OUR BABYSITTER GAVE ME AN ULTIMATUM: EITHER GET RID OF MY KITTEN OR SHE’D STOP WATCHING THE KIDS
At first, I thought she was joking. She walked into the kitchen, looked at my new tabby kitten batting at a dish towel on the floor, and said flatly, “That cat has to go. Or I will.”
I laughed nervously, but she wasn’t smiling. She said kittens are “unsanitary,” “unpredictable,” and “dangerous around small children.” Meanwhile, my kids were crouched on the linoleum giggling as the kitten chased their fingers. They were already completely gone for her.
I told her I’d keep the kitten out of the den, that she’d stay in a separate room during her hours with us. But she crossed her arms and said, “It’s me or the cat.”
I should’ve been furious, but instead I just stood there not moving. She’d been with us for three years. She knew our whole schedule, our kids thought the world of her. But asking me to give away a member of our family – just to keep her comfortable?
Then she slipped and revealed the real reason. And suddenly, it wasn’t about safety at all.
It was about something from
What Came Out of Her Mouth Next
Her own childhood.
That’s what she said. She stood there in my kitchen with her arms still crossed and the kitten now winding around her ankles, and she said, “I had a bad experience. When I was little. With a cat.”
I waited.
She didn’t elaborate right away. She looked down at the kitten, then away. There was something in her face I hadn’t seen in three years of her walking through my front door every weekday morning at 7:45. Something that wasn’t composure.
“It scratched my eye,” she finally said. “I was four. My parents had a cat and it got me right here.” She touched the outer corner of her left eye with one finger. “I had to wear a patch for six weeks. I still can’t see right out of that side.”
My son, who is seven and has the situational awareness of a golden retriever, chose that exact moment to run through the kitchen yelling something about a Lego. The kitten bolted under the table. Donna – that’s her name, Donna Pruitt, she’s been with us since my youngest was barely two – Donna flinched hard. Full-body flinch. Like the kitten had moved toward her face.
I understood then. It wasn’t a power play. It wasn’t some weird territorial thing about the house. She was scared. Genuinely, physically scared of a four-pound tabby kitten named Biscuit.
The Part That Made Me Feel Terrible
Here’s the thing. I’d had Donna for three years and I didn’t know this about her.
I didn’t know because I’d never asked. She showed up, she was good with the kids, she was reliable and warm and she made my daughter’s lunch with the crusts cut off exactly the way my daughter liked without ever being asked twice. I paid her, I thanked her, I gave her a Christmas bonus and asked about her mother when her mother was sick. But I didn’t know she had a partially damaged eye from a cat scratch at age four.
That felt bad. Still does, honestly.
But it didn’t change what she’d actually said to me. The ultimatum was still the ultimatum. And Biscuit was still Biscuit, asleep now under the kitchen table on top of my son’s left sneaker.
I asked her why she hadn’t just told me this from the beginning. When I brought the kitten home two weeks earlier.
She said, “I thought I could handle it.”
I asked her what changed.
“She jumped up onto the counter yesterday. Right by my face. While I was cutting the apple slices.”
I pictured it. Donna at the cutting board, the kitten launching herself up from nowhere the way kittens do, landing six inches from her face. The bad eye. The memory of being four years old and a cat’s claw catching her just there.
Yeah. Okay.
What I Actually Did
I didn’t get rid of the cat.
I know how that sounds. I know some people will read that and think I chose an animal over a person, and that’s not exactly wrong, but it’s not exactly right either.
What I did was sit down at the kitchen table with Donna for about forty minutes while my kids watched something in the other room. I asked her to tell me the whole story. She did. It was worse than the one-sentence version – the cat had been a big orange tom her parents kept, and it had scratched her twice before the eye incident, and her parents hadn’t done anything about it either time, and she’d been scared of cats ever since. Forty years. She’s forty-four.
I told her I wasn’t going to give Biscuit away. I told her that honestly, and I told her why – my kids were already attached, and I didn’t think it was fair to them, and also I was attached, and I didn’t think it was fair to me. I said it as plainly as I could without being mean about it.
But I also told her I wasn’t going to pretend her fear wasn’t real or that it didn’t matter.
So we worked something out.
The Agreement We Landed On
It took a few days of back and forth. A couple of texts, one more longer conversation on a Thursday afternoon.
The deal was this: Biscuit stays confined to the master bedroom and bathroom during Donna’s hours. Door closed. She doesn’t have access to the kitchen, the den, the kids’ rooms, anywhere Donna goes during the day. I bought a door stopper specifically designed to keep cats from pawing doors open, because Biscuit had already figured out how to hook her paw under the gap and pull. I put Biscuit’s food, water, and litter box in the master bath. She has a window in there that looks out over the backyard and a cat tree my sister-in-law had in storage. She’s fine.
Donna agreed to try it for a month.
I also – and I want to be clear I didn’t do this to fix Donna or because I thought I knew better – I mentioned, once, gently, that there were therapists who specifically worked with phobias, and that the treatment for animal phobias was usually pretty short and had a high success rate. I said it once. She nodded. I didn’t bring it up again.
That was eight months ago.
What’s Different Now
Donna is still with us.
She hasn’t mentioned the therapist thing, and I haven’t asked. That’s not my business. She knows the information exists.
What I can tell you is that two months ago, I came home and found my daughter sitting on the kitchen floor with Biscuit in her lap. The master bedroom door was open. And Donna was standing at the sink, back to the room, washing dishes. Biscuit was maybe six feet behind her.
Donna knew the cat was there. I could tell by the set of her shoulders. She wasn’t relaxed. But she wasn’t leaving either.
She heard me come in and turned around. She saw me looking at the situation and she said, “I’m working on it.”
I didn’t say anything. I put my keys on the hook and went to look at whatever my son was building on the living room floor.
My daughter carried Biscuit back to the bedroom and closed the door. Donna finished the dishes. Nobody made it a thing.
That’s where we are. Not resolved, not perfect, not some clean story about how everyone learned a lesson and the cat brought the family together. Donna is working on something that scared her badly when she was four and has scared her every day since. Biscuit is in the master bedroom from 7:45 to 4:30 on weekdays and doesn’t seem to care at all.
My kids still think the world of Donna. My daughter drew her a picture last month – a woman with brown hair and two kids and, in the corner, a small orange cat. She gave it to Donna without any explanation.
Donna put it in her bag to take home.
I didn’t ask what she did with it. Some things you just let be.
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If this one’s sitting with you, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more unbelievable stories, read about the officer who made one boy’s first day of school unforgettable or the time someone found a kid hiding in their cat’s carrier.
