Cat

When you read of characters who are only children when you too are one it's insightful. Thoughts you've had get echoed back regardless of whether they' re male or female, although the ones I've found most parallels with have tended to be male, but then I guess you could say that as a child I was gender-fluid – I assumed all children at a young age were!- since I wasn't conditioned to behave in a certain way or as appropriate to my gender. In terms of dress-up and play, anyway. As yes, my grandmother did remind me to sit with my legs together, as Colette's Grandmamma does in Gigi for reasons of decorum. But otherwise I played football, I played with toy cars, I made tents from furniture, yet I was still far more 'girl' than my tomboy cousin and whined like one too, though my younger boy cousin also beat me at that.
He got his way most of the time, being the only male and the youngest of our trio.
Those cousins however were related, only separated by four years, and there existed between them a sibling rivalry and jealousy that unless I was with them, in the holidays, I had no concept of. My day-to-day existence had nothing of that – fights over possessions or who could get the most attention - and I still haven't witnessed those sibling ties to a very large or close degree, because, strangely friends were and are either only children too, have much older siblings or are quite a few years older than me so a comparison doesn't seem fair.
A part of me however, does disagree with the opinion that a big gap between siblings e.g. brothers and sisters have left home, have their own lives, are married with their own families etc., somehow makes you an only child, at the very least an honorary one. I understand how it could, but if you have siblings you always have that knowledge there are others that share the same parents, the same blood. And that counts for something, even if relations are non-existent or strained, if only birthday and Christmas cards or an annual phone call are exchanged. In the final reckoning, anyway.
You won't be alone. Well, maybe one day...as who knows what roads life will take you down, but you don't have to confront that from the very beginning. Be raised to it and trained yourself for it, exactly like a plant is raised up by water and sun, to stand alone and perhaps even grow along a trellis. Sunflowers, for instance, though with their faces turned upwards, always appear to me to have further resoluteness than humankind. But then only children often take longer to get used to things, whereas sunflowers don't have that time or the energy. Their purpose is to grow, their existence is briefer.
It's that that gives some of us a reputation as difficult: that time lag thing. Because when we try to conform to the social norms and conveniences, it takes us longer to negotiate them and reach a point of acceptance, a point where whatever it is doesn't feel it has been imposed or is an effort to maintain; sometimes we're unable to reach that point at all and have to call it quits, return to a more comfortable (and solitary) way of living.
And if an only child grown tries to bridge that gap from aloneness to that of shared living, there will more than likely come a moment, and many moments after if they persist, where they realise, like Alain in The Cat, that nowadays they're never alone when before they always were, and they'll miss it, even crave it and eventually have to take themselves off to be just that: alone again. With their thoughts. With nobody else around or in their ear.
It will, to another, seem selfish, almost as if they're absconding, as well as self-absorbed, and it is, in a manner, but, in the main, it's a survival mechanism. Which, again to those who aren't only children or don't know this affliction, will sound dramatic, but only children know how to be alone. Sometimes it's all they know; all they want to know even, because this they can cope with, whereas togetherness – one to one, groups and crowds – is much tougher to tolerate without eventually showing or feeling irritation, and which if prolonged, beyond their normal endurance, escalates their resentment of the agent and the circumstances.
Personally, I've had a lot of time to reflect upon this – with more time to come – and have ultimately drawn the conclusion that I'm more cat than I thought.

Picture credit: La Chatte, a jacket cover for Colette

All posts published this year were penned during the last.