What Loving Cats Taught Me About Myself

I never thought I'd kiss a cat. Or love them, or be in a room with them. Cats, to me, were evil and unpredictable. A classic projection, if I've ever seen one, of fear manifesting as aversion. Intense fear. Intense dislike.

But then I became a mother and, as we all know, motherly love makes you do weird, selfless things from time to time. My kids started asking for a cat. I said no, of course. My home was my safe place. No cats allowed. For a few years they asked for a cat once in a while. Eventually the "why we should have a cat" lists started to get long and I started thinking, maybe we could have a kitten. Kittens are cute. I started watching videos. The kittens were cute.

We started looking. Rescue centers, breeders. Some breeders we met were really crazy. One of them kicked us out because we said we had to attend a school party and she wrote a venomous email. "If you want to put your children before any potential kitten," she wrote, "then you don't deserve a cat." Another said we couldn't have just one but had to have two. One was already one too many for me.

That did nothing to allay my fear that the world of cats wasn't one I wanted to be a part of. Then Covid arrived. We got to the top of a rescue center's list to be told we couldn't meet the kitten first - we had to show up and take it. I didn't want to do that. Temperament was important. My friend Anna told me about a cat that came through a newsagent's ad, which turned out to be "demonic".

Finally, we offered us a kitten that we could meet. Its owner, J, was calm and reassuring. I told him I was scared. She understood. The kitten, Sidney, was 13 weeks old, his brothers had already been taken in and he had been promised to someone, but they had changed their minds. As an advocate for attached parenthood, I liked that he was still with his mother.

We went to see him. He was cute. "He won't scratch," J said, adding that "his parents are very quiet and unassuming." Those were very nice words to me, and for the first time since I was four, I stroked a cat. He didn't scratch. Then I played hide and seek with him. We left, thought, then returned to pick it up the next day. I was really excited. Cat phobia cured! My friends were silent: “Are you going to have a cat? But you are afraid of them. Not anymore, I thought.

As soon as we got him home, everything changed. I felt overwhelmed and terrified. He was terrified too, of course. I didn't know what he wanted or what he was thinking. He was unpredictable and I don't like the unpredictable for reasons we'll find out later. I felt he was trying to trick me into stroking him so he could hurt me. It didn't help that I read an article that said, "Cats that go on their backs so you can tickle their bellies only get you closer so they can shred you." Poor Sidney kept throwing himself on his back in front of me and I just ignored him. (Don't worry, it was lavished with love and care by everyone.)

It's impossible to explain the fear I felt - it was huge, irrational and all-encompassing. I was constantly on edge. I felt like I was going to let a monster into my house. "We can just give it back," all said helpfully. But I knew we couldn't. I explained it then as I will explain it now: it was as if I had opened a door in my house that I had never heard of before and this door led to an explosives room and I did not couldn't, now, just close the door and leave it, but I couldn't walk through it either. I was stuck. I had to deal with it – the explosives had to be defused.

Then the flashbacks started. It would be a child me hiding behind the couch, which is weird because our couch growing up was always against the wall and I never hid behind it. I became hysterical during these flashbacks.

That first Saturday, my friend Tamsin (a cat pro, she has a Bengal) texted me. She knew something was wrong and came back, spending the whole day with me. I felt better with her there, her confidence made me more confident, calmer. "He's the coldest cat I've ever met," she said. But something else happened that day. I noticed that when Sidney was with her it was obvious to me that he was playing, but when he did the exact same things with me - chat things - I thought he was cheating on me, that he wanted to hurt me, because I had something wrong. It was a moment of realization. Something changed and I realized whatever the problem was, it was me, not the cat.

I had recorded a podcast about the trauma with psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr Jo Stubley. I st...