Somewhere in 2002 or 2003, Jennie and I decided to get a cat. At that point, we were living in our first house, on the east side of Niles, and we were thinking that, at some point in the future, we would start to make our family bigger (with children). To prove to ourselves that we were ready to do such a thing, we decided to rescue a cat.

That cat was Maggie.

We rescued Maggie from a PetSmart adoption event, if I remember correctly. We told ourselves, going into the whole thing, that we were going to try to do our best to ‘parent’ a rescue cat, and if that ended up going well, then we would take it as a sign that we were set to start thinking about getting pregnant.

But, it did not go well. In fact, if we’d abided by the terms of the loose agreement that the adoption of Maggie encompassed, we never should have had kids at all. In the end, we blamed Maggie for the way that things turned out, and since we were able to place the blame on her, we felt that we were acquitted of any responsibility in the matter. Of course, we probably could have done some things differently, but most of it was Maggie’s fault.

Says the human.

Maggie was a black and white cat, and she was fully adult when we rescued her. It was pretty early on when we felt like there was something psychologically wrong with her. Maggie seemed to be a bit of a devil-cat. Inasmuch as all cats have a certain independence within them, and most people understand that going in, Maggie went above-and-beyond in her level of disdain for Jennie and I. She rarely, if ever, seemed interested in us, unless you count her attacks on us as being ‘interested’.

Of course, there were good times with Maggie, and I’m saying this because I’m assuming that there were, not necessarily because I remember any such times. On the contrary, most of what I remember from our time with Maggie is me chasing Maggie around the house, after she’d done something that I wasn’t happy about, and Maggie running, to avoid my rage.

I think that I was under the impression that Maggie could have been trained, or at least, discouraged from behaving badly. Of course, anyone whose owned a cat before could tell you that cats do what they want to do and they’re not likely to be trained as easily as one might train, say, a dog, for example. Still, I thought that it must be possible for her behaviors to be molded, at least somewhat.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

Truth be told, Maggie was malicious. The malice inside of her may have been the result of her life –her circumstances– before she came to be ours; Jennie and I have always assumed as much. But, it’s hard enough to care for a cat when it seems to like you, or at least when it seems to be indifferent to you. Maggie’s malice was hard for Jennie and I to tolerate.

Maggie’s claws were the most intolerable, inasmuch as she used them to attack the two of us. Those same claws, when our son was born, became the reason that she left our home. While it was one thing for her to attack us without cause, it was going to be completely unbearable for her to attack our newborn child with the same malevolence.

Not long after our first child, our son, was born, we had Jennie’s sister –a veterinary technician at the time– find a different place for Maggie to live.

When Maggie attacked us, she would wait in a room that we were about to enter, around the corner, so that she could pounce on our ankles, with her claws exposed for the kill. Whenever Maggie did this, especially to Jennie –it didn’t really bother me that much, but Jennie was not to be toyed with– I would attempt to discourage Maggie from that behavior, and this didn’t ever go well.

Maggie did teach me that escalating with a dependent is never going to result in anything positive.

My memories of chasing that cat around our house are memorable because Maggie took those opportunities to step up her game; when it came to being an evil cat, she was never more evil than she was when I was trying to teach her a lesson about bad behavior.

At the end of the day, Jennie and I chalked the whole thing up to a bad experience. We made the decision to start to raise a family together, despite how things turned out with Maggie, and we’ve never regretted that decision, or any of the challenges that have come with it.

Maggie was a cat that needed something that we were incapable of giving.

In fact, we currently own two cats (and they were Jennie’s idea). People say that cats get along better when they have a fellow cat to play with, and I can certainly say that our two cats are significantly more interested in each other than they are in any of the humans in the house. They were barn cats, and barely old enough to leave their mother, when we adopted them from Jennie’s other sister –> the one who has never been a veterinary technician. By getting them at birth, we were pretty sure that they were unlikely to have any of the emotional baggage that we’ve always assigned to Maggie and our experience with her.

Sometimes, things just don’t work out. It’s not necessarily a sign of anything, and it’s not always that case that instances like these are someone’s fault. Maggie was one of those cases where it just wasn’t in the cards.