One of the many things my Mom taught me was how to handle myself around men I didn’t trust. Which is to say, stay on your toes, keep your eyes open, keep your elbows up, and be ready to raise hell.
When I was in high school, I came to grief by a boy in my class who was just one of nature’s nudniks. The guy was just naturally aggravating, and seemed to derive deep joy out of getting on people’s nerves. I’m kind of a naturally irascible person, so he lit upon me like a fly on a horse apple. He found several efficient ways to drive me nuts, and went to work on it as if it was a paying project.
One day I came home from school just plain fed up, and when pressed, I told my Mom about this pesty boy and his reign of petty terror. She recalled that she knew his father, and that the apple had not fallen far from the tree.
Back in the early-mid 1970s, before this guy had been born, his father was out in the world, being a damn menace and causing havoc in the community. On a particularly notorious occasion, he’d been out to Dunlap with some buddies for a drink and a laugh. And he considered it would be particularly hilarious to sneak up behind my Mom and untie the neckband of the halter top she was wearing, thus releasing the hounds while she had an armload of serving trays and could not halt the escape. What she did do, was swiftly divest herself of the trays, snatch his beer, dump it over his head, and grab hold of one of his ears and drag him out the front door by it.
After she had forcibly ejected him from the dining room, he tried several times to re-enter in order to tender some kind of apology, to be booted right straight back out by my Dad, who ultimately told the guy that he was gonna call the cops to haul him off before Mom could rack up an assault charge. Upon threat of arrest, the man finally subsided and slunk back to town with his metaphorical tail between his legs.
My mom told me that story to tell me that she had no problem with me raining hellfire down upon this kid at school if he pushed things too far. And I kept that knowledge in my pocket. That Mom kicked his dad’s ass back in the 1970s, and that I could kick his too, if I needed to.
Comes now 2025, and my own daughter is dealing with a gadfly boy at her school. And now I am in the position of being the mother doling out disreputable advice. This little boy has been calling my daughter rude names and generally annoying the daylights out of her. Now I don’t know this kid’s dad, and I have no bad blood with his family, but I am absolutely confident in my counsel to my daughter, when I told her to tell him to go to hell and take his dumb opinions with him. My mother didn’t raise a damsel in distress, and I don’t aim to do that, either.