When night had fallen on the day my cat died, I saw a white cat sitting outside my bedroom window. I’d never seen it before. Had that white cat always been there and I’d just never noticed? Was I just looking for meaning? I’ve seen the white cat sitting outside our window every night since she died. It’s comforting, this white angel cat that watches over me while I mourn. I’m 34, and I had my cat for 17 years. Literally, half a lifetime. Half of my lifetime.
My fur bb was my first real companion and the most consistent thing I’ve ever had in my life. Last night I dropped food on the floor and I panicked out of habit, thinking how I better pick it up before my cat comes to eat it. Nobody comes, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that. Towards the end she was very ill; she died in my arms, peacefully at home. I told myself I’d never be able to go through the pain of seeing someone so precious succumb to the consequences of time again. No more pets. Nobody else could compare to her, anyway. I wonder again; had the white cat always been there?
*
I walk down Barclay Road on a scorching September afternoon. Globey warms, or whatever. Since my cat died I’ve been wishing the days away. I just want to sleep for a few days, let myself sob and wallow in the sorrow for abit. But I’m a mother now, so the other best option when a depression nap is out of the picture is to keep moving. Stay out, stay busy, stay distracted. Before she was born I don’t think I grasped the fact there would be no days off, even when I felt like I was drowning.
‘Let me know if you wanna meet up again, yeah?’ I hear my husband say in my head as I walk down Barclay Road with my buggy, pushing our sleeping baby down the street. That was the last thing he said to me on the first day we met up, a date in the park. Barclay Road is where we parted ways that day, him going to his mother’s house, me walking to my grandmother’s house. He was everything I needed in that moment of my life, a time when I’d been through some things and I was trying to heal. He brought me a box of cupcakes for my birthday and I remember thinking, I’m gonna stay at his place tonight (not just because he got me cakes). He’s gonna be the one that gives me the exorcism I need. It’s all gonna melt away with him. And in many ways, it did.
It’s the present day and I am taking our baby to go and see my grandmother, her great maternal grandmother - isn’t she lucky, to witness the company of both of her great grandmothers (and one great grandfather)? I tell my grandmother about a friend who gave birth recently; yes, she’s doing well, her baby is adorable (mashallah). “Was it a normal birth?” she asks, and I feel defensiveness rise within me immediately. Yes, I say.
“You know where it went wrong with you? Why you had a caesarean? You lifted too many heavy things too late in your pregnancy, you lodged the baby in.” Shit, maybe she’s right. I did move a lot of heavy things when I shouldn’t have been, because I had to move home very suddenly at eight months pregnant. When I was pregnant, a caesarean was my worst-case scenario birth for one main reason - it was how my mother gave birth to me. I so desperately wanted us to start off differently. I wanted a water birth, I wanted to catch her as she came out of me. I wanted us to begin our relationship intimately. I didn’t want it to start the way my mothers and I did; it would feel like a bad omen, because my relationship with my mother has been one of the most painful I’ve ever had. If I see my life traumas as a tree, she’s at the root. Isn’t that a huge weight to put on my mother? The root of so much suffering. I almost feel bad for putting that on her. But it’s true. I know my daughter may turn around one day and tell me the same thing and I’m ready for any karmic retribution I might deserve.
The doctor stood in her scrubs on a Friday night, September 30 2022, and said the odds were stacked against me; I should go for a c-section now. I was 12 days overdue. I elected to try and induce labour first. My husband went home and collected my hospital bag that I had insisted I didn’t need when we’d first left to go to the hospital. He sent me a picture of the cat waiting for him at the stairs, then came straight back to the hospital with my suitcase. 48 hours of flesh-burning labour pains later and I had to have the thing I didn’t want - an emergency c-section.
After birth, I started to find the terms ‘normal birth’ and ‘natural birth’ painful, because that would inevitably mean my caesarian was unnatural, abnormal. They’re the opposite words for natural and normal, right? I start to appreciate people who say they had a vaginal birth. Words really matter. I hadn’t thought about any of this before because during my pregnancy I’d focused on yoga, labour positions, deep breathing. I never imagined I’d not get a chance to labour the way I had wanted to.
I’m not taking away from people who are proud of having vaginal births, but sometimes, language around c-sections makes me feel like my body failed at the thing it was supposed to do and that feels like an unfair lottery I didn’t ask to play.
I barely remember coming home from the hospital just 48 hours after having that major operation; I didn’t feel ready and I would have liked to have stayed longer. I remember walking down the corridor towards the exit and my husband striding happily ahead, holding the baby in the car seat. I remember his mum turning back and finding me a long distance behind them, I remember her telling him to slow down, I remember feeling hurt he hadn’t walked at my pace in the first place, hadn’t realised how painful walking was for me. I remember the pain of trying to climb into my mother-in-laws car, I remember how uncomfortable every bump in the road was, I remember the ‘baby girl’ balloon my mum-in-law got us blowing into the sky when I accidentally let go; up, up, up it went until I couldn’t see it anymore, lost in the night sky. I remember walking up the stairs to my flat with this new life, putting her on a blanket on the floor and my cat sitting next to her instinctively, checking her out. Did my cat recognise her as a baby version of me? I remember falling asleep that night in my bed with my daughter in my arms, because I was still high on dihydrocodeine that the nurse gave me in the hospital before I left. I remember crying when I woke up because I could have dropped her, anything could have happened. How could I have fallen asleep? What mother does that? One that’s high and exhausted post-labour, post-operation, that’s who. I’m much nicer to myself now.
Last night, my husband and I watch Eastenders. Stacey’s daughter had a baby and the first shot of the little one showed her with vernix on her head. “Our baby didn’t look like that,” I say to my husband. “They washed her before handing her to you, though,” he replies and then I think, that’s true, when they handed her to me, she already had her tiny beanie hat on. It starts to really bother me, that I never saw her without her hat. I never saw what she looked like when she left my body. I want to pause Eastenders and ask my husband to tell me everything he remembers of my birth journey from start to finish, but I don’t.
I said goodnight to the white cat and went to sleep. I had a dream I was in LA; it’s a dream I keep coming back to. It was once my favourite place, pre-child. I never remember how I get there but suddenly it’s pink skies, a long water fountain that leads to the sea, people skating and blading on the pathways beside it, a warped version of Venice beach. Looping highways and a blur of lights over a thousand hills at night. The sky is never truly black in LA unless you do a night hike over the hills. I did it once and turned back to look at my footprint, the only one in sight, and I felt like I’d landed on the moon. Driving past signs to Marina Del Ray and the rich red of the MedMen dispensaries where I bought THC honey, cookies, bath bombs, every marijuana product you can imagine. The humidity of June in LA - June Gloom - always make my thighs stick together when I walk. I indulge in snow crab legs dipped in cajun spiced oil and butter biscuits with gravy. I smoke blunts on the roof of live jazz clubs at night and spend my days in Malibu. I drive from LA to Vegas and see the Grand Canyon on the way, eat Florida frog legs fried in batter next to the Forever Grand wedding chapel and drive down an abandoned Death Valley at 47 degrees celsius.
I had my baby in this most recent dream and I kept putting her down to nap in random places and forgetting, so every few minutes I was like, ‘shit! The baby!’ Suddenly I was in my childhood home, and my dad was there. My dad moved out when I turned 13, so that was strange.
‘Where’s the baby?’ I asked him. We looked under the dinner table and I breathe a sign of relief. There she was; a tiny black and white kitty. My cat. Something in my brain knew while I was dreaming that this was a malfunction. Where’s my human baby? When did I leave LA again? I wake up in London with my human baby, and my cat isn’t here.
*
From Jessi Klein’s book ‘I’ll Show Myself Out”
Motherhood changed me, but when my cat died, it really felt like the end of the old me as I knew her. She died as my daughter is approaching one years old, so lots of reflection is happening, lots of processing. I think of weird, random things, most of them I don’t miss. I miss moving with abandon; a certain type of roughness. Hopping up onto the kerb after running across the street. Festivals. Standing outside a heaving pub with an overpriced drink pouring my heart out to someone who won’t remember in the morning. A regretful shot after four doubles. The n68 bus at 4am, Tottenham Court Road to Croydon via Elephant & Castle, not for the faint hearted. Your mate throwing up on said bus on a old Metro paper that was on the floor. Chain smoking at night and sleeping in the day after; ordering a pizza at 3pm and eating it in bed with my cat with Sex and the City in the background. Smeared mascara and the redemption act of a hot shower. Me time. Last minute flight to New York. Going into an office, sardines in a can on the 7.52am train. Me time. Me time. Me time. Nights I spent in the nursing home with my mother when she was on shift as a carer, eating biscuits and watching TV in the communal living room in the dead of the night, falling asleep on the floor. How much I needed her, and how deeply uncomfortable and suffocated my need made her feel. Resentment all round. Being a child who spoke to herself a lot. Motherhood makes your life flash before your eyes.
Matrescence: the process of becoming a mother. Those physical, psychological and emotional changes you go through after the birth of your child. The process of becoming a mother, which anthropologists call ‘matrescence’ has been largely unexplored in the medical community.
How to navigate this grief I feel about my cat while navigating - even now, almost a year on - what motherhood means for me as an individual, at the same time... I don’t know. I want to remember how her fur feels, the sound of her pur, her meow, her sitting on my lap. I thank her a thousand times for being there for me when I needed her most. I thank her for her gentleness, I thank her for sticking around long enough to meet my child. I thank her for the companionship, I still speak to her now. I thank her for sitting with me in my lowest moments, and I thank her for the moments of contentment she gave me. I thank her for the joy she brought to my life, her kindness, her loyalty. I hope she’s happy, I hope she’s peaceful, I hope she’s resting.
RIP Manu. She was peaceful soul x