Fierce Fighter

After a day of struggling to deal with insurance issues, requiring many hours on the phone, and financial issues, requiring even more hours on the phone, I at last get to find the word of the day is fierce!  I feel I’ve been fiercely fighting all day, and maybe I’ve gotten everything set in order.  We will see.  Transitions can be difficult, and sometimes you just have to keep going until you make it through to the other side.

There is no question I am a fighter.  I fight for the underdog. I fight for what is right.  I fight for what I want.  I fight for my family.  I fight for my man.  I think it would be safe to say that any one of us would do the same.  So this isn’t a post about what I fight fiercely for, but about when I learned to be a fighter.

Unfortunately this story really is about a fight.  (Modern parents may have come up with a less physical method of dealing with such things.)

I was six-years-old, and a neighbor girl, also six, would hit me and run off, crossing the street which I was not allowed to cross.  She was a bully.  I had no doubt that I was as fast and as strong as this other girl, and if I caught her maybe I could prove it.

Mom watch this occur day after day.  I’d go home crying, I’d tell Mom the entire story, and she would tell me to stand up for myself.  Mom did not call the other girl’s mother.  Mom did ask why I didn’t go after the other girl and hit her back. Once Mom heard my dilemma, she gave me permission to carefully cross the street.

The next day, my nemesis walked up to me and struck!  She ran across the street, and stood there taunting me.  I ran after her, stopping at the street, looking both ways, walking across the street, while she yelled that she was going to tell my Mom, with me walking right up to her.

“Go ahead,” I told her, “Mom told me I could cross the street to hit you back!”  I swung with all the force my little six-year-old arm was capable of and hit her, and hit her again.  Finally she got over her shock and instead of fighting back, she ran.  She ran with me hitting her over and over again, and I only stopped when I found I had run into her house to hit her one last time.  All the fury of weeks of being hit, and unable to do anything about it, ended in one fierce display of my personal power.

No one ever hit me, or hurt me, with impunity ever again.  I’ve never had to fight like this again, but neither am I afraid of a fight.