Why I Kept the Feral Kitten My Manipulative Ex Brought Home

I was nineteen and she was twenty-one. After dating long-distance for a year, and making only irregular visits, she gave me an ultimatum: move across the country to California, or she would break up with me. Everyone in my family cautioned me against going. They could see how much I cried over her, how controlling she was over my time and attention, and how much I had changed since we’d started dating. I, too, could see these things. I went not because I believed that our relationship was healthy or meant to last, but because she convinced me that she needed me, that I was the one who could save her.

Fair warning, kids and adults alike: never get into or stay in a relationship under those circumstances. Not only is it impossible to be someone’s emotional savior, but trying to do so, especially with someone who genuinely needs professional mental health counseling, will only serve to deeply wound the both of you. We didn’t know that at the time. We only knew that we were in love, or what we construed as love. We were two young girls, just out of adolescence, dumbstruck by the possibility of openly being with one another, of being out, of being safe. I made so many apologies for the things she did and said to me because she was a girl, because I identified with her pain, understood her trauma, and wanted her to be healthy.

I agreed to the move. I was scared, excited, exhausted and hopeful. I thought we might be able to make it work. I thought I could help her heal.

In the weeks before I took the long flight from the east coast to the west coast, she went on a family vacation to visit her grandparents in Texas. They lived in the woods, and on the property was a family of stray cats with several tortoise-shell kittens, only a few months old. The runt of the litter had been abandoned by the rest of the cat family, and was shunned, not fed or taken care of by the others. She was too small, expected to die too quickly. Instead, my ex-girlfriend’s grandparents had taken to feeding her scraps, and she had lived despite the odds. Thinking she was a boy, they had named her Louie. When my girlfriend arrived at her relatives’ place, she fell in love with the little runt. She Skyped me excitedly, saying that she wanted to bring her home to live with us, to be our pet.

“Kittens grow up into cats,” I’d said. “A pet is kind of a big deal. It’s a real responsibility.”

We talked it out and she saw my point. I’d never lived away from my parents or supported myself before then, and while she had, she was struggling with her college course load, her job, and physically debilitating depression. I, too, struggled with depression, although it had recently taken a backseat to her’s, the importance of her issues superseding my own. We agreed that we’d get settled in, straighten out our relationship problems, get our lives going more smoothly, and then talk about the possibility of adopting a cat.

A few days later, when she and her family were on the road back to California, she texted me a picture of the kitten, Louie, in a cat-carrier in her lap. The vet had said she was, in fact, a female, and had given her the appropriate shots and flea medication. She was healthy and she was ours.

I wasn’t angry. I was used to having my own opinions and choices overrun by her’s, of having the boundaries I tried to set ignored or laughed off. She was charming and sweet and aware of her flaws, and, at the time, I thought that made her behavior okay. It was neither the first or the last time that we would talk something out, agree on it, get on the same page, and then she would act as if it hadn’t happened at all, and just do whatever she wanted. I didn’t necessarily see it as insidious or disrespectful. At the time, I didn’t really know that I deserved respect.

We kept the name Louie. Louie for a little girl. It was sweet and butch. It suited her. Although I was wary of the added responsibility of caring for a pet, I was, admittedly, happy to have a cat. I had grown up with a lot of cats. For the few years that my mother had owned a small farm, there had been loads of strays on the property, some coming to live in the house with us, others staying in the barn or even deep in the woods. I knew feral cats, had raised them, loved them, run wild with them, and slept with them. For the last three years I had been living with my father, who was allergic to cats and had no pets.

I still remember the day I arrived, with only two big suitcases and nothing else. Opening the door to the dark apartment and seeing the smallest creature there among the shadows, as wary as I was.

I fell for Louie just as hard as I had fallen for my girlfriend, and she fell, in turn, for me. It was strange. I hadn’t expected it, or wanted it, the way people sometimes seek the love of an animal to fill some emotional void. Louie and I simply recognized one another: two strays, new in town, lost, uncertain, but plucky, courageous, up for anything.

On the first night of living together, my girlfriend and I piled all our now-shared clothes up in a big pile and began organizing them by color. We got drunk on vodka, rolled around in the piles of clothes, kissing, laughing. We bleached my hair. Louie played, too. Running after us, pouncing and ducking back. She wasn’t a shy cat. She never hid, never distrusted strangers. She always came to meet people, sat in their laps, insisted on being the center of attention.

Within a few days, Louie and I had bonded. Within a few weeks, something started to become obvious, and it was something my girlfriend deeply disliked: Louie quite clearly liked me better.

It wasn’t something that happened out of nowhere, nor was it based on some unexplainable soul bond. I was simply more tolerant of her. My girlfriend did with her as she believed people are to do with pet cats. She sprayed her with a water bottle. She put tape sticky-side-up on the counter to dissuade her from jumping up. She yelled at her when she scratched things up, became frustrated, unhappy with her pet. I made the argument I felt was reasonable, that Louie wasn’t a house cat, she was a stray, a wild forest animal. For us to be angry with her or punish her for living as she always had, when we were the ones who had taken her from her home and forced her to live in a fourth floor apartment with only a small balcony, with nothing to hunt, nothing to do, was ridiculous. She was a kitten, and a wild one at that. My girlfriend was only getting what she’d purposefully, and against my advice, brought into her house.

Within the first month that the three of us were living together, my girlfriend admitted that she shouldn’t have taken Louie home, that she didn’t want her anymore. Only a little while after that, we were in the midst of a torturous, back-and-forth break-up that would go on for months. After spending our whole relationship wanting to know where I was at all times, what I was doing, who I was with, and being intensely suspicious of any man I would speak to, she dumped me for a guy she met.

We stayed living together, although I was miserable. I had nowhere else to go except back east, and neither of us could afford to move out, or to stay in the apartment alone. Anyhow, within weeks, she decided she didn’t like the guy that much and wanted me back. At that point, I went back to the east coast to visit family for Thanksgiving, feeling happy that we would get back together officially, after weeks of only kissing when she was drunk, only sleeping in the same bed when she was depressed and needed support. When I got back from the five day trip, she informed me that she had decided that she should date the guy after all, since it would be, I quote, “so much easier to explain to my dad.” Her father still, to this day, seven years later, doesn’t know we ever dated or that she is queer.

Things continued like this for a while until finally she, and not I, put a stop to it. She decided resolutely that she didn’t want to be with me. It was a few days before Christmas and I sat out on our front porch sobbing harder than I’d ever sobbed up to that point in my life. I felt abandoned. I had been abandoned. I was separated from my family, my old friends, and my entire support system. Almost everyone I knew in California I knew through her, and the friends I did make on my own were pretty much all men who turned out to just want to sleep with me.

All I really had was a cat.

When my ex and I talked about going our separate ways, we both decided, with no argument on either side, that I would take Louie with me when I went.

And I did. I took her up to Portland, into two more relationships, and several more apartments. At times I let her run free through the neighborhoods where she howled and fought with other cats. Then I brought her to live with my current partner, who has two young kids who greatly tested her resolve, but won her over eventually.

Louie bites. Louie scratches. She hisses when provoked. She’s loving and cuddly, quick and proud and comical. She meows more than any cat I’ve ever heard in my life, talking constantly. She goes off on her own, but most of the time, if she’s not sleeping, she follows me from room to room. She loves green beans and asparagus and all kinds of vegetables. She hides around corners and jumps out to spook you when you walk past. She licks fingers and toes. When I cry, she licks my tears, sits on my chest and breathes with me.

I have bought her a small pumpkin every October. She has a tiny stocking at Christmas. On her birthday, which we assigned to April 1st, because we knew she was born sometime in April, we make her a tuna cake covered in treats, hold her up to the candle which terrifies her, and the youngest child thinks her wish and blows out the candle for her. When we have people over, she finds someone’s lap to sit in, and then lashes out at them if they try to displace her. She lets me pepper her nose and face with kisses even though the action means nothing much to her, only giving my nose a soft warning bite if I drag it out too long. She knows no words except for Louie. If you call her name she will turn, maybe walk over to you, sometimes even answer in her croaky, drawn-out mewl.

Since she was a kitten, she’s been lovingly called Louie Badcat. For all her charm, she is a bad cat. She’s a bad pet. She doesn’t do what she’s told. She won’t behave. She doesn’t care for anyone’s authority. She doesn’t think she has to listen. She’s not my pet. I don’t see it like that. I don’t see her as less than me, as someone who needs to be controlled, and from the first moment, I never have.

And my ex? To be fair, she married the guy she left me for, and they got another kitten together. But take a wild guess at whether or not they still have it.

(They don't.)