The Crazy Cat Lady

From Kate McGunagle of "My Dear Queer"

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Welcome to the final official post of Pride Month here at Qstack—we hope your Pride was fun, safe, and empowering—there always seems to be an uptick in pushback around this time of year, and that’s (ahem) one of the reasons we need to mark the long road we’ve traveled.

Starting in July, we are technically returning to a 1st and 3rd (and 5th) Saturdays schedule, with occasional special editions.

Please keep your submissions coming! Qstack is all about featuring your work to your community.

Next week we’ll be featuring poetry by

D. C. Wilkinson

, Alicia Drier, and

Maia Brown-Jackson

, and we have posts currently scheduled out through September.

In the meantime:

Kate McGunagle

of

My Dear Queer

wrote this most amusing analysis of that modern archetype, the Crazy Cat Lady, and being a cat myself, I was utterly charmed.

Please enjoy the following cozy stroll with Kate, Oliver, and Sam. 💜🐈‍⬛🎩

The Crazy Cat Lady

by

Kate McGunagle

---

I adopted a second cat last week. No, not Stray Cat, whose wildness is something I realized I have no heart to tame, but this guy: a seven-month tumble of cream and orange with olive eyes and a purr like sweet radio static, so that, in the night, I can always tell when he’s approaching to tap his teaspoon-sized paws against my forehead. His hind legs stop their orange exactly at the kneecaps, so he looks like he wandered into a paint basin, looked up at the birds for a minute, then scrambled out. There’s a smear of rust, too, under his chin, from when the universe chucked him lovingly there before pulling him out of his mama.

He was mine barely twenty-four hours before I went out to dinner with some friends, my heart a dry ache hoping the fresh orange body in my house was faring all right without me. I flashed pics of Oliver across the table, feeling like one of those moms. One of my friends tilted her head back and laughed and breezily threw out those three familiar words: crazy cat lady.

I laughed, too. Yes, yes, I often mention my career as a cat lady, though I haven’t always used the word crazy, but why not squeeze it in? Yes, yes, ha ha, I am at two cats now, but that’s how it begins. That’s how it begins. Two becomes three, and then suddenly seven. Before you know it, felines are dripping from the ceiling, your lungs acquire a permanent internal coat of kitty hair, your brain starts to fuzz, something ends – but what?

I think it came up two times more that night, the moniker I’ve been so blasé about, that I’ve fed in my own way over the last year and a half of living alone with a cat. I mostly didn’t mind. I laughed each time. But it got me thinking. Who is the crazy cat lady, after all? Has anybody actually met her? What does she think about what the world has decided she is? 

I wanted to know what she has to say for herself and her way of life. So I sat down to figure it out, and this manifesto appeared – almost as quickly and magically as Oliver, who I plucked straight from the very red heartstrings themselves of rural Tennessee. (The only difference is that one was initially nose-first in a plate of sardines, the other was not.)

***

Crazy cat lady is a title of assumptions. First, it presumes, unanimously, that said individual is female-identifying. Nobody says crazy cat man, although there’s a rise in the use of the term cat dad (which kinda feels adjacent to how people tend to react when they see a biological father out in the world PUSHING A STROLLER?!?!?). 

Also interesting is the use of lady, instead of woman or girl, suggesting that the person is 1) middle-aged or older and/or 2) refined in some way, although this feels strongly tongue-in-cheek. Lady also carries a flicker of solitude, of definite aloneness, a nod towards maybe dowager or spinster or old maid. Is that solitude chosen, or a circumstance this lady has no control over? More on that later.

Notice also that it’s not cat-owning lady. Cat is the simple adjective, and jammed right there next to lady, it pretends zero barrier between the animal and the woman, nearly equating both. The effect? This lady’s identity is subsumed by the animals she loves. She is almost a cat herself.  (Think Catwoman, but less spandex.) There’s not much room for other identities, characteristics, forms of expression.

Lastly, crazy. Wowza, where to start with that. It’s a fraught little word carrying its own history of misuse. If something (not a human) is crazy, it’s unexpected, wildly surprising, outside of an established norm, maybe a little terrifying (“that storm was crazy!” or “it’s crazy how much money I spend on my cats!”). If a person is crazy, that’s nasty shorthand for someone who may simply be struggling – with mental health, illness, trauma, etc. 

Let’s not forget that the title loses a lot of its meaning if one word is subtracted. Crazy lady, for example, or simply cat lady, or crazy cat. Different, right? There is a sense that all three words cocreate the holistic image of the crazy cat lady, which has its own finality. It’s as if each element compels the next element. There’s a causality, almost, something inescapable. I.e., if I am a woman who chooses to be alone or has found herself to be alone for an extended period of time, and if I choose to own a cat, I’m already on the slip ‘n slide. There’s no alternative. I just have to reach out and there’s crazy, right next to cat #3. I can’t retract. It’s like death, or sickness, or what happens inside of me the minute a kitten’s eyes meet mine: inevitable.

***

In other words, crazy cat lady seems a tidy little suitcase for everything our society thinks a single, independent, female-identifying person with a proclivity for felines should and can be. Society likes suitcases. They’re useful for stuffing things you just don’t know what to do with, or where to put. They’re easy to stick under the bed and forget about.

***

I have written about my neighbor calling me a recluse. About how I’ve left my lawn untended in tandem with my own proclivity for invisibility, not just felines. About the fierce love I have for Sam, my own experiences floating the damn void, my social anxieties, queerness, loneliness. 

I live alone, I own two cats, I tend to my mental health as best I can, but it isn’t easy. I try to make my readers laugh in order to make myself laugh, to find the absurdity in things that are otherwise devastating, dark, dying, or disappointing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

By all accounts and purposes, I am a crazy cat lady. So what’s the problem? Why can’t I just take that title and enjoy the slip ‘n slide ride, Oliver in my left palm, Sam in the crook of my right arm? Put on some damn sunscreen. Close my eyes. Slide on through to the end.

Since Oliver has entered my home, so too has a forgetting. I forget, every morning, how new he is to the world, that there are so many things that he has not yet seen and cannot yet do. He tries his darndest to jump like Sam, but I often have to scoop him up and set him on a chair that he wants to climb, or the softest edge of the mattress, or the window sill. I throw one of Sam’s favorite toys and he doesn’t yet know whether to chase, leap, or bite. He finds my chest and performs a tentative, basic inkling of a knead, because that, too, is somewhere wound in his body but still being discovered, like a rope made up of a million primal strands.

He is lighter than a book, his body a minuscule constellation of sinew and nerve and cell. He is scooped with wonder, and so am I. I find myself lying belly on the ground more often than not, scrambling on my knees across the hardwood, to get at his level. His legs are so short. His lungs are so small. I have to tell Sam be careful with that neck as he jaws it, his own teeth eager to come up against that orange fur.

I have forgotten such tenderness. I am breathless with it. I can’t think of anything else when I’m alone with Oliver and his immediate, brand-new, light-filled life. I am sure this is a fraction of what new parents feel for newborns. Or maybe it’s a whole mixed number of that, an entire googolplex. To wake four times in the night and reach for an orange-striped, breathing pile of fur, to ignite his purr within him like an earth hum, to feel him making his way to my face to nudge his chin against mine? I have forgotten such extraordinary love. I have forgotten such broad grace.

***

I can’t imagine that the crazy cat lady, society’s suitcase, does not have this tenderness for the animals she loves. Tending – the same prefix. Hers is a terrific job requiring astonishing care. She must feed her cats daily, mind the water bowls, address the litter, keep her house clean, monitor vet visits, pay attention to behavior, mediate conflict. She must grieve when one has passed on and celebrate when one has just begun. She must nurture, nurture, nurture, all those hearts beating softly and consistently under her roof.

The crazy cat lady thus must have resources – time, money, space, ability. She must be tuned to animal need, while also being attuned to her own.

The crazy cat lady may be up against the biggest, sharpest griefs, almost as fresh as the trails left behind one of her cat’s claws on her skin. She may daily swallow a loneliness that threatens to swallow her. She may not get out much. Or perhaps she does. She may have to face others’ expectations, and constantly set them to the side, explain them away, or tell herself she’ll do her best to meet them, and then sigh and choose not to. Because my sense is that crazy is less a term she is fond of and something more like what the world likes to chew and get stuck in its teeth and show off when it grins at all the women not meeting its expectations.

I think the crazy cat lady must be very brave, to keep so many bodies alive like that. To do so independently. To do so while holding inside her her very own beating heart, feeding its blood. To wake up again and again and say, yes.

They’re like my children, my elderly neighbor – who lives alone – told me the other day, referencing the many cats she has had over the years. I could never have kids of my own. 

She pointed to a freshly dug grave lining the chain link fence, stuck with red flowers. 

My eldest died the day before Thanksgiving, she said. Her eyes shone. She went inside before I could ask her to tell me more.

My elderly neighbor also tells me this, whenever we run into each other outside: I don’t want to keep you. She waves a hand at me, ducks her head. I know you are busy, I won’t bother you for a second longer. She gave me a glossy red flower pot and a card with a cat on it for Christmas the other day. Inside the card: Kate thank you for being such a caring neighbor. 

***

The danger of being a cat lady – effacement. Not yours initially, but society’s. Maybe that is the biggest obstacle the crazy cat lady is up against: her own slippage. Her outlines furring, her back hunching, her arms reaching to the ground. To become like your cats is to become invisible at preferred times. In some cases, it means disappearing under the bed altogether, closing the latches behind you with a meteoric sniiiiip. There’s a reason why cats like caves.

***

In the car after dinner, I told my other friend, I’m not a crazy cat lady! I slapped the steering wheel in mock rage. I mean, I’m so dateable!

That was a good one. I mean that we had a good laugh. But later, I hated it, because there I was, holding society’s suitcase with it – the crazy cat lady is not worthy of love.

No, no, no. The crazy cat lady is filled with love. It pours out of her fingers. She has more of it to give than anyone I know. It may just be that society doesn’t know what to do with that kind of love, its tenor and its shine. So she pours it into furred bodies instead, the kind that make apostrophes around your ankles, that see through the night and cry out with the dawn.

***

I don’t know what point I’m arriving at beyond the fact that society is wrong about the crazy cat lady, and I think suitcases under the bed are silly, and if it weren’t for my own two cats, I’d be laughing a lot less, I’d be colder in my sleep, I’d certainly have less to write about. I’ve always known that society doesn’t quite know what to do with me, and I’m okay with that. It also, maybe, doesn’t quite know what to do with cats (which maybe has something to do with that tenderness I was mentioning earlier). I’m less okay with that because, as Oliver’s foster woman stated in agreement with me last week, cats are fucking perfect.

Let’s just end on this point, then. If I’m the crazy cat lady in your life, it’s an honor to be so. I will happily spend my next stretch of days on the best slip ‘n slide I know. You don’t have to join me. But I promise I’m not insane, and I’m always good about sunscreen. With the acquisition of Oliver, something has ended, yes, but something else has begun, and it’s a good something, and I’ll put it all to words eventually.

For now, happy season of light from the pussy palace to all my loyal readers out there. May tenderness come to you in all the best ways, when you least expect it.

Meow.

Kate McGunagle

(she/they) is a queer and genderqueer playwright, multimedia visual artist, storyteller, and believer in the curious. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Five Points, Passages North, The Whitefish Review, and The North American Review. Their essay “Passive Voice” was the recipient of the 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction and recognized as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2022. Plays include SISTER OF MINE (October 2023 world premiere via the Strides Collective), CAT THINGS, WOMAN OTHER, and JUDITH GOES TO CHURCH.