Three quarters and five dimes all in a row. The oldest among them is 19 years old. I suppose that I had a wish that one would be older than me… When that coin was made in 1989, life was a whole other dish. I was 11, just about to hit puberty and still looked like a kid but wishing I was older. I think it was that year that I became aware of my sexuality. It was that year that I had my first kiss and thought it was the grossest thing that one person could do to another… Little did I know…
It was also that year that I become aware of and acutely interested in politics. I ran for Grade 6 Class Prime Minister and won only because I bribed the students with cookies for my victory party and told them that I would only share them if I won. So I acceded to the post with something like 90% of the votes. I modeled my campaign after that of Ed Brodbent’s. I was a die hard NDP in those years and followed the Canadian Federal Elections very closely. I remember feeling enraged by Mulroney’s Free Trade policies. I didn’t even know what any of that meant. I wrote a letter to Brian Mulroney and told him of my victory and that I was ruling my class in honour of his New Democrat counterpart. He wrote back saying “Congratulations, would that you had chosen the right party.”
It was also that year that the Berlin Wall fell. I was of course outraged at what the wall represented and had wished so desperately that I had been there to dismantle it. Incidentally, it was also that year that I learned of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. For years I thought that the two were one and the same…
I remember that year probably better than any from my youth. It was the year that I became highly competitive about my academics. It was that year that I noticed that some boys had grown armpit hair and was horrified when I realized that I too had done the same! It was that year that two boys had a huge fight over their love for me outside my grade six portable, yelling “I love her” ” No! I love her more!” It was that year that I played a tree in my school’s production of The Wizard of Oz.
I was on the gymnastics team because I was obsessed with She-Ra Princess of Power and wanted to emulate her acrobatic abilities. I never quite learned how to do back flips. It’s one of my greatest failures in life. I went to two NKOTB concerts and was sure that one day I would marry Joe McIntyre. I spent the summer in Italy and fell in love with my first real Italian.
I was 11 and sure that one day I’d either be Canada’s first Female Prime Minister or some magical princess who saved the world from evil. The former was achieved by someone else, the latter seems rather unlikely now that I have back problems as a result of having prematurely grown giant breasts in 1990 at 12 years of age.
I had everything going for me in 1989. But, as soon as that clock struck midnight spitting me into the next decade, my body morphed and, worse than turning into a pumpkin, I turned into a woman, physically that is.
It wasn’t until I turned thirty that my brain caught up.
