Cuties from our Foster Roster

"We can't break up this set."

I am aware that some of you think kittens are not real, that they are some sort of Photoshopped hoax created only to hoodwink gullible chumps on Facebook. You know, a kind of utopian aspiration that isn’t really of this world. Maybe like unicorns or milk chocolate waterfalls….

I can assure you that they are very real, indeed. For about seven years, my wife and I fostered tiny kittens for the Santa Fe Animal Shelter. We felt like we were getting away with murder, being treated to constant free entertainment. When we had fosters living with us, our TV consumption plummeted to around zero.

All in all, we fostered more than 150 kittens, generally three or four at a time. We would take them into our home at around three weeks of age – weighing maybe one pound each - and return them to the Shelter for adoption about a month later. The idea was, we provided love, care, and socialization in our home until the kittens were big enough to be spay/neutered and then adopted. We gladly would have paid for the privilege of doing this job.

Every single person who heard about it had the identical reaction: “If I ever did that, I would keep them all! How on earth can you give them up?”

The answer is, we believed in the system. The minute we messed with the grand scheme – and by the way, that’s called being a “foster failure” – the Shelter would lose our services because our house would be bursting at the seams. We didn’t want that to happen.

And it wasn’t just us. Our dogs were enthralled, following the little guys around everywhere they went. Our adult cats, not so much, so we kept them in different rooms when we had fosters.

Many of our fosters are only a blur of fur in my mind, but a few of them I will never forget:

Moonglow wasn't supposed to live through her first night at the Shelter. She was a tiny bit of static fluff with a wild Einstein look. But she pulled through and came to us for fostering. We brought her home along with Diana, a kitten three weeks older, and over their time with us, they bonded.

I showed up at their first adoption event, to tell people how special they both were. After a few false starts, I was approached by a young couple who had spotted Moonglow online. They picked her up repeatedly, and each time they put her down, she would snuggle again with Diana.

Finally, the woman looked at me with understanding eyes and said, "We can't break up this set." They adopted both kittens, leaving me speechless and if you won’t tell anybody, just a little weepy.

When you foster kittens, you get to give them temporary names. The people who adopt them almost always change it, which is fine. Barbara usually chose the names because she was very good at it, and because early on I suggested giving a tiny male kitten the name Foster, to be funny, and thus lost my naming privileges.

The naming part was fun, and sometimes we would go for themes. A dear friend, who also fostered, named every kitten in one litter after country music singers. You know, Willie, Dolly, and so on. We called them the “Nashville Cats.”

One litter we fostered included a calico beauty which Barbara named Samantha. The name was totally random, as was the shelter's decision to run some of my photos of her on their public Facebook page, to attract interest.

Almost immediately, we heard from a man who said he had had a calico named Samantha for many years, and she had  recently died. When he saw our calico kitten with the same name, it was a cosmic sign he couldn't ignore.

We struck up a daily conversation online. I sent him photos of young Samantha and shared anecdotes about her. On the day she became available, he adopted her. She now enjoys a rich life in a house filled with pets. The man, a professional photographer, posted daily photos of his menagerie, and we fondly watched our calico grow up from a distance. And she is still called Samantha.

In the spring of 2016, we took in a litter of four. We thought they were just routine, but we were mistaken. Young Jake, whose black nose made him appear mustachioed, and his sister, Lucy, worked their way into our hearts immediately.

We called them “the wrecking crew,” but you just had to admire their spunk. We failed miserably at fostering, that time. They are still the wrecking crew, but they are our wrecking crew.

A foster kitten who we named Buster arrived with huge odds against him. The whole litter was sickly, and the vets had a bad feeling about their chances. Indeed, one of his sisters developed FTT – failure to thrive – a usually fatal syndrome dreaded by all foster parents. We raced her back to the Shelter, but she died that night.

Buster had his own problem. Cerebellar hypoplasia, a disorder with symptoms such as jerky movement, wobbly walking, and head bobbing. Over and over, we watched sweet Buster climb to the top of his scratching post turret and jump off, just to splay out and fall over when he hit the rug. It was painful to witness.

Cats with this disorder can live long and happy lives, but they need homes where they are understood. When Buster went up for adoption, we were worried. The Shelter confronted the disorder head-on, posting a beautiful photo on Facebook and an explanation of how Buster was different.

One reader immediately shared the Buster post with her grown daughter, along with a cryptic message: “A damaged kitten for a damaged daughter?”

Scant hours later, the daughter uploaded her own shot of  Buster, smiling and lolling happily in a lap in his new home. The daughter described him as "so precious he makes my heart hurt."

Congratulations, Buster. This time, you landed on your feet.

But that wasn’t the end of Buster’s story. His new guardian changed his name to Kieran and continued to share photos with us as he grew.

About four months after the adoption, early in May, she startled us with a brave, raw, painfully personnel confession for all to see, on Facebook.

She said that May was Mental Health Month, and that she had long suffered from clinical depression, often being unable to climb out of bed in the morning but had been reluctant to resort to serious medication.

Her mother’s “damaged daughter” comment had really hit home. She looked at Buster, knew he was going to need her for a long time to come, and that she would have to be at the top of her game. So, she sought help that turned her life around. All of this was detailed in her Facebook post, which  encouraged others to do the same.

The last sentence of her sweetly sentimental posting read, simply, “Thank you, Kieran, for rescuing me.”