Dear Reader,
There comes a time in a little girl’s life where she stops pretending to be the damsel in distress and decides to become a warrior maiden. That was at least my experience. I think in playing pretend as children we are sometimes acting out what we are beginning to realize in our innocent minds. Little girls play princesses running away from the enemy during war time because they understand that there are bad people in the world somewhere. But even in this game, they are not quite helpless maidens. At first, they realize they must flee, but they also have to take their little sisters and probably some orphaned babies that they happen to find. As they run away, they realize that they must “outwit” the enemies and work together to escape. This does include some “pauses” in the game so that the coordination can be worked out of who does what and who gets hurt. After outwitting the enemies a few times, the princesses get fed up with the enemy and resort to guerilla warfare and win the war (with their orphaned babies tied to their backs).
No one told me specifically I was supposed to make this evolution, but the stories I heard told me that if I didn’t want to be a coward, I must. I remember going to see The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, at the age of six. (This also probably heavily contributed to my evolution from princess to warrior maiden.) I saw swords and bows and people riding horses into battle for the first time. To say I was intrigued was an understatement, I wanted a sword and the glory of riding into battle. This was not the only story that awakened something in me, there were other stories that I heard that showed a woman’s duty to bravery. Disney Princess movies also had a surprising impact. While I do not agree with the message of every princess movie (most of them were brats), there were some that truly embodied what self-sacrifice and bravery looked like.
Many fictional stories can be used to inspire bravery, but there were many true stories that fed my imagination and brought courage to my soul. Many of my childhood bedtime stories were “Grandpa Benny” stories. This was my great grandfather who served as a paratrooper in WWII. There were several of these stories, but my favorite one would be told while we looked at his medals. I would ask my dad about the Nazi medals, and he would say that he cut them off a dead soldier. My dad would then proceed to tell the story of how Grandpa Benny escaped the Nazis when he and others had been captured. The glee that I felt at my great-grandfather’s victories made me think that I could do it too. There, as a little girl in our living room, I would laugh at danger like a Viking warrior.
As I grew older, I realized that bravery was not only on the battlefield. I realized that though a woman may have the heart of a warrior inside her, she also had to play her cards differently sometimes than a man would. One of my favorite stories is how one of my distant grandmothers during the civil war and the sack on Atlanta, went looking for her husband after the battle. She found him lying in a ditch with an injured leg. He survived because of the maggots in the wound. As she took her husband home, she followed Union Army’s wake, so she did not get caught up in any fighting. As a teenager in my grandparent’s dinning room, I chuckled like an old woman who outwitted her better equipped enemies.
In middle school I wanted to connect to my Scottish roots, so I read extensively about William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. In my teenage head they were brave men fighting for freedom with cool accents. As an adult, I realize it was almost a hopeless cause, but they kept going, at the pain of death. Death not only for them, but also their families. They kept going because it was right and they were done with kiss up politics and playing it safe. They knew that the only lasting peace and only possible future for their people’s wellbeing would have to be true freedom.
Maybe my parents were feeding me these stories so that I would grow up to be brave and courageous. Maybe they wanted me to be able to get up and spit the dirt out of my mouth and keep going. By the time I was 12 I had the confidence to fight a grown man, could I really do it in reality, maybe not, but that belief might have just been enough to keep me alive.
Some might read these words and think I believe that “I don’t need a man”. Rather, I would say, “I am no man.” I believe that it is a man’s duty to protect the women in his life. But a woman also has a duty to do what is set before her, and if that means fight to the death, so be it.
