The Agony and The Victory, Part One

Chiapas, Mexico 1 - Photo by J. Sharland

When I decided I needed to change my name. Because I was tired of not only feeling bad but being the brunt of nasty people’s jokes. And having my mother’s boyfriends’ needs for making my name meaningful.

 It, the name, was my mother’s idea from either transferring her own misery onto me, or--wishful thinking on my part--wanting it to have a reverse effect. I could never quite understand her reasoning, and she maintains she didn’t remember. But then how could she remember anything so far back when she was always drinking, drunk, or passed out?

 I asked her on one of her more lucid moments, when I got a little older, why she drank so much. She told me it was because she wanted to forget things.

”Like what?” I had wanted to know.

“Things,” she replied. “Just things. Things you don’t need to know about.”

“But I want to know. I want to know what you were going through that made you want to give me a name that surely was from your own agonizing experiences. What made you feel so bad to name your only child what it was that you were feeling?”

She didn’t reply for a moment, looking as if she was trying to go back to that time.

A tear ran down her face.

“I was in agony,” she started. “Giving birth is agonizing. There is no other pain like it. I guess I wanted you to know what it cost me to have you, and I didn’t want you to have to go through it, to feel that kind of pain.”

“But I have to go through other kinds of pain because of that,” I whispered.

She didn’t reply.

I looked at her. I was certain that what she said was true, but I didn’t believe she named me because of the pain of birth. There was more to her tale that she wasn’t telling me. But I let it go for now, since she’d grabbed the bottle of preferred numbing liquid and poured a glass full with only a few ice cubes, which was my cue to back off. She’d tell me in her own time, or not.

I was 12 years old at that time. I had already suffered from three broken arms, severe beatings, a concussion, and my body was decorated with cigarette burns my mother’s friends decided I needed in order to fulfill my name’s destiny. But I became better at dodging those cruel intentions or making myself scarce when those men came around.

We lived in a one-bedroom house--a shack really--and I didn’t have any place to run to when the bad men came while I was in our bedroom doing homework and my mother needed the mattress. I used to hide under the bed since we only had a curtain for covering a makeshift closet in the corner of the tiny room, and that would have held no protection, or to hide me. But as I grew, the space under the mattress became too tight, and with the bouncing above, I had been unable to breathe when the bounces came from some of the heavier built jerks.

Chiapas, Mexico 2 - Photo by J. Sharland

But they always found me when I was unable to hold back a squeal from a particularly hard bump, which I began to realize would usually come toward the end. The guys would hear. Wanting a taste of youth, they would pull me out from under the bed and start slobbering over me and feeling me up until my mother would hit the man with a broom she always had leaning against the wall. I’d rarely seen her sweep, so I began to assume it was handy for such occasions as this when I would be discovered under the bed and the men couldn’t resist. They wouldn’t be wary or suspicious of a broom, and they wouldn’t do as much damage if they grabbed it to use it on mother, I think she figured, therefore, the broom was a handy item to distract enough for me to get away. But I wasn’t always so lucky when younger; hence the cigarette burns, broken arms, and the one concussion I suffered. Sometimes the men were just downright mean, and got their greatest kicks, not from sex with my mother, but from torturing me.

Mother couldn’t always protect me when those kinds would punch her out before going after her kid.

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At school, there were boys who wanted a piece of me, too, who wanted to show me, and whoever was watching, just what being named ‘Agony’ was all about. When I began to fill out, starting to become well endowed like my mother, she would also say, then the boy’s reasons for accosting me became different. These guys would grow into the beasts my mother would bring home, I was certain, like those who wouldn’t be thwarted by a silly ol’ broom. But because these boys were young and mean, they were also stupid, instead of being clever, and I was able to outsmart them when I began to see their game.

My mother often told me that I was too smart for my own good, getting all A’s in school. But by the time I turned fourteen, I decided I had to change my name, but to what, I wasn’t sure. I thought that might be the only way to discourage those who wanted to torment me.

But until my name was changed, I had to do something to protect myself.

I asked a teacher who seemed to like me, or felt sorry for me, if she knew where I could get some self-defense training.

“My boyfriend works at a karate studio. I can ask him if there could be a discounted price for you to learn some defense moves. I’ll ask him and let you know.”

That excited me to think that there was a possibility, but even a really discounted price would be too much, as I had no money from which to pay anything.

A couple of days later, the teacher asked me if I would stay after class for a few minutes, that she had something she wanted to talk about. I waited for the other students to leave and walked up to her desk.

“I talked to my boyfriend about your need to learn some defense techniques, and he talked to his boss. It seems that they could use someone to clean the studio with sweeping and cleaning the bathrooms, as right now they are, to quote him, ‘pretty gross.’” My teacher took a deep breath and continued, “So the boss says that if you’d be interested in the job of cleaning, you could take the classes for free. Would you be interested?”

Since I was used to sweeping and cleaning practically anything, I was thrilled at the thought that I could learn some techniques and not have to pay for them, so I said, “Absolutely! You bet! I’m willing to give it a try!” I was pretty excited about this new possibility and new adventure. 

After school, I went to the studio with my teacher to be introduced and get the ‘lay-of-the-land,’ she said to me. I told them I would clean bathrooms before class and sweep after. That was good with them, and then the training began.

I worked out and worked at cleaning every day except Sunday for a month when the boss took me aside to tell me he thought I had been doing a magnificent job with my cleaning, that the place hadn’t looked so good. Also, he wanted me to know that I had caught on to the training movements exceptionally well and could probably quit now and could likely deter most unwanted advances.

“If it’s all the same with you, Sir, I would like to continue. I don’t want to stop at just deterring ‘most’ advances, I want to kick the crap out of all those who would be trying to take advantage of me.”

And so I continued with the cleaning and moving up the ladder to butt-kicking.

Part 2 of this short story will be published here on my website soon.