Welcome to Domestically Feral, a storytelling podcast about life at home when the animals have motives, the coffee is necessary, and normal was never really an option. Start here if you’re new, mildly overwhelmed, or suspicious that your pets are plotting against you.

After weeks of waiting, a long road trip, and enough emotional instability to power a small town, we finally brought Edgar home. I had prepared the bathroom, checked for hazards, blocked every tiny danger I could think of, and felt extremely proud of myself. So naturally, not even an hour later, the kitten was missing. In a bathroom. A contained room. This is the story of finally meeting Edgar, surviving the trip home, and discovering that our first clue about his true nature came in the form of a tiny vanity drawer.

Before Edgar ever set one paw inside this house, he was already destabilizing it from a distance. In this episode, I talk about the long wait to bring him home, the emotional spiral that followed, Mr. Darcy’s uncertain health, holiday stress, ugly crying, spiritual struggle, and the deeply mature phrase: “I just want a kitten.”

When our beloved old cat Mr. Darcy suddenly took a frightening downturn, grief and panic sent me spiraling toward one firm conclusion: I could not be without a cat. What followed was an emotional chain reaction involving anticipatory heartbreak, a rare chocolate mink Ragdoll kitten, one very soft-looking lie of a baby animal, and the domestic menace now known as Edgar. This is the story of how we brought him home—and how I realized, with painful clarity, that I have no one to blame but myself.