Our newborn has sent our cat into a deep depression

We are witnessing a feline ego death

Joni in happier times…

It looked so cute on TikTok. Search ‘cat + baby’ and you’ll find endless streams of feline-infant love ins; tails draped protectively around Moses baskets, tiny fingers clasping at nuzzling foreheads, purrs and coos merging as one.

But when we brought Olive home from the hospital a fortnight ago and placed her down, absurdly, in the middle of our living room, Joni only hissed meekly and did that angular back-peddle they do, somehow like walking up and down a set of stairs at the same time.

Things haven’t improved since. In fact, they have gotten worse. While Olive has rapidly regained and overtaken her birth weight (so this is what it feels like! Pure pride!), Joni has stopped eating altogether. Her fur is malting in the January cold. Her usual spots – the back of our sofa or bed, looking down imperiously from the coffee table while blocking our view of the TV – abandoned completely. When we bring a crying Olive into a room to change her nappy or sing to her, Joni lifts her head with resignation then slowly skulks out.

Perhaps most heartbreaking of all, the arrogant creature we once worshipped with all the surplus love of our home has become meek and needy. Where once she’d scoff at our advances, she now submits to passing strokes on the stairs, grateful for the crumbs of an affection we now direct almost entirely towards this strange, pink, burbling stranger.

Discovering you are now no longer the cutest

We are witnessing, I think, a humbling – something like a feline ego death. Carl Jung believed that each of us, usually around middle age, encounter a life event – often a personal or professional failure of some kind – that shakes our persona to the limits of its usefulness. The qualities and outlook we have relied on since childhood to take us safely through the world are suddenly no longer up to the task. When this happens we are presented with two options: double down on what is familiar, or enter into a painful rebirth to discover who we truly are. Often this means engaging with emotions we have so far considered taboo: sadness, fear, lust, rage.

It’s too early to say whether Joni being usurped in the hierarchy of our home will make or break her. But I am quietly hoping it will be the former. In the months before Olive arrived, I grew tired of well-meaning friends making jokes about sleep being a thing of the past and our lives being about to change forever. I liked my life. Were we about to drop a giant bomb into it? While the answer to that question is basically yes, I hadn’t anticipated the geysers of joy and love and purpose that have erupted in our souls; biology’s little care package to keep the species going. Joni, to be fair to her, has had none of this. She can only see the disruption and chaos, the breast pads and the soggy muslins, the fact we sometimes forget to feed her because we have a three-part poo to contend with upstairs.

But she, like us, has time to adapt. Stick around another year or two, and she’ll have a third, much smaller human trundling towards her with outstretched hands, hoping for a pat of her head. By then she may have realised a fundamental truth: that none of us can afford to spurn love when it comes our way. On the other side of this painful period of self-actualisation, we may see a happier, more mature cat. Or at least one finally prepared to sit on our lap from time to time.

Good Anger, my book about the surprising upsides of anger, is out 5 June 2025 and can be pre-ordered here.