I Love My Grumpy Barn Cat & So Does My Kid

My cat is a joke among my friends and family. The joke is that he isn’t real, because almost nobody ever sees him. It’s not exactly true — he pokes his head out when my mom visits, and my sister once woke up in the middle of the night wondering why she couldn’t breathe, only to discover it was Elliott sitting on her chest. (He’s big-boned.) But he is not somebody who strolls meowing up to strangers demanding pets. Let’s put it this way: when my friends are cat-sitting, they report whether he’s eaten the food they put out, and an actual appearance is treated as an Event.

He is not a cuddly cat. He’s more of a barn cat. He likes to be petted, but not for very long and it must be on his terms and it stops the minute he’s over it. The only time I pick him up is very carefully, if it’s extremely necessary. He doesn’t let me carry him like a baby, and we routinely laugh in my house about how he’d rip my face off if I tried to put him in a funny Halloween costume. But I am very much his person, and I love him.

I got him long before I had my kid, before I even met my husband, and he is not the kind of cat the shelter would put “great with kids!” on the little description card. I don’t have any cute pictures of him with my kid when she was a baby. At best, I’ve got a picture of her staring in fascination while he ignores her. I’ll never forget the moment I’m pretty sure she realized that the cat was a barely domesticated living thing with teeth and a will of its own. She was toddling around the living room and was several feet away from him when suddenly she screamed. She just got scared of the cat out of nowhere. The cat hadn’t done anything to her. It’s like it had just clicked for her that the cat was a cat, not a Jellycat.

The unexpected thing is that now she’s a fairly responsible 7, and he’s a mellow old man, and my kid loves that cat. And honestly, he’s pretty great with her, too.

I think in many ways his barn cat personality makes him a perfect cat for a kid — he maintains the distance from her that he’s comfortable with. It also helps that we helped her learn how to be around him. We never let her chase or crowd him, and he’s historically had both a very tall cat tower and a series of out-of-the-way spaces where he could hang out when he wanted to be alone. (We did have to put a latch on the bathroom cabinets so he’d quit hiding in there, because we kept opening it for toilet paper and nearly having a heart attack at finding his little eyes gleaming in the dark.)

She pouts a little out of jealousy when she finds him sitting allllmost on me, but she’s enthusiastic about helping take care of him. She loves opening his tins of wet food in the morning and begs me to help brush him. He’s very patient, partly because I’ve explained all the signs that he’s getting mad and she needs to back off. One time, she was able to carefully lean into his face and touch noses, and she’s still laughing with delight about the time he “kissed” her.

I think part of why it works is that this cat was never my baby. That’s not our dynamic. He’s always been more like my kooky roommate. He’s my work-from-home colleague and TV-watching buddy. He’s my childfree friend who’s patient with my kid when she wants to brush him, as long as she respects his space.

Admittedly, I sometimes wish he was the kind of cat who’d curl up at the foot of her bed and keep her company at bedtime. I sometimes wish we had a cat who’d hang out on her lap. I slightly regret that I don’t have any cute pictures of her and him curled up together when she was a baby. But I think there’s a valuable life lesson in learning to love someone on their own terms, to pay attention to their needs, to honor their boundaries.

Kelly Faircloth is the executive editor at Scary Mommy, where she commissions freelance pieces. If you’ve got a story you’d like to share, pitch her here! She’d love to hear from you. Previously, Kelly worked at Jezebel.com, where she was a senior editor and also wrote about royal gossip and romance novels, along with body image and history. She grew up in Georgia between a river and a railroad, and she has a lot of questions about the world-building in Paw Patrol.