There is more than one way to be an orphan.
There are even more ways to be a mother.
At Tabby’s Place, we are no strangers to small strangers. A kitten is frailty that breathes.
His mother would be here if she could. A mother cat is instinct enfolded in mercy, and no one can tell where one ends and one begins. If she had her way, the same could be said of her newborn’s heartbeat and her own.
Mothers do not always get their way. Cars, confusion, and chaos all get in the way. Kittens get separated. Kittens become strangers, urchins, the prey of all prey.
But if you can become an orphan, you can become family.
Rupert, alone on the roadside, became ours.
We readily recognize such orphans. We bottle-raise them through the night. They rise in bald hands. Furless mothers go sleepless for a stranger, for no reason other than that he screamed for mercy.
This is Tabby’s Place, where you become family before you know your name.
Rupert became ours, and then Rupert became Shelby’s.
Having birthed a beautiful brood of her own, our newest mother welcomed one more. Rupert went from “orphan” to “massively mothered” overnight.
But there are other ways to be orphaned and mothered.
If she had her way, mama Saturn would draw rings of protection around her children. No grief or giants would find the way to her nest.
Mothers do not always get their way. Young and terrified, Saturn shuddered in a maze of fear’s making.
It was not for lack of love that she could not nurse her new moons, Titan and Prometheus. But fear makes many orphans. The boys were born underweight. The boys had no gravity.
The boys were born at Tabby’s Place, where mothers wear calico but also Crocs.
The boys had the gravity of love.
Orbiting south of three ounces, Prometheus and Titan could not see their home planet. They could not read the Tabby’s Place picture book, where mamas come with many faces.
They could only know that they were not orphans anymore. They tasted and saw that mercy is good. The giants of death trudged away, defeated again. Two new moons would grow into their valiant names.
Saturn, too, would go from orphan to adored. Our feral mama thrives on, cared for in a safe colony.
Where mothers are many, all is never lost.
There was no mightier mama than Jupiter.
Feral-born mothers do not always trust us. Why should they, when they have known their instincts far longer they have known our faces? Humans speak at blasphemous volumes and shoplift their kittens while they are sleeping. We can’t blame them if they shape-shift into grizzlies when we approach.
But Jupiter did nothing of the sort. She arrived so flooded with love, it burst the banks of kinship and soaked everyone. Jupiter loved us before we named her. Jupiter declared us family before we said the word.
Jupiter was expectant and jubilant. She told us all about her five kittens inside, and what she would name them, and the storybooks they would all read together at bedtime. Her little calico was going to be a poet, she could just feel it. Calicos are all artists, you know.
Jupiter was the mother of the century, even before she became a mother.
Then Jupiter had five kittens. Three survived.
Even the best mother can feel like a motherless child.
Cats do not grieve in the manner of humanity, but you can’t tell me that they don’t count. There were three where there should have been five. Jupiter’s losses were as real as ours.
Jupiter’s coping mechanism was familiar. She did not fall like a meteorite. She rose like fire. She rose like love. She raised three micro-moons, as though she was blessed to have any kittens at all.
We are all blessed to have any kittens at all.
This is why we cherish kittens as though they were earth’s first, last, and only kittens.
They tell me that the moon is darkest at precisely the moment it is closest to the sun. It never departs. It has its reasons for leaving the room. It is gathering light to bring back to the nest. It will not leave us orphans, though we all feel otherwise in the dark.
They tell us the dictionary definition of “mother,” but they leave out the most important part. If you filled all the books in all the worlds, you would not exhaust the meaning of “mother.”
This is good news for orphans of every stripe.
A foster family is a mother, an eight-armed organism of sleepless love.
A volunteer is a mother, stacking cans of Kitten Milk Replacer like votive candles.
A donor is a mother, putting on reading glasses to make out the credit card numbers, so someone small will make it through the night.
A mother cat is a mother and an orphan all at once, dueling fear and death like the rest of us.
There are many ways to grieve, but there are many more to thrive.
Happy Mother’s Day, beloveds.