We have a rat butt problem.

No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. Let me explain.

Back in early 2020, we decided it was time to add a couple of four-legged members of the household. The right amount of time had passed since we’d said goodbye to our last elderly pet, and apparently raising four-year-old twins and a seven-year-old daughter wasn’t quite enough chaos.

Eventually we found a bonded pair through a foster mom: a fluffy white-and-brown kitten who purred at the drop of a hat, and a half-feral black cat missing half his tail who hissed at everyone except his fluffy best friend. When we were told that he scratched and may never be fully tame, we realized he wasn’t all that different from our twins and we decided not to shy away from a good time. The white fluff ball became Waffle, because Becca got naming rights. The half-feral, partially tailed feline became Dennis Eckersley, because Michael insisted on naming him after his second-favorite baseball player.

The first six months were a little rocky. While Waffle quickly became an affectionate and gentle cuddler, Dennis Eckersley remained true to his promise: he was skittish, unfriendly, and prone to scratching if we got too close. After a few months of this, I began to tire of the amount of antibiotic cream we were stocking and declared that I would take extreme measures to tame the cat. I had read up on what to do, and the key was to separate the two cats so that Dennis Eckersley would learn to trust us without Waffle present. “We’ll keep him in the garage and go out and visit him a few times a day… With no other interaction he will eventually have no choice but to learn to trust us.”

“You want to put the cat in solitary confinement?” asked Michael.

Amazingly, the plan actually worked. Without Waffle there to be his emotional support cat, Dennis Eckersley slowly began to warm up to us. I would take wet cat food out to him a few times a day, and hold a spoon out to him, forcing him to come near me in order to eat. When this seemed to work, I began to gently pet him while he ate so that he could get used to human touch. It only took a week or so before he was lying in my lap.

“You basically Stockholm syndromed the cat,” Michael commented. He wasn’t wrong.

With Dennis Eckersley settled, the cats both took to us fairly quickly, and even the addition of a new dog, Bailey, six months later, didn’t disturb them overly much. But we did notice some interesting personality quirks that came out as Waffle and Dennis Eckersley grew from young kittens to fully adult cats.

With Waffle in particular, we assumed from his affectionate nature and almost incessant purring, that he would be a cuddly, mostly indoor cat. This expectation was further reinforced by his long coat, which made him look like the type of animal that posed on pillows for Cat Fancy magazine. What we discovered was that once he was fully grown, he became an intensely independent feline who made it his mission to almost completely disappear for days, if not weeks on end during the summer months. Over time, we learned to anticipate his disappearance and call this The Cattening. This season is marked by warm weather, frogs burbling in the nearby creek, and the complete disappearance of our beautiful long-haired white-and-brown cat.

Michael in particular has a dislike of The Cattening. An ardent animal lover, he has a particular soft spot for Waffle. He took it very personally when Waffle first began to disappear for days or weeks on end. As each Cattening season wears on, he tends to worry more and more about the potential misfortunes that could befall an exploratory cat. He worries about coyotes, about Waffle getting hit by a car, and about another family deciding our beautiful white-and-brown cat is theirs now. His anxiety increases to the point where he will stand at the end of our driveway some nights, playing YouTube videos of cats meowing on his iPhone, hoping Waffle will hear them, assume we have replaced him with newer cats, and come home out of spite.

Whenever Waffle comes home during The Cattening, Michael expresses his relief by showing his Irish–Italian roots and stands over Waffle as he eats, trying to shame him into some semblance of domestic indoor cathood. “What are you doing? Look at you. Look at your coat. How do you get so dirty? You’re not even white at this point. You’re just tan all over. You’re a disgrace and frankly, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” Throughout the lectures, Waffle remains unconcerned.

If Waffle grew up to be an independent, noncommittal pet, we were surprised when Dennis Eckersley went completely the other way. Although I was the one who had undertaken the primary work of “taming” him, he bonded strongly with Michael, now often jumping onto the bed at bedtime to cuddle, or waiting until Michael sits down on the living room sofa to lie down by his side and headbutt him until he is given scratches. Although Dennis Eckersley loves Michael, he retains a few vestiges of his feral ferocity, as he will make it clearly known with his claws when cuddle time is at an end. Michael has learned to be very quick when retracting his arm in order not to need any Band-Aids.

Dennis Eckersley also developed a fondness for hunting. This, in turn, has become one of our larger cat ownership headaches: to show his affection and gratitude, Dennis Eckersley will occasionally (but regularly) find and kill rats and leave them for us to find outside of our front door.

I described a recent situation to my sisters: “So Dennis Eckersley has been stalking and killing rats…It’s a whole pet cemetery situation right underneath Rebecca‘s window outside. Yesterday I realized there was another rat… rather, the back half of a rat. Michael asked me to describe it so he could handle it and I said ‘I don’t know…it’s basically a rat butt’ and now we’ve just been referring to it as the rat butt for the last 24 hours.”

As gross as it may sound, rat butts have become an unwelcome but regular appearance in our lives. In one particularly memorable incident, I heard a cat yowling at the front door and opened it to find Dennis Eckersley sitting proudly on our walkway a few feet away, with a mouse corpse carefully displayed on our mat. I screamed and closed the door and immediately called for Michael.

Michael went to the door and opened it. Dennis took the mouse in his mouth, flipped it in the air, and it landed back on the mat. Like a Benihana chef who desperately wanted us to notice and appreciate his work.

Michael yelled, “THANK YOU BUT MOUSE FRIENDS STAY OUTSIDE,” quickly shutting the door.

Dennis Eckersley yowled again a minute later and we opened the door to see him now sitting next to the mouse on our mat, looking at him expectantly. Michael said, “YES WE ARE ALL VERY PROUD OF YOU DENNIS ECKERSLEY, AND YOUR DEAD MOUSE. WE WILL NOT BE BRINGING HIM INSIDE.”

Last April, Waffle and Dennis Eckersley were joined by a sister that they very much did not expect. One day after coffee hour at our church, Michael and I had this exchange:

Michael: hey, heads up. While I was making the coffee I found a stray kitten outside. She was really friendly. We’re not keeping her.

Also Michael: long story short I put the kitten in our car

Me: WE SHALL NAME HER DAISY.

M: NO, we will see if she is chipped and definitely not keep her.

Rebecca: DAISY! Perfect name.

Michael: I cannot emphasize enough how temporary Daisy is.

Charlie: I can’t wait to get home and ask ChatGPT for the best way to introduce Daisy to our pets

Jack: it’s a great day to have a new kitten

Michael: continued making sensible arguments that none of us had any intention of listening to

There was never any question about Daisy becoming a permanent member of the O’Neill household. Compared to her two older brothers, she has very distinctive kitten energy; she constantly follows us around the house to see what we are doing, and requires that we scoop her off of the kitchen counter whenever dinner is being cooked. She, too, has become an indoor-outdoor cat like her brothers – but she takes her role as a family cat seriously, walking Charlie and Jack to their bus stop in the morning. This past Halloween, she walked up and down the streets of our neighborhood with us as we did our trick-or-treating. Because Daisy and Dennis Eckersley are both black, we mostly tell them apart by counting tails.

Every summer Michael still worries through another Cattening while I remind him that Waffle has always come home eventually. Dennis Eckersley continues to reject the cat door on principle. Every so often another rat butt appears on the front walk. Daisy, once the temporary cat, now seems convinced she’s one of the children. None of this was part of the original plan when we brought home two kittens in 2020. We’ve accepted that the O’Neill household is less something we run than something that keeps happening to us.