How We Met Baby Cat: Part Two

Hi, I’m Nicole! Read my introduction to learn more about me and my distinguished Burmese, Mr. Baby Cat.

Note: This is part two of How We Met Baby Cat. Read Part One here!

Baby Cat barely left our house following the late-night home invasion that saw him crash into our lives.

He made himself at home, sleeping on our bed, drinking exclusively from our nighttime glasses of water on our bedside tables, and curling up beside the fire. But the spot he was most partial to was a corner bench with large windows that would flood sunshine onto the bench swabs as the sun traced toward the ocean in the afternoon.

Of course, the rest of us left each day to go to work, run errands, surf, or walk on the beach. But each time we returned, he would still be there, lounging on his back, purring in the golden-hour light.

Months passed and seasons changed, and despite continuing to speak to neighbors about our strange cat inheritance, no one had a clue where he came from. So, there he stayed, sprawled on the corner bench, perfectly content with his newfound situation.

Despite his constant presence, I always assumed he’d take off at some point, follow his nose, and find his way back to wherever the heck he came from in the first place. Although, by that stage, it was the last thing I wanted. I’d come to love the little guy. He reminded me of a relaxed dog—following me on walks through the garden, jumping in the front seat of the car for surf checks, rolling on his back for belly scratches, and curling up on my lap for a sunset beer at the end of a long day.

But the broken cat door was still… well, broken. And in the back of my mind, I knew at any given moment, he might show himself out as quickly as he’d broken in. Until, one day, he did just that.

The Proposal

It must have been the vibes I was giving off. I was stressed. For months, I’d been planning my proposal to Nicole, and there were enough self-inflicted moving parts to the whole thing that I must have seemed like a wreck to any observant cat.

I planned to wake up early Monday morning and tell Nicole I was going to the gym. What I wouldn’t tell her was that I would drive to the airport, board a flight to Fiji, and make the three-hour drive across the main island to a resort at Pacific Harbour on the west coast.

Nicole would go to work as usual, but her boss knew a group of suit-clad friends of mine would storm the workplace, kidnap her, and drive her to the airport. From there, they would give her a plane ticket, she would board the next flight to Fiji, and once landed, a driver would take her the three hours across to the same resort where I would be waiting to propose, along with all of our parents and my brother.

As I said, a lot of moving parts.

Baby Cat seemed to pick up on my uneasiness as the day crept closer, and there was a period of several days before the big day where, for the first time since he’d crashed into our lives, he disappeared.

As much as I was missing my little mate, I didn’t have the brain capacity to focus on too much at the same time. I assumed he’d taken himself back to his home, and however far away they were from us, they would surely be happy to see him again. It was, of course, months that he’d been with us.

The Monday came and we all boarded our flights successfully, arriving in Fiji without a hitch. The proposal went well (spoiler alert, she said yes!), and we spent the rest of the week kicking back in paradise, drinking far too much beer and kava, surfing isolated reefs, and even getting to know a local Indigenous chief who invited us for dinner with him and his family at his village.

Waiting For Us

When Nicole and I returned to Auckland, we landed in the dead of night. By the time we pulled back up at our door, it was one in the morning and pouring rain. It was from that moment we pulled up outside our house that we knew Baby was our cat and he loved us as much as we loved him.

There, saturated from the rain, bedraggled like a rat outside our front door, sat our little friend, yowling and shaking from the cold. We rushed him inside and into a towel. It wasn’t long before he had warmed up and assumed his namesake position—cradled on his back like a baby and purring with dilated pupils.

Once we had collectively calmed down and taken a moment to catch our breath, Nicole and I realized something—we still hadn’t fixed the broken cat door. The gaping hole in our laundry room door had remained a permanent fixture in the house, serving as the perfect entrance and exit to any animal casually wandering by.

Baby Cat knew this. In fact, it had been the way he had broken into our house in the first place, and he had continued to utilize the broken cat door as his personal entrance and exit whenever he wanted to roam in or out.

Nicole and I looked at each other in shared acknowledgment that Baby Cat wasn’t sitting in the rain out of necessity. He was sitting there because he was waiting for us to come home.

That was it for me—no more searching for owners, no more ‘what ifs’ or ‘maybe we shoulds.’ Baby Cat had chosen us for a reason, and as Nicole and I made preparations to begin our own family, it felt only natural to welcome Baby Cat into that journey.

For the next year, that’s exactly what he did. We made plans—not just for our wedding but for the next stage in our lives. We bought a house. As we made plans to move to our new home, we never predicted the second time Baby Cat would perform his Houdini act would be the week we were packing up to move.

Baby Cat’s Houdini Act

As the boxes started to stack higher and furniture was cleared away in preparation for the moving truck’s arrival, Baby Cat vanished into thin air. We rattled his food boxes, searched under the house, and walked around the garden and neighborhood calling his name. He was nowhere to be found. Not a meow, not a scuttle, not a peep from our little mate.

We were devastated, but again, there was so much going on, that we sadly convinced ourselves that maybe, just maybe, amid all the boxes and chaos, he had decided to take himself off to his original home, wherever that was.

A week passed without seeing him, and the morning the moving truck arrived, I spent every free second checking cupboards, hollows, and every empty nook and cranny of the house. Nothing. When it was time to say goodbye to the house, we were barely thinking about the house at all but the cat we had shared so many memories with there.

We took one last look, got in the car, and sadly drove away behind the moving truck. The rest of the day we spent unpacking and arranging boxes in the appropriate rooms of the new house. But I couldn’t shake the thought of Baby Cat from my head. I still had a key to the old house in my pocket, and once the moving truck left, I turned to Nicole and asked if she’d be OK with me heading back to the old house and doing one final sweep. She knew what I was doing, and the moment she nodded, I tore out of the new house and booked it back to the old one.

One Last Look

As I was driving, my biggest fear was the thought of Baby Cat sitting sadly alone in our bedroom, where our bed used to sit. But, in the back of my mind, I knew it was far more likely that the house would be exactly as we left it—empty.

I pulled into the driveway, rattled the key in the lock, and leaped up the two flights of stairs to our bedroom, quickly scanning each room for any sign of Baby Cat. Nothing.

I ran into our old bedroom, and there in front of me was the exact vision I’d been dreading the entire drive over—Baby Cat, sitting sad and alone in the empty spot where our bed used to be. Needless to say, I scooped that little ball of fur into my arms, cradled him like the baby he was, and looked into his dilated pupils as he purred back at me.

‘You’re coming with us, mate.’

Officially Official

And, just like that, we were officially official. I rushed Baby Cat into the car and together, we made our first journey to our new house and new life as a family.

He made himself at home instantly, the way he always had—sprawled out in his newly chosen sun magnet between two windows. The afternoon light hit just right there, and he had all the room he needed to roll onto his back and stretch his legs as far as they could go.

The first renovation we made was a state-of-the-art cat door that wasn’t broken. And he barely used it at all.