The moment the seatbelt sign blinks off, I retrieve my backpack from the overhead compartment, slide my arms through the straps, and lift the pet carrier from under the seat. People are crowding into the narrow aisle with their suitcases. As I wedge myself into the formation, the only way to hold the pet carrier is to wrap my arms around it and pull it to my chest. Miles, who’s been lying down, scrambles to his feet and meows.
“Oh, a Siamese,” the woman standing directly behind me says. “My family had one when I was a kid. I know that voice.”
There’s barely enough room for me to turn around and nod. The woman looks to be in her forties. Miles meows three times in quick succession, an open sesame for a decades-old memory.
“He’s a blue point,” I tell the woman. “He travels with me because he doesn’t like anyone else. He hides and refuses to eat.”
“Of course,” she says. “It’s a Siamese thing.”
“I’m really allergic,” mutters another passenger from a few places behind the woman. His voice already sounds choked up.
Before I can apologize or ask if he’s okay, the line starts moving and several people who were ahead of us are suddenly ducking back into their seats to let us pass. I thank them and press forward. Soon, other passengers who were too far away to hear the allergy-sufferer’s comment are getting out of our way, too. Miles and I deplane in record time and head over to the baggage carousel to collect the rest of our things.
Miles continues to complain in the cab to the hotel and at the front desk while I check us in. But as soon as we’re in our room and I unzip the carrier, he hops out with his tail up, rolls on the floor purring while I pet him, and checks out our temporary home. During the ten days we spend there, he only meows briefly to greet me when I return from the classes I teach at the Low-Residency writing program that brings us from our home in Washington DC to Boston every six months.
When I invite friends over, Miles doesn’t have another room to slink off to, so he sits on my lap, tolerating their company. Ten minutes into the Presidential debate on June 25th, my friends and I turn off the TV, open another bottle of wine, and try to forget what we’ve seen. While the four humans meow in distress, the Siamese closes his eyes and falls asleep. None of us knows that Joe Biden will step down, Kamala Harris will run in his place, and the opposition’s sexist and racist misinformation campaign will feature cats.
Cat owners through centuries have noticed—and more recently, researchers have confirmed—that grown cats do not meow to one another. Kittens make small “mew” sounds to alert their mother when they are cold and hungry, trapped under the mother’s body, or stray from the nest and become lost. The vocalizations are nuanced enough to let the mother know what to do: shift her body to let all her kittens nurse without getting smothered, or leave the nest to look for the missing kitten. But once they’re weaned and can hunt on their own, cats abandon their vocal language except to hiss and growl to warn each other to stay away—unless, of course, they come to live with humans. We feed them, keep them warm, play with them, groom them, and pick them up and move them around just as their mothers used to do, so pet cats continue to behave like kittens no matter how old they are.
At home, Miles meows the loudest when I am in the hallway just outside our apartment door, talking to a neighbor. He picks up one of his toys—a plush blue shark about five inches long—and parades around the apartment carrying it in his mouth and meowing at the same time. The toy in his mouth distorts his voice. “He sounds like he’s being strangled,” my friend and neighbor Beth says. The moment I come through the door, he will drop the shark at my feet and sit down. He is not, at all, interested in playing further with it. He flops down on his back, stretches his legs, and waits for me to kneel next to him and rub his stomach. Now that he’s gotten my attention and I am doing exactly what he wants me to do, he has no reason to meow.
Siamese cats are notorious for sounding like an extremely unhappy baby, but all pet cats learn to amplify the weak “mew” they’d used with their feline mothers into cries that are closer to the volume and the pitch of a human infant’s. Perhaps during the ten thousand years of domestication, their ancestors evolved to be able to produce the sound most likely to get our attention, and/or our ancestors consciously or unconsciously selected for cats that sounded like their children. An average grown cat weighs 8 to 10 pounds, not unlike a newborn human, and most cats tolerate (and some enjoy) being held in our arms and carried around. There is no doubt that our relationship with cats, dogs, and other pet animals is based on the transference of the human desire to nurture the young of our own species.
Still, the comment that our now-vice-president-elect made in 2021 and doubled down on in 2024 about childless cat ladies running the Democratic party and spreading their misery is not supported by fact or logic. The majority of Democrats holding public offices in our country are men with children rather than women with or without children. As pointed out by many, the target of his comment, Kamala Harris, is a mother of two children by marriage. More importantly, it’s irrational to assume that only people with children care about our country and are qualified to serve as its leaders, or that humans are motivated to invest in our collective future only if our biological descendants will benefit or suffer from our actions. Besides, even if such pessimistic views about humanity were worth debating, I don’t see how cats would enter into the conversation. People’s decisions to or not to have children, by and large, are not influenced by the presence of cats in their household.
Long before I met my first cat at 22, I knew I would not become a mother. I have never enjoyed the company of small children. Even when I was a child of seven or eight, I dreaded being left in charge of my cousins when our extended family gathered at my grandparents’ house and the adults sequestered themselves in the dining room for their celebration. Instead of making sure that the dozen toddlers and kindergarteners were playing quietly, I climbed out the window to sit alone in the garden, not caring about the swarm of mosquitoes biting my arms and legs. After two of my cousins got into a fight and one of them broke his arm, I was relieved of my duty as the oldest child of our clan and allowed to sit in my grandfather’s study with a book while my aunts took turns minding their children. Later as an adult, whenever I heard babies wailing or young children having a tantrum in public places, I wondered what kept their mothers from getting in the car and driving away without them. Even though I was married for 13 years in a small town in Wisconsin where marriage was equated with “starting a family,” I didn’t choose to have children because I was afraid of losing my temper around them. A child’s cry of distress still makes me want to run away to protect myself from them, or them from me. Contrary to the claim that “childless cat ladies” are so miserable that we want everyone else to suffer as well, I chose to be childless to spare myself a life of misery. I love being single and childless. Except for the results of the 2024 elections, I don’t have anything to be “miserable” about.
J. D. Vance’s comment reveals more about him than about childless women or about human nature in general. The old saying, “Misery loves company,” means that humans who are unhappy usually gravitate toward others who are also unhappy because there is consolation in sharing our stories and being understood immediately, at gut-level. Those who are in the throes of their misery may not be fun to be around, especially if you are feeling euphoric and eager to celebrate your own good fortune, but few of them would go out of their way to wreck other people’s lives. Normal humans, in their low moments, prefer to stay home and be left alone. About all they can manage is a quiet get-together with a few friends who can offer sympathy. Only an extremely mean-spirited person would assume or act otherwise.
In fact, it takes a lot of toxic energy to organize public campaigns of negativity and harm and persist through them in spite of their lack of connection to any form of reality. J.D. Vance and Donald Trump did not withdraw their false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating “our pets” even after numerous bomb threats caused the city to close their schools. There is nothing family-oriented or child-friendly about inciting hatred. Poor cats, they had to be portrayed as enablers of female selfishness and then, a mere two months later, typecast as hapless victims of atrocities that never occurred.
To be precise, I didn’t decide to be childless since I had never considered becoming a parent. Living with a cat—or becoming a cat lady, if you will—on the other hand, was a conscious and unexpected decision. I didn’t have an opinion, positive or negative, about cats until my roommate’s sister left her two cats in our care during my first semester of graduate school. When she finally reclaimed them after nearly three months, I was so stunned and devastated by the quietness of our apartment that I skipped my classes and took an epic bus ride across town to visit a Siamese cat breeder who had placed an ad in the newspaper. My favorite of the two cats who’d stayed with us—the one who kept me awake at night by meowing loudly and jumping all over me and then headbutted my arm in the morning and caused me to spill my coffee—was said to be part Siamese. I didn’t just choose to have a cat; I chose to have a cat who would insist on my attention.
Since then, I’ve spent my entire adulthood with Siamese cats, all of whom have been devoted to me in an anxious, even neurotic, manner. The cat from the newspaper ad, Dorian, bit all my friends. I, however, could do anything to him: hold him upside down, brush his teeth, clip his nails, throw him over my shoulder and carry him around like a sack of potatoes. Of his successors, Ernest was a one-person cat though he never acted aggressively toward anyone; Algernon loved most of my friends and sat on their laps but took immediate and inexplicable dislike toward a few of them (whom he bit). Ernest and Algernon meowed nonstop in my car on the interstate on our cross-country move from the Midwest to the east coast.
There is some evidence that people and their pets do in fact resemble each other, especially in their temperament. Most researchers who observed human-pet interactions concluded that humans often gravitate toward animals who are like us, and also, our personality gets imprinted on our pets through daily interactions. Anxious humans are most likely to have anxious pets.
I don’t think any of my friends—or my enemies—would say that I am an anxious person, however. I prefer to believe that things are going to turn out okay until proven, undeniably, otherwise. That is how I’m determined to weather the next four years. If our worst fears were to come true, I want to arrive at the crisis with reserves of energy, rather than in a state of exhaustion from having constantly worried about everything. I plan to read, listen to, or watch just enough news to stay informed, not to be assaulted several times every day by every word uttered by our president-elect. I’ll spend my time doing what I love and what I need to do; with luck, there should be some overlap between the two.
But no one can be easy-going about everything. The one exception to my optimistic approach has always involved my cats’ welfare. Miles and his companion, Jackson, are fourteen. I didn’t take their health for granted even when they were younger, but now, every cough or hair-ball throw-up is a cause for alarm. Recently, when Jackson—the first Burmese of my life, chosen to be Miles’ companion because of the breed’s reputation for being calm —started waking up in the middle of the night to prowl around the apartment meowing, I took him to the vet expecting the worst. I made a list of pros and cons to get a head-start on deciding how aggressively I should treat every possible ailment he might have.
After numerous tests, there was nothing wrong with Jackson except age. It’s not unusual for older cats to be restless at night. We don’t (yet) have to worry about dementia, though, because he is not confused about where he is or who I am, like some of my friends’ cats were in their last months. Jackson wants to me to dangle a toy for him to pounce on, and he plays hard, like a much younger cat. So I just get up and play with him until he’s tired, Miles sits around sulking, and we all go back to sleep afterward.
Except for these nightly disruptions, Jackson is the mellowest cat imaginable. I don’t hesitate to hand him over to anyone—including my friends’ children—to hold and carry around. Because I can only take one cat on the plane, Jackson must stay home in the care of my neighbors while Miles and I travel. Of course, I feel guilty, but when my neighbors say that it was a pleasure to spend time with Jackson and they would miss him when I return, I know they are not just being nice.
I find it ironic, even endearing, that Jackson has finally decided to be demanding. He doesn’t make a racket when he is alone or with my neighbors. He meows and prowls only because he doesn’t like me to be sleeping when he’s not. Miles, a typical Siamese, is bred to plaster himself to me under the covers and sleep through the night. On the rare occasion he wakes up, he trots over to his bowl, meows, and quiets down as soon as I stumble out of bed to serve him a snack. He eats and crawls back to bed. Jackson, on the other hand, has an insatiable desire to play, eat a little, get cuddled and petted, and play again. Sometimes, we’re up for half an hour.
When he’s finally ready to sleep again, Jackson presses his head under my chin and purrs. A cat’s purr—which may or may not qualify as language because science is yet to determine whether cats purr by intention—is the greatest mystery and satisfaction. Why a cat’s cry, unlike an infant’s, inspires love instead of fear in me is another mystery. Regardless, my cats give me a chance to be obsessive about at least one thing. They are my safety valve: they channel my potential anxiety in a way that doesn’t harm them, me, or the people around us.
Many religious rituals and practices around the world are based on the belief that the essence of who we are—the spirit, soul, or chi—is an unstable entity that is liable to wander away from the body. This is one of the few religious beliefs that make sense to me. Every time I stand on a roof deck of a tall building, I understand why people wear amulets to secure their soul to their body or learn spells and chants to guide their loved ones’ souls back to their bodies. On a roof deck, with the sun slowly going down, it is thrilling to watch the light lingering in the tops of trees and gaze at other buildings, cars, and people reduced to toys or even specks. One minute, I’m enjoying the view, laughing and talking to the friends standing nearby with glasses of wine; the next minute, I’m simultaneously wanting to and not wanting to walk away from them and get closer to the edge, knowing that if I do, the only logical thing to do would be to jump. Although I have never contemplated suicide, the temptation to step forward into the pure nothing suddenly feels overwhelming, even inevitable. How can any of us resist the ultimate curiosity, the desire to understand the truth—the forbidden knowledge—of our own demise? The spirit’s longing to leave the body is powerful, potent, and real: it is existential rather than personal.
There are many things I call to mind—my own amulets and spells—in order to step back and rejoin the roof deck party, but even more than my friends or my work or my responsibilities as a citizen, my cats are the weight that keeps me from blowing away into nothing. They need me in ways no one else does. They are at once my joy and the burden of my responsibility. The duet of distress on the intestate, the demand for play in the middle of the night, the assertion of dissatisfaction in the crowded aisle of a plane: whatever the occasion, their voices call me back to myself, to the only life I have.
*
Kyoko Mori is the author of four nonfiction books, the latest of which—Cat and Bird: a memoir—was published by Belt Publishing in March 2024. Her essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Harvard Review, the American Scholar, and others. She lives in Washington DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson, and teaches at George Mason University and at the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. Visit her at www.kyokomori.com.
