The Cat's Meow

"My quest these days is to find my long lost inner child, but I'm afraid if I do, I'll end up with food in my hair and way too in love with the cats."  -Kenny Loggins

I used to say, "When I am old, I shall have orange hair, orange lipstick running up the fine cracks of my upper oip, and olive in a basement, with a cat".  I pictured myself a crazy cat lady.  But, one problem:  I have always been somewhere between scared they would jump on me and noting wherever they are in a room, so I can pretend I am not.

When we think of "Crazy Cat Lady", we think wild hair escaping foam curlers, a chenille robe, someone rarely leaving their basement, and a real cackler.  I am going to turn that on its heels.  Suddenly that sounds great.  Oh, I realize that cat ladies are not witchy old women, sipping their alcohol, being a hoarder at large, and having a cigarette poked in the stem of a long cigarette holder.  It is a 'hanger-onner' stereotype that goes way back, though.

In the Middle Ages, cats were seen as associated with nasty aggressive sexual perversion.  Well, if you have ever seen a cat in heat, yes, that stereotype still is whispered in parlors.  That stereotype is paralleled with a new ideology of a lonely, sexless, old woman.  Early on, as well, to be an older female and have a cat was to be a witch. But, early in Egyptian history, cats were seen as Gods (Bastet).   When Christians entered the scene, black cats were relegated to be the devil and being seen with one could have you killed. 

All through the 18th Century, superstitions reigned, and cats got another bad rap.  Women with warts were seen as having an extra nipple for the devil to suckle from.  Cats were associated with single older women who never had children.  From that came the card game "Old Maid".  In the 1900's, with the suffragette movement, images of cats and women were referred to as silly, useless, and 'catty'.  You recognize that we still have some of those labels and ideas about women with cats.  I, for one, was promoting that ideology.  Now, I think I might like to be exactly what I used to mock.

Women can be like cats.  We are independent.  We can get offended easily and simply walk away.  We are not easily put in a corner.  We tend to come and go as we please.  You never are, quite sure what we are thinking and what we might dream up to do next.  We require love or not love, depending on our mood.  We can give only subtle clues as to what we are preparing to do. We tend to live in our own little world and like a cat stretches and yawns, we sigh.  Other times we can be a big cat and we can roar, we can flex our sharpened nails ( a metaphor, ladies, a metaphor), spit, hiss, and take things very personally. We can make you adore us, be wary of us, and we know how to manipulate. Others might think we are domesticated, but do not test that.

So, now, I have changed my mind about women and cats and women being like cats.  I am taking back the negatives.  I, indeed, do want to be a cat woman when I get older.  It sounds like the cat's meow to me.

©Carol Desjarlais 3.24.19