I am a proud mom to three cats. To protect their identities (and mine), I will give them online aliases. Henceforth, they will be known as Fudgie, Earl Grey, and Cookies and Cream. (Or CC for short. My husband wanted to call her C+C Mew-sic Factory. Dear reader, choose whichever you most fancy. It’s still CC for short.)
Wow, those are cool names. Is it too late to change them? They don’t seem to know their current ones anyway.
CC was my first fur-child. My sister-in-law’s family used to raise Siamese cats and one of them came up to the house with two little kittens one day. They didn’t think she could have kittens anymore, so they were pretty surprised. There was a girl and a boy and I picked the girl. (I always wanted my first baby to be a girl.) It took me two weeks to name her and I ended up calling her “Baby” the whole time. That’s still the name she responds to the most.
It was just the two of us for a long time. She really saved my life. I was going through a rough time in grad school and she was a little furry ray of hope. Secretly, I thought of us as something akin to the Gilmore Girls, except we lacked the cute outfits. However, our repartee was pretty snappy, albeit one-sided. She has not followed the stereotype of the chatty Siamese cat until relatively recently.
My fluffy Earl Grey is another story. He talks ALL the time. In fact, he’ll do a cute little trick where he meows when I say “I love you”, like he’s saying it back. It’s adorable. People love it. However, he won’t always do it on command. I adopted him about a year and a half after CC. He was from a feral cat colony, but he was rescued as a kitten. Oddly enough, he is the most domesticated cat I’ve ever seen. A real homebody. He hates to leave the house and really hates to ride in the car. He actually did calm down and remained completely quiet when we played classical music during a long car ride to my parents’ house for Christmas. However, that didn’t work on the way home or since.
It’s unfortunate that he likes to stay home the most, because he’s the one who ends up having to leave the house the most. He is the most accident-prone little kitty and has to visit the vet a lot more than the others. He had to have three teeth out a few years ago, because he essentially got cavities. Recently, he broke one of his canine teeth and had to have it removed, plus some roots that hadn’t resorbed from the other teeth that had been removed. Plus, he gets battle scars from his bouts with Fudgie. Fudgie never seems any the worse for wear, but he is totally black, so he is able to hide it better.
Fudgie has already butted his way in to the story (Just as he butted his way in to our lives.), so we’ll go ahead and do his biography. He was a stray at my last apartment complex. I had never met a cat like him in my entire life. He wasn’t quiet like most strays. He would wander around that apartment complex and meow at the top of his lungs. It was like he was saying, “Hey, you stupid humans! It’s your fault I’m in this fix. Somebody better do something about it! Love me, dammit!” I did fall in love with him and fed him everyday until I moved in with my future husband. I couldn’t bear to leave him there and, although my husband is slightly allergic to cats and had just acquired two, he went back with me a few days later to get Fudgie. I said he would be a stray in our neighborhood, but I think we both knew he would find his way in the house and never leave. We brought him in to recover after we had him fixed and he has indeed never left. He has grown fat (19 pounds) and happy and is the most gorgeous, crazy, splendid boy you ever saw. I don’t know how we ever lived without him. He and my husband have developed an interesting bond. It’s like a buddy comedy, except with a man and a big, black cat.
We’re not entirely sure that Fudgie’s history with us began with him meowing his head off around the apartment complex. On a freezing day just before Christmas of 2005, I was walking to my car to go to the bank. A small black kitten with big green eyes came meowing around the tail pipe. He looked up at me and meowed insistently. I hesistated, because I could not afford more cats and furthermore, was not allowed to have more at my apartment complex. I could not resist the plea in those eyes, so I compromised, scooped him up, and carried him to the apartment complex’s office, in a desperate bid to keep him safe from the cold. They promised to let him run around and one of the workers even said that her husband would probably be ok with keeping him. I left after making them all promise that they would not let him outside and telling them I would be back before 5 to take him home if none of them could.
When I returned, the beautiful black kitten was gone. It was hard for me to hide my anger when they told me they let him go outside. I asked why, through gritted teeth, and they told me that “he wanted to”. I hope to God none of these people are parents. They said he would come back, but I knew he wouldn’t. However, a lanky, mid-size black cat showed up outside my apartment a few months later, only to be chased off (temporarily) by the orange stray that was wooing me at the time. The black cat had very green eyes and, although he stayed safely away after the orange stray routed him, he was just biding his time. He knew he had found his home and he would wait. He had faith. More than I did at the time.
So, that is the capsule version of how I became a kitty momma. Adopting the three of them changed my life and I can never repay them for the countless moments of joy they have given me. But I will keep trying.
Kittymomma's Adventures 