If Animal Cruelty Is A Postpartum Side Effect For You, Maybe Give Up Your Cat?
Seriously, will someone please take this woman's cat away?
For years, I have considered The Cut’s enragingly fact-averse defense of “repressed memories” (read this if you read that) to be the absolute worst thing they have ever published. In fact, I’ll actually stand by that. It’s a very, very bad article. But a close second, for sure, is this week’s “Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby?”
The subheadline of the essay reads My postpartum loathing of Lucky made me wonder whether I might be a late-onset psychopath. And, you know, when I saw that, I assumed I was going to read an article about someone who was just being really hard on herself over feelings she probably could not help due to postpartum depression.
I did not. And she wasn’t.
The anonymous author starts out by identifying with a woman who has just told her dog to “fuck off” and veers into a weird supposed-to-be-sympathetic story about a woman who wanted to put her dog down rather than pay for its surgery — the purpose of this essay being an attempt to show that what she felt and did to her cat was normal:
“It’s so bad,” Camilla, who has two children, told me. “The dog needed surgery on her leg at the beginning of June, and I asked the vet if I could put her down instead. He looked at me like I was a monster. I shelled out $5,000 we don’t have on the fucking dog instead of the millions of other things we needed it for.”
So, there are multiple options beyond literally killing the dog — which, no, a vet is not going to do just because you ask for it. There are animal welfare organizations that can help, payment plans and, sure, worst case scenario, rehoming or taking the dog to a shelter. You don’t just kill a dog.
Well, unless you’re Kristi Noem.
The author begins her own story by saying that, from the beginning, her cat Lucky “was only intermittently tolerant” of her, instead of loving as she had hoped. Despite this, she says, “all of my disposable income went toward fancy cat food and wholesome toys.” (As opposed to what? Tiny dicks stuffed with catnip?)
But the honeymoon, it did not last.
When I got married at 30, Lucky took an active and territorial dislike to my husband. It was unpleasant but manageable for everyone. A few years later, we had a baby, and my postpartum loathing of Lucky made me wonder whether I might be a late-onset psychopath. In the months following the baby’s arrival, any redirection of attention sparked fury. If Lucky nuzzled me as I nursed in bed, I shoved her away. When she barfed on a nursing bra, I threw the soiled garment at her head (and missed). When she threaded through my legs in figure eights during diaper changes, I could barely suppress the urge to — not kick but firmly scoot her away with a foot. (I didn’t, I didn’t.)
Now, you may be thinking “that’s not great, but it’s not like she actually went through with kicking the cat.” I assure you, it gets worse.
Basic needs went unmet. I often forgot to feed Lucky, which caused her to eat houseplants in desperation and puke them up. She shat and urinated on the floor in protest of her overflowing litter box. A few weeks in, I abandoned the effort of wet food altogether and placed a trough of dry food in a corner; Lucky binged and gained a statistically significant amount of weight, which made it impossible for her to self-groom, leaving her greasy and coated in dandruff. She lost at least one tooth. (No idea where it went.) I forgot to fill her water bowl, which I didn’t realize until I saw paw prints all over the toilet seat — her hydration source of last resort. The toilet paw prints broke my heart a little bit. If I treated a human the way I treated my cat, I would be in prison for years.
So … that is actually animal abuse. That’s not “having messed up thoughts because of postpartum depression” or not loving your cat enough, that is straight up animal abuse.
By the time the baby was 2 months old, I hated Lucky so much I began to leave our windows open in the vague hope that she would take the initiative and leap out of one — not directly to her death (we live on the ground floor, so a level of plausible deniability factored into my calculations) but, realistically, to her death. Call it voluntary catslaughter.
This certainly seems like a weird moment for wordplay, no?
Anonymous Cat Hater then veers back into talking about other women she claims experienced the same thing as her. That they realized later their pets had been “practice babies” and that they stopped caring about them after their children were born — not that they purchased them for that reason to begin with.
But let’s grant that it happens. You had a pet who was your baby, and now you have a baby who is your baby. Does that mean the pet is sentenced to irrelevance?
The answer from most of my polling group was “Yes, but it’s not a life sentence.” More like one to five years with time off for good behavior.
Um. Did her “polling group” know that she was depriving her cat of food and water? Because the other women said things like, once their baby came, they no longer had time for “hourlong walks and photo shoots” with their pets, and that is just a little bit different from “I left the window open hoping that my cat would die.”
Wait it out, they implored me. “Don’t trust your feelings right now,” said Cynthia. She promised my affection for Lucky would return once the baby started noticing and interacting with her.
Yeah, I don’t think that she should do that. Cynthia does not know what she speaks of, as the author makes evident when she describes an incident in which Lucky took an interest in a stuffed dragon her sister had bought for the baby.
Having jumped onto the bed under false pretenses, Lucky froze. Her overgrown nails dug into the duvet cover. She stared at the dragon, the baby, me. Then back at the baby, who wobbled his head in the cat’s direction. Lucky moved closer. For six or seven seconds, the two creatures stared at each other. A hint of the affection Cynthia predicted flared up in my chest. As did a flicker of irritation because now the cat had to be fed or watered or whatever.
Oh, how rude of the cat to not want to starve to death? Jesus.
Just as an aside, I’d like to know what the husband was doing in all of this? Like, he couldn’t be bothered to put some food and water out for Lucky either?
Then I remembered something that Natasha, a mother of two kids and one dog, had told me: “Being irritable and not having enough love are two different things.” At that moment, on the bed, both happened to be true — I did not have enough love for the cat, and I was irritable. But that didn’t mean one followed from the other. In fact, a mountain of evidence pointed to the opposite: Every person and animal I’d ever loved had caused me vexation, and I knew myself to be a periodic or chronic irritant in the lives of my entire family, all my friends, my partner, and my colleagues — yet none of them ever invited me to self-destruct. I haven’t fallen back in love with Lucky, but it could still happen. I’ll shut the windows until then.
NO! No, you absolute lunatic — REHOME THE CAT. Find someone who will not abuse or starve the cat to take it from you. Take it to an animal welfare agency or rescue or a shelter.
It’s unfortunate, but people do give up pets all of the time due to major life changes, including having children. We’d all prefer that not be the case, but it is infinitely preferable to killing them or otherwise torturing them. That being said, a pet is a commitment and one should not get one in the first place if they think they might not want them after they have kids or stop caring for it for any other reason!
As for the big questions this essay asks — Is this normal? Am I a psychopath? — I think the answer is fairly obvious.
How does a cat jump up on a bed "under false pretenses"?
Where was the "I went to a counselor and got the help I needed" part of the story?
JD Vance approves, though.