Dear Prudence,
I am a gay single mom with a 10-year-old son. I’m also in a great relationship with “Zoe,” who I’ve been seeing for the last two years. We click on every level, she gets along great with my son, and she says she wants to spend the rest of her life with me. The problem is the ill-tempered hellbeast she calls a cat. She loves it to bits, and it barely tolerates her. It attacks everyone else (I have to wear thick boots and jeans when I come over if I don’t want to bleed). My son is seriously allergic to both cats and dogs, and carries an Epi-Pen. I have to shower and wash my clothes when I come back from Zoe’s before I can see my son.
The cat is old and on its last legs; Zoe said that once it died she would move in with us. Except she just took in two rescue kittens without telling me (I found out from her announcement on Facebook). She said I was cold and unfeeling for objecting, and I told her she wanted to be a mother to these cats more than to my son. I feel misled. If I knew she was always going to get more cats, I would not have introduced her to my child. Now I am two years into a relationship with someone my son and I both love, but prefers cats to a life with us. After our fight, Zoe is just carrying on as usual. She came to my son’s ballgame and my parents’ barbeque. She hasn’t brought it up and I am afraid to. What should I do? Make a quick end of it and break my son’s heart and mine? Keep this holding pattern? Zoe is the one who brought up moving in and getting married, the one who told me to wait until her cat died and then we could be together as a real family. Then she gets a pair of kittens and I am Cruella for objecting.
—Cat or Kid?