Category: Pondering Quietly

Some deep thoughts in the shallows of my mind, some shallow thoughts . . . somewhere else.

slack

The slack.  Like in “taking up the . . . “  That used to mean, leaving my car with almost no gas because I was too tied to stop for a fill up and finding a full tank the next morning.  Or having someone to wash dishes when I cooked, or taking a turn cooking.  Or running the vacuum while I straightened up before guests arrived.  Or picking up milk or the kid after school or the conversation that I let dangle.  Or getting the coffee/tea started after the main course.  The slack is what a partner does without really thinking.  Not part of the grand division of labor or assigned chores or anything that you talk about.

God, I miss it.

I was thinking about the slack after I wrote that Julia changed the toilet paper roll yesterday.  A tiny piece of slack, true, but one thing, just one thing that I did not have to do.  But that one little thing brought to mind how I would like to have a roommate, a partner in crime, a partner.  Period.  I was not built to live alone.

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recovery

DSCN0478

Laying in bed this morning, waiting for Julia to wake up to begin the day.  I am sore and a bit achy in the body after pushing myself yesterday to plant 400 bulbs.  If I bought next autumn’s bulbs the day after I planted, I would probably have many fewer tulips and narcissus in my garden.  And yet, I am so very grateful that my optimism and passion for the garden has returned.  Actually, it has been around the whole of this planting and weeding year.

Last fall, after a rather dreadful emotional summer, I seemed to emerge from the heavy years of grieving.  Last year, around this time, I realized that I was walking around with a lighter air.  I did not trust the feeling and kept looking around behind myself to see if the gloom and doom goonies were waiting to pounce.  I waited for the inevitable sadness to descend when something attempted failed or someone said something, did something, something something to remind me of the life I lost.  I was metaphorically shifting my eyes from side to side checking.

And of course, the time from then to now has not been without feeling sad or lonely or yearning for what I cannot have again.  But the burden of carrying that baggage around does not weigh on me as it did.  Perhaps I have earned a wheeled suitcase with expanding handle to haul around my baggage.  Wheels help.

In a celebratory but slightly achy mood, I feel like I can finally announce with glee that I’ve started reading again!  This too has been coming on slowly.  To lose the pleasure of reading and to live without it has been awful.  I’ve always read.  It is an activity that defines me — not that when someone asks what I do, I announce passionately that I read, but to myself and for myself, it has been part of my definition.  After David died, I lost the ability to be lost in some story as if I had lost the ability to understand my native tongue.  And it took so very long to come back that at times I worried that it was a permanent loss.  What if I became that kind of person who never browses for book, who travels on vacation with a bunch of movies loaded on my iPad, who has no interest in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review section?  When I look at these fears, I admit to feeling a wee bit pretentious. But hell, yes!  That is me and I was really scared that that was never going to be me again.

And many times during this time, I been the kind of dinner guest who sucks the air out of a room.  I had no questions to ask new acquaintances, nothing to add to conversations and when I listened, my eyes glazed over and forgot everything the speaker said almost before the words were out of his/her mouth.

And I wondered if this was forever.  What if my best slightly intellectual, perceptive, pretentious years were behind me?  How long could I fake it with my faithful friends who must have noticed my less than sparkling repartee?

At the beginning of the summer, I started reading again.  I was gentle with myself and went back to my reading roots — biography and science fiction and a bit of memoir.  I read with that same looking over my should feeling.  Was this just a season of reading that would pass?  Towards the end of the summer, a friend asked if I wanted to come to a book club meeting.  She invited me because it was a new group and she knew that I had not liked the memoir that the group was reading.  Was I really the person to invite to spice things up?  But I went, just glancing at a few chapters to insure my disgust.  At the meeting I voiced my feelings and listened to the passionate defense of the piece.  Last year I had forced myself to read the book, after the meeting, I re-read and changed my mind.  At least for the most part.

And I liked the people in the group, so I read the old Barbara Kingsolver book that was the next one up, and last months I read The Orchardist (by Amande Coplin, and very good).  I  seemed to be able to contribute to the discussion, ask questions and listen to opinions.  Along the way I indulged in the guilty pleasure of all of the Hunger Games and Divergent.  Literary merit be damned, I was having fun.  Just yesterday, I looked up Connie Willis because I could not remember the full title on one of her books (To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last  which is very funny and well done) and discovered that she had published two books since I stopped reading and was struck with wondering that the world had run so far ahead during my healing time.  What else will I discover?

So, I come back to words on the page and screen (almost understanding the intricacies of Overdrive — gotta’ stop by the library one more time to connect my devices.) with such gratitude that this gift has returned and also with a new and growing list of must read titles.

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that mother . . .

A few thoughts that may or may not form some sort of whole.

It was a glorious fall weekend.  A bit too warm for Wisconsin this time of year but please don’t let me appear to be complaining.  Over and over, I heard comments that this could be the last, best day.  So, we carved pumpkins outside, we raked leaves, we listened to our favorite book and knitted outside, and we did homework outside.  And in shirt sleeves.  Neighbor kids threw balls and frisbees until dark and FaceBook is lined with pictures of babies in leaf piles and everyone else at the homecoming game.  Go Badgers!

And in the midst of raking leaves and what passes for philosophical rumination, I stumbled upon the giddy realization that there is an encore in my life.  I am giddy in love.  With theater.  With performance.  It has come upon me slowly this time.  For reasons, stated, assumed and known only in the dark night of the soul, I left this first true love sufficiently long ago that Cheshire had no touch with a theater mother.  I regret neither my theater years nor all those post-theatre years.  I learned.  I grew.  I made some fabulous friends that I would have never met had my path not included law, adoption, autism and grieving.  But to be back in the first flush of theatrical romance is delicious.

I never stopped seeing theatre, albeit sometimes with condescension as I’ve lived so long outside of the City, but in the most mediocre of productions, there is a good set or interesting lighting, one performer on whom all eyes are riveted or an interesting piece of blocking.  But the prompt that has pushed me over the edge and into boundless infatuation is the “live” performances of the National Theatre of Britain at our local Sundance Cinema.  One friend offered me tickets to Medea, then another friend invited me to Street Car, and tonight I am instigating seeing Sky Light by David Hare.  I have my yearly subscription to our local professional theater and now a subscription to take Julia to kids’ theatre productions.  I picked up the brochure for a dance company and I am dreaming of opera.  Who knows where it will end?  I refuse to enter any 12 step program unless it has choreography.

In another corner of life, I am becoming . . . that mother.

You know, the one who is chatting up teachers on a daily basis, who goes on all field trips, who is ever present for drop off and pick up, who immediately returns to school to bring forgotten assignments and glasses, and who is second guessing every move teachers make.

I have know those mothers.  I have listened to and gossiped about them.  I have agreed that they “need a life.” Their kind walked the halls of Cheshire’s private elementary school.  It was a school for the academically gifted and a catty remarks from my circle was that the kids were most gifted in the parents that they had.  On a third grade field trip, I rode in a van with a mom who, when I asked about her family, sighed and said, “yes, yes, four children.  All gifted.”  I judged her pretentious and wanted to wretch.  Of course, we were there as well although I allowed myself to believe that we were only there because the Indianapolis public schools could not meet Cheshire’s needs.  (And I could only rarely go on field trips. I had a job.)

There was a music prodigy, whose mother did not allow her daughter to participate in gym to guard her fingers or in any of the school’s music ensembles.  Gym could be justified, but band was a different story.  The school was blessed, truly blessed, with a genius music teacher.  Students played music every day from 3rd to 8th grade.  This teacher had a gift for picking excellent music.  Middle school concerts were a pleasure.  For a school full of nerdie kids — said with the greatest of love — band was a marvelous team sport.  The band travelled every year — once to Carnegie Hall — for competitions.  And so, I judged that mother holding her child apart from mine.

There was another kid who skipped grade after grade and who eventually skipped high school.  He was in one of Cheshire’s math classes when he was barely old enough to hold a pencil — I exaggerate only slightly.  I heard about his mother from kids and other moms long before I met her.  According to reports, she was there, at school, all of the time.  She helped her son at his locker in the morning and sometimes between classes.  She was there for lunch and sometimes was seen sitting in her car when her son was in class.  Waiting.  I judged her excessive and a bit ridiculous.  I thought she should get a life.

And now.  Me.  Someone should probably be judging me excessive and a bit ridiculous.  And all I can say is that I am sorry for my less than kind imaginings.  I am trying to micromanage Julia’s time at school and I know exactly why I am doing it.  And I am so very sure that those other mothers had reasons which seemed just as vital and significant.

So, mea culpa.  As Julia says all the time, “I will not make the same mistake again.”  I am not as positive as she usually is, but I will try very hard to take a breath or two before scrutinizing what I may not understand.

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lessons

I don’t clutch at winter.  I like to gaze at new fallen snow from the cozy overstuffed chair near the fire, but once the snow begins to fall, the skies are full of it and I find no reason to over cherish any single falling.  Summer is the same, the days unfurl one after the other, blue skied, hot enough to swim, too buggy to garden but armed with the appropriate chemicals, lovely to swim or walk or bike ride or star gaze.  Even during the few absolutely perfect days each summer, I enjoy them and let them pass through me, I don’t wish them to stay longer than their 24-hour cycle.  Living in the moment, in the present.  Pretending to be an accomplished buddha.

Ah, but not so with the autumn and spring. Transitory, sensuous delights and seasons so short that I can’t help but long for more when they finish.  The early crocus, blue bells in the lawn, tulips, daffodils, peonies that debut and fade at full tilt.  Every year, I resolve to let it flow through me and then find my heart aching to hold onto the delicate Fritillaria Meleagris for just one more day in the middle of May.

I am no better this time of year.  One day there is a golden arching of leaves and sunlight and the next skeletons with barely perceivable buds.  Today, there is a lazy shower of red and orange and tomorrow the ground will rustle brown and children will jump in leaf mountains.  The very water turns steely while I walk the bay path.  Julia and I raked and composted leaves yesterday.  We will do it again and again, perhaps until the week after Thanksgiving, as our trees let go of their bounty.  The leaves falling in the back garden to go into my compost piles and those in the front raked and piled awaiting retrieval by city composters.  I know the round of autumn duties outside and in – the cutting back of perennials and pulling of annuals, the cleaning of beds and mulching of a tender biennials, the storing of equipment and making garage room for the wintering of the car, the pulling down of storm windows and listening to the silence of one more layer of glass between the neighborhood and myself, the piling of wood and setting out fireplace tools — and all the while I wish for one more day, one more minute, one more gazing up and taking in of sights and sounds and smells that even now have dimmed.  What I have is never enough.  I want more and I don’t want to let go.

I have not clutched at the unfolding of a happy life.  I celebrated milestones without formal portraits.  I did not video Cheshire’s concerts or Julia’s gotcha day.  I allowed myself to depend on memory and rely on a partner to help me recall what I had not retained.  In a happy life, it is easy to be the accomplished buddha.

The present, however, is no longer a time of assumed accomplishments.  It is a laboring time.  Not of painful clutchings and releases but of shadows and ghosts that linger.  I no long struggle with sorrow although sometimes, while aiming for joy I stumble and forget the places that it hides.

Today, like other days, I seek guidance and find it Rumi’s words:

“Your task is not to seek for [joy], but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

“What you seek is seeking you.”

And into these words I breathe.

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and again . . .

Call to action or just a terrible awful week?  Um, maybe 12 days.  And maybe both.  Processing and working to avoid leaning to despair or Poly Anna optimism.

Yes.

So the terrible part.  Starting with last week — Julia unraveling in orchestra because there was no cello for her to play.  Tests without preparation to assess what was being learned when I could see the answer was ‘not very much.’  Projects coming home to finish without adequate instruction for me.  Sometimes not coming home at all.  Julia constantly rearranging the all important binder and losing its contents all over the school.  Julia picking and scratching at her head and growing bald spots — clear anxiety.  My own trip to the ER last Friday which postponed the teacher and staff meeting that had been scheduled for that day. Continue reading →

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to everything . . .

The season begins to rest upon.  To turn.  To penetrate, moving from skin to deep inside marrow.  It can still be short sleeve sunny in the middle of the day but rich decaying leaf smell is unmistakable and if we sleep with open windows it is under cozy quilts. Over the past two weeks, I’ve unconsciously moved towards the burgeoning season.  It is easiest to see in closets and dresser drawers.  Summer skirts and capris migrate into the upper cubbies of Julia’s closet organizer and out of my drawers and into the hight reaches of my closet.  The long sleeved shirts and substantial socks are pulled from their hiding places one by one until the full array of warmer clothing, not the warmest by any means, but the warmer wardrobe is what we are wearing.

T’is the season.  A season.  I hum “And the time for every purpose under heaven.”

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5 july

Hand print on my heart.

Happiness. Joy. Is a decision. Not always, mind you. Joy takes energy. Joy takes resilience and power.

Today, I am choosing to get out of bed, to pick up eggs and milk, to do our daily school work and practice cello, to weed, to bake peanut butter cookies, to have supper with Robert and Mary and tonight to make deviled eggs for tomorrow’s brunch at Amy’s house. All of this is a choice. I could just as easily have limped through the day, let Julia do as she wants, probably play on her iPad all day, and get take out for supper. Choice is something that I have now and I am very grateful for it. Four years ago, three years, ago, two years ago I had few choices that involved joy. Last year, my choices began again. Although they felt narrow. My doors are open much wider now.

I chose to find joy. It still takes effort, like exercise, like running. Perhaps one day, once again, it will be my default setting. Right now, I have the energy to make it a choice.

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the fourth

So, I don’t feel like hiding under the covers but I am still not up for sending best wishes for the fourth. Today, four years ago was David’s last day on earth. I woke up this morning and assessed my feelings. Like stretching muscles the morning after strenuous activity, I stretched my heart, my soul, my spirit . . . something inside . . . to see how I felt. How much I felt. What I felt. And what that feeling felt like.

No searing pain. I didn’t expect any but I was still relieved to be without those sharp pains of loss. Without thought, I have been preparing and testing myself for the last week. Without thought, I re-constructed the last days, remembering what we ate, the yellow dress that Julia wore that fourth that was bought to a bar-b-Q in Jersey, how hot it was and whether I went to church that Sunday.

The other evening I went to a movie with my neighbor and afterwards we had dessert. For the first time, she told me about the night that David collapsed and was taken into the hospital for the last time. I called 911 and then I called her and asked her to stay with Julia. She came right over and I did not return until the morning. Julia was asleep when she came over and she expected to camp out on my couch, but a bit later there was a thunder storm and Julia never slept through thunder storms in those days. Julia called out for me and Maria went upstairs. She knew that Julia would be startled to see her and Julia greeted her with, “Go away.” Maria talked to her for awhile and they went downstairs and watched Howl’s Moving Castle. Julia never went back to sleep and was up and playing when I came home in the morning.

I had no idea that there was thunder that night. I was only aware of the struggle — the ER docs did not know what to do for David’s pain which seemed to increase by the moment. There was a scramble to get in touch with the heart team, and then when they knew it was an infected gall bladder, they did not know whether to operate or try to stem the infection. In the end, surgery was deemed to risky although in retrospect . . . . well, the antibiotics just didn’t do the job.

They re-started the heart at least once that night, something I didn’t find out about until after David’s death. Not that I was not told. I expect that I was told, I have no memory of it.

Two other things from that night which was actually the week before the fourth. One, I had been on a longish fast, more than 4 days although I don’t remember how many more. As I drove to the hospital after the ambulance left our house, I started to have sharp stomach pains. I have always been careful about fasting. I’ve never fasted in times of stress. I knew that I was in pain because my body could not respond the way it wanted in the fasting state. When I got to the ER, I made it into the registration desk and sat down. I told the nurse why I was there and then asked for juice. The nurse asked something and I told her about the fast and the pains and she moved very quickly to get what I asked. A container of OJ and the pain disappeared. It was a lesson for me in vulnerability and understanding. A lesson that I would be learning over and over in the days to come.

Second, as I drove home from the hospital in the early light of morning, reeling in feelings centered on fear, I felt an injection of power straight into my veins. My ability to handle crisis and stress had been tested but for a first time, I acknowledged my ability to cope with what was thrown at me. I remember feeling that there was nothing that I could not do. I had gotten David to the hospital when he needed it and he had survived the night. It would be the last sense of power that I would feel for a long time although I can see now that there was power in everything I did for the next three years. Power that supported and kept me going. It feels good to recognize it and name it, even four years later.

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fair

On the deck, waiting for the school bus.  Julia has taken it home two days this week and it has been ok.  So, yes, I have seen at least one kid move away from her when she gets on — we are not going to change the world.  We, she and I, keep talking and she has a few allys to stand up for her.

For the first time ever, Julia has a great many feelings about school ending.  AND school closes in two weeks.  She walked around the school the other day taking pictures with her iPad and then told me about them when she got home.  She has been crabby and grumpy.  She is telling me that she is excited about middle school but also that she will miss people.  Julia is inhabiting so much more of her world than she did a few years ago, so much more than last year.  (A side note: When Julia’s special ed teacher ask her about being crabby, Julia told her that she was crabby because of her period.  Her period actually ended on her crabby day but what surprises me is that she said that.  I have not talked about hormones effecting behavior either seriously or in jest.  I wonder where she heard it.  And this, just another sign of her being in her world.)

I mulched another part of the front garden for most of the day.  Did three trips to the mulch site — city owned and managed — and loaded up my plastic containers and black leaf bags.  I can only take as much as I can hold in my trunk.  If I use the back of the car, it stinks for most of the summer.  I’ve been doing one or two trips a day and gotten tired and sore.  Evidently the gardening chops are coming back.  Whew.

Much later.  Night now. Sitting outside on the deck in the dark.  It is still delightful!  My neighborhood is as quiet as a small city neighborhood can be.  People walking dogs chatting on phones or walking themselves with partners or friends and doing the same live.  Traffic from the surrounding busier streets and sirens going to our nearby hospitals — sirens and ambulances have such powers of remembrance.  So this is not the country like I imagine my sister’s porch on her farm in Virginia.  This is not a mythical fire escape in Brooklyn, but there are a few stars above, enough to wish on, and the leaves are finally thick enough to muffle the outside world.  I am pretty happy sitting here tapping away.

So, sitting on my deck in the dark tapping away is something that I’ve often longed to do but have kept myself from doing.  All the is conventional in me knows that my mother would have disapproved, and probably David would have disapproved.  And once the mosquitoes come out in full force, I will need no one’s disapproval to send me inside.  But for tonight, for right now, I am grateful for this delicious night.  I am grateful to not care if I am seen and thought odd.  I am grateful for stars and leaves and fresh spread mulch.  I am just grateful.

I read this lovely blog piece this morning “disney das” (http://adiaryofamom.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/disney-das/) — a review on the revised program at Disney for access for people with challenges.  I thought it was pretty evenly written, no rants and few complaints.  I agree with most of it.  Like that writer, Julia and I managed the theme parks pretty well at Christmas.  We were very laid back and Julia is very able to understand that we could sign up for a ride and then come back later, but like the writer, I need to acknowledge that the current policy would have been a night mare when we were there a few years ago.  And I think about those in our position a few years ago, those who will never be in as good a position as we were a few years ago, and wonder if that “happiest-place-on-earth” will even be a possibly for them.  There are always a few comments to that type of blog entry that show a complete lack of understanding of the family that have members with challenges.  The writer was accused of wanting a “better experience” for her children than is possible for other children and of taking more than her fair share of rides when a child with autism is skipped to the front of a long line.  One commenter — parent of a child with a “real” disability which translates to a physical disability — expressed his/her disapproval that the rise of autism diagnoses is the real reason for the change of policy.  If one in  68 kids gets a diagnosis, might that translate to one in 68 disney-visiting families asking for special treatment?  And how is that “fair” to those with “real” disabilities?

I admit to the usual initial feelings of anger and frustration towards these commentors but as I read on, it was the lack of understanding, the lack of generosity and the scarcity thinking of the writers that breaks my heart.  There was unwillingness to stand in the shoes of another.  Selfishness and utter and complete self-absorption.  Most of all, it is a lack of imagination.

Visiting popular theme parks can take planning and strategy for all families, but how many families with typical members plan that same way when they go grocery shopping or holiday visiting to grandparents or to the movies or a sibling’s school play.  How many parents need to scrutinize childcare providers for their 15 year olds or teach their children about safely crossing streets every day for three years.  And all of this kind of planning is easy-peasy compared to the planning that some parents engage in.  And so, that GAC (Guest Assistance Card) at Disney was a gift to those families.  For once, a family could indulge in the pleasures of an amusement park the same way that typical families go food shopping.  I guess to that extent the situations of families with typical members and those with members with disabilities changed places.  It was the typical families who needed to engage in strategy to make their way through possible melt downs  on long lines — still the typical four year old’s melt down is unremarkable compared to a nine year old on the spectrum tantruming.  The families with kids with disabilities was free to indulge in delights the way typical families might go from store to store in a shopping mall — almost unimaginable for many of us.

How to open the hearts of those who feel the pie is too small for pieces for all?  There is enough!  How to build empathy, compassion and community?  Even at a theme park and on a school bus.  Surely, this is what we all need — those who would begrudge Julia and I skipping to the front of the line for “It’s a small world” and me who can easily conjure up a dozen uncomfortable experiences to “help” the complainers understand my world.

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all’s well . . .

All’s well . . . although I can’t be sure it will  end well.  For now, all’s well.  Small gratitudes are gratitudes all the same.

It has been a week since I heard from “downtown” — the school’s district’s office that is running the music experience in July.  I wrote an email to the woman I spoke to last week:

Dear B,

We spoke on the 13th about finding support for my daughter, J, so that she can participate in the summer music experience.  I wanted to check in with you to find out how that is coming along.  If you have difficulty finding an aide for her, I should be able to come up with a short list of people who would be interested in doing it.

Thanks for your help,

S

The response came quickly, about a half hour later:

Hi S.

Thank you for checking in on this.  I am working with our Human Resources Department to secure an SEA; they’ll use the list of applicants for summer school.  I sent an email this morning checking on the status and will let you know as soon as I can when we’ve secured an SEA for Julia.

Thanks very much, b

Later, I wrote back with the name of the person who has been her strings aide all year.  We — myself and the SEA — would love to have her spend the music experience with Julia but I don’t really expect that the PTB will take my suggestion.  Still, it is worth a try.  I am just so relieved that I didn’t have to put on battle gear.  I will send our communication notebook and ask whoever the SEA is to let me know how the class goes.  I would not be surprised if there are still some lumps along the road but the big barrier to Julia’s attendance has been removed.

Relief floods in.

Just before I picked Julia up from school, I talked to her principal.  He had called as I was headed to school and I was thankful that he initiated the calling.  On Friday, I sent him an email about the bullying and he responded during the weekend that he would explore the issues.

He talked to all the kids who were involved in some way.  Julia and her supporters told the same story, as did the fourth graders who were bully followers.  The perpetrator did not deny any of the behavior and did not come up with a good reason for it.  He is not a powerful or popular kid and Julia is not his only target.  It sounded like some of his targets are bigger than he is and the principal pointed out to this boy that it was really not in his best interest to push around bigger and stronger kids.  (One of my concerns is that Julia, for all her training to “walk away” or “report to an adult” may one day find the end of her rope and deck the bully.  She is fully capable of doing that.  We cannot forget that she used to fight for food and win.) The boy was told he did something wrong and that his parents were called.  At that point, the boy broke down and cried although I expect it was from the anticipation of parental correction and not from the realization of his wrongdoing.  The hope is that if his behavior changes the younger boys following him will back off.  I know that I wrote that I wanted to punch him out, I really don’t want to bring him down in any way.  Rather, I want  to get him to stop doing what he is doing.  He was also told that if news of continued bullying trickled down to the principal again, that being removed from the bus and suspension were apt descriptions of consequences.

I hope that this solves our bus bully problems for the semester.  I am however, stymied as to the reason this boy does what he does.  I know, I know the reasons in text-book phycology language but to see it played out is bewildering to me.  I was either raised right or raised much too timid but the urge to exert power over those with vulnerabilities never existed in me.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I did attack one neighborhood boy when I was in fourth or fifth grade.

Tommy Sopko lived three doors down from our family and he was one of a bunch of brothers.  He was in my class at St. Thomas the Apostle elementary school and had terrorized me since my arrival there in third grade.  I don’t know if I had been told or it was instinctual but I knew that my stutter made me a prime target for what we called ‘teasing’ of any kind.  I got out of Tommy’s way, said nothing, never reported it, cried a few times at home and was told or ignore the ‘teasing.’  Tommy was a bully, to be sure.

One very rainy morning, I was walking to school with my brother who was 2 years behind me in school, when Tommy fell in behind us and started his socially acceptable banter, except this time he started making fun of my brother — over what, I don’t remember.  My brother, for any of his little brother faults, had no obvious target pinned on his back.  I distinctly remember being in a irritable mood — rain, sharing an umbrella, heavy book bag and who know what little brother complaints.  Tommy was on our heels, under the back of our umbrella, taunting, teasing, bullying, first me and then my brother.  At that moment, I had enough and I had a weapon.  I turned on him and started hitting him with the umbrella.  I remember his stunned face!  And then his running from us.  I do also remember the powerful feelings coursing through me.

One of his parents came over to our house that evening, complaining about my behavior.  I suspect that I must have left some mark with my umbrella.  I can’t imagine that he would have told his parents of being beat up by a girl otherwise.  I was asked why I beat up Tommy on the way to school and I think I stuttered out my reasons.  I have no idea what was said, but I did not apologize (timid but stubborn), I was not punished after they left and was not told to keep my umbrella to myself.

What I felt then was a self-righteous victory over an oppressor, but it was a feeling of power.  I wonder how it compares with our bully’s feeling.  Could telling Julia that she is stupid feel as good as beating up Tommy Sopko with an umbrella?

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