When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
The innocence of me, the five year old.
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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