WOMEN WHO RULE, part 1

We all know women who rule.

Once upon a time, or fifth grade for those keeping score, my Mom was a neat freak.

Every time I took off my coat after school she hung it up.

A place for everything and everything in it’s place.

She worked for the state, a DMV staffer and later DMV boss.

Liars, cheats, and thieves showed up in her office every day, and she still liked a tidy house.

Turns out she was checking my coat pockets for evidence of something wrong when she hung my coat up.

One evening she found it.

Even in fifth grade we had a man-code: if you wanted to hang with the bad boys you needed to do something bad.

Since my grade school was near Pony Village, the biggest mall on the coast between Seattle and San Francisco, that was the testing ground.

The test was whether or not you’re willing to steal something, because that’s what bad boys did if they wanted to join other bad boys.

Right and wrong wasn’t an evolving concept in those days. The kids in my house knew the difference.

Encouraging one kid to bang his head on the biggest window in the house because it sounded like thunder didn’t seem wrong at the time.

Breaking the window, shattering it in place when no parents were home, was a chance to explain how a bird, a really big bird, flew into it.

That was the story and we stuck to it, until Mom noticed the only missing pieces were on the outside, not the inside.

After a conference with Dad, they asked how the window really broke since the shards would’ve been inside from an outside bird strike.

Not much slipped by them. She was DMV, he was an insurance adjuster. They heard it all.

Mom hung my coat up and found a small notebook in the pocket.

“Where’d this come from?” she asked.

“One of my friends gave it to me.”

“Who?”

I gave her the name of the bad boy leader whose parents were family friends.

Dad called his pal and asked why his son gave me a notebook, then handed me the phone.

Here’s what I heard:

“Did you give someone a notebook?”

“No.”

“Why are you lying to me.”

Then the yelling, the crying, the beat down of a sixth grader started. I heard it all on the phone until I couldn’t take it anymore and confessed.

Instead of kicking my fifth grade butt for stealing and lying, my Dad took me to Pony Village and stood me in front of the Payless store manager.

“He robbed you. Do what happens to thieves.”

Instead of calling the police, the manager banned me from his store, the mall, the vicinity, for life.

My Dad paid for the notebook. On the way home he said, “Write it down, if you lie you’re a liar. If you steal, you’re a thief.”

What I understood was I was a bad liar, but a good thief, just not good enough to make it past my Mom.

During the ensuing fifty years the lesson stuck.

Was my Mom perfect? No one’s perfect. Did she have my best interests in mind? Absolutely. Did I learn anything?

After that I hung my coat up when I got home.

And I didn’t make the cut for the bad boy club.

My big lesson was seeing my reflection in my parents. It was a warped fun house mirror image I needed to straighten out.

Was I afraid of my Mom? Yes, and I wasn’t the only one.

Women who rule are a little frightening, and she ruled.

There’s a big question for women who rule: Why put yourself through that wringer?

The answer is the same for men and women. If you think you can make a difference for others, you should make that difference.