My kid could kick your kid's ass! ... or could she?

Today was my thirty-seventh week checkup. In nasty, medically-official-sounding news, my cervix is 80% effaced. Good job, cervix. I'm glad we're on the same page.
     When the nurse practitioner went to measure Siren's heart rate, she got startled and developed a case of the hiccups, which pissed her off so hard that her heart rate shot up and she kicked the Doppler. Okay, there, Courtney Love--I guess hiccups can be pretty frustrating when you live in a warm little bubble and eat all your food through a tube attached to your belly.
     I told my mom about it and we got into a conversation about what happens when your kid is the kid that kicks other kid's asses--and how to teach your kid to kick other kid's asses if they try to kick yours. She never had to deal with this; I was a little bitch all through childhood and partially through adolescence.
     There were a number of factors: Madison doesn't really have the same Castle Doctrine culture of self-defense that, well, the rest of the world has--and I weighed no more than fifty pounds until puberty. Being one of those precocious high-IQ pieces of shit didn't help the situation, either. Basically, I was the skinny, dorky Asian kid who liked throw-up and virtual reality chat clients, until puberty finally hit and I could compensate for my utter lack of social skills with being extremely good-looking and excellent at sex my personality and varied interests.

I don't want Siren to grow up like that, though. Being beaten up with your own skateboard before having it stolen from you kind of sucks. I may have been gangly and into throw-up, but someone could've stepped in and taught me how to defend myself. My father was very physically protective of me, primarily because of my size, and my mother worked sixty-to-eighty hours a week for most of my childhood.
     In retrospect, I wish my mother would've been the one to step in. Apparently, being a hood rat skips a generation. (This bodes well for Siren!) During our conversation, we compared polar-opposite levels of confrontation; my mother, because she is way more sure of herself than I am and always has been, described only tenacity in her early years.

It totally is.

Siren, someday you'll find this blog, so here's something to take from it: don't be a little bitch like I was. Don't instigate violence, but don't let other kids beat you with your own skateboard before stealing it. Be like your Nana: defend yourself & your loved ones when you see that the time calls for it.