Mum's the Word: Yes we were little girls, but we were just kids!

GROWING up in Ontario, Canada, in the 1980s, I was really largely unaware of the difference between boys and girls, I know that doesn’t sound realistic but it was true.

This was because my parents encouraged my sister and I to play with the things we liked. We liked lego, hot wheel cars, and Star Wars and we loved playing our Atari video games. We adored stuffed animals but could take or leave dolls.

We dressed in all the colours of the rainbow and at several points across our childhood had short hairstyles. Yes we were little girls, but we were just kids!

There were definitely years when we dressed up as princesses for Halloween but there were many more years we dressed up as Ewoks or animals. At times for big family events our parents did like to get us matching fancy dresses but that was rare.

It was all about a balance and I think my parents achieved it well. We were encouraged to be who we were.

In school our best friends were an equal mix of girls and boys.

I probably first became aware of us being different around grade 8, just before we started secondary school. My dad hosted a graduation party for us and we all dared each other to kiss the boys. It wasn’t appealing to any of us because they had just been our best friends for years and why would we all of a sudden kiss them!

The same was pretty true for secondary school although we became more of a girl gang than a mixed gang. Boys separated a bit from us at this stage as we started dating them. But the boys in our gang were that pre ‘woke’ generation we talk about now whereby they all made a point of talking about equality and signing up for women’s studies classes.

Again it was pretty much the same in university, the men I was drawn to as friends and boyfriends were very pro women, they wanted to examine gender identity and dispel a lot of traditional thoughts around what it means to be male and female. So in truth I feel the issue of equality didn’t hit me until I entered the work force.

It was then I had to learn skills to help get through situations whereby perhaps my gender was a consideration and not a positive. But I strongly feel my upbringing gave me an incredible foundation to acknowledge men and women are different but equal. This is something I have passed on to my daughter, after all it is second nature. I feel the world she is living in is of course different from mine and even more evolved. Where I might not have had little boys in my school wearing pink nail polish, absolutely no one bats an eye in her class when it happens.

In the 80s, the majority of families were set up whereby mom was a stay at home mother and dad went out to work. This is not the case for Joan’s peers and extends that ideal from a young age that both men and women have careers and that those careers can be so varied.

To push this further, I feel we have moved on largely as a society from attaching negative associations with things that were seen to be only for girls. There might have been some of this around when I was growing up, but it seems very out of place now. So my hope is that Joan grows up being proud of herself as a woman and as a person. I want her to treat everyone equally and I hope she is always treated the same.

Happy International Women’s Day!