In the years since I realized she was being silly, maybe even neurotic. It had me plenty worried at the time, though. In the summer between high school and college, I was nearly beaten to death by a woman who was upset that I didn't close my eyes during a moment of physical intimacy. That's an exaggeration, of course. I wasn't ever in any danger, but getting hit by somebody who wasn't supposed to try and hurt me went against many things I assumed were true.
That summer, I was less than two years from the peak of my physical strength and development, and her tiny fists beating on my meaty flesh weren't much of a mortal threat, but it was a great surprise. I wasn't even aware that I was supposed to keep my eyes closed or that not keeping them closed was some sort of rude crossing of the lines of polite exchange. Without meaning to, I offended her to the point where she felt violence, ineffective as it was, was necessary to correct my behavior. She also cried, which hurt me considerably more than her fists.
All boys are taught that they should never lay hands on a girl. Boys my size are especially reminded of that rule. There were two times when I broke that rule without meaning to. One was a day in the fifth grade when, during the physical education period, we boys were playing and practicing moves we'd seen on MidSouth Wrestling on TV, mixed with a few Godzilla movies. Since I was the biggest, I got to be the bad guy, and everybody tried their best to take me down as elaborately. Being boys, we were playing pretty rough. Young bodies are more resilient than older ones, so nobody gets hurt.
Our games excluded girls. Pretty much everything we did in the fifth grade excluded girls. I never really considered that might be an offense, as they never showed much interest in playing our games. Unaware as I was, at least some of the girls were watching, and wanting to be included.
Among my many attackers, I felt someone smaller jump on my back. Although I didn't know who it was, I assumed it was one of the boys who always played these games with me. That was a mistake. Without looking, I grabbed the arms grappling around my neck and threw my assailant over my shoulder. They performed that sort of move on TV wrestling all the time. I'd done it in the gym like we were then and on the grassy yards outside. I expected whoever I threw to jump back up and come at me again. That was the point of the game. This time, once thrown, my playmate didn't move. They lay in a lump on the gym floor, all arms and legs and gym clothes--girl's gym clothes. I'd made a terrible mistake.
Her name was Tiffany. Weeks before I admitted to some other boys, I thought she was pretty. This started an argument about which girls were pretty and who we thought was prettiest. She lay on the ground, frozen in shock and crying. A teacher rushed to her and made sure nothing was broken. Nothing was. She wasn't injured, but nobody could believe what I'd done. I was sent to the office.
I tried to argue that it was an accident, that I thought it was a boy who jumped on me, that it all happened so fast I didn't know what I was doing. The grownups tried very hard to make sure I felt guilty. They didn't need to. I felt unredeemable. Playing rough with boys was one thing. That was expected. Playing rough with girls was just alien, a violation of the code kids lived by. It was difficult enough just to talk to girls; they weren't for wrestling.
Later that year, I tripped someone, without looking, that I thought was another boy, my friend, but it turned out to be a girl who had run ahead of him. After getting in trouble again for the same thing, my days of wrestling with anyone, boy or girl, were over. Clearly, I couldn't be trusted to do it safely.
Disciplining a child like me couldn't have been easy because, knowing I was wrong, I became frightened about what made me do these things. I worried that it must look like I wanted to hurt people, which I thought wasn't true, but since I did hurt people, what really was true? I tried to explain that I hadn't meant to hurt anyone, but that wasn't good enough.
These incidents were enough to change my behavior without ever really doing much damage to one of my classmates. After that, I spent most of my life afraid to ever raise a hand in anger to anyone or lose my temper.
That summer between high school and college, whatever events shaped my behavior hadn't shaped the woman who was angry at me. Yelling at me, even hitting me, were permissible in her rules of engagement, even though I maintained that I didn't know I was supposed to keep my eyes closed. I didn't know what I did was wrong.
It didn't matter that she wasn't physically hurting me; she was making me feel very guilty of a transgression, even though I didn't know it was a transgression. In the moment, it seemed like my ignorance of the transgression was yet another transgression. I should have known better.
This wasn't the last time I suffered physical violence from a woman I was involved with. We tend not to talk about this very much since it's less dangerous when it's a woman hitting a man. It also makes the man look weak. Women tend to be less inclined to violence, so it happens a lot less often than when the man is the aggressor, but It does happen, though. Anyone can be abused.
People who suffer from any sort of abuse often feel like they did something to cause it, that they deserved it. I certainly did. Since she wasn't causing any physical injury, I usually just let it happen. All I could think of was to take it quietly and just not call on her again.
Human interaction is terribly complicated. We have all these expectations of how people should interact with us, and often, they don't meet those expectations, which can lead to frustration and anger. It's not healthy to assume you're in the wrong like I did, but it kept me from acting back in anger, so it wasn't a bad trade. Healthy interactions with others are required for life, even though they're sometimes challenging. I was lucky that I was able to absorb an awful lot of abuse before it became a problem. That's not ideal, but it helped prevent hurting anyone by mistake ever again.
