Cat-Schlepping While Pregnant: A Difficult Combination

March 21, 2019 Solana Joy

Trucking around London with my BFF, just after finding out I was pregnant. A very real ‘gap’ was already starting to open up between our old adventure and a new one.

My last post here was in July. I was packing up for Aífe and I to go on a big schlep to England, via the Netherlands, so that I could participate in a conference on animal ethics and to enjoy a big, summer schlepping adventure with my best friend. I was pretty excited, and intended to blog about our journey in great detail. And now it has been eight months without a word. What happened?

What happened is that exactly two weeks after that last post, I discovered I was pregnant. Which means I was already pregnant when I set off on the big schlep with my heavy suitcase and kitty in tow. I didn’t know that though. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for a few months, but we’d had no luck in my previous cycles, and there was absolutely no sign that anything was different about this one. After a few months of getting down over the negative results, I’d decided to stop worrying myself, to stop thinking about getting pregnant, and focus on the adventure at hand.

So while I was completely exhausted from the moment we set off on our trip, I assumed my fatigue was easily explained by an intense schedule, a lack of sleep, an excess of baggage, and carrying a twelve pound cat around all day in an unexpected and unrelenting heat wave. Those were valid reasons to be tired. But in our last days in England, it finally dawned on me to take a test, and I discovered that there was another reason for my unrelenting weariness; I’d been carrying a stowaway the whole time. A stowaway not much bigger than a poppy seed, yet already triggering an astonishing cascade of changes throughout my whole body… and about to trigger a lot of changes throughout my life.

I am now over thirty-eight weeks pregnant. My due date is April Fool’s Day, but all the books and apps I look at tell me to be ready to go into labor at any second. And so, now that the end is nigh, I’d like to share my experience of trying to combine pregnancy and cat-schlepping.

Long story short: they don’t mix very well at all.

#8: Cat + Bicycle = Cat-Schlepping on Wheels

August 8, 2016 Solana Joy

I’ve never been much of a cyclist. At seven, I was the last of my friends to move on from training wheels, and only then under persistent peer-pressure. This was when I was practicing on dirt and gravel roads, in a hometown too small for stoplights. A quarter century later, I am currently living in Berlin, and get very stressed out cycling around such a major metropolis (cabs, busses, tram tracks, oblivious pedestrians, car doors opening, delivery trucks, bike lanes that abruptly disappear, other mental cyclists, etc). And when it comes to cycling anywhere hilly, or while hauling camping gear, forget it. I’d rather get off and walk.

My natural inclination is to go everywhere by foot, to have time to take in my surroundings as I move through them at a human pace, with minimal chance of crashing into anything. I consider myself to be something of a champion pedestrian – I’ll walk ten miles up, down, and around town or country and not think twice about it, until my flat feet and dodgy knee start to ache.

However, moving at a walking pace certainly does have restrictions. Especially if you’re schlepping a twelve pound cat. The desire to get out and see more of the world, schlep further and faster, and minimize the damage to my shoulders, has finally motivated me to get over my aversion to cycling. I’ve started going for bicycle rides with Aífe, and it’s far and away one of the best, most gleeful things I’ve ever done.

#5: The Adventure That Waits Everywhere

July 17, 2016 Solana Joy

One of the best and most challenging things about taking cats outside is their incredible alertness. We get used to our feline companions lounging and snoozing besides us at home, and forget that every bit of their little brains and bodies is actually rigged to form the perfect hunting machine. Aífe can spend hours being a blob beside my desk, but the second she’s out on the sidewalk, she transforms into a different creature – one to whom any smell, sound, or movement could signal a potential danger.

Walking with a cat, you realize that you and your pet have very different perceptions of the World Outside. Part of this is that, as a human, you will be able to make sense of things like words and traffic lights. But part of it is that your human and feline selves are equipped with very different sensory inputs. According to bestselling author/ veterinarian John Bradshaw, cats have olfactory powers similar to that of dogs, and so:

“their world, unlike ours, is not based on appearance. Smell is at least as important to cats as vision is, so even if they could imagine, they might well conjure what something smells like rather than what it looks like.”

Which explains why, when I see just a crappy old tarp, Aífe perceives something that inquires a thorough investigation. And why sometimes Aífe becomes terribly agitated, hissing and swatting at the air around her, even though I can’t see anything but a very peaceful, empty garden.

#4: Where Do you Want to Go?

June 29, 2016 Solana Joy

Once you’ve established that you can leave the house with your cat, the next question is – where will you go?

This is, of course, the real question we all face continuously from our childhood forward. Whether it’s wanting to go on a walk, a hike, a holiday, whether we’re just starting out to seek our fame and fortune, or looking to start anew after a breakup or layoff, or fleeing some horrible home-life or war zone, we find ourselves continuously confronting that same question: Where will you go?

Encased within that misleadingly short query, of course, lie a variety of bigger, scarier problems, like “How do you want to spend your life?” and “What are your suited for?” and “Who will have you?” Also, the wonderful, tingling awareness that it’s a very big world out there.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been great at answering the question. There’s just too many interesting options, and I don’t want to rule any of them out.

When I first started schlepping my cat Aífe about outside on a regular basis, and she started showing real improvement in her ability to handle The Vast And Terrifying World Outside, I got really excited, and my imagination started running way ahead of us. We were in Berlin at the time, and it was a humid 100 degrees outside (that’s 37 Celsius), in the very heart of a thoroughly paved metropolis. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get a visa to stay in Germany with my then-fiancé, and I began finding reasons I’d rather be elsewhere anyways. (You know, the thing where you reject the thing/person/situation you care about before they reject you. Defensive, fight-or-flight, the-grass-is-always-greener-elsewhere-anyways-so-fuck-you shit that I had learned from my childhood, and had grown so second nature in my young ‘adulthood’.) As fear melted with fantasy in the boiling brickwork, I had visions of Aífe and I heading back to America, hiking and camping and road-tripping our way through the extraordinary array of stunning terrain that my vast homeland has to offer. Retreating from the anxieties of immigration, romance, crowds, and humans in general, reasserting my independence from everybody except my cat.