“Oh no,” she thought. And kept sweeping, hoping it would go away.
But every time she flicked the broom across the painted concrete, the kitten would mew again. Finally she relented and peered around the wall.
There it was: a tiny gray tiger kitten huddled under the bushes where the coyotes paw quail eggs out of nests, where bobcats hunt toads, under the tree where the barn owl perches nightly. The kitten’s eyes were crusted closed.
She went into the house for gloves in case it was sick (it wasn’t) or a bobcat kitten (it wasn’t) and deposited it into the vestibule of her home, where at least it wouldn’t get eaten. And she got to work getting rid of the thing. She called her neighbors, the HOA president, anyone she could think of who might have lost a kitten.
But no one claimed it.
Dad wandered past the vestibule at some point and looked at the kitten long enough to name it Temporary. Because it was, obviously. They are not cat people.
After striking out with the neighborhood, mom started calling nearby shelters. I have a kitten, she said; when can I drop it off? But there was no room at the shelters. Kitten season, they said, we’re full. She called shelters farther and farther away, but no luck. Same story: No one had space.
My mom grew up on a small farm in eastern Colorado. Her mother, a woman who led a life of endless hard work, found joy in her barn cats. Every night after dinner she put some leftovers in a small metal tray, carried it out to the barn clicking her tongue as she went, set the tray on a hay bale, and sat there as the cats emerged, purring and rubbing their heads on her calloused hands, bringing their shy, clumsy litters out to meet her. A moment of peace. When she died several years ago, she didn’t have horses or cattle or chickens anymore, but she sure as heck still had her barn cats.
But mom has never wanted a pet, and unless you count the aging olive-green parakeet someone from church offloaded onto her in the ’90s, she’s never had one of her own. Dad’s dog passed away last year, a hodgepodge old thing, half shar-pei and half dachshund, that somehow looked exactly like him. I always figured mom didn’t like animals. Figured she left that farm and didn’t want to look back.
This is why the text I received from her one day at work was so shocking: A video of a kitten playing with a strip of leather. I recognized the floor — there was an actual kitten in my parents’ house. “Who are you and what have you done with my mother?” I replied.
It made sense to me they would care for the kitten until they found a home for it, but that’s not what was happening. They were clearly keeping it. Beyond that: They were completely in love with this creature. Over the next several weeks, mom texted increasingly unbelievable images and texts. They had built a system of ramps for the cat to enjoy. They had converted one of the bedrooms into a cat playroom. There were several new structures in the living room for the cat to play in. The cat was being fed homemade meals. Its name was now just Tempo.
I flew out for a visit planned well before this cat situation started; the timing now seemed perfect. I could go see what had gotten into these people I thought I knew so well.
Upon arriving, I quickly saw they were right: The cat is awesome. She gets crazy kitten mania and sprints fast gray streaks, then hop-hops sideways like a cartoon Halloween cat, and then curls up on my dad’s lap so he can spoon-feed her oatmeal.
I asked my mom to retell the story of how she found Tempo. At one point I interrupted, “But you don’t like animals.”
“That’s not true,” she said, “It’s about responsibility. When you get older, you make choices: ‘How responsible do I want to be, for how long?’ That even applies to furniture: ‘Do I want to have a big thing I have to move around?’”
And I realized that I had always assumed I knew how she felt about animals but that my assumptions were wrong. The truth is that she loves animals, but she has always been realistic about the weight of responsibility a pet entails, a responsibility that would have been added to her plate already piled too high with kids and husband and work and all the unexpected complications of simply proceeding through life.
How could I have — yet again — misread her so completely?
When I was a kid, we went camping deep into the woods most weekends. One time, I climbed partway up a ponderosa pine and promptly fell back down, gouging a fairly deep cut in my left thigh. I ran screaming to my mom, who put two Band-Aids on it and sent me on my way. To this day I have a thick 1 1/2-inch-long scar there, as persistent as the stories around it. Stories that have evolved from me making a stupid decision to “ride the branch like a horse,” which resulted in it breaking and me falling, to teasing my mom that she climbed up and pushed me off.
Her two-Band-Aids response appalled me at the time: Where was the drama? Where was the clucking concern that my entire leg could fall off? I wanted to be fussed over, I wanted at least a discussion of going to the hospital for stitches, I wanted furrowed brows and whispered discussions with my dad. I wanted deep concern. But I got Band-Aids and thought she didn’t care.
As I get older, I see it differently: She was a woman responsible for packing and preparing three meals a day for four people in the woods for the weekend, not to mention clothing needed for every weather eventuality. A woman keeping tabs on the audible herd of unfenced cattle somewhere nearby, kids running around the camp with BB guns and slingshots, and the sound of me accidentally falling through a beaver dam for the hundredth time. And all the things I don’t know: Was she fighting with Dad, stressed about church or work or neighbors or family? Was she just tired? Did she like what she was wearing, did she like her haircut, what was she worried about or happy for or looking forward to? What were the gajillions of things going through her head and happening in her life when her kid fell out of a tree and cut her leg? What was she supposed to do, whip out a surgical kit and stitch it up? Pack up the entire camp and drive for hours all the way back on steep, rutted washboard dirt roads into town for a cut that did not even involve an artery? Everything she did that weekend was out of deep love and caring for all of us and our well-being. So that I could have a fun weekend in the woods and fall through the beaver dam with full confidence there would be a dry change of clothing and a warm meal waiting for me after I got fished out. But I didn’t see it.
I thought I was mature enough to start to understand my mom. But then this kitten shows up and I feel like I fail, again and again, to see my parents as whole human beings with all the glories and failings that make us all so wonderfully human. They have complicated histories and secrets I’ll never know — they are good parents both because of their pasts and in spite of their pasts. I am part of their rich lives, but only a part. They are not perfect and never pretended to be.
Tempo was batting me with one soft little paw; Mom and I were discussing the mystery of how a kitten came to be alone outside her patio wall.
“Why did you keep it?” I asked, thinking of the responsibility, trying to know her better.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “All the shelters were full.” She looked at that cat with all the love in the world.
“It was the cat distribution system,” I said. The cat distribution system is a theory that the universe gives you a cat when the time is right.
“Actually,” mom said, “I think my mom sent Tempo. She knew I needed this cat.”
