I Was a Toddler Bad Ass

Pretty provocative title and the baby girl mugshot fits right in, don't you think?  It's totally true, though. I was a toddler bad ass. I gave my first black eye at the age of 4.

As an aside, I generally think of my childhood in the plural. I have a brother who is precisely one year and 19 days younger than I am. We had the same experiences, so I generally use a very not royal "we" when describing my formative years.

When we were very little, and we were very little even for being little, my father would strap these giant boxing gloves on us and teach us how to throw a punch.  He told me that I needed the lessons because I would need to fight off the boys when I grew up.  Yup, I was totally Daddy's Girl. And, yes, this is a position I relish to this day, some 8 years after his death.

So, Daddy has his hands up and we are taking turns punching them with our comically enormous boxing gloves.  It turns out my hands were just too small to keep those ridiculous things on, and they wound up flopping off  my hands and onto the ground.  This didn't deter my father and he told us to keep going.  But, at some point he stopped paying attention and my tiny little fist hit home, home being his eye.  The punching stopped then and he went into the kitchen, where I heard my mother exclaim, "You've got a black eye!" Then, I darted for the closet and stayed there, convinced that I was in big big trouble for beating up my father. He was over 6 feet tall, and I still fit in baby clothes. That should give you a pretty good idea of just how imposing and intimidating a figure I was.

I should make it clear that my parents never once lifted a hand to us. We didn't even get yelled at much and I think I was grounded once, maybe twice as a teen. The first time I got grounded, it was for a week. During that time a boy from school called to ask me out on a date. I told him that I couldn't go because I was grounded and when I got off the phone, my mom informed me that she "made allowances for love" and that a date would nullify the punishment.  That's just how strict my parents were.  

There I was, in the back of the coat closet, curled up, knees bent, arms around legs, perhaps wondering when they would be setting up the guillotine in the family room. But, in truth, we had no guillotine, nor any other implements of torture or death.  My dad's real weapon was "the look", and I didn't even get that. What I got were my bragging rights, and I think I earned them.