If you had 15 minutes to tell someone who you are, what would you tell them?

I would start with that I am never as tall as in peoples memories. I am not short- a sturdy 5ft 7", but not tall like Clare from my form was tall or tall like my sister-in-law; both girls who skim 6ft in bare feet. I have always worn heels so maybe that is why people remember me taller, or maybe it is because I seem like the kind of woman who would be tall, not all that feminine, kind of gravelly voiced, not mannish but not dainty.

I had a really ordinary childhood on the surface and it wasn't really so bizarre if you scratched a bit deeper, but there were dysfunctions there. I don't think that either sets of my grandparents really loved one another and that seems to have left a strange scar on the family and in me somehow. On the surface the two sides of the family tree couldn't have been more different: mother born into a solidly working class family but with parents keen to better themselves and who moved, first to the nicer end of Dagenham and then to a garden suburb in a nicer borough. They remained married for more than 59 years, until my Grandfathers death when I was 25, but they didn't like each other and that was clear to anybody who met them even briefly. My Grandfather was a kind and gentle man, who a few years before his death told me of a pining for a girl called Elsie sixty years before, a pining that never left him I don't think. My Grandmother this strange, depressed and angry woman who I can see echoes of in myself sometimes, even though I do not much care to admit that.  Their elder daughter became my mother later on.

On the other side there was much more obvious catastrophe: a teenager pregnant by a boy that I suspect she did not know very well and who went on to leave before my father could know him at all. She went quite mad, I think, and ended up institutionalised at some point on the timeline, although I am not sure when as I never knew her. My father brought up by his maternal grandparents who were classic almost underclass, what we in the family would call- not unkindly- pikies. They were in and out of sketchy paid employment and gambled the little money they had on dogs and horses and spent what they won or what remained after they had lost on drink and cigarettes. There was not much food. 

I think that my parents saw that little bit of dysfunction in one another- the bad mothering and the strange atmospheres they had each grown up in- and identified with it. My father needed a mother and my mother needed to be a mother, even before she had children. I think that was what stuck them together. Anyway, some of what transpired was me.

And what's to know about me? I am not that tall. I like a drink. I have read a lot of books in the 23 years since I learnt to read. I have always felt fat despite not being especially so. I fell in love for the first time when I was five years old, and had love affair after love affair in my head each year from then on: with unobtainable men on posters, with my teachers, with boys in my class at primary school, with men on the news, and then with my English teacher who later fucked me and fucked me and fucked me until I nearly died. I am a teacher now myself and I am married to teacher too, but not the same one who tried to kill me with sex. I have a daughter and I would like another one. I love The Smiths and drinking Coke with sugar in and red nail polish. I love the man I married more than I have ever loved anyone, but I know that if I had met him ten years before I would not have done. I wasn't ready then and so you have to wonder about fate or the stars aligning or something, don't you? Well I do, anyway, I don't believe in God but I do believe there must something out there that sometimes puts the dominoes in the right formation to fall down in such a way as to do you a favour- or to cause action and reaction, anyway. It may all just be random, but if it is then I think I am glad of the random way that I came to be anyway, and looking out into the dark night sky there does seem to be some sense to those grandparents of mine who did not love each other, or know each other, and to the way it all fell into place to create me.