Cats in the Cradle

     Maximus Caticus, Ruben James and Maeby Olivia. My cats. Yep, before I was obsessed with being a mommy, I was obsessed with cats. A bona fide crazy cat lady. I was always a cat lady. I always liked them, but over the time that I was trying to conceive, I absolutely went crazy. For the years that I desperately wanted a baby, they were my babies.

      Max is a southern boy from New Orleans. He and his brother had been abandoned in a house there before the local animal shelter found them and Jim eventually adopted him. When he moved back to Pennsylvania, Max came along.

     Ruben, named for the corned beef sandwich that my friend who found him, tiny and sickly in the field behind the building where he worked gave him to eat as a first meal. He is a sweet and timid soul, who loves to sleep on whatever high perch he can find around our house.

     When we adopted Maeby, we thought she was a boy. We had intended to adopt a boy since we had two other boys and didn't know what throwing a girl into the mix would do. We got her home, named her Gob (Arrested Development reference, of course) and fell in love. Later that evening, I happened to look at her medical records and noticed one word. Spayed. I thought, “that's weird,” and flipped my new little kitten over to find that she had in fact been spayed. With that she got a new name, Maeby, keeping with our previous Arrested Development theme and also as a play on words... Maybe she was a boy or maybe she was a girl. Our little Maeby completed our family for the time being.

     I loved my cats. I loved my cats more than I like most people. In the early days it was an appropriate, completely sane love, but as the years went on and as Jim and I tried unsuccessfully to start a human family, I'll be the first to admit that that love became well, a little bit crazy.

     At first it was just a nice distraction. It felt good to dote on them. It was funny and a bit of an inside joke with family and friends. I wore my crazy cat lady title with pride. Our cats didn't want for anything. We had three cat trees, a cat forest if you will in our living and dining rooms. They had the best of everything.

     I dressed my cats. Hats, bow ties, scarves, many, many sweaters, Halloween costumes, nothing fancy... Always occasion appropriate. God love them, there were great sports. I developed a technique. I can dress a cat in under 30 seconds. The trick is working with them not against them. All three would cuddle at night in bed with us, every single night. Ruben would spoon Jim, Maeby would sleep on my head and Max occupied the area at the foot of the bed.

     We spoiled them, but they were good to us too. For Mother's Day they would get me gifts and flowers and for Father's Day they would get Jim candy and cards. For Christmas we would go all out. I have cat ornaments all over my tree. I even bought special ornaments that I thought they would like to play with and hung them low on the tree so they could reach and enjoy them. Obviously, the boys had Christmas sweaters and Maeby had a fancy Christmas dress.

     I hung beautiful Christmas stockings for them and filled them to the brim with treats, toys and accessories. We opened their stockings before we moved on to any other gifts on Christmas morning. Their big gifts, of course were under the tree.  It sounds very silly now, but at the time it truly warmed my heart to see them with their presents. It filled a tiny part of the huge hole that was developing in my heart. The temporary reprieve felt good.

     It was fun. It was all fun. The jokes with people were fun. The jokes Jim and I would make felt good. It felt like a release. While I longed for a baby it felt nice to be able to do for them. It was a place for some of that lost love to go.

     One thing about the holidays that I have always loved were the Christmas cards. I love getting them and I love sending them. I always make personalized Christmas cards. I would send funny caricatures of Jim and I and the cats, or a pretty picture of our decorated tree and I always decorate my home with the ones that I get back. I tie them to a pretty ribbon and hang them like garland above one of our doorways between the dining room and the living room.

     It was our second Christmas in a row of TTC, and I sat down with my stack of Christmas cards to assemble them on my sparkling gold ribbon. Like every year, I kept one of our own to hang with the others. With cheer in my heart I picked up the first card in my stack, a beautiful picture of my nephew in a reindeer hat. I smiled. Just looking at that baby made my heart want to explode with joy. I secured it in it's place on the garland, and picked up the next. A card from a friend who had just had her second baby. Her children looked out from the card like little angels. Big blue eyes, platinum blonde hair and porcelain skin. They looked like dolls, not even real. Absolutely beautiful babies. The next card was another friend, her baby was about 18 months old at the time. He was wearing a Santa hat and smiling sweetly at the camera, a stocking in his chubby little hand. Babies in elf hats, in cozy baskets filled with blankets, older kids posed hugging each other. Happy families. Card after card after card. I saw the babies who I had expected my own child to grow up with now sitting up on their own, getting ready to crawl right out of the card. The children who had been announced right when I had started trying were already walking.  Everyone was growing and moving forward. Everyone, it felt, except for me.

     I then came to my own card in the stack. It was a card that had taken me a long time to make. The picture had been difficult to get. My three cats, dressed in Christmas sweaters next to the tree. It had taken me an hour to get them to sit in the frame together. I'm not sure if you have ever tried to get three cats in sweaters to pose together in front of a specific backdrop before but I'll tell you the short version. It's a shit show. I had been excited when I finally snapped the perfect photo. It was going to be so cute. To be honest, it was cute. But sitting there, surrounded by the photos of babies and kids and “real” families, it didn't feel cute. It didn't feel funny. It felt pathetic. I felt embarrassed. I had an irrational urge to run to every house that I had sent my cards to and steal them out of the mailboxes before anyone could see them.  I felt sorry for myself. I sat and cried in my pile of Christmas card garland.

     This year, I debated putting Archer on our Christmas card. In fact, I debate a lot of the posts that I put on Facebook. I never want to make anyone feel like I felt for all of those years. I hate to think that my happy moments could be causing pain for someone else. But as with Facebook, I made a conscious decision to enjoy these years to the fullest. I feel like I've earned them. These are the experiences that I grieved when I felt that I would never get to enjoy a baby of my own. So I dressed up my little man in an elf hat and shorts, scattered a few fake snowballs around him and lived out one of the countless dreams that I had carried in my head and in my heart for so long.

     Since having Archer my cats have reverted back to pets. Sometimes I think they miss the attention and the old sleeping arrangement, but for the most part I think they enjoy the peace and are thrilled to have been clothing free for the past year or so. Now, they spend their days lounging on the couch, the single remaining cat tree and getting kicked off of Archer's pack n play. Now little Archer is the boss and we are all just happy to live in his kingdom.