My mother was forever calling me weird, or peculiar (pronounced "peCUUULiar!") from when I was a small child . I would become obsessed with things and not be able to shut up about them. Electricity in general and substations and transformers in particular for example. I used to go on about step up transformers and step down transformers. I think this showed a certain intellectual curiosity, but not in my mother's eyes. I was "just showing off" according to her. Worse, was – bedbugs, of all things! I read about them in my Godmother's Encyclopaedia of Home Hints, dated around 1930. My mother warned me not to talk about them in case people thought we'd got them! Understandable, I suppose.
I tended to go on and on about my interests when out in public with my mother and it enraged her. She threatened me with murder if I didn't keep quiet when with her. So I tried to, but invariably slipped up and ended up wearing a set of red fingerprints on my face – yet again. This was for "showing her up"
Later obsessions were horses and jazz. I used to get teased about the horses at school, but could just about put up with it . I didn't talk about jazz at school, it was too precious to me to be exposed to that kind of negativity. But the kids I played with out of school knew, and pulled my leg a bit. As I also liked the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals and the Kinks I fitted in pretty well - they might have called me "professor" but I knew they liked me . But at home mum was always screeching up the stairs to "turn that bloody row off". She often use to threaten to "have you put away" which I found terrifying.
When I developed depression at the age of 16, she was in her fucking element. " nutty-fruit-cake" , "nutty Nora " "funny ah-ah". You get the picture. She was ashamed of me.
I ended up being a jazz and blues singer, and have done some good gigs with some good people. More than a particularly nasty boss at work could say – he ripped the piss out of me about jazz all the time especially when we were on a course together. I live in a "little world of my own" according to him. One good thing to say about my world is that he wasn't there! When I told my (jazz musician) boyfriend about him, he was furious and threatened to phone him and say to him "I am fucking your wife".
I took early retirement this year, and although I am in constant pain from my right hand, ( I have arthritis and am waiting for a major operation) I have seldom been happier. I had a terrible time at my last workplace, including being so badly bullied I couldn't work well, and was demoted as a result. Part of the bullying was rolling eyes behind my back and sniggering because I was – you guessed it – weird. Well I will never have to deal with those hateful stupid bitches again. For the first time in my life I am not living under someone else's thumb, and it's really good. ( any mistakes in this – blame speech to text and not my weirdness!)