No Apologies Needed

One of the things I love most about cats is how little they apologise for being themselves. They know what they like, what they don’t like, when they want company, and when they’d rather be left alone.

Ollie is particularly good at this. He can spend the morning following me around, wanting to be close, and then simply decide he’s had enough.

He gets up, walks away, and finds somewhere else to be. No guilt, no explanation, no wondering if I’ve taken it personally. Just a very clear boundary.

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Learning Who He Actually Was

As my first cat, I found it hard at the start that he wasn’t clingy, or a lap cat, or any of the things I’d pictured him being before he even came home. I wanted the version I’d imagined.

But Ollie taught me who he actually was, and I had to respect that before we could build any real trust. Once I stopped expecting him to be different, he started choosing to be close on his own terms, which somehow meant more.

Boundaries Don’t Need a Reason

We often make boundaries feel like something big and uncomfortable, something that needs a serious conversation or a good enough reason. But cats don’t seem to need a reason.

If Ollie doesn’t want to be touched, he moves away. If Otis wants to be left alone, he finds his own little corner. If they want attention, they come and ask for it.

They don’t seem to think they have to earn the right to feel comfortable. I find that beautiful.

The Only Language They Have

Cats only have their bodies to say it with. A shift in your arms, a change in the ears, a tail that starts moving. That’s the whole vocabulary, and it’s usually enough, because the people who love them learn to read it.

If those small signs get missed too often, the message gets louder. The scratch comes. And it can look sudden, like it came from nowhere, but it wasn’t sudden at all.

The cat had been saying it the whole time, in the only language it had.

We Have So Much More

We have so much more than that. We have our bodies too, the tired eyes, the tension in our shoulders, the way we go quiet in a room we’d normally fill.

But we also have words. We can actually say “I need space,” or “not today,” or “I’m not okay with that.” We can explain, ask, negotiate, come back to a conversation the next day.

Cats never get that option. We do, almost always.

Why We Stay Quiet Anyway

And yet so many of us don’t use it. I think a lot of people hold their boundaries in rather than speak them, because somewhere along the way they learned that saying no might make them seem too much, too sensitive, too difficult.

So instead we shrink the need down until it’s small enough to not be a bother. We say yes when we mean no. We stay in the conversation when we’re tired. We answer the message when we needed the quiet.

No Verdict, Just a Need

That’s the part I find worth sitting with. Ollie never worries about being difficult. He just gets up and leaves.

He’ll be back later, wanting cuddles, as if nothing happened, because for him nothing did. The walking away was never a verdict on how much he loves me. It was just what he needed in that moment.

I don’t think I’ve ever managed a boundary that lightly.

Borrowing His Lack of Apology

Watching him has made me want to try, though. Not to communicate like a cat, since I have far better tools than a tail and a set of ears, but to borrow that same lack of apology.

To say “I don’t feel like it today” without following it with three reasons why that’s okay. To trust that a boundary is just information, not an attack, and that the people worth keeping close will hear it that way too.

What Rest Actually Looks Like

I notice I pay more attention to Ollie and Otis the more I learn from them. They’re such beautiful creatures, each with their own way of communicating, and watching them has made me want to find my own way of setting boundaries too, not only with other people but with myself.

I can push myself until I burn out, while they simply rest when they need to. They don’t overthink where or how.

Sometimes it’s a patch of sun, sometimes somewhere dark and quiet, sometimes curled in a blanket, sometimes wedged on top of a shoe for no reason I’ll ever understand. They just are what they are in that moment, and they let themselves have it.

I love every bit of watching two little personalities be exactly themselves, and slowly learning, alongside them, how to respect that in each other.

An Invitation, Not a Wall

Because a boundary isn’t about keeping someone out. It’s an offer to be understood a little better. Sometimes that means asking for space. Sometimes it means saying so before you’re too tired to say it kindly.

And every time I watch Ollie walk off to his corner, completely unbothered by what I might think of him for it, I’m reminded that saying what you need doesn’t have to be complicated.

It can just be true.

Thank you for reading.

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What’s one boundary you’ve been quietly communicating but haven’t said out loud yet?

How grief, an algorithm, and a little grey cat changed the way I understood love and family.

I spent most of my life trying to build the kind of family I had always wanted.

I just never imagined two cats would become part of it.

I have wanted to be a mother for as long as I can remember.

I don’t remember deciding this. There was no particular moment when I held a baby and thought, this is what I want. It feels older than that. Almost instinctive. Something I knew about myself before I knew very much about myself at all.

I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional home, and I think when you grow up without much stability, you can become unusually determined to create it.

I was ambitious from a young age. I wanted a career. I wanted to work hard, to be independent, to have my own money and to know that I could take care of myself.

For a long time, I thought that was simply ambition.

Looking back, I think a lot of it was about safety.

I wanted to build a life that felt solid beneath my feet. Enough money. Enough security. Enough freedom that one day I could slow down and turn my attention towards the part of life I had always imagined would matter most to me.

Family.

I wanted a good one.

A home that felt safe to return to. Ordinary dinners and birthdays and traditions that lasted long enough to become annoying. People who liked being in the same room. Children who never had to wonder whether they were loved.

That was my private definition of success.

More than anything, I wanted to be a mum.

For most of my life, I assumed that was what the next chapter would eventually look like.

Cats did not feature anywhere in this plan.

In fact, I was never a cat person.

Not because I disliked them. I simply didn’t know them.

I grew up around dogs. Dogs made sense to me. Their affection was obvious, their excitement impossible to miss. Cats existed somewhere at the edges of my life, sitting on walls, disappearing under cars, occasionally staring at me suspiciously from someone else’s sofa.

I never really understood them.

I certainly never imagined that one would become one of the most important relationships of my life.

I moved overseas when I was twenty-four.

I wanted to work hard, learn new things and build a life of my own. Somewhere in the middle of all those plans, I fell in love with a kind man who became my best friend and later my husband.

Slowly, the life I had spent years working towards began to take shape.

We loved each other. We bought a home. Work was going well. There was stability.

For the first time, I felt as though I had built the foundation.

So we started trying for a baby.

It took some time.

And then, eventually, I became pregnant.

I was ecstatic.

There is something strange about pregnancy and time. Your body can be only a few weeks into something while your mind is already years ahead.

I watched videos about what to expect. I saved tips. I made lists of names. I thought about what we would need to change in the house, what our routines might look like and what kind of mother I wanted to be.

My mind had already started making room.

Someone whose face I didn’t know yet had already changed the way I imagined every year ahead of me.

I felt full.

Not accomplished. Not relieved. Not even simply happy.

Full.

As though a part of me that had been waiting quietly for years had finally been answered.

For a brief period, all the separate pieces of my life seemed to meet in the same place.

The career I had worked for.

The stability I had wanted.

The person I loved.

Our home.

And now, finally, the family I had imagined since I was a little girl.

If you had asked me then how life was going, I probably would have said one hundred.

Completely, stupidly, blissfully one hundred.

Then I miscarried.

And one hundred became zero with an efficiency I still find difficult to explain.

Grief is rarely as simple as sadness.

Mine certainly wasn’t.

There was sadness, but there was also anger. Guilt. Fear. Confusion. A strange disappointment in my own body.

I knew rationally that I hadn’t caused it. But rationality becomes remarkably useless when you are desperate for an explanation.

I replayed everything.

What had I eaten?

Had I exercised too much?

Had I rested enough?

Had I missed something?

My body had been the place where this little life was supposed to be safest, and suddenly I didn’t trust it anymore.

I became deeply depressed.

Eventually, I told my husband I was scared to try again.

The desire to be a mother hadn’t disappeared. If anything, the loss had shown me just how deep it ran.

But now motherhood had another possibility attached to it.

Loss.

And once you know exactly how something can break you, it becomes much harder to approach it innocently again.

There was another part of grief I hadn’t expected.

My phone still thought I was pregnant.

The algorithm didn’t know what had happened.

Every time I opened social media there were pregnancy tips, babies, newborn routines, nursery ideas and tiny clothes.

Advice for a future that, only weeks earlier, I had believed belonged to me.

The pregnancy had ended.

The algorithm carried on.

So I started trying to change it.

I searched for nature. Dogs. Wildlife. Funny animals. Anything gentle. Anything that could occupy my brain for a few minutes without asking me to think about the future.

And eventually, somehow, cats.

Lots and lots of cats.

Maybe this is just a very ordinary story about algorithms.

Or maybe it is one of those strange little ways life finds you when you aren’t looking for anything at all.

Because one day, somewhere in the middle of all that scrolling, I saw a photograph of a little grey cat.

And I cried.

Immediately.

Just a little face.

Grey fur.

Big eyes.

But something about him stopped me.

He looked sad.

Maybe I was projecting. Maybe it was simply the expression on his little face. But I was sad too, and something about that felt strangely familiar.

Maybe it was nothing more complicated than timing. Maybe I was simply in a place where tenderness could reach me very easily.

Whatever it was, I stared at his picture for longer than was reasonable and sent it to my husband.

Look at this cutie. Can we please go and meet him?

There was one fairly significant problem with this plan.

My husband was allergic to cats.

Very allergic.

He had cats before, and his body had made its opinion on feline companionship fairly clear. But his reactions weren’t always the same around every cat, and apparently I had already become sufficiently attached to a photograph to believe an informal allergy experiment was a sensible idea.

We contacted the woman caring for him and asked if we could come and spend some time with him.

Just meet him.

Two days later, we went.

She told us he was the only kitten in his litter. A man had previously adopted him and then returned him. From what we understood, he didn’t like his colouring, or something equally ridiculous.

He also had a funny little leg that made him walk slightly differently.

I didn’t care.

His name was Stove.

Yes.

Stove.

He had already been rejected and, as though life had decided he needed one additional indignity, somebody had named him after a kitchen appliance. Apparently they had chosen the name so they wouldn’t become too attached to him.

I thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

The moment I met him, I already felt protective of him.

I played with him. He was sweet and gentle.

My husband held him and cuddled him while we waited to see whether his immune system would declare war.

Meanwhile, I fell completely in love.

When it was time to leave, I cried.

I didn’t want to leave him there.

Fortunately, my husband’s reaction was surprisingly mild.

More importantly, he had seen me with this cat.

He knew.

And by then, I think he was falling for him too.

He agreed he would take allergy tablets if necessary.

We would go home, prepare everything and come back for him the next day.

⸻

That night, I barely slept.

I researched cats with the intensity of someone preparing for an exam the following morning.

Food. Water. Litter. Scratching. Grooming. Toys. Toxic plants. Behaviour. Veterinary care. How to make a cat feel safe.

I had spent my entire life knowing almost nothing about cats and attempted to correct this deficit in approximately twelve hours.

The next morning, I bought everything I thought he could possibly need.

That afternoon, we went back.

Stove came home.

And, with apologies to whoever named him, Stove immediately became Ollie.

What happened after Ollie came home was much quieter than everything that had happened before him.

I’m careful when I say that he helped me.

People sometimes talk about animals as though they arrive with the responsibility of healing us. I don’t think that is fair to them.

Ollie didn’t fix my grief.

He didn’t replace the pregnancy I had lost.

He wasn’t the baby I had imagined, and I never needed him to be.

He was a cat.

And somehow, that was enough.

He needed breakfast whether I was sad or not.

His water needed changing. His litter needed cleaning. He wanted to play. He needed brushing.

He had preferences I had to learn and boundaries I had to respect.

And slowly, without meaning to, I began paying attention again.

I learned the differences between his meows.

What frightened him and what made him curious.

That affection didn’t always mean being held.

That a cat could love you very much and still prefer to sit forty centimetres away from you.

That sometimes being trusted enough to sit beside someone is its own form of intimacy.

There is something extraordinary about learning an animal who cannot explain himself to you.

You become a student of tiny things.

The angle of an ear.

The movement of a tail.

A slightly different sound in the middle of the night.

The cupboard opening that makes them appear from nowhere.

The particular place they sleep when they’re cold.

Eventually, you know this creature so well that you can sense something is wrong before you can explain what has changed.

I found this fascinating.

I still do.

Grief had made me spend an enormous amount of time looking inward.

Ollie made me look outward again.

There was this little life happening directly in front of me.

He made me laugh. He made me curious. He gave shape to days that had started to feel shapeless.

There was someone waiting at home.

And perhaps, most importantly, all that love I had been carrying had somewhere to go.

Not where I had expected.

But somewhere.

Much later, I realised Ollie had been born around the same time I conceived.

I have never quite known what to do with that information.

I don’t particularly like the phrase everything happens for a reason.

Some things happen and they are simply terrible.

I don’t think pain needs to reveal a lesson before we are allowed to move forward. And I don’t think something beautiful arriving afterwards makes what came before it necessary.

But I do think we are allowed to find meaning in what happens next.

Ollie arrived at a time when I had an enormous capacity to love and no idea what to do with it.

He didn’t become a replacement for anything.

He became something entirely his own.

A small life I was responsible for.

A relationship I hadn’t known I wanted.

A creature whose inner world I became increasingly determined to understand.

And because of Ollie, eventually there was Otis.

Otis is another story entirely.

Another personality. Another little universe to learn.

He deserves a proper introduction of his own, and knowing Otis, he would probably be deeply offended to discover I had squeezed his entire existence into a paragraph at the end of Ollie’s story.

But eventually, somehow, there were two.

Two bowls on the floor.

Two sets of paws moving through the house.

Two completely different meows.

Two animals who occupy an astonishing amount of emotional and physical space for creatures that weigh only a few kilograms.

Somewhere along the way, I became a cat mum.

⸻

I know some people find that phrase strange.

They’re not children.

Of course they’re not.

They’re cats.

And I think that distinction matters precisely because I love them.

Loving an animal well is not about turning them into a small furry version of ourselves. It is about becoming curious enough to understand the creature in front of you.

The more I loved Ollie and Otis, the more I realised how little I actually knew about cats.

And the more I wanted to know.

What does a good life look like from the perspective of a cat rather than the person caring for one?

Can an indoor cat be perfectly safe and still be bored?

Why does one cat want to be touched constantly while another seems to love you deeply from the opposite side of the sofa?

Do they miss us?

What does play actually do for their brains?

Why do we continue buying expensive beds when cats have made their position on cardboard boxes perfectly clear?

And then there are the questions about us.

Because somewhere between feeding schedules, litter boxes and veterinary appointments, we build entire private languages with animals who will never speak ours.

We learn their routines.

We rearrange our homes around them.

We worry about them.

We photograph them sleeping.

We talk to them knowing perfectly well they cannot answer, and then become convinced that somehow they did.

We leave places earlier than we intended because we would rather be at home with them.

And without noticing exactly when it happened, their presence becomes part of the architecture of our lives.

⸻

I spent much of my childhood believing that success would mean creating a family.

For years, I had a very specific picture of what that family was supposed to look like.

Life has complicated that picture.

I still believe deeply in family. I still carry the dreams I have had since I was little.

Loving Ollie and Otis hasn’t replaced any of them.

It has simply made my understanding of love and family bigger.

Because family, I have learned, does not always arrive in the form you imagined.

Sometimes it arrives quietly.

On four paws.

With grey fur, a funny little leg and the deeply unfortunate name Stove.

And sometimes a love you never planned for finds you in the exact season you need somewhere for your heart to go.

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That is where Cat Mum Notes begins.

I don’t have all the answers about cats.

Quite the opposite.

I have questions, and I want to keep learning.

I want this to be a place for people who love their cats enough to be curious about them.

A place to explore how cats experience the world, what they need from us and how we can give them lives that are not only safe and healthy, but interesting, enriching and joyful.

There will be behaviour, enrichment, food, home, play and research. Things worth buying and things absolutely not worth buying. Things I learn, things I get wrong and questions I still don’t know the answers to.

And there will be Ollie and Otis, of course.

But there will also be the ordinary things.

Because the older I get, the more I realise that a life is largely made from moments that don’t seem particularly important while they are happening.

A cat sleeping in the afternoon light.

The sound of paws moving through the house.

A little face waiting for you when you come home.

Ordinary things.

Until one day they aren’t.

So I want to pay attention while they still are.

This is Cat Mum Notes.

And this is where our story begins.

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