‘I’m going to kill that cat,’ I say to Cat Dad.

I don’t mean it, but also, I do.

Two of our cats have injured legs.

A stray– who I’d perhaps foolishly fed once or twice (or three times, four, more). His ribs were showing, his coat dull. I have a heart! – has attacked them.

I’ve seen it before, years ago, a stray tore one of my pets down from a tree, breaking its back leg in the process. They go for the leg to disable them, making them an easier target. Two cats with the same injury? It was no accident.

*

I'm dressed for work. We’re due in the theatre in an hour, my makeup is done (for once), my dress is a period style khaki number that disguises my boots as fashion instead of what they really are: practical. We’re late, just a little, bordering on time really.

I go to grab my keys and see him in the garden. Dropping the keys, I grab the gun and stride quickly to the side door.

He spots me and despite having frequently come to me in search of food, he sees something in my gate that warns him. He turns on his heel, fleeing, and I do not run, but I do not slow either. In my head, I am Lara Croft-esque, fully made up, khaki gown, gun at my side. In reality, I probably look more like something from The Field.

When I'm sure he's close enough and seems to have thought he's lost me, I raise the gun to my eye and pull the trigger.

*

I became a much worse pet owner when I became a mother. And I don't think this is uncommon.

Maybe not worse, as I'm aware of my new biases, I'm careful to still treat animals with the same care and consideration I always have. But the heart and love I had once for them pales now. Not that I hadn't understood love before I had a child. Rather, that I'm more aware of the work involved in pets, I'm more aware of the damage they could potentially cause to my child.

I’ve always had an affinity for animals which bordered on ridiculous. It was something I passed on to my son, seeing the possible negative effects when we were forced to have multiple funerals a day for insects last summer. To hurt an animal caused, and still causes, me pain. It feels unnatural, like I am tearing parts of myself to shreds.

My cats and dog, while not my babies, were under my protection. My dog in particular, with her loyalty and complete dependence on us, was childlike in my eyes. But when the baby was born, I soon saw her strong jaw, sharp teeth and instincts which would remove all responsibility from her, placing anything that could happen to the child squarely on my shoulders.

As it happens, there is no greater protector of my child than that dog. She’s a gentle creature, and the only time I have ever seen her display something that could be regarded as territorial or protective is in thinking that he may be in danger. When I try to scold the child for something, she will calmly step between us. The first time she did it, I remembered a similar scenario twenty five years previously, I was sitting on the bottom step being given out to by my mother (deservedly, no doubt) and our boxer stepped in between us, resting his heavy skull on my knee. It diffused the situation to laughter and I escaped punishment I no doubt had been courting for days.

I wouldn’t say I trust my dog, in that she’s an animal who when frightened could harm a person, but as much as you can trust a dog, while being cautious, I trust her. I certainly feel safer walking quiet lanes with her by my side. Saying that, if she so much as nipped my son, I wouldn’t think twice before killing her.

*

The baby animals are having their season. Lambs and calves in the fields.

I find myself repeating the warnings of my childhood. A cow with a calf is more dangerous than a bull.

I took my son to the petting farm a couple of months ago. A goat had been born the day before. It lies belly up, head twisted, bleating desperately. When the kids approached the kid, the mother goat went bonkers. She pucked over the barrier, front hooves straining. I told the children she was just protective, the same as their mums.

We got a staff member and alerted them to the barely conscious baby goat. He carried it away behind a shed door. When he reemerged he told us that the kid wasn’t feeding, and just needed a bottle of milk and a warm box to have a rest in. My child is unconvinced, thinking it’s one of the many lies adults tell children to stop them from worrying.

To ease his mind, I told them that sometimes human babies need that too. It’s normal, I said. It is, normal for some young not to thrive. For some young to not take the milk. To die, distressed mother bleating at their side.

To take the baby goat away was the only way to save it. It would be returned to its mother when it had fed and was standing. Still, all I could hear was the calls of that mother goat, and the clashing of her horns against the fence as she tried to escape to search for her kid.

My own child was in the NICU briefly. A day, two. The cycle of night and day is meaningless in the postpartum period. I could only visit him. An agonising walk that should have taken two minutes, but with the trauma of surgery to my abdomen took me twenty. Leaving him there, with these strangers, went against nature.

During this time, my instincts kicked into overdrive. The warm feelings of glowing love that I had expected to come after birth didn’t come until much later. Possibly due to c-section, anaesthetic, stress, but that’s a tangent I won’t go into now. What did kick in was protectiveness. I remember my son’s father saying the same, that the feeling that overwhelmed him was a need to protect this baby.

Is this what we call love, an instinct to protect? Love, in the way I love my child now, grew as I got to know him. A relationship both like and unlike any other. It is unconditional, but I also won’t insult that love by saying it arrived when he did, fully formed and intact. To love someone just because they came from your body, you’re not really loving them, you’d love anyone that you grew. Or at least, that’s how I felt. I suspect that when we say we love our children more every day it’s true, because we are learning more about them, they are becoming and there’s more of them to love.

I believe love at first sight is instinct, is animal.

The first night I met my partner, the draw was electric, so strong it felt like being winded. Did I love him? Of course not. I didn’t know him. But my body, hormones and psyche included, knew I wanted him more than I’d wanted anyone in my life to that point. I can’t claim it was love at first sight, as romantic as I am, because I don’t believe that’s possible. Unless, we think of love as instinct, as part of our animal selves… and who’s to say that it isn’t?

When I met my son, that instinct, a sheer protectiveness which overwhelmed every part of me, was immediate. It was as powerful as the desire which had drawn me to my partner years before, more powerful. It wasn’t fueled by want, but need. A need to protect. If I had thought I felt disconnected to myself during labour, this new self was even more alien.

In the postpartum fever I saw threats where there were none, intrusive thoughts playing butchery in front of my eyes. A man (I know now, just a father also visiting his child) walked into the NICU as I was walking out. In my head, he was a killer, there to annihilate my baby specifically. I knew this wasn’t true, I was, thankfully, not experiencing psychosis, but my body, set on protecting my newborn, was watching out for all potential threats.

And what is more threatening to a woman than a strange man?

If I had horns I would have disemboweled him. If I hadn’t been hanging on to the threads of sanity I may have tried anyway.

There is a ferocity in motherhood that we are not taught to prepare for. A mother would die for her child, we expect that. I didn’t expect how quickly I knew that I would kill for him.

I don’t pretend to make assumptions about an animal's capacity for love. Who knows where instinct ends and love begins? Perhaps there is no distinction. There is instinct and there is a bond. Combine the two and you get love.

I had the pleasure of leading a workshop with MOSS & MILK recently on writing maternity as a mammal. During it, I talked about this idea of the mother as dangerous. As rage as an essential part of maternity. Rage can come as a surprise, and make us feel unlike the warm and loving mother we’re supposed to be. But that rage doesn’t always make us feel powerful.

Speaking with that group of wonderful women at the workshop, the idea of fragility came up. It has come up in conversations before, and it is undoubtedly how I felt during maternity. I was exposed, in paint, out of control, and terrified. I felt vulnerable, and yes, extremely fragile.

Sure, I felt dangerous – to myself. But the idea that I was now the world’s most dangerous animal? Preposterous.

And yet… the new mother is a scary thing.

A new mother is the world’s most dangerous animal because, even at her weakest, her most vulnerable, she will tear herself apart to protect her child.

*

I raise the gun to my eye and pull the trigger.

Water shoots across in an arch and he dashes without getting so much as a droplet on him.

Fuck it, I yell, and return the water pistol to the house. We’re late for work. I make a mental note to send another email to the cat rescue people.

If it had been a real gun, I wonder if I would have had the will to shoot. I recoil from injuring an animal. But I do not know if I can claim that to be out of morals or habit. If I cannot get this cat out of my garden permanently, the next time he attacks one of my own, it may be fatal. And my cats, while not my children, are my babies, and I will kill for them if I have to.

A mother is gentle, a mother is loving, a mother is patient. Love is patient and kind and all that shit. But a mother has to protect, and to protect we must be fierce.

How do we hold ferocity and love except by knowing where to direct each?

We are loving, we are dangerous, we are animal.

Meow.