Hey Little Girl

I was threatened today. That's as hard to admit as it is shocking that it happened at all. People don't threaten me. That's not arrogance, it's just basic truth. What is also basic truth is that as much as I am an intelligent woman, a confident woman, a woman with obvious power and an at least unreliable *seeming* temperment to people who don't know me, I am still a woman.

This is a fact that usually doesn't have a lot of bearing in my world. Today, I was reminded that I am sometimes isolated from my gendered reality by virtue of a naturally prickly set of non-verbal cues that signal me as someone not to be trifled with.

There's been a pit bull running the neighborhood. I don't like pit bulls. Aesthetically, I find them quite handsome. They appeal to my taste for powerful and reletively dangerous predators. However, people who own pit bulls are consistantly of a temperment that take a handsome and rather gentle breed and turn it into something ugly and unsafe to be running loose. I tried for a while to bite down my learned bias for the animals when he would sometimes get loose. Recently, it's been more frequent and I found out he'd growled several times at my Goddaughter. Unacceptable. I asked around, and apparently the dog had bared his teeth, chased and otherwise showed unreliable temperment towards other people as well. The dog has to go.

For the last week, it seems the dog has been loose all the time. Early this week, I'd had it. The dog was growling at my loved ones, chasing the neighbor kid on the bike, and who knows what it could/would do to my children. I called Animal Control. I didn't get a person, so I left a message. I'm not sure if anything happened because of my message, but the dog was still around today. I was at the neighbors house when I saw him again. I urged her to call Animal Control again and she did. I believe the neighbor across the street also called them, because the dog had taken to sleeping on her back porch. The neighbor across the street from me had shot him in the ass with a pellet gun sometime last week to get it out of his yard. The whole street has had it.

When I got back from the gym today, the owner was out looking for the dog on his 4 wheeler. I figured it was him, although I'd never met/seen the guy before, since he was riding around calling out a name. I presume that's the dog. I wandered over to the neighbors house to see if the dog had been picked up, or if Animal Control had come by or what the gossip was. He rolled by, an ugly man of around 50, and looked at me hard. I was mildly surprised he recognized me at all, and a tiny bit disconcerted that he seemed to be aware that I was involved in the calling in of Authority about his dog. Then, he lowers his head, squints his eyes at me and growls, "You call on my dog again, and there's going to be big trouble."

I stopped in my tracks. Naturally possessing more guts than brains, I was a hair's breath away from telling him just what part of my ass he could kiss. Suddenly tho, my situation came crashing down on me. I was alone. I live alone and worse, I sometimes live alone with two young children. I don't even have a fucking dog to give me advance warning if someone breaks into my house, much less a man around to act as a deterrent for crazy ass pit bull owners who like to teach mouthy women a lesson about their place. In that moment between his comment and my preferred response of sarcasm and disdain, I recognized us both for what we were. He's a brute, a man who is just crazy enough to push someone around if he thought he could get away with it. And, he figures, you can get away with it when it's just a woman you're pushing around. And I am a single mom living alone.

Just a woman. All three of those words are significant in their own right. Just = less than, a = alone, and woman = weaker/vulnerable. I remember feeling vulnerable and weak once. Twice, actually, tho the second time was different in many ways. It was during pregnancy. I remember feeling slow and cumbersome and completely and utterly helpless to whatever the world may throw at me. At the time, it was a panic that was controlled by my husband. In response to my increasing frailty, he became increasingly protective and watchful for danger. I thought it was romantic and not a little bit comforting. It was always nice to have his physical presence at my back.

Did he go away and leave you all alone
I got a bad desire. . .

Not today. My husband is now an ex-husband. There is no physical presence at my back. In fact, the only physical presence in my house is mine, and it's my presence that's at the back of people smaller and weaker by nature than I am, my children. I'm all we have, and that reality choked me. In the end, I faced that reality and called on the resources I had, I talked to the neighbor about it, and enlisted the protection of that man, knowing that masculine protection is the only language except for brute force on my part that guy would understand. Other women I've told have suggested I call the prosecuters office pre-emptively. That way, when/if something happens and the guy does decide he wants to fuck with me, I have a report already in. Why? Because we all know a woman is only believed reluctantly and has a better chance of getting a quick response if there's already been a report made. Other than that, it's just histrionics.

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby
Edgy and dull and cut a 6-inch valley
Through the middle of my soul

I guess I need to get a dog, or a boyfriend, or a penis.