My cat sleeps around: a sordid tale

I thought my cat didn't like me. I only saw her when I went to the bathroom: a scrawny gray kitty, with white paws and orange eyes, curled up in the bathtub. Unkempt fur, eyes smeared with sleepy gunk, Mirielle looked like a living corpse.

So when I left her with my friend for spring break, I told him not to blame himself if she died.

Two days later in London, I got an e-mail:

"Your cat gave birth to two kittens!"

And so I became the Cat Woman ... and apparently the authority for my cat's sex life.

When I got back to Hopkins, I heard the same question over and over: "Who did your cat get with?" or "Who's the father?"-- often in all seriousness, as if I could talk to my cat about the guy who made her a woman.

To many, she became the "ho" and the "bitch"--but according to area veterinarians, my Mirielle isn't all that uncommon for an animal species as sexually inquisitive as cats.

"Cats are very fertile, so a lot of stray females tend to be pregnant," said Dr. John Fioramonti of Towson Veterinary Hospital. "A lot of people adopt stray cats, and a month later there's a litter."

Both cats and dogs are pregnant for only two months, so often animal shelters don't know that they're giving away a knocked-up pet.

"The first month you are not going to see anything," said Fioramonti. "Even veterinarians get fooled."

But labor is unmistakable -- or should be. Both cats and dogs undergo abdominal contractions and should be left alone during labor, which can last from 12 to 18 hours.

"It takes over a 12 hour period," said Fioramonti.

It shows how much basketball my friend was watching the day Mirielle gave birth -- he didn't notice she had gone through labor until the kittens had already been popped out.

For the longest time, the kittens were just little crawling rats who could barely crack open their eyes. Mirielle --like all teenage moms --wasn't very attentive, and she often scowled to have two little rats nibbling her teats. Sometimes, she just stood up and scampered away so that the little kittens tumbled from her nipples, mewing in shock.

Even a veterinarian's family had its own pregnant cat story. Nancy Herko, whose husband Michael Herko is a veterinarian at Falls Road Animal Hospital, adopted a stray cat who turned out to be pregnant.

"It was at my brother's house, and my brother found it," she said. "She kept getting bigger, so she stayed at my mom's and never left."

Even though it seems like a good joke, the kittens have taken over my life and my conversation ...

I remember the time they suckled one of my friends on the chest, looking for her nipple.

Or the time I came home to find only one kitten--I crawled around the entire place looking for the other, with Mirielle batting at my hair, only to find that Mirielle had hidden the kitten in the hole in my box spring ... possibly out of jealousy.?

And now, four weeks old, they are stumbling around my place, smelling shoes (they have shoe fetishes) and climbing up my couch.

There's just one problem: They are still sexless and nameless.

"Cat genitalia tend to look a lot alike, so a lot of times people don't always know whether they have a girl or a boy," Fioramonti.

And I'm afraid to tinker with their sexuality by giving them the wrong names.?

But I guess the damage has already been done. What I now think are two girl kittens were treated like guys for the first few weeks of their lives ... as I learned in the e-mail from my friend.

"Since they gave birth at? my place, I took the liberty of naming the kittens," he wrote to me in London. "I named them after U2 members."

The Edge and Bono.

Oy.