I have an older and younger brother, the middle girl child between two boys. It’s an oddly precarious birth position. I could play sports and dolls. The 60’s and 70’s weren’t easy for a non-conforming girl…and I don’t mean in a sex/gender way…I mean in non-conforming attitude and behavior. Maybe non-compliant is a better word. There were constant mixed messages on female behavior, think the series “Mrs. America.” The struggle was confusing and real. Encouraged to be strong and smart but denigrated and castigated when actually attempting to be…strong and smart… Culture politics for girls
Anyway, I was walking home from school with a friend when I was about seven or eight…downhill…seriously we really had to walk up and down a steep hill to and from school and I lived in Minnesota. No, really. I’ve thought about visiting that neighborhood to see if the hill would seem as steep to the adult me but suffice it to say I recall the neighborhood kids pulling and pushing each other up the hill to school on very cold, snowy mornings. My mother, a Clevelander all day, every day, used to shake her head when we got home with mist and miasma coming off our overheated, overexerted heads. Busy building character…or pneumonia. But I digress…
Anyway, my friend was walking home with me so we could play together after school when a boy I didn’t know well who lived down the street snuck up behind me, put his hands around my throat and started to choke me, hard. I could not breath, I was in distress. We carried metal lunchboxes to and from school, and I had one of those iconic plaid ones. My panicked reaction to ending the attack and getting some air was to swing my lunchbox over my head and whap the kid hard on the top of his head. He let go and ran home screaming and crying. My friend and I took a minute to recover, shook our heads and walked to my house.
We were playing downstairs when my mother called down, “Karen did something happen today?” We had already put the brief incident behind us and my friend and I both shook our heads no. “Did you hit someone with your lunchbox?” Oh yeah, this boy was choking me and I had to hit him to make him stop. My friend nodded in agreement. My mother closed the door and I never heard another word about it until many years later.
My mother was sharing family stories at some gathering or another and relayed that I was the only one of her kids to whom she ever had to field a parent complaint. She apparently was taken aback at how matter-of-fact my friend and I were about what had happened and must have shared our version with the mother on the phone and that was the end of it. I assume the boy had left out the choking part of the story.
There is likely some darker, deeper meaning here that I’m too lazy to figure out but this story has stayed with me because it was the exception to the narrative that my behavior was often viewed as too forward, too aggressive, too uncompromising. My mother used to jokingly refer to me as her “sweet little girl.”
In hindsight I believe the boy was probably looking for attention and had no idea how to behave around other kids, I think he was an only child without many friends but his use of violence to get attention is certainly disturbing. I’d bet there were no repercussions for his behavior…
Make of it what you will.
Khatzkel Did It 