When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Standing at the top of the stairs, staring down. I knew I could jump off the top step and make it to the bottom. I was superman, or boy. The only problem to five-year-old me was the curve at the bottom.

The stairs were just inside the front door, and the last three (or maybe four) steps turned to the hallway. I just could not imagine how I would make that bend. Every morning for around half an hour I would sit on the top step and contemplate the jump. What a hero I would be, my sisters would celebrate me. Perhaps even let me play with them and their friends.

A woman in white interrupted this ritual one morning. Long white cotton smock, so white it looked like fresh snow. She scared me, all unknown people scared me, and many that I knew.

“Hello,” she said.

I whimpered.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

I nodded.

She stepped over me taking the stairs two at a time. At the bottom of the stairs, she turned and beckoned me down with smile.

That smile, broad and as white as her uniform, comforted me like I had never known before. I would have followed that smile anywhere.

As I ate, she gently brushed my hair, stroking it away from my face. I smiled a cornflake smile. My sisters were already on their way to school, this woman in white told me that my father was walking them. My mother was still in bed. Later I would have another brother, or sister.

I smiled again. My mother had told me about that. But I did not care. She was having a baby, what difference did that make. For me, they were just words. The abundance of girls in my house convinced me it would be just another girl. Always I would play on my own. Without friends, not allowed to go anywhere but the back yard. The football I passed to myself, playing one-twos off whatever surface I could.

There was always school in my future. That threat that I would have to go had got louder over the last few months.

“I do love your pretty red hair,” the woman in white said.

I smiled again.

I knew what I wanted to be when I grew big. I wanted to marry the woman in white.

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