Four Bottle Babies and a Whole New Respect for Mama Cats
By Ashley Schausten
Four kittens. Two hands. Zero sleep. Let me tell you about my current houseguests.
Shaggy, Freddy, Daphne, and Velma are four orphaned tabbies — a full litter, all alone in the world, no mama in sight. Which means everything their mother would have done for them, I now do. And I want to tell you, with total honesty: I had absolutely no idea how much that actually was until I became the one doing it.
Bottle feeding every two to three hours — through the night, not just the day. Stimulating them to go to the bathroom (yes, that's a thing, and no, nobody warns you). Keeping them warm enough, because tiny kittens can't regulate their own body temperature. Weighing them daily to the gram, because a kitten who isn't gaining is a kitten in trouble. Wiping faces, changing bedding, running laundry on an endless loop, and somehow still finding time to worry about each one of them individually.
It is relentless. It is exhausting. And it has given me a completely new appreciation for every mother cat who has ever done this — and especially the feral mamas.
Think about it. A feral mother cat does all of this with no warm house. No clean towels. No heating pad, no bottle, no scale, no vet on speed dial. She does it in a bush, under a porch, in a cold crawl space — in the rain, in the wind, in the dark — while also keeping herself fed and alive and avoiding every danger the outdoors has for a cat. She nurses them, cleans them, teaches them, protects them, and moves them one by one by the scruff to a safer spot when she has to, with nothing but instinct and grit.
I'm doing this with every tool and comfort available to me, and it is still the hardest thing I've ever taken on. She does it with nothing.
So if you ever needed a reason to have compassion for the cats living outside, there it is. Every one of them is somebody who survived a version of this that I can barely imagine. Every kitten we take in, every mama we get spayed so she never has to do it all over again, is a small way of honoring how much they've been carrying all along.
Shaggy, Freddy, Daphne, and Velma are warm, fed, and sleeping in a pile as I type this. Their mama never got that. I'm honored to give it to them.
