Both Thingumy and Bob

You Put Your Whole Self In

One of my pieces of therapy homework last week, was to look at the masculine side of me and figure out where it might be in relation to the rest of me and what it means to me.

When I was a child, I spent a lot of my time envying boys. For a long while, I thought I wanted to be a boy. I certainly realised very early on that being a boy was more desirable. My mum used to tell the story of how, when I was born, my paternal grandparents came to visit me in the hospital. My grandfather, a peculiarly unpleasant man, took one look at me, sniffed and said: “Never mind, Sue. Perhaps it will be a boy next time.” My mum made it abundantly clear that she thought my grandad was an idiot, but his words stuck with me as I grew, because it seemed clear to me that although most people wouldn’t be so crass as to say them out loud, they thought them and acted on them.

I realise now that I didn’t want to be a boy but I did want what boys had. Life for boys seemed much more straightforward. From where I was standing, there seemed to be a direct line between their thinking and their doing, which looked cleaner and more uncluttered than the labyrinthine, convoluted ways between mine. They took up space without apology. They did the things they wanted without explanation. They were offered the things I wanted but was often denied.

My brother joined the Cubs, where they spent hours running through the woods, or falling into rivers, building rafts and treehouses. They were allowed to be free and slightly feral. My experience in the Brownies could not have been more different. We learned to plait and polish horse brasses. The first badge we ever did as a pack was ‘Safety in the Home.’ I didn’t want to be safe in the home. I wanted to swim across rivers and play with knives. Instead I got told off for uniform infringements and was forced to wear a terrible, bobble hat, even when we were playing rounders in the blazing heat. In the Brownies, how we looked was a big part of who we were. When the Cubs went off to run through the woods, they didn’t have to keep their stupid caps on. They were encouraged to get dirty. We were encouraged to sit modestly on the floor of the church hall, wearing aprons and smelling of Brasso and crushed dreams.

I asked to join the Cubs instead. All power to my mum, she tried, but in those days boys and girls did not mix until they got to Venture Scouts, which was a whole other lifetime away. I was so oppressed by Brownies I refused to join the Guides, who in those days, dressed in pencil skirts with squashed pillbox hats on their heads. That uniform screamed air hostess not freedom fighter. Nobody was doing anything thrilling in skirts that restrictive. I stared into a future of close harmony singing to the elderly and learning to make quiche and dug my heels in. It did not go down well. In fact, there was an intervention by all the grown ups, who decided that I did not know my own mind.

Brown Owl came round to discuss my future. It was the second time she had visited. The first time was when I had ridden my bike head first into an oncoming car and come off much the worst. On that visit, she held my hands in hers, looked deeply into my eyes and made me promise that I wouldn’t get run over again. Like I had planned it the first time. I promised. I remember thinking that it was an absolutely stupid thing to ask me. I liked Brown Owl, but from that point forward I had her pegged as ‘nice but dim,’ so when she earnestly implored me to join the Guides because it would be lots of fun, I knew she had no idea what she was talking about. Nobody could promise me the wildness I craved, especially not the woman who had thought I had been run over to see what might happen.

I refused all coercions and interventions. I gave up being a model girl. I think I gave up quite a lot of other things alongside it. I stopped being a Brownie and I wasn’t allowed to be a Cub. I think this had a huge, unconscious impact on who I thought I was in terms of genders and roles that were assigned and allowed. It’s not like Brownies and Cubs were the only two institutions in which gender seemed to be a vitally important dividing line, but it was the most pronounced, visible divide of my childhood and it showed me just how much deviation from the norm was allowed outside of the home.

My parents were pretty radical for the time and place I grew up. My brother spent quite a significant portion of his toddlerhood wearing my dresses, a brown quilted anorak and wellington boots. We were allowed to wander around with matches lighting fires, use tools without supervision and behave in a manner not a thousand miles from Lord of the Flies. I enjoyed a great many freedoms that other children did not. Apart from not being allowed a pen knife, because they were for ‘boys’, I had a lot of leeway. I’m still baffled by the pen knife thing, because I distinctly remember smashing up a typewriter with a lump hammer, using a magnifying glass to set fire to stuff and learning how to make and shoot a bow and arrow, activities which make owning a pen knife seem tame by comparison.

I spent a fair amount of my time at home living free of gender expectations, under the tutelage of a mother who was like a human Swiss Army knife. Mum could do everything. Dad just went to work. Mum had a tool shed of her own. She went fishing. She could do complicated bets on the horses. She tiled and grouted, built fires and fences, chopped wood, grew food, hung wallpaper and did all the jobs a man was supposed to do and all the jobs a woman was supposed to do. She cooked, baked, made yogurt and cheese, sewed all our clothes, embroidered and made dolls. She was a powerhouse.

Looking back, I think my mum must have had such a hard time of it. My gran, who I loved more than life itself, was a great granny but I think must have been a difficult woman to have as a mother. She often told me how she had never wanted children. She only had them because my grandad wanted eleven boys. I used to get so upset when she would tell me this. I can only imagine how it must have made my mum feel. And of course, my mum and her two sisters were definitely not the eleven boys my grandad wanted for his Von Trapp cricket team.

Gender expectations in her family were blurred. My grandad learned to sew and knit in the RAF. My granny was a hopeless needlewoman, so my grandad made all his daughters’ baby clothes. My granny was pretty terrible at being a housewife. My grandad stepped in. He taught his daughters everything he knew, and treated them like the sons he didn’t have. But both my grandparents were quite Victorian in their moral outlook. Expectations for a lot of life outside the home were divided down rigidly gendered lines. My parents broke away from a lot of that in the way they brought my brother and I up, but there was still the external world to deal with.

My home life was a time out of time. It was the Seventies, but apart from the access to television, you wouldn’t have known that. In this space, there were no clear divides between things that boys could do and things that girls could do. We were very much living an analog life in a world that was rapidly becoming digital. Outside the home, confusion set in for all of us when my parents had to equip us for what the world was like out there. Attempts were made both to foster independence and freedoms whilst also constraining and curtailing them.

One of my responses to this was to be terrified of almost everything whilst simultaneously wanting to live a life of boundless adventure. It took me ages to be daring because I was so afraid. I would hesitate on the brink for so long, when I finally jumped into whatever it was, I would hurt myself, which seems a fitting metaphor. Hence it being me that cycled into a car. Me that nearly bit my tongue in half jumping from the top of the climbing frame. Me that got stuck upside down on the monkey bars. Me that thought I was sinking in a pedalo at Drayton Manor Park when the water was only ankle deep. The stories of my failures are the stuff of family legend. I learned to think that I was a coward, when nothing could be further from the truth.

I was brave. I didn’t think so at the time, but I was. I was brave when I jumped off the top of the climbing frame, because I did it even though I was afraid. It has taken me a long time to believe for myself what I brought my children up to understand. It is not bravery when you do things because you’re good at them or because you’re not afraid. It’s brave when you do things that you don’t know how to do and when you’re terrified. It’s brave when you do things that cost you dearly.

I was brave, going to school day after day to be confronted with all the ways I didn’t fit into the life that everyone else seemed to be living. I was brave when I dug my heels in about joining the Guides, when I refused to keep trying to fit the person I was into the female sized slot allotted to me. And now I am being brave because I am looking at a part of me that I have wanted and feared in equal measure for so long. That part of me that doesn’t match my biology or my sexuality, the masculine part of me that was allowed out at home, but not in public. The part of me that I had coded as wrong because it was too much. The part of me that wanted and still wants what boys had and have. The part of me that wants to take up room and spread out, that knows, without hesitating, which way to jump and what I think and feel. The part of me that doesn’t have to think about which bits of me to hide, which words not to say.

I listened to an episode of Grace Dent’s Comfort Eating recently, where she interviews the brilliant Tamsin Greig. Greig talks about how proud she is of her children and how much they have taught her. She touches briefly on gender, saying that it is so brilliant that her children are not so rigidly caught up in binary definitions of gender and how thought provoking that is. I absolutely agree. It gave me the way in to start thinking about my own gender and thinking about everything that my children have taught me in their calm and matter of fact acceptance that people can be more than this or that.

I would like to make clear here that I am talking about gender, not about sexuality or about biology - and I am talking about my experience, not advocating for anyone else. I am utterly disinterested in building any more boxes. I have just spent the last six months climbing out of all the boxes I put myself into.

What I discovered, for myself is that actually I no more want to think of myself as a man than as a woman. I am not interested in being either. Both of them seem too small and joyless as definitions of who I really am. If I had my time again, I would be firmly committed to a non-binary approach to life, because anything smaller than that seems reductive and painful. It has been reductive and painful. It has resulted in a life in which I have spent fifty two years on the earth feeling like a freak and apologising for either being too much or too little, when in fact, I am, much in the manner of Goldilocks and her revelation; ‘Just right’.

What I am is just right for myself. At the moment that feels painful, because it seems to involve a lot of learning to unfold the bits of me that I had carefully origamied away. My shoulders are still knotted to hell, but I think this might be the start of the grand unknotting. A flexing out instead of a curling in. A taking back of the space I need to take responsibility for my whole self, which requires broad shoulders and a willingness to look myself in the eye instead of down at the floor. Ownership of me, on my own terms, for me. Neither this nor that, but both.