Before I was born my mother, who was 21 at the time, thoroughly prepared for her new baby to come. I would have a four-year-old brother, and a sister who was one and half years old. My mom had kept most of the clothes from both of my siblings, so I would wear their hand-me-downs. As long as I can remember, I was girl who enjoy typical girl and boy activities.
Whenever, my big sister and her best friend came over, we would play with our barbies. We would be so engrossed, we would play for hours! We would share our dolls and create a family like our own family with a mom and dad and kids. Once we had our family, we would create cool names and jobs for them to have. We would grab our stuffed animals and use them as the Barbie’s bed and then would finally play and talk nonsense.
My sister and I would play dress up and dolls together. For birthday’s and Christmas, I would get Barbie’s and Barbie movies. But when I was five, my sister and I got a pink and a purple barbie car. We didn’t just use it as a barbie car… we would use it and play along with my big brother and little cars.
Other days, my brother and I would play with his dolls…but he would always call them action figures. We would play wrestle with them. We would talk about their names, their music, and their famous wrestling moves. We would always play with: Triple H, John Cena, The Rock, Hulk Hogan, the brothers Kane and the Undertaker and a few more, but these were our favourite. My favourite was John Cena, because he was so strong and won lots. His famous wrestling move was called, “Attitude Adjustment” and his catchphrase was “You can’t see me.”.
Looking back, I wonder what we even talked about or did when we played.
Before my sister and I had our own rooms, we went to bed in our big double bed with the bright pink walls and my mom would always read us books that we chose. Everything I knew was pink. I had lots of pink clothes, some days I would even wear all pink, which wasn’t difficult, because pink was what the majority of my closet was. To this day I still have lots of pink. My two gym bags are pink, the cup and water bottle that I drink out of most of the time is pink. My closet still has lots of pink, but has many other colors including blue. My winter jacket is blue and my car is blue. I notice as I write, this that my nails are painted purple, the colour that you get when you mix pink and blue. A colour I enjoy. My room is purple, my USB key that I use for school is purple, my grad dress was purple, purple has always been one of my favourite colours and always will be.
To this day I still have male and female friends and enjoy learning and doing new things; whether it is girly or not.
From the sounds of it, your mother was rather young when she started having kids, my mother was 18 when she had me; a rather young age as well. I didn’t get to experience the hand me downs from siblings as I was the oldest. Dolls were a popular item that my young sister and I also played with.
Now that I reflect on it from your post, my room was also pink, with dolls lining the floor. A typical “girl” trait that many experiences. I enjoyed how you also played with the “male” version of dolls. I put quotation marks around the gendered toys as society has socialized us into a way of gendered stereotypes. Where males are supposed to only play with cars and girls are to play with dolls.
The idea that you brought up of pink and blue making the color blue is a strong argument of breaking these stereotypes, mixing the roles that are supposed to be portrayed by specific genders, further relating it to be your favorite color.
This was a great read! I definitely enjoyed the way you wrote out of how you didn’t just live a gender stereotype life.