The Marvelous Miss Mable, Part II: The Screamer

 

She is a beautiful little beast.

Mable is, I will admit, all of the qualities I wanted in a cat when we were looking for Empress. If we'd found Mable four months ago, she would be Empress. 

We don't know what Mable is. She is medium-haired, which means she could either grow into a longhair or a normal shorthair. She does not have the fur between her toes like Empress does, which would denote a longer-haired breed. She is one of six in her litter -- her mother was at the shelter too (she was adopted yesterday) and her mother, named Sassy, was a normal black domestic shorthair not unlike Pete. We do not know what her father was, however. All of Mable's siblings were fuzzy/poofy like her. All of them have also now been adopted.

Mable is not entirely black. She has some cinnamon/brown undertones, similar to Pete, and if you look closely in the photo above, you can see that she does have some mottling of white hairs on her back leading to her tail, and she has a little white spot right underneath her neck. 

She sort of looks like a werewolf -- giant, super-furry ears with tips and hair growing out of them like a Maine Coon (also, like Empress) and an overall very fuzzy, scraggly, super-soft coat all over. It's very possible she'll end up as a longhaired cat. It's also very possible she'll be a normal shorthair like Pete, as Pete looked similar when he was a baby in 2007:

Pete, however, was always destined to be a shorthair -- he was never that fuzzy, not like Mable. 

We learned some things about Mable the first night we had her, and the first (and most obvious one) is that she is a screamer. 

I wish I were making this up.

Mable does not like to be left alone. She wants to be around people and around other cats. Her history report says that she, her siblings, and her mother were all "owner surrendered," which basically tells me that whoever had her mother didn't like the fact that she'd gotten knocked up, and as soon as the kittens were born and old enough to go into the shelter system, away they went. Mable's mother is only a year old, so she is young herself. Mable is nine weeks old, and she'd never left the side of her siblings -- they were all fostered together, they were all sheltered together (three in each little enclosure) and to my knowledge, they were all adopted out separately. 

This was a problem for Mable. Being constantly around other cats and people in the fostering/shelter environment made her wonderfully sociable with cats and very comfortable around humans -- but when she's alone, she screams.

As in, if we're in the bedroom with her and then leave, closing the door behind us (we still need to keep her sequestered a bit so she can fully heal up from her surgery), she begins screaming once she realizes she's alone. And they're not cute little kitten mews, they are screaming banshee cries like someone is beating her. These cries can be and are heard throughout the house, which I am sure was the other cats' first clue that there was a new child upstairs. 

Sometimes she screams for only a few minutes before she settles down. Other times she can go for close to an hour, especially if she knows we're still around and just not in there in the room with her. It's because of this that we will absolutely be trying to expedite her introduction to the house and other cats, because I honestly don't know how much of that needy screaming shit either Daisy or I can take before we lose our minds.

Ahem. Anyway.

Mable's first night home was Thursday. I work Thursday nights, and Daisy always works in the office on Fridays. So, I was downstairs and she was closed in the room with Daisy upstairs. We'd established early in the night that yes, she is litter trained -- she knows how to pee and poop in a pan, and she knows how to find the water and food bowls. Daisy had done a quick runthrough of the room so that there wasn't anything the tiny little tribble could get into in the night, and went to sleep with her. Per her reports, Mable is a cuddler and would change positions with her, always trying to cuddle close to her and sleep. This is a good sign.

However.

Mable was spayed on Wednesday. It takes a few days -- longer for female cats, as we saw with Emmy -- to really recover from it. During that time they're frequently sick, they either don't want to eat/drink or they are constantly nauseous from the anesthesia as it wears off. Emmy had diarrhea on the bed a few times, and vomited water several times in the first 48 hours we had her, the poor little thing. 

Mable was a little different. No diarrhea that we saw, anywhere, but she did vomit water a couple of times. However, hilariously, she had manners and would go into the pan when she needed to vomit -- which Daisy found endlessly funny.  But that was it, her apparent nausea wore off quickly, and by Friday night we were beginning to see her true personality start to come out.

That personality is -- as I expected it would be -- a hellion.

I had warned Daisy, and I have mentioned it here a number of times in the past, that raising a black cat kitten is no joke. They are the most difficult cats to raise, because they are all little demons. I have never seen an exception to this rule. Daisy wasn't around when I raised Pete; he was five years old when she and I first got together. She did not, therefore, see the levels of absolute asshole that Pete was during his first year or two of life, asshole levels he maintained until he was about four years old. Pete climbed into, on top of, or under anything he could, and destroyed everything he possibly could. He got into everything -- he once broke into the closet where I stored his food, tore open the bag, ate his fill and scattered the rest around the top floor of the Kansas house. He howled. He mercilessly attacked his sisters. He left scars from teeth and nails on my feet, legs, and hands that wouldn't fade or fully heal for years. He once gave me a black eye for a week when he decided that he wanted to run full speed from one end of the apartment to the other, ran up the bed, up my body, and three feet up the wall before gravity took over and he landed with the force of a brick right on my eyeball. 

He was a dick, is what I'm saying. I love Pete dearly and he has very much softened and slowed down now that he's a very old man, but he wasn't a fun kitten to raise. He was an asshole. 

Mable may end up being the same way. She's already showing some tendencies of it.

For one, she's hyper. For a two-pound tribble, she toddles around very quickly and she likes to bite. A lot. Daisy thinks she was weaned too soon, and when she bites, she's looking for a nipple. Thursday night, she awoke Daisy several times to play, because kitten energy, to the point where Daisy was downstairs and awake for the day by 5:30 in the morning. A lot of that playing involved biting. 

Friday night was no different. In the overnight hours, she incessantly attacked Daisy while she was sleeping -- she seemed angry that Daisy was sleeping and not playing with her, and went after any body part she could to wake her up and get her to play. So, as I usually take a night nap on Friday nights so I have energy for Saturday, when I awakened around 5am to go to the bathroom I saw the following:

1. I exited my room, where I'd been sleeping in the chair, to see that the hallway light was on.

2. In addition to the hallway light being on, the trash can from the bathroom was sitting in the hallway.

3. In addition to that, the bedroom door was wide open (no idea how Daisy could sleep like that)

4. And the bathroom door was closed.

I opened the door to the bathroom to see a very sad looking, confused Mable sitting on the bathroom rug next to the bathroom litter pan and her water bowl. She meowed sweetly at me, and as soon as I peed, flushed the toilet, and left the room -- because I assume she was put in there for a reason -- she began screaming. 

Which, of course, I'm sure she'd done when Daisy first put her in there, but I was asleep and did not hear it.

I had no messages from Daisy -- no texts, nothing. No explanation. We had to put Empress in there for about 36 hours when she was having her diarrhea, so I assumed maybe Mable had experienced a similar episode.

Nope. She simply wouldn't let Daisy sleep, so Daisy locked her in the bathroom.

I was, at the time, angry. When she started screaming again, it once more woke Daisy up, and I said something along the lines of "I can't imagine what you'd do with a real kid, because you can't just lock a child in a bathroom when you don't want to deal with them anymore."

This was cruel, and I later apologized for it because I realized that, but I am not wrong.

I took Mable into my office with me, where she continued trying to be a hyper, biting gremlin, so that she would stop screaming and so Daisy could sleep. She sat in my arms -- I would not let her go/get down -- and I loved her and soothed her. Eventually she calmed down and fell asleep on my stomach/chest:

And I did this for three hours while Daisy slept. When Daisy awoke, I had already moved back to my lounge chair and Mable was sleeping on my chest just below my neck. I wasn't even holding her anymore, she was just snuggled up there. I was watching TikToks, for the record, at the same time -- which tells you how at peace she was. 

She really is a sweet little girl. But she has that black cat kitten energy. So I employed the same tactics with her that I used to use with Pete when he wouldn't settle down -- I held her lovingly, but firmly against her will until she settled down and just accepted it and willingly bonded with me by sleeping on me. It's how I trained Pete to be a teddy-bear kitty and hopefully how Mable will become one as well given her predisposition to people and liking to cuddle anyway. 

She's still a screamer when she's left alone in the bedroom, and it hurts my heart to hear her cry. But, she's crying for lesser amounts of time every time -- shorter durations -- and she is always incredibly happy to see us when we return to her. We're sort of unintentionally training her to be able to be independent and alone, but also know that we're always coming back. I think it's going to end up being a relatively slow process compared to Hank and Empress.