Another quiz.
http://www.playbuzz.com/gregs/what-gender-should-you-actually-beI got male.
But in my family, most of the women weren't very feminine. Mom & my sister had only a few dresses that were just worn on special occasions. There were 5 boys, my sister, Mom, & dad in the house. So the guys outnumbered the girls by a lot. My sister usually played with me or the other brothers, doing the same things we did, & rarely played with the dolls. The "Easy Bake Oven" toy was the only girl's toy I ever remember my sister enjoying. But we all liked that one.
My mom did most of the minor repairs & painting inside the house. Even painting/remodeling the rooms, or switching out & fixing light fixtures, & switches, fixing the vacuum, toaster, & other stuff. In the day when most electronics still had some vacuum tubes, my Mom maintained & repaired all the TVs, & radios too. She was also into science, astronomy, & sci-fi. There were lots of science books & full encyclopedias in the house that my Mom bought for her own interests. So in the day before google, if you wanted to look something up, you just went to a book. If you wanted more up to date info, or more on the topic, you went to the library. Almost every neighborhood had one nearby, or in the nearby schools, plus a big main branch/town library that had everything. Science, astronomy, popular mechanics, popular science, & other magazines arrived at the house monthly to keep up on the newest stuff. Daily newspapers were also thick & packed with stuff other than just news. On weekends, it was twice as thick. Many kids in the neighborhood made extra money just delivering them all.
So even if I was born female, a quiz like that would have said I was male, & probably would have said my sister & Mom were male too. I was raised in a very "butch" household compared to most of the time. Most of the women in my family could probably pull a plow with their teeth. So we were all brought up "butch".
Dad was a crane mechanic at the steel plant. He took care of the outside of the house, painting, roofing, building a new porch, plumbing, furnace, & he was our car mechanic. Everybody (guys & girls) in the house knew how to mow the lawn, fix their own bicycles & tire flats, cook, clean, sew holes in socks, or buttons on a shirt, cut hair or glue a toy model car together. We depended on outside contractors, services, or repair people for almost nothing. We did everything ourselves that we needed done.
So I wasn't exposed to much femininity except outside the family, like at some of our neighbors houses, at school, or on TV. If I was born a girl, I probably would have grown up to be a Peppermint Patty type, who happened to like pretty things.
But as the youngest, & smallest of the boys in the house. I got the hand-me-downs. There was a sewing machine in the house, so it meant the clothes would last almost forever. They also knew how to fix shoes & be a shoemaker. So in the 1960s I could be stuck wearing clothes going back to even the 1940s. If I needed some new clothes, or shoes, they dug through big boxes of stuff until they found something that fit good enough. It didn't matter if it wasn't a perfect fit, or it looked like crap, or nobody wore anything like it in a decade or more. Even my underwear was used worn hand-me-downs.
At school they thought we were poor because of what I wore. Nope, they were just too cheap to buy us anything. My childhood bicycle was one from the late 1940s. I had to pick parts out of the neighborhood garbage, & steal them out of a junkyard to get enough parts to get it running. If I didn't, I wouldn't have a bicycle. It wasn't until high school I had a recent model bike, because I bought a used one from a friend out of my own pocket. Years later we were poor when my Dad got sick, & had to go through several operations, that they botched more than fixed anything, but I was much older then.
We had a nice home. New car every 2 years. Nice camping property with a cabin in the country too. But us kids lived in poverty. Parents were raised during the depression & had a rough life then. They also struggled during WWII. So they felt their kids should get nothing too, or it would spoil them. But nobody was raising their kids like that anymore in the 1950s & 60s unless they were poor. Most other people didn't make their children & loved ones go without things they need, or suffer just because they did decades ago. They had closets full of new clothes. Buy your kids clothes, & every kid should have their own bicycle that isn't a broken down ancient antique that they have to fix themselves. Jeeze, no kid in our family ever even got a birthday present. How hard can that be?
In our house you got a choice. Cake or pizza for your birthday, not both, & not anything else. An hour or 2 later, it was all over, except the birthday kid didn't have to do chores that day... which usually meant you had to do twice as much the next day.
I hated what I had to wear. All the kids in school poked fun of them... right down to my old shoes & sneakers. From head to toe, I was dressed like a poor fool. It was all boy clothes, but no kid wore anything like it in at least a decade, they didn't fit, & looked worn out. Even our haircuts were 1940s or military style. I looked like a WWII refugee. It didn't help that I was the littlest person in the school at the time either.
I was so jealous of my sister's clothes. She was the only girl, so no hand-me-downs for her. Most of her clothes were brand new, pretty, & fit. So I got fascinated by what all the pretty stuff the girls in the neighborhood, & at school wore too. The ones who dressed the prettiest, I had a crush on. I would browse through catalogs of pretty girls stuff when nobody was watching, wishing I could have them.
Topic: Quiz: What gender should you be? (Read 9716 times)
