My Tortoiseshell Cuddlebaby

What happens when you've finally tamed that tortoiseshell hellion you acquired as a kitten into an affectionate squeeze toy? A fearsome dichotomy between part-time lapcat and part-time Sith Lord.

I have a tortie who's been with me over ten years now. As torties are known, she's strong-willed, smart, and highly demanding, as well as feisty. While we've had her, we've paid her plenty of attention and given her an enormous amount of affection, which is just our way. (I come from a very long line of cat lovers. Everyone in my family has a cat or two.)

The result is that she's now quite close to me and constantly asks me for attention as she rarely did when she was a kitten (because she was usually raising some kind of hell or other). Autumn, named for her colors (the place where we got her had named her 'Mocha', which I decided was a cute placeholder for a better name), has become very affectionate to both of us, especially me, and she knows very well she's Daddy's girl. My wife is the disciplinarian and Autumn runs to me immediately when she's catching it from Mommy.

However, she's still quite feisty. She'll let me pick her up for a while now, which is actually amazing considering her response to that in the past, which meant bloodshed, but she makes no bones about telling me when she wants to be put down. There's also the overstimulation factor when she demands petting or grooming and gives no warning whatsoever when that's no longer wanted either, and when that happens, it still means bloodshed. The backs of my hands usually have any number of minor wounds from interacting with my Baby Feist. My wife just tsk-tsks at me and brings some first aid to patch up my paws.

Then there's her 'brother', Sidian, our black cat who is a cuddly miniature panther and very pretty. He's got some really strange quirks, even for a cat, as we adopted him when he was already eight years old. We don't know what went on with him in his original home but while he's very sweet, he's kind of odd in his interactions with us, particularly me, which means he's my wife's cat.

From the beginning, however, his relationship with Autumn constantly has been renegotiated from total hostility to selective hostility. They sometimes play, but Autumn is Autumn, which means she goes full tortoiseshell on him at moments she chooses, which usually means when we're around. They'll sleep on our bed together but there's a lot of sparring. They not only hunt each other (usually Autumn hunting Sidian) but they also try to swipe each other's food. Sidian, in his wierdness, likes to stalk and watch Autumn while she's using the litterbox, which makes my wife think he's kind of creepy. He's definitely voyeuristic. Autumn hasn't really caught on to that yet, but I know what will happen when she does.

When we decided together to get a cat to compliment our dog (Mia, a Westshire/poodle mix who was gifted to us by my in-laws at 8 years of age and passed away a few years ago), I insisted that I wanted a tortoiseshell. My wife was immediately terrified, because she'd heard all of the stories that my sister and I had told her (corroborated by my cousins) about my mother's legendary and notorious tortie, Daizy (1986-2002).

Daizy was sixteen pounds and sixteen years of abject terror on four paws. She was terminally cute as a longhaired tortoiseshell but she was also a mega-hellion: she was half again as big as Autumn and exponentially as feisty. If you didn't live in my parents' home, you were fair game until she got used to the fact that my parents sometimes entertained, and then she modified her behavior to something closer to catlike aloofness. A friend of mine who decided to play with her during a visit wound up losing a bit of skin off of a finger and a surprising amount of blood. He refused to ever come back to the house again.

Fortunately, compared to my mother's Daizy - and they were a perfect pair, as my mother surely would have been a tortoiseshell if she'd been born a cat - Autumn is a bit downtempo and downscale. While she still bears a bit of notoriety as a feistball with our friends and family (my sister had to take care of her once when she was a kitten, but she'd found Daizy for my mother so she knew what she was in for), my wife was relieved that she was nowhere near the terror that was Daizy.

My wife thinks we made mistakes introducing Sidian to Daizy - I mean, Autumn when we first brought him home. For one thing, we was sickly and very drugged up when we chose him from all the cats they had at the shelter. We soon learned why when we saw how shy he really was. Not only had he been neglected (the shelter people told us an elderly woman had him and was now in hospice, so he was dropped off to them) but he hadn't been handling the presence of so many cats so well. Strangely he did try very hard to be friends with Autumn.

At the end of the day, though, the two of us have accepted that the two of them will always have a sparring relationship with occasional moments of camaraderie, as when an occasional mouse appears in our home and the two of them immediately work together to corner and eviscerate it. We cuddle with them and play with them and my wife pays great attention to their diet and health, as she does with me.

She says often that she has no idea what she was thinking when she'd wanted to have children back when we got together. This was quite enough for her.