...recently a friend of mine stopped by to see me and catch up...we've been playing facebook tag for a while and finally he just called and said he was coming over..."i'm really, super pregnant," i told him, "don't expect me to even get up from the recliner"
...i didn't...
...and we had a long chat...
...what surprised me about our talk was how very little he knew about the circumstances surrounding my resignation from my teaching position that happened around this time last year...what had provoked me, he wanted to know, to post to my blog something my former boss said about my writing? "it seemed like you attacked her out of nowhere," he said...
...i was floored...to me, an attack is showing up with brass knuckles, not writing something down that is bothering, frustrating, or otherwise angering me...
..."you didn't characterize her well," he went on to say...
...true...i did call her "She Who Is Looking Her Age"...an appropriate (albeit stolen) moniker...though now people call her Shriveled Spider and i wish i could've stolen that one instead...
..."it was like you came out of nowhere and called her a name," my friend said...
...when i was a child, i used to pinch my sister, deidre, under the table at meals to see if i could get her to whine or cry out...as the older child, i found it funny when my sister got into trouble for something i did, mostly because then my parents would see me as the good child, the one who didn't whine or complain...of course, once she realized if she screamed she'd get into trouble, she started pinching me back...then the game became simply about the will to stay quiet while our thighs burned and bruised...i haven't played that game since i was seven, but looking back at my former working environment, i was reminded of it and for the first time experienced the injustice deidre must've felt so many years ago...
...for over a year, my former boss thwarted me professionally and tossed subtle insults in my direction--insults that were subtle enough she could deny them--one conversation that still sticks in my craw is when she called the birth of my first child a "lifestyle choice" for which she, as my supervisor, was making painstaking scheduling choices, (offerings i hadn't asked for but that she'd provided because she was such a kind, accommodating boss, and as she said, "it takes a village")...all of the pinching was done in private, conversations that took place in her office, or mine, or the copy room when no one else was around...looking back, i see how convenient it was for her to pinch me under the table and what an idiot i was to continue to trust her...