Week One with Holloway

I’ve wanted a cat for my entire living memory. When I was sixteen, I dreamed of my own apartment in the city, with big windows projecting sunlight onto clean white walls. I dreamed of coming home from my cubicle job to a full-size memory foam mattress, trailing pothos vines, and a cat. I’ve spent the last six years of my life dutifully checking off each one. Now, finally, we’ve arrived at cat.

I’ve improved my depression-management skills enough that I’m ready for pet caretaking responsibilities. In early 2022, I could barely get myself out of bed to drink water. Three years later, I’m ready to take care of both myself and another. I think of her as an emotional support animal, but I no longer have health insurance that covers therapy, so I haven’t gotten an official ESA letter. In theory, she’ll support me because knowing I need to take care of her reminds me that I need to get out of bed and get my own food and water. She’ll reminds me that I, too, am a human animal that deserves water and food, not deprivation as self-flagellation. And of course, she’ll be adorable.

My friend Jenna started fostering Holloway after the Los Angeles wildfires displaced many people and pets this January. Holloway was up for a new home because she doesn’t get along with Jenna’s first cat. I decided to take her in, somewhat on impulse, in the kind of calculated impulse decision you make when you’ve wanted a black leather jacket for two years, and then the perfect one appears in a Goodwill for $20.99. That impulse led me through a deliberative two-week process of applying through the agency, amending my apartment lease, paying hundreds of dollars in adoption fees, and finally, moving her into my apartment.

First, the plant debacle. I love my houseplants. My oldest, “Leef,” is a pothos in a who has lived with me in a brown ceramic pot for nearly seven years. From my old friends, I’ve been propagating baby pothos and philodendron vines into scrap containers. On the application, I expressed my plant affection by stating, “it’s unacceptable if my cat tries to eat my houseplants.” The foster agency flagged this and reached out with concerns about plants in my space. I thought it’d be fine if I put them up out of Holloway’s reach. She has weak hind legs and can’t jump very high, nor does she have any teeth due to a removal surgery, so there’s no chance she’d munch on plants living on high kitchen countertops and the fireplace mantel. The agency was far more cautious, requesting that I remove any mildly toxic plants from the premises altogether. I met them halfway and moved the moderately toxic plants, like my massive monstera and the baby pothos sprouts living in kombucha bottles, onto the balcony, from which Miss Holloway would be entirely prohibited. I want my cat to be happy and healthy, but I also don’t want to rehome or trash my home garden. To me, it’s in the vein of how it’s unethical to surrender an old pet to make room for a new one. My houseplants are living creatures that I’ve nurtured, many of them since their “birth,” and I can’t in good conscience get rid of them for a new hire. I believe I’ve found a solution that keeps Holloway safe without violating my ethical code or disrupting my slightly absurd emotional attachments to those plants, even if it doesn’t perfectly follow the requests made of me.

After the plant and my lease amendment were settled, we moved her in last Sunday. I stayed at home with her all day for the first three days, sick with a cold. Perhaps my ill lethargy was for the best. I was anxious to impress her with toy time and catnip and head scratches, and I might’ve come on too strong if I were at full energy. At first she hid under the bed and skittishly ran whenever a car went by outside. By that first night, she was padding around my bedroom, poking around my closet, climbing up onto my bed and desk via the cat tree placed near the window.

Holloway slept between my legs on Monday and Tuesday night. Should co-sleeping be encouraged or discouraged? Trying to find the right answer feels like the free trial of navigating the conflict-ridden, morally-crucifying world of parenting advice. The internet drips with condemnation at every corner for not perfectly treading the line between conflicting advice on proper pet parenting. I can’t imagine how bad it’ll be when I inevitably enter the mom-blog-osphere. I think pet parenting will help me learn to tune out of the noise and into the signal.

Her worst habit is scratching at my sliding floor-length mirror closet doors, which makes a flubbity-flub noise like shaking a posterboard. It’s like that psychological test for concept of self—she definitely can’t recognize her self in the mirror. The noise bothers me at night, but in the daytime it doesn’t matter. I’ve been trying to deter this behavior by shaking my tennis ball tube of quarters. I know I should shake those quarters if she tries scratching the couch or armchair. But what about when she’s poking around near the oven or empty fireplace? Some of my pet owner friends recommend training her to avoid those locations because they tend to have hot, dangerous objects, and we don’t want her to find out the hard way. So far, I’ve let her do as she pleases. My roommate and I accidentally turned off the fireplace pilot flame and never learned how to turn it back on, so that’s no risk. And I trust that Holloway can sense the heat emanating off an active oven enough to stay away from direct contact. Time will tell as to whether this trust-and-corresponding-freewill are misplaced.

I’m not certain how to appropriately acclimate her to the new space. Jenna said that she should spend the first two weeks in a small starter space. I’ve assigned my bedroom as the starter space. Jenna also said, if she’s curious and wants to leave, I could let her expand her territory into the full apartment after week one. She’s inquisitive by nature and wanted to leave my room on Tuesday, so I let her, supervised. Since then, she’s enjoyed wandering around the living room and occasionally into my roommate’s room. She’s a curious critter who wants more mental stimulation than the average cat, a demand I may fail to meet with my full-time in-office work schedule. We’ll see how things go. Stay tuned on this blog! xoxo Jazzy

More ideas for the garden

• The ethics of pet ownership

• Signal vs. noise of online advice