Trojan horse...

We've been married almost three years now, and still keep each other awake talking into the night. About our day, philosophy, theology, psychology, and any other ology we can think of. The conversations I enjoy the most though are the ones that we try to catch each other up on our different pasts. I love imagining him as the knobby-kneed pre-adolescent he tells me about, smarting off to the bullies and invariably getting knocked around. By the kids. By his dad. And I love introducing him to the neurotic, long-haired little girl I was and imagine our two remembered selves meeting and becoming friends.

I began one of my stories not imagining it to be anything terribly important. Or, I should be honest and say that I couldn't imagine anything to be more important; it was my story of course. But relative to that grand delusion it did not seem particularly monumental. I was telling him about me being ten and at summer camp with my best friend of the time, Courtney. My years kept at home had already started to show as I found myself in complete bewilderment at the general hormonal upheaval rampant in that place. Courtney was quickly snatched up by some scraggly kid, but, not only was I not snatched, I had no idea how to get snatched. There was even the obligatory end-of-camp banquet, but I watched baffled as every guy I could imagine interest for was paired naturally with every girl I could acknowledge as cute. Where did that put me, I began to think with growing unease. What if no one even asked me? Even the unpaired remnants would be better than being the only person deemed unaskable. To my relief, a prematurely pot-bellied hick from the backwoods finally asked me the night before the banquet. He asked from a distance of about twenty feet; had never talked to me before that moment. In fact, he didn't talk to me after that moment either. As he ignored me over the meal in favor of his friends and talk about hunting and cowtipping, I saw the realization grow that I did not have whatever it was these people were looking for. I was either ugly, or stupid, or too weird to be around. Or something.

That night, being the last night of camp, there was a huge water balloon fight. Now this was something I knew how to do. The water wars we had had on my block growing up were legendary, complete with mercenary bazooka launchers and subversions and betrayals. I remember running into the frey with the first real excitement I had had all week. And I saw Courtney and her boyfriend, so I went launching towards them with my little bombs, laughing with loud bursts. I was going for Courtney, so I did not notice her boyfriend flanking me with his own bombs in hand. I did not notice until I felt the burst on my face and then a raging burning blinding my eyes. Rubbing them, I felt the soapy mess covering my whole face and realized that this boy had filled his balloons with shampoo and that he had found me and he had aimed at my eyes.

I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, washing my eyes out with sinkwater and tears. And as I was telling this long time ago story to Tom, I felt a tightness in my throat and the moistness growing in my eyes.

"So what could you expect except to be either ignored or hurt by boys?"

And quite simply, there it was. How could I have not realized how significant and fundamental that one event became as I entered adolescence. I had so few experiences to draw generalizations from in my homeschooled seclusion, so each one was given unmerited weight in my mind. I avoided and mistrusted males for very long with the split assumptions that there was nothing attractive about me and, even if there was, there was nothing to be gained except pain and embarrassment from such a relationship. Friends would betray you for a guy and defend their boyfriends no matter how unjust. This small story suddenly synthesized one of the major issues I have struggled with even into adulthood, and yet remained relatively unexamined and small for so long. A whispering giant in my developing self.