Awakening a Giant is a Complicated Bag

Chores

The hot sudsy water was filled with bits of meat and corn, floating around like soup with the knives and forks and Tupperware cups.  Washing the day’s dishes by hand was our daily chore, and the perfect place for a sister storm to brew.  I am not sure what we were fighting about… who was rinsing, or why one sister kept demanding that the pot be re-washed while the other sister insisted it was clean.  But, like 12 and 10-year old sisters do, we were at each other like alley cats. 

He came at me with a broom handle, swinging for my legs.  My nimble 12-year old muscles reacted with fight-or-flight intensity.  I jumped.  High.  He missed my legs and, instead, hit the cupboard door behind me, leaving a gaping hole.

We all stared in stunned silence at the black void where pressed plywood used to be.

The adrenaline was still pumping through my system, loud and hard, lending me courage.  I looked my father straight in the eye and said, “If you ever hit me again, I will call the police, and you will never work as a doctor in this town again.”  (How very Degrassi Junior High of me.)

As the thundering in my head subsided and my heart beat slowed to normal, something deep inside me told me I had won a battle.  It told me that I would never again be embarrassed by bruised legs at the swimming pool, or a bottom too tender to sit down at church, I would never be held by the arm and whipped with such fury that I peed myself from sheer terror.   It had awakened within me a sleeping giant.   A giant who still had to finish washing the dishes, after all. 



"Though she be but little, she is fierce."    Shakespeare