After ten years of living without pets, I've suddenly found myself with full time custody of H’s eight year old cat (I’ll call her Princess B to protect her identity). Since I’m at home most of the time and H is often away, she and I have spent countless hours in each other’s company. As I write this, she’s curled up alongside me, snoring quietly, after having given the inside of my elbow a good 10 minute licking down. We’re quite close, Princess B and me.


I know she’s going to be traumatised when the real baby arrives. The one time she managed to get into the nursery to see what I was doing in there (rearranging stuff, in a vain attempt to feel organised) she looked disgusted with me, stuck her nose in the air and ignored me when I tried to call her out.

Maybe we should buy her one of these so she doesn’t feel left out:


I stumbled across the pet stroller site when I was googling “Jeep stroller”. If I thought pregnancy and babies opened up a whole other world previously unknown to me, I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface of the pet industry. But I digress.

I got to thinking the other day about how Princess B’s changed my life (bear with me for a moment):

• how I don’t like to go away for more than a couple of days now in case she gets bailed up by the marauding neighbourhood tomcat and I’m not there to rescue her


• how I spend far too long in the pet food section at Woolworths deliberating over whether she’d prefer mornay or casserole and whether she’d notice if I switched brands (casserole, and she did)


• how I will leap out of bed at 4 in the morning if she’s crying at the door, and so on.

I haven’t had to look after anyone but me for such a long time and I’m rather enjoying the responsibility of another creature’s welfare, not to mention the love I get in return, despite what people say about cats being disloyal creatures.

I think she’s preparing me well for the onslaught of motherhood. She’s taught me that:

1. Toilet accidents happen, sometimes on the bed, through every single layer of dryclean-only-bedding. It's really not the end of the world and you don’t have to behave like the wife in American Beauty.
2. If you yell at your pet (/child), say in the instance of point #1, it will go and camp out at the next door neighbours’ (who will assume it needs to be fed and nurtured because you’re obviously not doing the job properly) and not come home for a few days, just to make a point. You will lie awake worrying and feel like an awful parent.
3. You don’t have to yelp and scream when in pain (though I unequivocally reserve the right to). H thinks Princess B is a closet Scientologist, given how mute she is when you roll onto her in the middle of the night or tread on her tail at the dinner table. Princess B may never have given birth, but I suspect if she had she would have been a cool customer throughout the whole ordeal.
4. You don’t know the meaning of a bad hair day until you have a series of furballs around your neck and a bald patch where one’s fallen out. Touch wood.
5. You might think as a staunch vegetarian that you’ll never be able to prepare meat for your pet (/child), but actually, when you love someone and that’s what they want to eat*, you just do it.

*However, I do have to draw the line at buying chicken hearts and gizzards for Princess B, and my kids aren’t going to know about polony as long as I have anything to do with it.