Pink

My mother had some sort of a "thing" about little girls and pink. Most of my party dresses, when I was small, were pink. All of my bedrooms were pink, until I was in maybe 9th or 10th grade, when I managed to get her to allow me to paint my room yellow. Before that, we lived in two different houses in England, and both of them had pink bedrooms for me.

The first house we lived in in Canada was the house in the "Hundred Acre Wood." All the rooms upstairs had this nice wood panelling, horizontal boards, maybe four inches wide, and a really warm, light colour. My room had a built-in window seat, and was beautiful. Sunlight poured in and all the room needed was a bright rag rug and a quilt, and it would have been paradise.

But, no.

Mom decided that it would be too cold and drafty with the panelling, so the first thing she did was slap some wallpaper on it. Pink wallpaper. So, of course, the first thing I did was to run my fingernail along the joins between the panels, slitting the wallpaper.

The upshot was that I wound up with a room that satisfied neither of us.

I was already sick and tired of being dragged around, willy nilly, from England to Canada, and clear across that. I was a child, with no control over my life, and existed as sort of an afterthought in the life of my parents.

I was supposed to be blonde, blue-eyed, intelligent (or at least capable of reciting poetry on command), submissive, cheerful, helpful, honest and pretty. I was encouraged to wear dresses, summer and winter, and pink frills for parties and church.

It did not take me very long to hate pink.

As parents, they did not know what to make of the cuckoo they had taken into their nest.

I was gangly, truculent and lazy. When they were young, the word "teenager" had not been invented. They had no clue what to do when I started liking pop music, wild clothing and boys. I'm sure I caused them a lot of grief. Hopefully, some amusement, as well.

Oh, and the room that I managed to get painted yellow? My first weekend home from college, imagine my surprise when I walked in and it was...you guessed it...pink.