I’m not sure when I first noticed she was gone. Our cat had been sleeping next to me since we’d moved into the new place five years ago. Sometimes she slept at my wife’s feet instead. She was almost always in our bed at night. Then one day it stopped.
Detective John Munch, which is the name of the cat, wouldn’t come upstairs with us when we went to bed. She was going up later and sleeping on the third floor, we thought? I wasn’t sure. All I knew for sure was that she wasn’t with us at night, and so wasn’t where she’d been pretty much ever since I met Detective (and my future wife). Eventually she began avoiding our bedroom entirely. The past year or so, she’d been spending most of her days sleeping in the little fabric cove that approximated a yurt. “She’s in her yurt!” I’d say as I took my 10,000th lifetime photo of our cat sleeping. But when I walked into our bedroom, she’d never be there.
I worried this was an indication of the worst. She’s a senior cat, maybe 13 years old, and I wondered if she was getting sick, and didn’t want to be near us as things got worse. Our neighbors’ cats had done this before they died. But Detective was fine physically. There was a better explanation.
My son was born in late 2023. We were a little worried about how Detective would deal with it. Websites provide detailed instructions, but who knows if they’d work and also who knows if we did any of them (I currently do not remember anything I’ve done for the last two years). I have no idea if those cat pheromone devices work. There’s that TikTok where the cat is looking at the wall because she’s mad about the newborn, which isn’t quite evidence of anything but felt right. Detective had hissed at toddlers in our house before. What if she hated our baby, too?
For the first months of his life, Simon slept in our room in a bassinet at the foot of our bed. Detective was curious about this. She continued sleeping in our room—her yurt was under the bassinet—and laying in bed with us at night. She did not hiss at Simon. She did not get that close, either.
Eventually Simon made the move to a crib in the nursery. He was growing up. Maybe around this time is when Detective began avoiding our room. Maybe she wanted to sleep near Simon and was sad that opportunity was closed. Maybe it took her a while to realize she was no longer No. 1 in the house. Maybe seeing my wife carrying Simon instead of her was taking its toll. There’s no way to ask, really.
My wife and I tried to rectify the situation after I broke the news to her that Detective was gone from bedtime. (We have a king-sized bed, so it takes a while for news to travel from one end to the other.) We vowed to play with Detective every night, right after we put Simon to bed. This lasted about three nights before we lapsed into our usual “sitting on the couch completely zonked for an hour before going to bed at 8:30” routine.
My son eventually started crawling, then cruising, then walking. Detective and Simon began having more interactions now that both of them were mobile. I’ve been trying to teach Simon to be gentle with her, to mixed results. But I hoped the two were becoming friends. Simon would see the cat and walk as fast as he could to her end of the room. Detective would sometimes run away, but not always. Sometimes I hold Simon’s hand and help him pet her gently. Detective does not bat him away. I hoped they could become friends. Was I getting somewhere?
I think I was. Sometime in the last few weeks, Detective began sleeping in bed with us. A week after that, she started sleeping in her yurt again. When I realized it, I was thrilled. When Simon realized it, he was curious. When he’s in our bedroom, he always checks the yurt for our cat. When she’s there, Simon sometimes pets her. I seem to have modeled good behavior for him in that regard. And when Detective isn’t there, sometimes Simon really needs to make sure.
I don’t know if Detective returned because she’s starting to like Simon. But things are going pretty well now. The two aren’t friends, but they interact, and the cat only occasionally runs away. Detective seems content; Simon seems fascinated. The other day the cat jumped up onto the dining room table while I was feeding Simon. He had one thing to say:
“Cat.”
You can buy a Defector T-shirt or tote bag with my cat’s face on it.
