Being a Girl {Part One}

When I was teaching, I always got on better with the boys in my seventh grade classes than with the girls. I used to say that it was because I was the mother of two sons and, therefore had no experience with girls but that wasn’t the total truth. Really it was because I had no experience being a “normal” girl.

When I was six, I was told that I was responsible, totally responsible, for my four year-old sister. This meant I got her breakfast and got her dressed before I went to school, I took her on the bus with me when I went to school and I walked her to the child-minder’s house, I picked her up after school and took her back home on the bus with me and spent most of the rest of the evening amusing her, feeding her, undressing and bathing her, feeding her and putting her to bed. I was six. Six! {This all ended after I deliberately took her to a busy street and “lost” her by walking away from her. I got into an enormous amount of trouble and was beaten for doing this, but looking back on it, I think it was a solution I now consider a very creative way to get from under responsibility I wasn’t strong enough to take on.}

My father was a self-educated man who had left school when he was 13 to go down the coal mines to help support his mother and sisters when his father died. When I was born, he was a police constable and was enormously proud of the fact that I was clever, that I was a straight A student obviously destined for the first college degree anyone in his family had ever earned. And, of course, as a child, I interpreted this as straight A’s equal love.I got it into my head that not only did I have to get A’s to be loved by my father but it also had to appear easy. So, not only did I do the two hours of homework demanded by my school {this was in England during the 40’s} but I set my alarm clock for 2 am and secretly studied for at least another hour at that time.

It was very important to me that my father should be proud of me because my mother was an alcoholic who had made it quite clear to me that I was a burden. Being a not-stupid person, I had picked up on this very early and became a very prickly don’t-touch-me child almost from birth. The problem was compounded by the fact that I was always unusually tall for my age, {I am now five feet and ten inches} extremely thin {and believe me when I say I have got over this}, freckled, and wore glasses from the age of three onward. Oh, and I forgot to mention that at 11 I broke one of my front teeth in half and it was not fixed until I was 14.

Looking back over the years at my mother, I can see now that she did try. But she was an Irish Catholic woman trapped in a marriage because of pregnancy {me} with a man she considered to be of a lower social class than she was, and with absolutely no idea how to bring up children except to hit them to make them be quiet. I learned very quickly. I was so quiet about a pain I had for six weeks that a neighbor found me on the street doubled up in pain from my ruptured appendix and the subsequent peritonitis. I was so quiet that I didnt dare tell my parents I had an earache in the middle of the night and only confessed in the morning when the pillow was covered with blood and pus. I was so quiet and overlooked that it took an aunt who hadn’t seen me for a long time to realize that the puffiness of my face and legs was not “puppy fat” but a severe kidney problem.

{to be continued}