Tips for fosterer burn-out?

[SingingSilver]

I've been fostering cats for nearly three years. For over two years I loved it.

Towards the end of last year I'd started to get a bit tired of some of the issues - always having to make sure the cat was corralled into the right room and the right doors kept closed, and living with issues like carpet scratching or 5am yowling or bath crapping or whatever, sometimes annoying communication with other volunteers like not being told about an adoption until the actual day (this has happened to me twice), having strangers in my home for visits, and the sometimes distressing experiences of looking after a new frightened and distressed cat - and then the other side of that which is watching your happy settled cat leaving in a carrier looking frightened and distressed again.

I took a few months off but then my area manager started asking if I was ready for a new cat yet with lots of ?????? which made me feel a bit pressured.

So I got a new cat two days ago. She's beautiful but she's angry and confused and hisses when she sees me. She peed on the floor twice yesterday, and just vomited her lunch up on the rug. And I am struggling to find the positive!

Tips and/or advice please?

If you have money to throw at the problem get Amtico or similar flooring anywhere the cats are likely to go. Cats can't destroy it at all and pee just wipes up. It's a drastic and expensive solution to only part of the problem though.

The rest - I can't really help you. Being involved in cat rescue makes me incredibly stressed and miserable and messes up my house, takes my money, causes relationship problems, makes me feel as though I'm constantly fire-fighting. I would be SO much happier if I had never got into it. But now that I have I just feel that I have to do it because there aren't enough other people willing to do it instead, and I know what not doing it at all would mean. And I suspect that deep down you feel the same.

If you really don't though then don't do it. Or at least take a break.

if you have stopped enjoying fostering then yes take a break, i usually do feral kittens which is a single kitten at a time and this time i broke my own rules and took on a mom and four kittens, so far they have shredded my wallpaper, wrecked my vase with twigs on, the landing , thrown cat litter all over my house, turned their dainty little noses up at the food offered, tried to trip me up on the stairs, done sherpa tensing up and down the curtains, much as i love them to bits i will be glad to take them to the vets on thursday and back to the rescue centre on sunday and go back to fostering single feral kittens they are so much easier