Remember when you had the image of a good husband during your high school years?
Then suddenly Rupert Graves.
To be honest… no.
I went to a girls-only high school, and my focus there was the work. But it’s not been something I was ever interested in.
I mean, when I was a little kid, most of my friends were boys. And people would say “Oh, are you two going to get married when you grow up?”
Sometimes the boys would enthusiastically say yes, but every single time I’d screw my face up and go “eew, no!”
And sometimes people would ask who I was going to marry, to which I’d say something along the lines of “I don’t know yet” if I’d been told to be nice, or “Nobody, I don’t want to get married” if I was already annoyed or just felt like arguing with a grown-up, as I often did (which is probably why “uncle Adrian” the vicar suggested to my mother that perhaps it might be best if I never went to Sunday School again, though I don’t remember the incident).
The latter response occasionally got a “Good for you. I bet you do well at school, don’t you? So you’re going to focus on your career. What do you want to be, then?” which, of course, was something different every time. But more often, I’d get “Oh, you’ll change your mind, boys won’t seem icky when you’re grown up. You have to get married so you can have children!”
And that, generally, was when things turned nasty. “I don’t think boys are icky, I think babies are. Why would I want to have children?” at which point the majority of people stopped talking to me and talked to my mother instead, saying how funny I was, and reassuring her I’d change my mind when I got older.
I was an odd child and other children often annoyed me because they were so silly. Teachers tried to tell mother that there was something wrong with me and that she should encourage me to change, but she wouldn’t hear that her baby wasn’t perfect. One teacher even told her that I read far too much and should be enouraged to play with other kids more instead.
I did mostly play alone, and very rarely played with dolls. I had some, like Flower Fairies, for which I also had various ‘playsets’ but I treated them like construction toys. I’d put them together, sometimes in ways that weren’t intended, and set up tableaus, then get bored and wander off. I didn’t tell stories with those dolls like other kids did.
I did do partnered and group roleplay, though, often of stuff I’d seen on TV. So if I was given a baby doll, then it was sick and we were doctors trying to save its life or it had been kidnapped and we were police tracking it down. Which was a good excuse to hide the damn thing. Once a lad insisted we had to play husband-and-wife and it was our baby. So I said fine, you can stay at home and look after baby and I’m going out to work. He was perfectly content playing with the doll indoors while I dug up the garden ‘supervising a quarry’.
The stupid comments did stop for a while, but once I was in my 20s, things changed again. Mum told me that every time someone asked about me, and was told I had no kids, they’d assure her that I’d change my mind soon. The marriage expectation had gone, by then, but not the idea that all women MUST want babiesbabiesbabies.
Mum got a bit fed up with this, and so started to tell them about my wonderful boyfriend, and our little 6-year-old girl Willow, with her glossy black hair and big brown eyes.
She’d then show them this picture of her.
Generally, those people never spoke to my mother again, which mother was quite happy about.
I am still happily unmarried.
