Growing Pains

My eight year old sister has been learning a few of life’s less appealing lessons lately. It started with her fencing tournament this weekend (Thank you Lindsey Lohan in Parent Trap for making fencing so appealing to eight year olds. Let’s hope she doesn’t find your bout with anorexia as appealing). The organization that runs her fencing school has allowed a boy who JUST TURNED 9 to compete in the 8 and under group. When my sister found out she went nuts with indignation. She began planning what she would say if he won. How she would point out the unfairness of it all. As my father put it he couldn’t wait to see all of “her inbred, genetic aversion to injustice” kick in and hoped the guy was wearing a cup when it happened. As it turns out lesson number one is life isn’t fair.

She fenced the 9 year old who, again as my father put it, “whupped her ass”. Well this threw her off for the entire day, screwing with her confidence in every other match. In the end it was left to my father to let her know that life isn’t fair and that if the rules let him compete in her age group she will just need to deal with that fact. This particular lesson resulted in a lot of crying which the rest of us are not supposed to know. Realistically, did he expect anything less from an 8 year old? C, I can hear your response and no, I don’t want another lecture on sportsmanlike conduct. In this family we like to win and if we don’t we like to cry. Have I ever let you get away with one game of Skip Bow or Scrabble if you win the first?

To add insult to injury, my sister came home yesterday upset because a boy had hit her at school. She said he just kicked and punched her for no reason. Knowing the unlikelihood of an out of the blue ambush, my father asked for the whole story. As it turns out the boy and some of his friends were making fun of her because she had made a mistake during a soccer game. What really got her is one of the boys was her friend and even he laughed. So she kicked the boy who started it all and he hit back. Lesson two: boys do not hit girls.

My father agreed with her that boys do not hit girls under any circumstance. In fact, he told her, when he was young he once went on a trip up North to visit some cousins. At this time my father wore his hair in a white blond buzz cut just like every other boy in his hometown. He was introduced to his cousin Carey who proceeded to repeatedly beat the crap out of my father. Knowing that he could not hit her back, he went to my grandmother for some advice on what to do about the girl who kept hitting on him. My grandmother’s reply “That’s not a girl”. It seems my father didn’t know any other boys who wore their hair longer than a quarter inch and therefore assumed this cousin was a girl. Poor little Carey got his in the end.

In a way these stories make me smile and reflect on the hard learned lessons of my own childhood. In another sense it makes me sad to know that soon enough she’ll learn the bigger lessons; that life is unfair a lot more than you think. Today it’s a fencing match tomorrow it will be a boyfriend, a job, or something else just as heartbreaking to lose. That although boys aren’t supposed to hit girls, many of them aren’t taught that and become men who hit women. Hopefully she will carry this lesson around and if it ever happens she’ll have the courage to walk away. After kicking his ass.