Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
How a peace-loving mom stopped worrying and learned to love her fists.
Jan 11, 2000 | My new accessories are beautiful -- red and white, with a slightly pebbled, leathery finish and a sharp new smell. I am ridiculously pleased when I slip them on and fasten the straps. They feel bouncy, sexy, outrageous. It's the same feeling that new sneakers always gave me when I was a kid -- I just knew that I could run faster, jump higher and fly like the wind as soon as I tied them on.
But this time it isn't new shoes I'm admiring. I've just bought myself a pair of boxing gloves.
My husband and kids are still trying to figure this out. Hell, I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm the family peacemaker. I'm the one who forbids our son and daughter to have toy guns and Power Ranger figures, or to watch Angry Beaver cartoons on television. I'm the one who thinks football is too violent, who won't let even the 11-year-old watch "Batman" and who refused to make toast for a week after the kids nibbled it into gun shapes to shoot at our two cats.
So they aren't sure what to make of it when they see me lovingly pack my boxing gloves into my backpack when it's time for sparring class, or watch as I carefully dry and air them, their inner padding impressively sweat-soaked, when I get back home from kickboxing.
In the kitchen after a class, I execute a quick right hook for my son while I whisk salad dressing for dinner and do a couple of fast side kicks before I put the rolls in the oven.
"That's really good, Mom," he says.
He looks embarrassed for me. I think he must wonder why his mom can't put on a nice leotard and do yoga or aerobics, like the other moms. Sometimes I wonder the same things myself.
I've decided to chalk it up to my granny. That's right, my tiny Southern grandmother, who died almost 20 years ago.
Granny was a fight fan. On Saturdays she tidied her house, fed her French poodle and laid out her Bible and her hymnal for church the next day. She swept her yard so clean that grass didn't dare grow in it, put on a flowered shirtdress, dabbed White Shoulders cologne behind her ears and stocked her capacious handbag with a lace-edged handkerchief, a cardboard fan with a funeral home ad on one side and a picture of an airbrushed, blue-eyed Jesus on the other side, and a pack of unfiltered Marlboro cigarettes.
Then Granny would wait on the porch swing in the cooling air of the summer evening for her cousin Brown to pull up in his car and take her to the fights in Knoxville. Once there, they would watch a variety of men in boxer shorts pound each other into salsa for three hours. Then Brown would bring her home again, walk her to the door and make sure she latched her door safely before he left.
Her friends were not so much horrified by this weekly ritual as they were simply confused. They couldn't make this fit with their picture of their friend May. It didn't go with the Sunday school lessons she taught every week, with the flower arranging she enjoyed, with collecting the tiny, girlish treasures she stowed in a special drawer for my sister and me to find when we visited. And that, I think, was the attraction for her.
Living alone in a tiny town in east Tennessee, where everyone had known her for 65 years, Granny bristled against being pigeonholed and railed against being thought of as just another little old lady.
I, too, live in a pretty conservative small town, one in which we tend to compartmentalize and stereotype one another. And I don't always like that part of living here.
It would never occur to me to arrange flowers, to collect porcelain whatnots, or -- let's face it -- to go to church. Nevertheless, like Granny, I lead a quiet, unassuming life.
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