Do I love him?

How does one love something meant to be healed and released?

Amber brings home a kitten to foster. He is underweight and runty, his white spotted black fur matted and tacky despite having received a bath. His green eyes are beacons, and his ears are satellite dishes, so disproportionate that I joke he must be part bat.

He was found in a car that had been in long-term parking at JFK, though only once the car was closer to Rhinebeck. It would take someone without a solitary redeeming feature to toss this unfortunate stowaway to the curb rather than to someone who could help him. These people called Amber's animal hospital to ask what to do and were told to bring him to a cat rescue. Instead, they brought him to the animal hospital and left him.

I hoped he would go to another home to foster while Amber and I were on vacation. I had not interacted with a kitten since Jareth and was unsure I would react well to something small and damaged in my home.

He--this wee beastie I keep giving names that don't take--is smaller than Jareth when he came into our lives. He is weaned from some mother who may never miss him but is not weaned by much. Amber invests in pricey kitten food and tapes shut the cabinets and toilet of our downstairs bathroom to keep little Kennedy--"No, that's not his name"-- away from our cats, at least until Merobiba--"Absolutely not"--gets used to humans.

Amber says the moment they scruff Daredevil--"He'll never get adopted if people associate him with Marvel"--he looks up at them with an Are you my mother? gleam.

I try to scruff him. He gives this look readily. The kitten purrs madly the moment I rub his manky forehead.

If Amber came home and said, "Guess what, buckaroo? We have a kitten now. Deal with it," I would accept it. I would also consider "Buckaroo" a potential name. That we will bathe, feed, and cuddle him, then hand him over to a stranger to love is uncomfortable. It is not that I love the kitten. ("We could call him Snickerdoodle since he looks like one," -- he looks nothing like one -- "but you couldn't abbreviate it to Snicker. It would have to be Doodle," maintains my spouse.) He is cute and fun to play with, but I cannot make myself authentically love him. I say the word to him because I want him to get used to hearing it. I want someone to love him, even if it is not me.

The first day, I cry. Holding a wriggling kitten makes me miss Jareth. The second, I openly weep, explaining this to the kitten, who is too fixed on the scratching post that Amber had rigged up to care that my face leaks.

The first day Jareth was in our home, I loved him. He laid his gray and black head on my thigh and looked up at me with totally open fondness. I was his now, and he would never doubt it. Loving him was one of the best things I had ever done, and losing him so dramatically and soon affects Amber and me still.

The kitten likes me, but the kitten likes toilet paper only slightly less.

He feigns running away--running where in the bathroom is unclear--but loudly purrs when I take the flea comb to him to dislodge some more of whatever has done this to his coat, usually taking conspicuous fur with every session. Amber asserts that his mother must have been a rough licker.

We strip him a little barer each time we try to fix him.

I wish he were either my kitten or not. I might not react differently, but I would stop checking whether I loved him yet. I pick him up and stare into his unblinking eyes--why won't he blink?--and try to make myself love him. I will protect and care for him, but this isn't enough. I cuddle him in my lap for three seconds before he runs off to play and only feel a pleasant inconvenience.

I tell Amber some of this, conflating it with my favorite student leaving the facility in June after I had known, talked, and cared for him for a year and a half. Colleagues told me I was the best thing that ever happened to him. He is the culmination of my teaching experience to that point: a queer, mentally ill, felonious genius. He is the closest I've had to a kid and only the second student I ever thought of as mine. (The other was a girl when I worked at Maplebrook. She was a partially deaf pixie who went up 3.2 grade levels in reading in a year of my teaching because I was so interested in what she thought.)

I am sure my former student would gag and roll his eyes that I conflate him in any way with a kitten now equal parts sticky fur and naked skin.

Amber wants to foster more kittens in the future. That cannot happen if I wonder about keeping this one, which doesn't mean I won't. I merely wish I could know what is right, what I end up doing.

I broach the subject with Amber one night, facilitated in no small part by their having begun a meditation and exercise practice, which means that they come to bed late and wake up early. Daily sleep deprivation does not improve my mental health. (They seem happier, though.)

They say keeping the kitten was not their intention in bringing him here, but other people thought it was an inevitability. I tell them, feeling I am divulging a big secret, that I do not love the kitten. It feels almost sinful to say this, but it is accurate, and I don't want to hide it anymore. I will temporarily cede my bathroom to this tiny goblin, but I can't find the love I need for him.

Amber is surprised that I would even accept that we might keep the kitten and thinks I would not have let him into our home under those pretenses.

They diverge into the reasons that we should not have a third cat. Among these is that our two established cats do not like the kitten. They hiss at him or want nothing to do with him. Columbia, for her part, will stop eating and hide if she sees the kitten in the apartment. She is terrified of him, even though she outweighs him by a factor of three.

This conversation does not make me feel any closer to wanting the kitten or not wanting the kitten. If I made that decision, I don't know that I would be thinking about the kitten. Instead, I would envision the student I lost. Instead, I would remember the kitten who died years ago. This kitten, who is the reason I can't use my downstairs bathroom, is a locum tenens. He is not in himself a kitten to me. He's symbolic. I probably don't have a good reason to keep a symbol in my bathroom. If I were to love him, it would have to be authentic or not at all. I couldn't pretend at this.

Amber is clear this is not the point at which people would usually fall in love with the kitten. This is not a cuddly beast. This is a partially hairless gremlin. He's cute. Most kittens are. It doesn't matter much, even if I might emphasize the verdure of his constant gaze and the silliness of those ears.

I don't know what the right thing to do, if there is a right thing. Amber complains about the cost of a new cat, especially a kitten. They talk about getting cat insurance, which I vaguely knew was a thing, but they put a price on it. To me, this is two hours of work a month; money this small is not relevant to me.

The cost is not a concern, but I agree that our apartment is small. It can more or less fit two cats, but a third may be ambitious. As Amber is the one to clean litter boxes and brush their teeth--which they begin doing to the kitten even though his teeth are made to fall out--it is a more significant burden for them. I feed the cats, occasionally slipping pills into the wet food and hanging out with him; a new mouth to babysit until the dish is clean is not much of an investment for me.

Amber says that it's not totally in our hands. If the co-worker who might want the kitten does not want him, finding someone to adopt him would be hard.

Right now, anyone looking at the kitten would be taken aback by the state of his fur. They might believe he has mange, which is not the most attractive quality in a kitten. It is challenging being reminded of things so painful by something frolicsome. The kitten has no idea about much of the world, principally among this is how he makes me feel.

I don't react differently to the kitten. I feel an obligation to his rehabilitation. I need him to feel love, even if I'm not the one to love him. I need him to become the cat he can be.

I broach the subject of a hard line on keeping the kitten. When he gets his checkup, he has to be free of FIV and FeIV. I cannot bring another kitten into my life whom tumors will cover, who will break my heart before his first gotcha day. I do not regret Jareth--not for a moment--but I cannot endure a sequel. To my relief, Amber agrees.

They are also worried about my cat allergies, which I do have despite having two cats. One of our cats is on an allergy control food because she has long hair and would most likely cause me to sneeze.

Amber thought that he would be a more demanding kitten to rehabilitate, that he would come into our home some hissing feral rather than a ball of energy and purrs. Given how he was found, he would have every right to have a chip on his shoulder. He doesn't. He is simply happy that there's food, which he eats prodigiously. He has gained twice his body weight in maybe as many weeks. His belly always feels swollen, but Amber says there is no limit to how much one can feed a kitten as long as they keep eating.

This experience makes me feel like I cannot let Amber foster more kittens or any animal really. It is too emotionally draining for me.

NB: Weeks later, partly because I am incapable of processing this experience, we adopt the perfectly healthy kitten. Amber names him Zageus, which I would love to tell you is because they are a keen student of mythology, but which is that they played the game *Hades* for a hundred hours.

When Amber tells the agency we will keep him, they call us a "failed foster," which feels unnecessarily judgmental.

last watched: Fargo
reading: Why Buffy Matters