They Fuck You Up.

Warning: The following is completely true and accurate, so look away now if you secretely suspect that you are one of my parents. Oh, and keep sending the crack, it's really helping me to come to terms with my childhood.

These are the parents I requested whilst waiting to be born:
These are the parents I got:
My first words were "May I please speak to the manager?" Seeing as the warrantly only covered my first six months, I couldn't get a refund. To those of you who knew me, this is why I learned to speak after only seven months. One month too late. After this, my development tailed off somewhat as I resigned myself to my fate.

Parents are funny things. They bring a life into the world, roughly in their image, then spend the next sixteen years or so trying their hardest to make you as little like them as possible. In the process, they not only fuck you up, but themselves aswell.

From my early history, I can only assume that my father was something of a troubled genius and that my mother wanted me to become a cross dresser. I will start with my father, and one of his crimes.......

One of the first school projects I was given was on the Wright brothers and the first airoplane. The mind of a six year old is simple, but logical. I decided that the best course of action to take would be to ask my father. The conversation went as follows....

Me: Dad..... how did the Wright brothers make the first errplane?
Dad: They used chewing gum and string son.
Me: (For even in those days I was extremely clever.) Wouldn't that be too weak?
Dad: No son, in the olden days they had very strong chewing gum, now pass me the um....... Oxo cubes.

I learned a very important lesson the next week when my project, which I had worked very hard on the presentation of, if not on the research, was not displayed with the other kids projects. They all got it wrong. They said that the first airoplane was made out of canvass and stuff like that.

Me: Why isn't my project there?
Teacher: Because it is so crap, all the other kids will laugh at you.
Me: They already laugh at me.
Teacher: That's because you are wearing a girls school uniform and not a boys one. (This comes under crimes of my mother.) This time they may laugh at you for being thick, which is something you have no control over, and would be more insulting.
Me: But they're all wrong! The first Airoplane was made out of chewing gum and string. My Dad told me.
Teacher: Oh really? I suppose you'd jump over a cliff if he told you it were safe as well!
Me: That reminds me, is the school nurse in? I need to get my dressings changed.

You'd think I would have found solace in the warm bossom of my mother.....

Think again!

I had two older sisters. This has its' advantages, but they only become apparent later in life, and involve borrowing money. The disadvantages of having two older sisters, combined with a mother who isn't stifled by the norms of society, hit you hard when you emerge from swaddling clothes and into short trousers. Or, in my case, a cast-off checked school dress.
For the first year of my school life I used the girls toilets, played with the girls and payed no heed to the chants of "Boys are fantastic, Girls are just spastics.". This was not insulting as I didn't know what a spastic was and we weren't terribly politically correct in those days. We would reply "Girls are nice like puppy dogs tails, boys just smell and regurgitate quaills."

The crunch came when Terry in the year above took myself and Jenny into the corner of the playground to show us his willy. "That's nothing." I said when I saw it. "Everybody has one of those." Jenny ran home crying, thinking she was abnormal. Funny really that nobody on the school board though it unusual that there was a little girl called Monty running around in the playground.