Are You My Soulmate?

Suki. She was everything I said I wanted. Young, check. Healthy, check. Cute, check. Playful, yup. Never one to waste a minute, before my cat of 18 years had been in the ground 24 hours, I was scouring the internet for Siamese kittens. The best way to get over a heart break? For me, it was to give my love quickly to someone else. We always had multiples – several dogs, a number of cats – but Beeky had been my soulmate. He was the one who kept me sane during tumultuous teenage years; the one I snuck into the college dorm; the one who moved with me to the big city and was with me through the start of both married life and motherhood. While we had other cats, no one was able to read me like Beeky, and when he passed, I was anxious to find his replacement.
Suki came from a family breeder – not registered, nothing fancy, but certainly a decent upbringing. There were six siblings, but several had already been claimed, so I had a choice of two females – both so cute – how can you go wrong with a Siamese kitten? After careful consideration, I went for the one that appeared to be deep in thought, surely a sign that she was soulmate material. While she was young, only 8 weeks, and tiny, only 4 pounds, I figured this would give us a great start on the bonding process. Plus it was May, and as a teacher, my summer stretched in front of me with nothing much to do but focus on my new best feline friend.
It was, and was not, a busy household. I was married, but my husband worked out of state, so was only home on weekends. I had one daughter, aged 7, who was on the quieter side; while involved in plenty of extracurricular activities and friendships, very few of them happened at our home, a six acre spread out in the country. The busiest part about it was the other animals – at the time we had three dogs, a rabbit, two goats and several ducks. Plus we had several cats who had always been indoor-outdoor and were not about to convert to indoor only; with Suki, however, I was heading towards the mindset of indoor only.
So how to raise her as my soulmate cat? Well, it only made sense that some of her personality would come from genetics; I had met the parents and they certainly seemed like nice cats – no skitziness, raised underfoot, busy but involved family. I figured the rest was up to me – I needed her to bond tightly with me, and being not one to sit around much, I fashioned a sling-like pocket that I put her in while I trapsed around the house doing whatever it was a somewhat ‘single’ parent did while caring for a seven-year-old child, three in-house dogs, four cats, the rabbit, goats and ducks. Day in and day out I worked to make sure we spent as much waking (and sleeping) time together as possible. I would be her favorite person, and she my favorite cat.
And so it went for those formative three months – we were together day and night (to the best of my ability). Did you know that seal females are very smart, but also typically very independent? They can be quite opinionated and determined, and often don’t like to be told what to do. They also, in general, will fill the role of queen bee, choosing their companions – both human and feline – and blossom with routine and predictability. Despite all my efforts – and my determination to have Suki fill the role of Siri’s soulmate, she was not having it. She liked to do her own thing and was certainly not going to be told who she should bond with. She was not much of a snuggle bug, and I had wanted an ‘in your arms’ type cat. She definitely was not going to be molded into something she was not, and the ‘carry around in the sling idea’ expired the minute she figured out how to jump out of it. The other felines were tolerated, but were clearly below her. As time went on, and yes, the animals continued to accumulate (three dogs became six, four cats crept up to seven), Suki made it perfectly clear that she was one unhappy camper. Not only did she dislike all the animals, she was also not that keen on me, despite all that early together time I had manufactured.
The lesson here? Soulmates only happen once in a great while. You can’t force them, you can’t finesse them, you should consider yourself lucky if you do find one. At one point after we stopped intaking cats into the Rescue program I counted how many personal cats we had over the years, and came up with some crazy number – I think it was in the 60’s. (This is because we typically took in the older cats who only had a few years, so while we had a great many, we also lost a great many.) But in all of those family members, while there were many cats that I absolutely adored, and there were many that fell into the ‘pretty good’ category, there were only four that made it to soulmate status. Suki? She was a nice cat. But my take-away from the experience with her was the lesson, not the cat.