The Day I Knew I Was Different From The Other Little Girls On The Block

I was born a bastard child.  Let me give you the back story first: It was 1970 and my mom, a strict Catholic who was bipolar and not receiving any help, had just broken up with her boyfriend.  Whoops, she realized she was pregnant, but never told him, or maybe she told him and he went to Europe.  The story differs depending who you talk to.  Her family, being good Catholics, put her in a home for unwed mothers to give me up for adoption.  I was born three weeks late and in a fierce snow storm and she remembers riding in the ambulance for almost and hour.  Of course, she ended up keeping me.

Unfortunately, a few years later she got knocked up again, but ended up getting married to the BASTARD of the century while five months pregnant without anyone knowing.  Flash forward a year and we moved into to the south side of Madison Heights, a stones throw away from Detroit.  Our home had a history – the owner’s son had died when he was hit by a car after school, so we got a great deal, maybe $25,000.  We moved in on Halloween night, and I remember seeing the neighborhood just packed with kids.  I was excited at the prospect of friends.

It was a cold winter, and I wasn’t put in pre-school, so I met my neighbors that next spring.  A girl who we will call D lived across the street form me.  They had a nicer house, her daddy worked for one of the auto companies, and they even had a boat.  Big fish in a little pond.  Instantly, we hated one another.  I was annoyed at her ability to boss around all the younger kids, and how she always tip-toed.  (She would go on to have surgery a few years later … at the time no one realized she had some sort of deformity, we all thought she was being fancy or something.)  We would play on my side of the street, as my mom was a freak and wouldn’t let me cross the street at the time, so whenever she wanted to piss me off, she’d bring the friends to her house, where I couldn’t go.  Or we’d play tag and she’d encourage the other kids to run across the street so I couldn’t get them.

You can see where this is going.  We grew to hate each other.  I was annoyed she couldn’t accept me as the new kid, and she resented that I had an imagination and always came up with fun games to play.  And lets not mention my jump roping skills.  When I was almost six years old, I started Kindergarten.    My next door neighbors had their cousins in town, and D and I were fighting for them to come play with us on each side of the street.  She then decided to embarrass me and called me a “Blonde Nigger.”  She told me her parents called me that, as I was always running up and down the street, and I didn’t have a real father.  Nice, huh?  So, I did what any other pissed off five-year old would do … I grabbed the neighbor’s cousin’s BB gun a put a cap in her ass.  Well, I just shot her in the ear, but you know what I mean.  Totally ghetto, right?  Like I had any idea what a BB gun would do, but our fates were sealed and we could no longer play or even talk to one another after that.

I was really upset and did some investigating as to what being a n-word was.  Right around this time ROOTS was on tv, and I wasn’t allowed to watch it.  So I was pretty horrified what that word meant once I found out.  At the time I did not swear at all, and had puked once when I thought of the F word in my head.  Seriously, if you know me know in real life, that would make you laugh, as I love to swear and find it liberating.  I wore dresses until the second grade, even while playing tag.  I had long blonde flowing hair I wore in two braids just like Laura Ingalls.  I was a good girl who loved to read and listen to music and swing at the park when my mom brought me there.  All of a sudden, I had this rap on the block that I was poor white trash and fatherless, even though I had a mean step-dad who refused to even acknowledge me who was living with me.  It was if D had poisoned the neighborhood kids against me.  Some of the other kids on her side of the street wouldn’t play with me anymore.  So I branched out, found some older friends, like Big Tracy and Little Tracy, and eventually The Big A when both of the Tracy’s moved away.

This popped into my head today when I was at work at a meeting, one of three we have ever had.  I thought about how everyone there used to like me, until I got myself a hot boyfriend that one of the other girls had a crush one.  You know what happened next … I was poisoned again & I’m still the blonde N word today.  It’s not a nice feeling.

I have just one question: Why are women such a-holes to one another?