt of the litter with a heart murmur and a neurological condition that kept him on anxiety meds. I loved him desperately, built my life around his weird quirks, worried about his happiness, studiously ignored my clear cat allergy and stocked up on anti-itch eye drops. He barely tolerated Vic, but I was determined that he would be a part of our family for as long as we were gifted his time.

Then came Mira. The cat expressed his displeasure with this turn of events by vomiting with such frequency that the vet was convinced he had kidney disease (he did not, he just really hated the baby). When Lily came around, he developed stress acne that made the hair on his chin fall off, and which I was supposed to treat with medicated pads that, you guessed it, he hated, nearly as much as he hated the kids, and I hated this too, hated chasing the cat around with $80 cat exfoliant, more than I'd ever spent on my own skincare. The cat spent most of the day hiding, and would only come out after the kids had gone to sleep, at which point he would leap onto my chest where he would proceed to knead my tender, swollen breasts and wrap himself around my neck like a murderous fur muff. 

One of the last straws came when I got home from the hospital, where I'd been for 72 hours watching Lily, who was then two months old, rapidly decline from RSV. I hadn't left her side as she got sicker and sicker and was finally rushed to the ICU, and while she was now stable, I was not. I was blurry and frantic and heartsick. The cat had had 8 teeth removed the day before Lily went to hospital, because of course he did. As we flew past each other in the hospital, switching places so I could go home and take care of Mira while Vic sat at Lily’s bedside watching our baby fight to breathe, Vic hurriedly mentioned that the cat didn't seem to be doing that well. When I arrived home around midnight, sleep-deprived and vibrating with terror, I found the cat, face covered in blood, staring at the wall. I immediately called the emergency vet, and she listened to me weep about how my baby was on a breathing machine and my toddler was asleep upstairs but my cat was refusing to eat the Churu I was currently chasing him around the house with and looked like he'd ingested a truck-load of ketamine. The very kind vet told me I should try and get some sleep, and to bring the cat in in the morning. (I did, he'd had a bad reaction to the sedatives they'd given him because, again, of course he did.) 

So again, the short version: the cat now lives with dear friends of ours, friends who cared for him during the pandemic when we were stuck in Canada, who missed him dearly when he came back to us, who do not have kids and who dote on him with the kind of royal attention he has done absolutely nothing to merit but 100% deserves. 

I've thought about the cat a lot as I've thought about the ghost child, the third kid who will never be, the baby I'm always longing for, trying to reconcile what I know to be true with what I desperately feel. And that is that while my capacity for love is unlimited, my capacity for care is not. 

There is this pervasive and pernicious idea that women have an inborn and limitless ability to give care. Some do, I’m sure (just as I'm sure some men do, although I have yet to meet one), and for a long time I believed I was one of them. Caregiving is where I do my best work. It’s why I longed for a partner when I was single, someone into whose care I could pour myself. But I have watched as each subsequent care-object pushed the former care-object off a cliff, the cat replaced by the husband replaced by the first kid replaced by the second, until my ability to care is stretched thin to breaking. (Care for myself, which I am aware should be on that list, never interested me much, for reasons that are probably best dissected in therapy but can also be boiled down to the fact that I believe my value as a human rests in my ability to provide care.) On the rare occasion when I have care of only one child, I marvel at how patient I can be, how attentive, how willing to engage on their level, to cater to what they need. I find within myself such a wealth of care that it feels intoxicating.

But the dilution of that care is messy. Where love is instinctual, often unconscious, care is work. For me, love is a noun, where care is a verb. It is how I show love, yes, and I find it gratifying, of course, but also exhausting. It’s why I know a third child would inhibit my ability to care for my first two.

They—lawmakers, politicians, The Men—assume the female capacity for care is endless, and therefore that we should/can stay home with our children (have a few more while we’re at it!), that teachers and caregivers don't need to be paid as much as CEOs. As Jessica Calarco has written, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” Women are expected to take up the slack of care because we are believed to have an unlimited well within us. But the quality of that care matters. It’s why a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy simply because she does not believe she has the ability to care for a child in the way she wishes. (Or, you know, just because she doesn’t want to have a kid. That’s great, too.) It’s why, as guilty as I feel about re-homing the cat, I try to remind myself that I am a better care-giver for having made that decision. And it’s why I wish we’d extend more leniency to that other tired cat mom, too.

Our cat is happier now. I do not doubt this for a moment. When I visit, he is lukewarm, trepidatious: Do not for one second think that you are taking me back, he seems to say. Our house is happier, because I do not have to worry that the cat will take out his unhappiness on one of my increasingly feral children, or that Lily's allergies and breathing issues will be exacerbated by the cat, or that I have disappointed one more creature who depends on me, one more being in my home who warrants the kind of whole-hearted care I wish to give.

Self Soothing

• Bon Iver has a new single and it is very “Justin went back to the cabin.” I love it. I first heard Bon Iver when a friend (👋 dpk, if you’re reading this!) closed out a mix CD he made me with “Re: stacks”. Killer move if you’re hoping to have someone fall irrevocably, immovably in love with you for the next 10+ years!

• We took the kids to Cape Cod for a few days at the end of August and rented one of those old one-room cottages. We spent hours at the beach and no one ate sand and I made mozzarella sandwiches and read a great book. Vic and I sat on the screened-in porch after the kids went to bed and played cards and drank white wine. I was very happy.

• The third season of Industry just finished and it was a wild ride. Not enough people are watching this show! I’m biased because a dear friend stars in S3 but other much smarter people are also hip to this. S1 starts out a bit rocky but it finds its feet quickly. It has been described as the missing link between Succession and Euphoria but for me it’s really about how we pathologize vulnerability and obfuscate weakness in ways that damage our humanity beyond recognition. But in a fun way!

I’m hoping to spend more time here now that I’m through the big novel edit that consumed me in July and August. I’m grateful to you for reading. I’m grateful to you for your care, in all its forms.