Advice needed

Hi all,

Okay, let me start by introducing our cat, Mina.

She is, we think, about 2-3 years old. She turned up as a stray, eating
the hedgehogs food, last summer. We shooed her off for a bit, but
eventually caved - she was painfully thin. A couple of weeks passed, and
we saw her feeding four kittens. To cut a very long story short, with the
help of a superb local rescue home, Newmarket Cats, we captured mum and
kittens and they took them on board to feed them up and rehome the babies.
Eventually, we took mum back and have had her since about September.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear here and now: we don't consider
ourselves barbarians or cruel people, but we originally had ideas of
maybe, just maybe, keeping her as an indoor only cat. We're on a major
road, we're bird lovers, and to top it all, we have no real facilities to
letting her in at night - we'd have to wait for her to turn up, etc. We
also know you're supposed to keep a cat indoors for a while when you first
get them so they get used to the area, right? Our intention was not to be
cruel, but to be kind. Besides, she wasn't actively seeking to get out...
She wasn't pacing by the door, she wouldn't paw or claw the door or
windows. She seemed quite content, really. [I know there are mixed
opinions about indoor cats, and I know it provokes strong emotions, so I
want to avoid a flame war here and now.]

Just recently we decided that she ought to be going outside a bit, I guess
it was because if she bolted as a door was opened, we wanted her to trust
us enough to come back and not think of it as a desparate bid for freedom.
Anyway, we got a cat flap fitted, which we haven't really prepared for her
use yet. This was a couple of weeks back.

Since then we've been letting her out into our back garden. The back
garden isn't huge, but it's okay. There's a six foot wall at the back all
along it. Down the sides are similar walls and hedges. We can *sort of*
blockade the sides of the house to prevent her from going out down the
sides and by the road, but naturally, being a cat, she'll find a way
eventually Beyond the wall at the back is a football club car park, the
club slightly beyond that. At night a bunch of muppets tear up and down in
their cars, so naturally I'd really rather avoid her getting over the
wall.

She's already been over the wall once. I'm getting slightly ahead of
myself here. The other day she managed to climb up onto the back wall and
walked along it, but she got really scared, you could just tell. She was
miaowing and looking really terrified, pacing up and down. I went around
the back via the club car park and she almost leapt into my arms. She
struggled on the way home, but she was okay after a while. Then on the
weekend she got onto the wall and jumped down into the car park. She
disappeared for ages, the first time she'd been out of the house AND out
of sight since we had her, pretty much.

We let her be for about 15 minutes, just to see what she did. In the end
my wife went around and she was cowering at the base of the wall miaowing.
My wife picked her up and passed her over the wall to me. The rest of that
evening she was very affectionate, so we reckon she scared herself a bit.

So we're naturally not the greatest "parents" in the world, and there's
probably a load of things we're doing wrong. We're trying, but it's very
hard. It's amazing how much stress and tension it puts you under. Since
she started going out she's been a different cat; it might only be half an
hour a night, near enough, but she wants to go out and when she's in she
seems distracted. She wasn't like that before. The problem is that when
she's out there, the whole time she's either looking for a way out or she
seems to not know what to do or where to go. Sometimes she just wanders up
and down sniffing everything, which is fine, and sometimes she just lays
under a bush.

I'm really not sure what's for the best. Should we just shove her out,
lock the door and let her do her own thing? Should we sit with her outside
and still prevent her from "escaping"? I mean, there's a million things we
could be doing, but I'm damned if I know what to do for the best. It's a
nightmare, it really is. I'm terrified of her going out on the road. And I
don't want to keep her in all the time if she doesn't want to be in, but
generally she seems fine about being in. The fact that her temperament has
changed since she started going out is a cause for concern simply because
she hasn't been, in my opinion, as affectionate and avoids us both more
than she used to.

So if anyone has any advice, suggestions or helpful words, please, feel
free to send them my way.

Thanks,

H