vs 

Now that we’ve reached our thirties, many of my friends have recently begun to spawn human children.  On the one hand, it is nothing short of fantastic to watch them out and about with their mini me’s and at some point prior to menopause, I intend to join them (at least once) in their race to overpopulate. But as their interest in bugaboo’s and Tommee Tippee’s reaches new heights, their abilities to share in the delights of my furry family has, quite surprisingly, begun to decline.

It is quite strange to watch your friends turn into mothers. To cut their hair shorter, stop bothering with contact lenses and start purchasing trousers with elasticised waistbands. Trying to organise a coffee or (God forbid) dinner out with them that doesn’t involve a plethora of juice boxes and bananas or end in at least three items of your clothing being irreparably tarred in white sick or unidentified stickiness is no mean feat.  A simple outing can involve weeks of military calculations until a suitable plan can be drawn up usually involving some ignorant, overpaid and semi-responsible sod getting lumbered with the task of child death prevention for four hours. By this time, my now understandably desperate friend, wants nothing more than to knock down half a bottle of pinot grigiot (a taste for which I assume one only acquires post-partum) and wax lyrical over the delights of her offspring.

I do not wish to play down the vital importance of traditional, human motherhood and completely understand the amount of time and energy that my peers now have to spend preventing their chubby cherubs from meeting a premature and grizzly death elbow-deep in a plug socket. I get the vital importance of their little angels not being the only Jack and Mia’s in the playground unable to converse in at least three European languages. But if I am now to be subjected to hours upon end of Steiner vs Montessori or the vast benefits of baby sign language, I do wish that people were just a little more sympathetic as to the responsibilities of being a feline parent.

Now while I do appreciate that as a cat mother I am free as a bird to leave my charges unattended and indulge in any number of evenings of alcoholism and recreational drug use without either of them being removed from my care, it is still a complete misconception that cat parenting isn’t without its pitfalls.