Sharing My Cats, Sharing My Heart.

“Don’t forget that today is my cats-night,” he says to me as he grabs his plate off the counter and promptly drops his spoon.

I shake my head and bring him another as he cleans the chunks of quinoa and lettuce off the floor. A decade ago, a friend of mine who had been a father for many years had told me he never scolded his child for dropping or breaking things by accident and it wasn’t until recently that I realised I had incorporated that advice into my parenting. I’m a clumsy, accident-prone human being with two left-feet and no coordination between my eyes and fingers, and my family lets me be that way, asking only that I clean up after myself and occasionally let them thoroughly rib me for it. I live with a man, a child, two cats and a dog, but I am still the messiest person in our house.

“Oh, please take them! Last night Nai-Nai bit me because I turned my side,” I tell him, placing the fresh cutlery onto his plate, “In fact, why don’t you take them today and tomorrow.”

“Seriously?” He asks, eyeing me with suspicion, “Just to be clear, I can have them today, tomorrow and on all my usual cat-nights for the week.”

There are some moments when your child says or does something that baffles you because you cannot trace the behaviour back to a didactic source and then there are moments where it is painfully clear they learnt something from you. This careful and explicit process of clarified negotiation is a core trait of my behaviour, because nothing hurts my brain quite like confusion and misunderstanding, and I delight at seeing him demonstrate it. When I started to notice this pattern of behaviour in him, I was surprised by how gleeful it made me feel because it’s hard to admit that I wondered whether my nurturing would ever reflect in him in the same way that the nature of his biological parents does. He looks like his biological mother and father, his mannerisms often mimic theirs and his wants are frequently governed by what they desire, and while I have little desire to stake proprietary claim over him, it is gratifying to see you have had an influence.

“Yes,” I tell him, “Today, tomorrow and all your usual cat-days.”

“I cannot believe it,” he says, walking off to the living room to watch television as he eats.

I get it. His disbelief is comprehensible. When he first moved into the house where I already lived with his father, and my cats, I struggled with sharing them with him. I know it sounds bad, I know that all adults everywhere, especially those who embark upon parental responsibility, should want to be completely selfless when it comes to the children. Give them the shirts off our backs, the run of our space and anything they could possibly want, but it’s hard to incorporate a major life-change into your life without struggling with it a little bit. When I met my (now) spouse, he was a separated man, going through a difficult divorce, who had a child but was fairly certain he would never be able to secure custody of that child. It was a source of profound pain to him, the kind of pain that never really leaves, it goes to bed beside you at night and wakes up before you open your eyes to complete consciousness. I, on the other hand, was a twenty-three-year-old journalist, living out of a suitcase, failing to brush my hair on a daily basis, and settled into my belief that I didn’t ever want to have a child. As our relationship developed, I came to love our life as autonomous, private, cohabitating people very much. I don’t live well with others, I have a pathological need for privacy, and can sometimes seem secretive even to those closest to me, but I lived well with him despite how different we are.

He loves classic rock and beer; I like classical music and drink green-tea. He is quiet as a person, I say a thousand-words a minute and still have more in me. He like to watch films and go to restaurants; I loathe visual stimulation and prefer to eat leaning over the kitchen sink while completing a secondary task. In some ways he is conventional—traditional career, stability and creased trousers—while I am mayhem wrapped up in carefully derived structure—walking into the woods, changing my mind and career as often as I like—but it didn’t seem to matter because inside our home, we made sense to each other. We built a little life together—mismatched furniture, iniquity, four-hour dinners and my silly cats—and when he told me, one sweltering June-morning that he would be able to secure custody of his son and he would come to live with us in just a few months, I knew my little life would change completely.

People always dramatize those moments. They play them out like movies and the movie version of me would have spent days fielding the question of whether she could remain in the relationship or not, she would have struggled and then found some kind of grace in a moment where she nursed a wounded animal and realised, she too had a nurturing side. She would start combing her hair and become the picture of a domestic goddess who would renounce the evil way in which she lived before and embrace whole-heartedly this new meaningful endeavour. This is why I hate movies; they fail women as often as they fail reality. In reality, it never occurred to me that I should leave, when someone you love gets to have something they were sure not to get, it’s hard not to be overjoyed, besides it’s not matrimony that makes one commit to forever, it’s love, and even though we weren’t married, I already loved my partner in the stylings of forever. I wasn’t going anywhere but I was worried about some things, the things that I would be losing.

I worried that I wouldn’t be able to walk around naked in my house whenever I wanted. I worried that there would be a whole other person in the house, one who was always around, and that would mean that my precious privacy would be wholly compromised. I worried I would have to stop dousing all our meals in peppers and hot-sauce. In the months that followed, I heard my partner talk to the kid over the phone, making plans for his arrival and telling him about the cats. The kid was excited by that. He had spent the past few years living on a farm with his mom and his grandparents, and was very fond of animals. I could tell he was eager to meet the cats, he couldn’t be very eager to meet me since he didn’t know of me at the time, but the cats represented some excitement, and there were parts of that I loved, because having a common interest could only help bring people closer, but I was also scared. They were my cats and I knew I would have to share them with him.

It didn’t happen immediately, the first few weeks, he played with the cats and they familiarised themselves with him. Wednesday took to him immediately, she’s a playful sort, we call her the village idiot sometimes but Nai-Nai took her time warming up to him, as she does with everyone. Each time one of them willingly wandered into his room or sauntered over for his attention, he rushed over to me to report it, like it was the ultimate validation he could have received. Finally, the day I had most dreaded arrived.

“Can the cats sleep with me tonight?” he asked, as we cleared the dinner-table and prepared to retire for the night.

He was so puny back then, he wore matching night-suits with cartoons on them and frequently featured missing teeth. I looked at his hopeful face as he waited for my response. I said yes but I wanted to say no. It was the right thing to do but doing the right thing and wanting to do the right thing are not the same. I had grown to enjoy watching his relationship with the cats develop, I had even come to trust him with their care but some comfort remained in the fact that they slept in my bed every night.

“Though, you sleep very early, they might try to get out of the room,” I explained, “If they do that, just knock on our door and we’ll take them.”

The cats and the child slept through the night, but I woke up several times. There was a phantom emptiness in my bed, there was a startling awareness that I wasn’t just an untethered girl about the world, anymore. I couldn’t carry with me all my things, some of my things were in another room. Still, it was a long time before he asked to sleep with them again. It may have been my manner, it may have been something I had said about missing the cats or maybe they had just bothered him a great deal in the night but whatever it was, it took a while for the experience to repeat itself. During that time, we became a lot closer, I found that I am not so difficult to tolerate for children, I don’t quite possess the affectionate charm we have come to associate with mothers but I am a tinkerer, an adventurer and eager to experiment in all kinds of ways, and children seem to enjoy that in an adult. They like a parent who will make slime with them, design a scavenger hunt, let them paint their sheets and help build shelters for all the strays in the neighbourhood. As time wore on, he would intermittently ask to sleep with the cats and I began to unthinkingly nod my head at the requests.

One day, back when he was ten, his father went into his bedroom to wake him up for school, and a few moments later, I heard him erupt into peels of laughter so I followed into the room. The child was climbing out from under the bed, dragging and pillow alongside him, as the cats followed suit.

“He was sleeping under the bed,” my partner explained to me.

“Why were you sleeping under the bed?” I asked him, curious and still unsure if I ought to be perturbed.

“The cats wouldn’t sleep on the bed with me,” he explained, rubbing his eyes and falling back onto the mattress, “I tried so hard and finally, I just gave up and got under the bed with them. Wednesday slept on my arm!”

He was so excited but his words squeezed my heart in a vice grip. If that is what he was willing to do, if he was willing to climb under the bed just to ingratiate himself to the cats, it was time for the cats to reciprocate. Later, over breakfast, I made the offer that had to come from me.

“Do you want to sleep with the cats on more nights?” I asked him, “We could come up with a system.”

“Every day?” He asked, expectantly beaming at me.

“No!” I retorted, “I want them too! How about alternate days?”

“Okay, okay,” he said thoughtfully, “What about Sunday?”

“We can do alternate Sundays too,” I told him.

“No, it’s okay,” he said, “You can have Sundays.”

That is how a tween taught me to share like a toddler, by being more generous with me than I had been able to be. We continued that system until he finally convinced me to let him get a dog, and then we modified it. It was the first thing he stated when Sirirus joined our family, he wanted her to sleep in bed with him most of the time but he didn’t want to let go of his cat-nights entirely. He let me have the dog for two-nights a week and I let him have the cats for two-nights a week. It’s the system we still follow, though now he has managed to convince me to let him have all the pets on my two dog-nights but I don’t mind anymore. When someone you love gets to have something they were sure not to get, it’s hard not to be overjoyed, besides it’s not parenthood that makes one commit to forever, it’s love, and even though I did not give birth to him, I love my kid in the stylings of forever. There’s no one in the world with whom I would rather share my cats, for whom I would rather adjust my notions of privacy and learn to put on pants in my living room.

“Well, believe it,” I tell him, walking behind him into the living room, “I don’t mind if you keep them every day!”

“That’s too much bro,” he says, plopping down on the couch, “You need the cats too.”

Some creatures just have your heart, and even when they have the power to twist it into knots and stomp, they choose to be gentle with it, instead. Not the cats, though, Nai-Nai fucking bites me when I turn on my side.