The Scared Little Kitten

Learning to Trust Again: The Story of a Scared Little Cat

Several years ago, I was leaving a class at my children's school when I spotted my kids and their friends all crouched around a parked car, one of them halfway underneath it. What on earth are they doing—learning to change the oil? I hurried over, picturing another car backing out and not seeing them.

It wasn't an oil change. There was a wild kitten wedged up under the hood.

Somehow we borrowed a pet carrier from someone at the school, and my son—brave, foolish, wonderful boy—reached in and grabbed that terrified kitten with his bare hands, earning himself a fistful of bites and scratches for his valor. We pieced together that the kitten belonged to a litter of ferrals someone was trying to re-home, and that this one had somehow hitched a ride to the school under the hood of a car and survived the trip. The kids looked up at me with those pleading eyes.

And just like that, we were cat people.

The great escape

Our new kitten had other plans. While we were transferring her from the carrier into the cozy little cardboard home the kids had built, she bolted—straight down an open floor vent and into the crawlspace under our house. And not just any crawlspace: we were mid-remodel, and that section had been built in 1857. No one was army-crawling on their belly through a hundred and fifty years of who-knows-what to retrieve a kitten who did not want to be retrieved.

So the kids set out food and waited. And waited. For hours, for days. Meanwhile, all night long, that kitten meowed—an endless, echoing wail from beneath the floorboards that slowly drove me to the edge of my sanity. I have never been so sleep-deprived over an animal in my life.

The rescue, when it finally came, was pure comedy. My son built a fortress of furniture, blankets, and pillows to hide himself and a "cat trap," ran a length of yarn from the carrier door to his hiding spot, loaded the carrier with sardines, and—to my absolute horror—drizzled a trail of sardine juice all the way from the vent hole across our freshly sanded, exposed wood floors. I can laugh now. At the time, I was celebrating the capture and frantically calculating how I'd ever get that smell out of the wood. At some ungodly hour, the whole house jolted awake to a triumphant shriek: "I GOT HER! I GOT HER!"

We named her Sandy.

The love that wasn't enough (yet)

We adored that cat. The kids talked to her sweetly. We fed her like clockwork, let her out to play, welcomed her back in. And still—she watched us with fear in her eyes. She wouldn't rub against us, wouldn't be held, and vanished the second a visitor knocked.

Then, to my chagrin (she was barely more than a kitten herself, and I hadn't yet learned to get her spayed in time), Sandy turned up pregnant. We didn't even realize until right before, one afternoon, we heard tiny mewing and discovered Tailey, Sassy, Drake, Starburst, and Saphira had been born under our family room couch.

I'll be honest: I half-hoped that becoming a mama, and watching how tenderly we cared for her babies, would finally melt Sandy's fear. It didn't. She loved her kittens fiercely and kept her distance from us all the same. We found wonderful homes for every one of them.

And here's the part I didn't understand back then: love, all by itself, on my timeline, was never going to be enough. Sandy didn't need more proof that we were good to her. She needed time. She needed the same safe, gentle, utterly predictable kindness, repeated day after day after day, long past the point where I thought she should have come around—until, somewhere deep in her little body, the fear finally started to loosen its grip.

So that's what we gave her. More patience. More consistency. More quiet, undemanding presence. Months of it.

And then one ordinary day, out of nowhere, Sandy walked up, pressed her sweet little face against mine, and asked—asked—to be held. I was so stunned I actually grabbed my camera. The fear in her eyes was simply... gone. Our skittish little hood-cat had become a lap cat. It hadn't happened in a lightning bolt. It had happened the way trust always rebuilds: slowly, safely, and on her timeline, not mine.

The scared little kitten in me

This morning, folding laundry, I did a quiet check-in on where I actually am these days. And of everything I could have related to, the one that landed was this: I am that scared little kitten.

I said no to a trip to the Grand Canyon recently. I still haven't dared ride our new motorcycle—even though my ninety-one-year-old grandmother has (she's a legend, and I am mildly humiliated). Yesterday, reaching for comfort, I paused long enough to actually feel what was underneath, and there it was: fear. Old, deep, familiar fear.

Years ago, someone who cared about me looked at me with tears in her eyes and gently said something I've never forgotten—that there are wounds the spirit carries long after the mind has tried to move on. I didn't fully understand it then. I do now.

Sandy never sat through a single counseling session to process how she ended up so afraid. She healed the only way she could: through time, safety, and patient love. I'm doing my healing a little differently—I'm in counseling right now, and talking things through is helping me more than I can say. But she reminded me of something I needed this morning: I have to be as patient and gentle with myself as we were with her. My trust is going to come back slowly, safely, on its own timeline. And that's okay.

Be gentle with the frightened ones

So this is my little Christmas offering to you. If there's a scared, skittish, guarded creature in your life—two-legged or four—love them anyway, and love them slowly. Don't rush their trust or take their distance personally. Keep being safe and steady and kind long past the point it feels like it's working. That patient, unglamorous, day-after-day love is exactly the thing that heals.

And if the frightened one is you—if you're the one flinching at the knock, saying no to the adventure, guarding the last soft place in your heart—then hear me: you are not broken. You're healing. Give yourself the same gentle, patient, predictable kindness you'd give a rescued kitten. Trust comes back. It really does.

(For me, part of that gentleness is small, grounding rituals—a warm mug of raspberry-and-peppermint tea in the fridge for the whole family, the comforting scent of frankincense when a day is coming apart at the seams. Little anchors. Find whatever quiets your own storm.)

We all have some healing to do. We all need to forgive, and be forgiven, and learn to love and trust again. Be tender with the scared ones—especially the one who lives inside you.

Merry Christmas, everyone. May God bless your efforts.

With much love,

Steffanie