A little big deal

I walked into the house yesterday evening after work and found people there. Not just my father and Small Cat – who knows she is as much ‘people’ as most people we know – but visitors, of the ilk that we do not often get. These were people who were now strangers, to me, at least, since I had not seen them since I was about 20 or something thereabouts. But I had grown up with them in my life, as friends of my parents, so I could not do my usual social stint of nodding a polite hello and then retreating to my own room. But because I had known them to long, I could take my time to start making conversation.

So I pottered around the house getting at least a little unwound from the office and chatting with Small Cat, who had beat a hasty and scared retreat under the chair in my room. She had to be coaxed out to eat the dinner of tuna that she normally barrels into the kitchen for, and peeked furtively at the guests after each bite. And then, after she was done, fled again to her security position. I, meanwhile, took as long as possible to get set to sit. Lighting the lamp, pulling down the blinds, closing windows…all rapid-fire jobs, were dragged out for as long as possible. It is not that the visitors were bad people, or even those I did not like. It was just that I knew that they would do a long stint of reminiscing and may talk more than either my father or I was comfortable with about my mother.

But I was surprised, in a way pleasantly so. My mother was not mentioned, except in casual passing, until they were leaving, when the lady told my father how much I looked like her now (“Obviously, I am her daughter!” I hissed indignantly and illogically at him later). And while the gentleman babbled on with some degree of incoherence, the lady burbled paeans to her success, the success of her children and their children and their various friends and relations….

But at the start of my socialising with them came something that was amazingly incongruous, in a way very irritating, and disturbingly familiar. The couple was seated on our three-seater couch and the lady patted the cushion between her and her husband, asking me to come sit there. I almost instinctively refused, vaguely repelled, saying that I would stay near my father, but the suggestion grated. It was as if I was a very young child again, one who would have her cheeks pinched and her hair ruffled. Which left all of me ruffled. It reminded me of an evening years ago when the front door bell rang and I opened it to find a gentleman standing there staring at my knees. While my knees were at that stage fairly pulchritudinous, I did not think they deserved so much attention. It turned out that the gentleman was one who had been rather closely bonded to the family at the time that I was born – my parents and I, an infant a few days old, were brought home from the hospital in his car. And he had not thought that I could have grown up a little from that period in our lives.

Even while I know how associations stick and how age is comparative, I will never be comfortable with the words “My, how you have grown!”. I always start thinking sadly of the piece of chocolate cake I should not have eaten and the jeans that once fit me perfectly without my having to breathe heavily to get into them. I see myself ballooning alarmingly from a wee baby in a cradle to a full-grown adult, soft curves, spike heels and all, as if it were faintly unsavoury an activity. And I cannot help feeling that the assorted traumas of the years I spent growing up were all for naught.