When I was old enough to be driving, but young enough still to be living with my parents, I was returning with my mom from a shopping trip at the mall, when I drove over a mouse in our garage. I don’t know how the exact timing was possible, but his darting out of the way didn’t take him far enough to miss the slowly rolling tire, and I crushed the back half of his body. I discovered this when I opened the door from the parked car, and heard squealing. Squealing that was quiet enough to be barely perceptible, yet still ear piercing. Soul piercing. I craned around and saw the mouse, still alive, pinned there under 2 tons, his head and chest now reaching out from under the wheel, straining for a reality that was no longer possible. I instantly reversed out of the garage, straining for that same reality and then rushed out of the car to see. But no, there he was, half pancake, half mouse. I retracted around the huge fist of a feeling that punched my gut and started wailing and whimpering just like that mouse.
My mother too had been taking in this whole scene, whatever horror she was experiencing enhanced by factors from watching her daughter, her baby, so tormented by something that could not be undone. For a moment she stayed in the horror with me, no doubt incapacitated as I was, but also, it soon became evident, summoning up something colossal. Something so out of her normal way of existing that I felt it happening. I felt her straining against the weight of her nature, 2 tons, just like that car, as she strode with almost too much purpose, just to avoid faltering, to the hanging tools on the garage wall and plucked the heavy metal shovel from its hook. “Stand back!” she commanded, but I could hear the doubt and torture in her voice, as though she wondered without words just how she would be able to do this. In that one fleeting moment, I saw my mom, really saw her, partly crushed by years of doubts and conventions and limitations, and partly alive and strong and defiant. For her baby, for me, she did it. She lifted the shovel high over her shoulder and came down in one fast, unwavering arch of a swipe, right on the mouse’s head. And though the mouse was no longer squealing, his head was not flat like the pancake half of his body, so, the blows coming easier now, she lifted the shovel and slammed it down twice more in quick succession to be sure. Then she stopped, and I beheld her, the horror of the mouse’s fate at my hands supplanted by the awe I felt for my mother. I understood without words the wild and brave extremity she achieved, for me. Not that the mouse was forgotten. Horror, which of course is that feeling you get when confronting something awful and against every value you hold dear, but about which, in that moment at least, you believe you can do nothing, softened into a still difficult but more manageable sorrow that I would recall all my life. But the horror of that moment was dramatically and completely swept aside by the vision of my mother, standing there with the shovel handle clenched in her fists, breathing fast, somewhat overwhelmed and sick to her stomach, trying to regain her composure and a normal blood pressure. Somehow, she did what she had to do: put the mouse out of its misery and thereby smash its and her daughter’s horror completely and beyond reach. In her act, I saw just how much she loved me. For it is one thing to care for and minister to the needs of a child. It’s another thing to do something that requires heaving off one’s own horror. To break through the command of the primitive part of our brains, that renders us afraid and frozen like a threatened gecko. To strain wildly against debilitating, irrational paralysis and manage to act.
We make up all kinds of rationalization after the fact for our debilitation in the face of horror, because it is shameful to us. We know that we were too weak to overcome it; we were completely ineffectual. And when the horror has to do with the social behavior of others our inaction is even more shameful. For we know on some level that paralysis in the face of witnessed violence or physical injury is more excusable than paralysis in the face of witnessed rude, insulting or insensitive social conduct, which after all, presents no actual threat to our bodily integrity. So we paint over such moments with the justifications of societal conventions, “supposed to’s” and staying out of the way and not making a big deal, but afterward we recriminate ourselves silently and repeatedly for having been overpowered by fear. That’s what it is after all. Our residual but still very powerful primitive instinct to freeze in the face of callous or insensitive treatment of others or ourselves is fear.
I have had many, many moments where I failed to act when I witnessed rudeness or insult, whether to me or someone else, and I still feel the shame of those moments so many years later. In the case of mistreatment of my children by ill acting teachers or nasty parents of schoolmates, I managed to summon up at least enough courage not to remain silent, but I didn’t call things out exactly for what they were. I didn’t say, “You grabbed my child! How dare you! Don’t you ever touch my child again!” Instead I said, “My son says you grabbed him by back of his neck when he tried to get something from his cubby, and I’m very concerned about that.” I didn’t say, “Do you realize how twisted and mean, and damaging your sarcasm is to my eight year old? To most eight year olds?” I said, “Your way of interacting with the students doesn’t work for my daughter and I would hope as the teacher you would consider that.” And I didn’t say, “Are you nuts? All the other parents think your kids are the nastiest, most conceited, and crassest kids in the entire school, and you have the nerve to tell me that my kids are defective?” Instead I said, “Well I’m sorry to hear that my kids are doing things when I’m not around that aren’t’ very nice, but that doesn’t give your son a free pass to do something mean that has my daughter feeling sick.” But watching my 21 year old daughter begin truly to understand and struggle through the tangle of mistreatment, selfishness, inconsideration, sexism, you name it, that constitute the “jungle” of our society, and watching her wonder whether she dare call people out for the things they say and do, I feel empowered to rise above my own fetters and shout “Yes! You are right! That person was an asshole! This person tried to belittle you! That other person was manipulative! You are not crazy to think so. You do not have to remain pleasing and conflict averse! You do not have to be worried that people will think you are ‘trouble’ or oversensitive because you refuse to let mistreatment, however nicely dressed or camouflaged or even unintended, pass unchallenged.” As I see her recognizing and identifying all the social interactions that stun us, as I witness her paralysis, I am, it seems, finally able to summon up the strength to heave off some of my own.
A few days ago, the defining moment came.
My daughter and I were eating at a small neighborhood restaurant in Brooklyn. There we were, me with my gray hair, older skin, manner of dress and overall bearing that announced me as a woman over 50, and she being obviously a young woman in her 20’s, perhaps my young friend or perhaps my daughter. Someone who seemed like the owner waited on us, but in any event he was a man somewhere between the age of 38 and 48. He kept referring to us as “girls” and not in that hammy, flirty way that is intended to be a compliment, effective or not, to older women. It was in the dull, automatic, unseeing and oblivious way that some men refer to women generally. With each utterance of “girls” our discomfort grew. We did not have to say much to each other. We both knew that a man waiting on us was referring to a 53 year old mother as a “girl” in the presence of her daughter and that it was belittling, all the more so because it confirmed an absent, careless and undervalued interaction with customers. “You girls want anything else?” It matters not if someone else would have not taken offense; I did. My daughter saw me struggling. She saw me pinned under convention and yet trying to summon up something, anything, to heave it off. When the proprietor brought our check, said, “thank you, girls,” without even looking at us and walked away, I must have contorted my face in some crazy way, for she whispered, “Mom, don’t. Mom, let it pass.” And when I continued to fidget and struggle, apparently presenting the risk of some kind of uncontrolled, over the top outburst, she said, “If you’re going to say something, I’m getting out of the restaurant.” I was too busy summoning up my courage to respond. So she beat a hasty retreat, saying “I’m outta here. I’m going to the bathroom.”
I sat there for about 5 seconds trying to breathe my way to doing what I knew I wanted. I half couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to say something to this stranger. I was afraid lest he think me a crackpot, a “feminist” an overly sensitive, silly female. The conventions and the “supposed to’s” and the always-at-the-ready “Why make a big deal out of something so little?” rose up in my brain. But I knew that if I didn’t say something, I’d be ashamed of myself and always regret it. Not because I’d have let what was just a careless remark pass, but because I’d have let my fear win. I took that one final deep inhalation, stood up and walked over to the proprietor, my payment for lunch already on the table. I said, “Excuse me, you seem like a nice man.” “Thank you,” he interjected. I continued in a calm voice that at first belied how hard my heart was pounding but then actually managed to help me find my ground. “So I’ll ask you to please consider how a 53 year old mother might feel being referred to as a girl in front of her grown daughter.” In the face of his momentary confusion, I added kindly, “I’m really too old to be called a girl; I deserve more respect than that.” He looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time. Suddenly he was a respectful person addressing an older one. A service provider addressing a customer. He asked, “I called you a ‘girl’?” And when I affirmed that he did, he apologized, perhaps more because now he was afraid, (what if I made a scene?) than out of any regret. I smiled, and thanked him and told him with a twinkle that I left him a good tip just the same. Then I turned and strode out, feeling like I had just successfully completed the pole-vault at the Olympics and joyously caring not one whit whether the proprietor was judging me.
My daughter was waiting for me outside. “Mom,” she beamed. “I’m really glad you did that.”
Huh?? “You heard?” I asked.
“Yeah, I heard part of what you were saying after I came out of the bathroom. I was afraid for you to say something, but deep down really I wanted you to.”
Well, I wasn’t doing something as heroic or dramatic as euthanizing a doomed animal, but I managed to heave off my fear, and she watched me do it with pride and gratitude. It was something I had to do. It was my way of saying “See? You can do this, and, by the way, I love you.” And I think by her comments she got that. It was her way of saying “Thanks, Mommy.” In the end, perhaps it seems ludicrous that I would have been afraid to have said something, or even that I felt compelled to do so, and yet, how many times have we not spoken up merely because we didn’t want to seem silly or, heaven forbid, make the transgressor (who may well be unwitting) uncomfortable? And why is seeming silly so catastrophic, to be avoided at all costs?
My daughter and I linked arms and walked on.
