When my parents got married, my father said to my mother, “I want four girls.” Eight years later, when they had my sisters, my mother joked, “You said you wanted four girls. Well, you have four of us now.”
It took me a long time to realize how unusual this was, given that it was the environment I was accustomed to, but my parents were dedicated to raising me, a daughter, as a person first and foremost. They took care to make sure that I had an abundance of traditionally “girl” toys like stuffed animals and dolls, but also traditionally “boy” toys like toy cars and trains.
I displayed a preference for the stuffed animals and dolls as a child, but very quickly lost interest in the toy cars. In my adulthood, some people in my family have reflected on this and pointed to it as proof of my inherent femininity shining through. I disagree.
I liked to play pretend, making up stories. It’s easy to see why stuffed animals and dolls would appeal here. I liked the toy cars that could do things: there was a truck with doors that opened and closed that I used a lot. The toy cars with motors that allowed me to propel them across the room were fun too, though it was hard to make them work on the carpet of my room. The plastic cars that did nothing―no motors, no doors that opened, no figure inside them to be driving―confused me. What was I supposed to do with these things? Yes, I could roll them along the floor, but what sense did this make if there was no one driving them?
Clearly these cars had to be sentient to make sense. The notion of sentient cars was a nightmarish one to me, and I had a recurring nightmare about my mother’s car kidnapping me from my mother after she had gotten out of the car, before she had come to the back of the car to unstrap me from the carseat. (I continued to have this nightmare for years, even after I was no longer in the carseat; and even then for awhile after we no longer owned a car.)
That was why I largely ignored my mostly-useless, driverless, nightmarish toy cars. When I got a radio-controlled car from my godfather, however, I had no such compunctions and I very much enjoyed that. I also had a wooden puzzle train set that, though it could only be set up into a figure eight, delighted me.
When my parents first took me to India at age two, a Hindu priest “blessed” my parents, that their next child would be a son. My father took offense at this, and berated the priest that he wanted more daughters.
It became a common theme throughout my childhood that whenever she heard me saying things that subscribed to gender stereotypes, my mother berated and corrected me. It often seemed strange to me, that my parents were so dedicated to keeping me from thinking in a way that most of society seemed to think. But I would not, perhaps, have become as confused as I eventually became if not for the books.