How I, a 52-year-old cat mom, finally got my 9-year-old cat to stop hiding

I work at a pet store. Have for eleven years.

We get a lot of scared cats through here. Ones that came from houses with dogs, ones found outside, ones that have never seen more than two people in their life. Part of my job is knowing how to handle them. Go slow, get low, put food near yourself before you try to get near them. Give them time. Most of them come around.

I have a cat at home who has been hiding from me for two years.

One Tuesday I was restocking in the cat section when I saw a kitten tuck herself under her mother. She didn't make a sound, just slid under and disappeared.

I had to sit down on the floor.

Priya, my coworker, came around the aisle and found me.

"Lue, you okay?"

I said I was fine. I hadn't told anyone about Monty in two years. I just didn't know how to explain what had happened to him.

Monty is nine. I've had him since he was eight weeks old.

I remember the drive home. He was in a cardboard box with holes in the lid, crying the whole way. I talked to him the whole drive. Told him about the apartment, told him he'd have the run of the sofa. He kept crying but got a bit quieter, and I took that as a good sign.

For the first six years he was everywhere. On the bed, on the sofa, near the door when I got in from work. Nothing dramatic, just present. He'd come and eat while I was still in the kitchen. He'd sit on the windowsill and watch the street. Normal things.

About two years ago that started to change.

It didn't happen at once. The first thing I noticed was that he stopped coming to eat while I was in the kitchen. He'd wait — ten minutes, then twenty — until I'd gone into the other room. I didn't think much of it. Then he stopped coming to the kitchen while I was home at all. I started putting his bowl outside the bedroom door. Then he stopped coming to that. I moved it inside the room, near the wardrobe. He stopped coming to that too.

Now I slide his bowl through a gap at the back of the wardrobe and he eats in the dark after I've gone to bed.

Some mornings the bowl is untouched.

He's so frightened of me that he won't come out to eat. I don't have kids. It's just me and Monty in the apartment. I've had him since he was small enough to fit inside my coat pocket. Now, when I walk into a room, he scrambles backward like I'm going to hurt him. I am what he's hiding from.

I work with frightened cats every day. I know what that looks like: pressed to the back of the enclosure, belly low, watching every movement. But even the worst ones eat. You back off far enough, you wait long enough, hunger wins.

With Monty, the fear is winning.

I watched that happen for two years and I couldn't stop it.

The hardest part is getting up at 6 AM. Washing his bowl, scooping the litter box, paying the vet bills—going through all the motions of taking care of him, knowing the whole time he's in a dark corner wishing I wasn't there.

I changed how I moved around him. Slower, lower, no direct eye contact, no reaching toward him. I bought a Feliway diffuser and ran it for three months. I changed his food three times. I left worn clothes near his spot so he'd get used to my smell. I tried staying out of the bedroom completely for two days to see if the space helped.

He ate less.

I took him to the vet. Bloodwork fine. Physically healthy. "Some cats become more reclusive as they get older. Has anything changed at home?" Nothing had changed. Nothing I could point to anyway.

I just sat in my car after that appointment and stared at the steering wheel.

I went back six months later. Same thing. Give him space and time.

I found a behaviorist online. She told me to stop trying to interact with him and let him come to me on his own terms. I did that for four months.

The hiding became normal. I think that was the worst part. I just adjusted to having a ghost for a cat.

I joined a Facebook group. Tried CBD drops someone in the group recommended. Tried a different bowl, a different spot, a different feeding time. I sat on the bedroom floor for weeks at a time. Not moving, not speaking, just being there, hoping he'd get curious. He watched me from the back of the wardrobe gap and didn't move.

Every morning I checked the bowl. Most mornings it was exactly as I'd left it.

Sometimes I'd look under the bed and see him pressed flat against the skirting board. Or I'd find him squeezed behind the toilet in the bathroom. His eyes would be huge and black, staring at me like I was a stranger. I'd sit on the bathmat and say his name softly. He wouldn't blink. He'd just press his weight harder against the tiles to get away from me.

I left him there and went to work. That was the Tuesday I saw the kitten hide under her mother. The one that made me sit down right there in the middle of aisle four, smelling the cedar shavings and crying into my hands because I was so tired of my own cat being terrified of me.

Priya found me sitting there. She sat down next to me on the floor of the cat section and just waited.

So I told her all of it. The two vet visits. The behaviorist. The sitting on the floor. The bowl through the wardrobe gap every night. The mornings I got on my hands and knees with my phone flashlight just to check he was still back there.

"I don't know what I'm doing wrong," I said. "We work with scared cats every day and I can't even seem to help my own cat. He's not eating properly. I don't know how long that can go on before Monty gets ill."

Priya was quiet for a moment.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

I just shook my head. I didn't have a good answer.

"I had something like this with my cat," she said. "She'd only come out when I was completely out of the room. Barely eating. Vet found nothing. I tried many other things as well."

"What changed it?"

"I did some reading. Found something about heme iron. It's the iron in fresh meat, blood and muscle, what a cat would have hunted back in the day or something. Cats can smell it differently to anything else. Something in them responds to it. Gets past the fear before the fear has a chance to kick in."

"Like a reflex."

"Like a reflex, exactly. Within a few days my cat was coming out before I'd even put the bowl down. And then after a while she just started being near me again. Like once eating wasn't the scary part, I wasn't either. She remembered I was the one taking care of her."

I didn't say anything. I just listened to the hum of the store's air conditioning.

"So she stopped hiding." I didn't even question it. It made sense. The cats here react to fresh food and start rubbing against our legs like we're their parents.

I felt embarrassed, honestly, that I hadn't figured this out myself. But Priya gave me a faint smile. "She stopped hiding, yes. And I'm so glad I made a change before it was too late."

I texted Priya late that night. I couldn't sleep. I asked her to send me whatever she had read about the heme iron.

She sent me a link.

I spent two hours sitting up in bed, reading the page on my phone in the dark. Biting my lip, hoping, praying that a revelation would come.

And as I read about the hunting reflexes, it did. It all made perfect sense.

I ordered a bottle right then, at 2 AM.

When it arrived, the bottle was small, cold glass. I squeezed four drops of the dark liquid onto Monty's food. I stared at the bowl. He's so picky, I thought. If it smells like medicine, he won't even go near it.

I pushed the bowl through the gap behind the wardrobe and went to sleep.

I felt sort of silly, honestly. Like I was falling for a magic trick. What if this is the fix I needed all along, and it was just so simple?

The next morning, I reached my hand into the dark. My fingers brushed the ceramic bowl. It felt light. I pulled it out into the daylight.

It was completely empty. Not just picked at. Licked clean. He hadn't finished a full bowl in two years. I guess it just smelled like meat to him.

I didn't want to get my hopes up. I told myself he was just extra hungry.

But three days later, I was standing at the kitchen counter making coffee. The fridge was humming. Then I heard a floorboard creak in the hallway.

I froze. I didn't turn around.

I just looked down at the floor next to my feet. Monty walked into the kitchen. He didn't press his belly to the floor. He didn't look over his shoulder. He just walked over to his bowl, looked up at me, and let out a short, quiet meow.

I sat down on the linoleum right there and cried.

That night I texted Priya: He came into the kitchen. While I was in it.

She replied straight away: That quickly? Took Sofia a few weeks for me. Keep me updated.

A month later, I woke up at 3 AM because my feet were hot. There was a heavy, warm weight resting on my ankles. The room was dark, but I could hear him purring.

I didn't reach out to pet him. I just laid there in the dark, listening to him breathe, until my alarm went off.

I was doing my early shift in aisle four yesterday. A woman came up to me holding a calming diffuser. Her shoulders were heavy.

"Excuse me," she asked. "Will this stop my cat from hiding? Sorry to be a bit of a bother, it's just my cat hasn't come out from under the sofa since Thanksgiving."

I looked at the box in her hand, and then I looked at her face. I knew that exact look of exhaustion.

"Put that back," I told her. "It won't work."

"Then what do I do?"

I pulled out my phone. I didn't show her another product on our shelves. I opened my photos and showed her the pictures of Monty hiding, and then the ones where he wasn't.

"How did you get him to do that?" she asked.

"It's a liquid called Nutribial," I told her. "It's just the heme iron they're supposed to get from hunting. I mix four drops into his food every morning."

"Does it smell bad?" she asked. "My cat won't touch her food if she knows I put something in it."

"It doesn't smell like medicine at all," I told her. "To them, it just smells like fresh meat. Monty licks the bowl clean."

She looked at the picture of Monty again. "And he just... stopped hiding?"

"It took a few days for me, some weeks for others," I said. "But I'm never going to stop giving it to him."

Her shoulders dropped and she gave a faint smile.

I won't ever forget that.

If you're sliding a bowl into the dark every night. If you're wondering what you did to make them so scared of you. I did that for two years.

I thought I had tried everything. I hadn't.

Lue has worked with cats for eleven years. She likes to read thriller novels in bed. What she believed she had lost forever finally came back: Monty is asleep on her feet.

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