Actually, I’m a below average driver. I don’t drive much, and I try to drive only in the daytime.
My daughter is a beautiful genius, though, or near genius. She’s very intelligent, she’s gorgeous, and she’s >this< close to getting her first black belt in taekwondo. She’s interested in foreign languages. She’s taught herself Japanese, and can and does speak it with native speakers, and watches anime (non-dubbed) and reads manga in Japanese. If I’d managed to live through childbirth half a millenium ago, and she’d lived, she probably would have been the equivalent of Cleopatra.
Supposedly, I’d be a minor contessa if my father’s parents hadn’t emigrated…VERY minor. Our family had titles and a bit of land, but no real wealth. Grandma and Grandpa thought they’d have a better life in the US without the honors of being minor nobility than in Sicily with the honors. I think that I’m happier, overall, in the US than if I’d been born and raised in Sicily.
Well, I can read and write (don’t know if that would translate back or not), I can lift heavy things reasonably well, and I occasionally display a knack for telling tall tales. I imagine I could at least make a halfway decent living (or at least get drinks) hanging around inns telling ghost stories.
I’d have been born to a successful shopkeeper (since that’s what my Dad actually does) and raised helping in the family business (as I was). My mother would not have survived my sister’s birth, so I might have increased domestic duties depending on if/when my father remarried. My family is in the jewelry business, so it’s likely my Dad would have been a gold/silversmith, which was a pretty high-status profession back then. I’d have been raised reasonably comfortably, and as the only marriageable daughter*, I’d likely have been married to another goldsmith who could take over for my father. Perhaps his apprentice.
From then on I’d be a housewife, and in a time before modern equipment that was a serious and backbreaking job no one should sneeze at, especially given that most women could expect to be continually either pregnant or nursing for most of their childbearing years.
If we were going by what our families were doing at the time, I come from a long (long) line peasant farmers. My father’s family has been growing something or other on the same patch of land in Sicily since the Black Death. They’d probably been there since Roman times.
*I have a little sister, who is developmentally delayed. With modern interventions she is leading quite a normal life, but I feel like in the middle ages she’d just have been locked in the attic.
I’d like to say “Explorer” (if I ever succeed in Time-Travelling, you’ll know because there’ll be a capital city of a Colony somewhere called Port Martini ;)).
simpletons that could be trained to simple tasks [goosegirl, shepherdess, spinning wool into fire] were more useful back then than they are now. They were given simple tasks and earned their way in the family in that manner. They as females could also get married off or sold into prostitution… it was only if they were seriously um… substandard and really useless that they could be dumped in a ditch or killed.