MJ Corey & Baby Blue
Among friends and family, I live in infamy for an embarrassing relationship I was in in 2018. The woman in question “checked all the boxes” on paper, but she was needy and demanding of me, and downright bombastic and rude to others. I still sometimes look back at this phase of my life and cringe because the relationship’s failure wasn’t the more common and understandable consequence of unrequited love or bad timing—I simply feared turning thirty and was tired of dating, so for several months I willfully deluded myself about someone I didn’t even like as a person. I did, however, gain two profound takeaways:
1. Checklists often make life worse.
2. Cats always make life better.
This ex had a super cool cat that I’d become close to, and I knew that once I ended the relationship, I needed a kitty of my own. Around that time, a friend had taken an international job and was considering giving away her just-adopted kitten. The answer was obvious. Enter Baby Blue, a cream-colored “long lady” with striking blue eyes, “chocolate-dipped ears,” super-soft “pantaloons,” and “wild critter markings” across her face. Those detailed descriptions were coined by my animal-lover fiancé, who I met not long after Baby Blue came into my life. The three of us have been a happy family for over three years now, and it’s a lesson I think of often while gazing at our sweet girl: once I stopped trying to control life, everything fell into place.
“She’s my shadow and my playmate, following me everywhere and initiating tag, fetch, or hide-and-seek at her whim.”
Baby Blue is a chatty princess with a keen sense of humor and an unexpected dark side. She’s my shadow and my playmate, following me everywhere and initiating tag, fetch, or hide-and-seek at her whim. She usually suggests tag by pawing me and then prancing away; she asks for fetch by dropping her favorite toy—a little plastic spiral—in front of my feet. It’s amazing. Over the pandemic, my partner and I quarantined on the West Coast, and because our temporary home had a yard, we borrowed her nearby family’s dogs—two hilarious Chihuahuas named Lola and Lili. After an initial adjustment period, Baby Blue came to love those sassy dogs. Games of tag were frequent, fierce, but always in good fun. Plus, all three critters shared a common love: vigorous belly rubs! My partner and I had to hand Lola and Lili back upon our return to New York, and I know that Baby Blue misses her best friends. My long-term dream is to find a way to establish a bi-coastal lifestyle and reunite Baby Blue with her fur-aunts.
Baby Blue’s relationship with my partner, “the other mama,” is totally different—more tender. She lives in my partner’s lap—especially when the laptop is out—and sometimes head-butts into her arms until she gets a full embrace back.
These are fixed roles that Baby Blue expects us to uphold. When my partner tries to play—or I try to cuddle—she often melodramatically withdraws. (Fortunately, she sometimes deigns us with exceptions, always when we least expect it.)
We do enjoy equal treatment in the form of conversation. Anytime my partner and I are chatting in a particular room of the apartment, Baby Blue strolls in to join. No other room. Just that one room. If she hears our voices, she comes in meowing, and then jumps onto the bed to be at our level. Every time! And when we say, “hi girl, what’s up?” She answers in complete sentences. Baby Blue loves using her voice, which ranges from cute chirps to mini roars to melodramatic yowls! I once even caught her meowing in her sleep.
I think one of my favorite Baby Blue quirks, though, is the fact that anytime my partner and I get a little rambunctious—say, have a tickle-fight—Baby Blue runs urgently into the room, meowing with an upspeak as if to check on us. My partner theorizes that she “wants to be where the action is.”
I did mention a dark side, though. Unfortunately, Baby Blue has pica and is a fiend for hair ties. If she sees one, she’ll blurt out an eck-eck-eck followed by a sequence of desperate cries. If you’re not fast enough, she’ll hunt that thing and swallow it before she can be stopped. Baby Blue’s adolescence entailed at least three inconsolable trips to the kitty ER. Fortunately, she’s never needed surgeries—just one endoscopic procedure—and we’ve learned to become obsessive about what we leave out around the apartment.
She’s our kit-kit, our bunny girl, our tiny lion, our long lady, our critter, our little clown cat, our lil Baby Blue, and loving her is a joy. My partner and I aren’t the only ones, either. I’m a psychotherapist, and, before the pandemic, when I still worked out of my home office, my patients joked that Baby Blue was my “therapist assistant.” Observing the interactions between Baby Blue and my patients was delightful—and fascinating, too, because every interaction went differently.
In addition to my therapy work, I have an online alter ego as a “pop culture philosopher” and I always find a way to work references to Baby Blue into my various writing and video projects. My followers encourage this, treating her almost as a mascot of my work. One of my followers calls her “the ferret.” Anytime I do a TikTok live, he asks, “where’s the ferret?”
Baby Blue’s one-of-a-kind sparkle obliterates any expectations I had about having a cat, and my hopes had been high. Her presence in my life is proof that good things happen when you let life do its thing. And even during hard times, I know I have everything because I have her.
MJ Corey is a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and writer. She is best known online for her social media presence, Kardashian Kolloquium, where she deconstructs the Kardashian family using postmodern and media theory frameworks. Her work has been seen in Vogue, Paper Magazine, and Refinery 29, as well as a forthcoming feature with the New Yorker. She's currently working on a book.