Adopted by a cat- No, I didn’t have a choice
No one can say that cats don’t have their own mind.
When they make a decision they stick with it regardless of how irritating, frustrating and the borderline insanity of it. From sitting on the one thing you need and refusing to get up to getting the dreaded zoomies at 2am waking you up to a clattering of pots and pans going flying in the kitchen.
So it stands to reason that when a cat decides that yes, this house seems like a good permanent holiday home and these humans are mine, you have no choice but to accept.
About three lovely years ago a cat wandered into my house and decided that very same thing and after that, there was no changing her mind.
The first few days were cute. A random cat appears and makes her way around the house, constantly asking for attention and chin scratches as she sits on my lap and purrs so loud I can barely hear the TV. And the fact that she keeps coming back when I am home and happy to give her all of my attention because this is the closest I am getting to having a cat, makes it all the more sweeter.
But then comes The Night. See about 4 or 5 days later at about 10 in the evening when we have sent the lovely kitty home and it is chucking down with rain, we hear a clattering coming from the upstairs bathroom. The house was on edge as we look around and count, seeing that we are all downstairs as the noise continued. So, either we have about a hundred things that have simultaneously gained sentience escape from their shelves and tables in a bid for freedom from human use, or we have a very determined and very clumsy intruder that has forgotten to check if the obviously brightly living room windows were alight.
My dad and I raced up and flung open the bathroom door, only to see the window open, a drenched floor and a speeding soaked cat dodging and weaving around our legs. She looked up at us with the most irritated expression as if she had forgotten her keys and had been knocking on the door for the last 2 hours to no avail and had given up and decided to find her own way in.
Of course, it was hilarious at the time. She had clawed open a window after spotting a weak spot in our defences of a window not latch shut and had prised it open with jewel thief-like skill and then made a mess of our floors, and afterwards begging for praise was adorable. We called the owners after a few hours of attempts to send her home. Luckily they lived down the next street and came and got her as she refused to leave. We all laughed at the door thinking this was the end.
Spoiler alert, it wasn’t.
For the next three years, this fuzzball with motor sized engine lungs and an arsenal of B&E skills made it her mission to claim our house as her own and we were powerless to her might.
After many nights attempting to keep her out only to find her curled up on the sofa, a radiator or even on us in the morning. So many rainy nights she drenched our floors, stole our heating and manned all the high grounds, cupboards and shelves, eventually we had to give up.
Hell, even when the pandemic hit she was determined to attempt to claw her way into our house, even if she needed to evolve opposable thumbs and dig her way in with a spoon. For over half a year she sat outside the house meowing at the top of her lungs at all hours of the day to let her in when we didn’t know the consequences of it. The spoilt queen of a cat demanded we give her access to ‘her’ house and that barring her entry was treasonous and deserves pets in reparations.
In the end, a deal was arranged between the owner and us that satisfied our little tyrant that set the terms. She can come and go as she pleases, we do not feed her in hopes she will return home, and to try and chase her out for the night…. So far we have had a very low success rate of that last one as she seems to have apprenticed with Houdini and we still don’t know how she gets in.
So in the end, as it always does, the cat wins and we must gracefully bow down and relegate ourselves to be her servants, pampering her as Miss Needy demands.
