A friend wrote me today about the emotions attendant on a possible visit from her father, from whom she was long estranged after her parents' divorce. She wryly acknowledged the bathos of the idea of waiting for his arrival at mid-life, staring out the window like a child.
Her image of waiting at the window unleashed a flood of memories equally bathetic.
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In my early 20's I saw and immediately, in unexpected tears, bought one of those "cat" posters that are so kitch and corny. I was too cool to admit to owning the thing, so it resided on the inside of my closet door, where only I was likely to see it. It showed a little frowzy kitten from behind, gazing out a rain-streaked window. You could tell that the perch was precarious and the kitten really had to work staying there. The caption (in PINK script, I told you it was kitchy) read, "Love understands, and therefore waits."
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Despite the rank sentimentality, it always moved me. It seemed to sum up my childhood, which also included parental divorce when I was very young. I at least had a relationship with my father -- a rich and delightful relationship -- but on Daddy visit days, I would wait by the window for the first glimpse of his car with the intensity of that kitten. Going back further, in the year after my parents' divorce, I was, by special arrangement with the school, always the last one picked up at nursery school (or maybe this was kindergarten). Mom now worked until 5, and in 1960 or so, working mothers were pretty unusual. I was going through a hideously insecure, newly rocky and needy phase. After the last other kid left, I spent the next eternity at the window (probably only 10 or 15 minutes) waiting for her, yearning. It's more of a sense memory than pictorial, but I know I had to stand on something to see out of the window, I was a shrimpy kid, and my perch felt as shaky as that poster kitten's seemed to be. No amount of teacher's encouragement would lure me down. A million other childhood memories (any childhood, I'm not unique here) involve waiting for the adults to be done with their adult stuff and get to the all important ego-dominant child ME.
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To this day, if I need to summon tears, I think of that poster. (You know those times when you NEED to cry for something very real and immediate, you'll burst if you don't, but the internal editor has turned off the waterworks? You just need a little nudge. That's what an image like that poster is for. Instant emotional release. Actors do the same thing.) I searched online, but somehow that poster seems not to have made it onto the internet. I found a similar image, above.
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While searching, I found another image that made me laugh, and then think. So much of my adolescent and even adult anger sprang from that same waiting. Children do love, and they do wait, but they don't always understand. That adult stuff is pretty important to the adults, and, in the case of my mother especially, important to me if I'd only understood. Her job and absence was necessary to keep us both alive, literally. However, sometimes there's still a bad kitten in me, waiting at the window with a Great Big Grudge:
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I sent both images to my friend, with the above explanation. Hope it gives you a laugh too.
..................................................................................... Lookie what I've got.
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