The Home for Wayward Black Cats: Life as a Cat Dad

I am now and will always be a cat person.

I’ve talked about how my partner and I don’t plan on having kids, and how we prefer having cats instead. Since I’ve taken to posting fluff on Sundays, today I’m going to talk about my cats and how incredibly cute they are. There are some sad stories in here, though, so be warned.

We currently have four cats: Jello, Bilbo, Katsu, and Toner. Jello and Bilbo are brothers from the same litter, and they initially came with a third brother: Darby. All three of the brothers were black, with Jello and Bilbo having a couple of small white patches. When we got them, they were being kept by a couple who wasn’t technically allowed to keep them due to their apartment not allowing pets. We offered to take them, as we had just bought a house and didn’t have a landlord.

The couple had named them after a trio of punk rockers: Jello, for the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, Billy Jo, named after the lead singer of Green Day, and Darby, after the lead singer of the Germs. We accepted the names, as we had only intended to foster them until a proper home could be found. Guess how well that worked out!

Darby was the absolute leader of the pack. He was constantly getting into things, jumping up on the counter, and generally causing trouble. Jello was the second-most rambunctious, not causing quite as much trouble as Darby, but still doing his fair share. Billy Jo was the best behaved, and on the rare occasions where he jumped on the counter or otherwise misbehaved, he would immediately stop once caught and would seem ashamed to have done it. We quickly renamed him Bilbo, after the hobbit in Lord of the Rings.

Having intended to simply foster them, we didn’t take a lot of kitten pictures and tried to not get attached. After about a year of watching them grow up, we realized that we had foster failed and that the three little black cats were well and truly ours.

After about two years of having the boys, we got a call from a different friend about a small black cat that had been found mooching for scraps in a restaurant parking lot. My partner and I immediately agreed to take the little kitten. She had been named Eevee, as Pokemon Go had just come out that year, but we decided to rename her straight away.

We settled on Katsu, a Japanese word meaning “cutlet.” She was a small kitten, even for her age, and she wound up growing into a small cat, so it fits. Katsu is also a Japanese pun, with the two syllables separating into the phrase ka tsu, meaning “to win.” We figured that she had lucked out in getting us as owners.

We had decided at this point that we were now the Home for Wayward Black Cats. My partner has a special place in her heart for black cats — she’d had several growing up, and had seen some of them killed by people who didn’t care for black cats for one reason or another. At one point, she watched a passing car drive over the curb and onto the sidewalk to intentionally hit one of her cats. The stories of what people do to them on Halloween are pretty terrible.

So, we decided that black cats were our thing. It helps that we have a bit of a darker aesthetic — my wife loves to decorate for Halloween, and our 2020 decorations are still up and will probably make it to Halloween 2021. Having a bunch of black cats running around goes with the decorations.

Katsu joined our family in the summer, and she got to know the three boys fairly quickly. She’s a little feisty thing, so she would pick fights in the way that a kitten does, and the boys would let her bat at them, bopping her on the head if she got out of line.

Unfortunately, that fall, all of the cats got sick in rapid succession, starting with Darby. One Saturday in late October, he started acting a bit lethargic. We had plans that afternoon, so we decided to see how he was the next day. On Sunday, he had degraded, so we took him to the emergency vet. After a few nerve-wracking days, watching him fight whatever had attacked his system, seeing him hooked up to a bunch of tubes and IVs, and agonizing over what might be, he passed on Tuesday early in the morning.

The vets never did figure out what caused it. He just experienced a sudden, critical system failure. Several of his organs shut down, and there was simply no recovery. We drove to the clinic at five in the morning to hold our cat one last time, and I had a massive emotional breakdown. After we were done saying goodbye, the vets took his body to be cremated. We picked up his remains and a plaster paw print that the vets had made for us, on Halloween.

Darby’s sickness and sudden death marked the first time I had properly cried in over a decade. As he was fighting for and eventually losing his life, the two other boys got sick in turn, and my partner and I were panicking over the prospect that we might lose all of our cats for reasons beyond our control. It was a stressful few weeks, and it turned out to be the start of a horrific several months.

Thankfully, the other two brothers survived their experiences, and life for the cats transitioned to a new normal. Jello moved into the de facto leader-of-the-pack spot, and Bilbo started acting out for a bit. Katsu, always kind of a bitchy cat, was more or less her typical self, having only interacted with Darby for a few months.

My partner and I settled into the three-cat life again — a trio of black cats, but with two boys and an oddball younger sister instead of three brothers. As we recovered from the various traumas that befell us that year, the cats were one source of joy in our otherwise not-so-great lives.

Nearly two years after Darby passed, a stray cat found its way to our neighborhood. She was well-taken care of, had been spayed, and generally had no fleas or parasites. Our neighbor and I fed her so she wouldn’t kill a bunch of the wildlife, and we eventually caught her and took her to the vet to get her checked out and see if she was chipped. She was not.

I say that we caught her, but it is kind of a misstatement. This cat, who was a very friendly thing, tried several times to simply break into our house. She demanded love and affection constantly, to the point of clawing at our door until my partner went out to pet her.

After going through the process of posting “lost cat” notices in a variety of places, we simply decided to keep her. We got her the necessary shots and registered her with our vet. She spent her first few weeks in my partner’s craft room to get acclimated to the other cats.

Unfortunately, we had a float trip scheduled during the first week of us officially adopting her, and my partner got into an accident on the river and tore her calf muscle. As a result, she was in a walking boot for several weeks, which meant that she couldn’t properly look after the new cat and our other cats. Between this fact and the fact that the new cat wasn’t a big fan of other cats in general, she began picking on Katsu.

Katsu, who was typically a feisty cat, became fearful and skittish. After trying several things, we wound up keeping the new cat separate at night to reduce attacks, first in a large dog kennel, then in my partner’s craft room. This seemed to help a bit.

During the first few weeks, we tried to figure out what to name this stray that had decided that she lived here now. We went through a couple of options — Cuba was one option, as she had black hind paws like Cuban stockings, and Sweet Pea was considered as well. My partner, always the clever one, came up with Toner.

This new kitty was a gray tabby, not exactly matching our cat color scheme of “black.” My partner decided that, as a gray striped cat, “the printer was running low on ink.” The name stuck, and Toner brought us up to four cats again.

We’ve had our four cats for a few years now, and things have settled into a new normal. Katsu spent a couple of years being fearful of Toner, hiding out in a cat tower when Toner wasn’t in her room. Recently, Katsu has started branching out during the day, first to a nearby chair, then to the window next to that chair, then to a different window. She will even venture out to use the litter box while Toner is out, which is big since Toner has cornered her there before.

Toner, for her part, has stopped being so aggressive towards Katsu, becoming more curious than anything. They’ve even managed to share a windowsill for about 20 minutes — supervised by me, but still. We started leash training her, and when she gets aggressive with the boys, as she sometimes does when she’s hungry, we take her on a walk in the backyard. Neither my partner nor I have ever had a cat get hangry before.

The boys are as fun as ever. Jello likes to demand love and pets, and Bilbo has taken to bonking us (and table legs, and other furniture) with his forehead. Sometimes, Jello gets a bit of separation anxiety, which results in him singing to us outside our bedroom door at ungodly hours in the morning. Otherwise, they still get into stuff, Jello jumps up on the counter and gets into the sink, and Bilbo headbutts us and demands cuddles.

I’m honestly happy living the cat dad life. My partner and I spent most of the past seven years avoiding the moniker of “cat parents,” which is often used as a sort-of cutesy “we don’t have kids” thing. However, at this point, I’ve given in and have accepted the title of cat dad. Honestly, it’s fun.

I’ve been a cat person all my life, so this seems like a fitting way to be for me. I’m the kind of person who has more pictures of my cats on my phone than I have pictures of people. Generally speaking, I like cats more than dogs, as they can be both loving and aloof, all while not requiring as much attention and work. It also helps that I’m allergic to dogs, which sort of makes me a cat person by necessity. It’s not that I don’t like dogs, it’s just that I can’t touch them without my face exploding with snot.

My partner and I continue to be the Home for Wayward Black Cats. We are happy with our current four and have no plans for more, but that doesn’t stop us from looking at cute cats up for adoption and asking each other if we could manage five, six, seven, or eight cats. After all, there are so many cute cats and kittens in need of homes!

I will continue to preach the cat life to anyone who will listen. The fact that cats are the sort-of mascot of the internet makes me happy, as there are never-ending kitten pictures to look at. When it all comes down to it, I’m a huge softy when it comes to kittens and cats of all kinds, and I suspect that I will likely always own a cat.

Or two, or three, or four. You can never have too many cats, after all.

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