Perspective is the lens through which any story is told, and using a different perspective can drastically change how one event is seen and understood. Imagine if you will the story of To Kill a Mockingbird from the perspective of Tom Robinson instead of Scout. Or if Catcher in the Rye were told from a third-person perspective instead of from inside Holden’s mind. We’d understand those stories completely differently in those instances, though the events of what actually happened would remain the same. 

A wholly objective biography of my pre-teen years would tell the relatively unexciting tale of a mostly quiet, kind of odd girl with a huge imagination and moderate anger management issues, raised in a loving family and community, checking the boxes of a ‘normal’ white, middle-class suburban life. But! From a certain perspective, my girlhood is the true* story of a tiny badass 80’s female action hero, a la Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley. I’m here to give you that story.

*All of these stories are 100% true. Well, they are 90% factual and 10% hyperbole, but definitely all are actual events from my life. Please remember the framing device, and don’t take this as a reliable account of my entire childhood.

Zoom in on 3rd grade at Mansfield Christian School where small Stephanie has just been sent to the principal’s office for the first (and only) time. Like any good badass, I wasn’t facing the elementary authorities due to something banal like desk graffiti or excessive talking. No, 8-year-old me had just beaten a boy with my bare hands.

I walked into school that morning, like most mornings, with my little sister, Kristina. As she headed to her kindergarten classroom a few steps ahead of me, a boy from my class brushed past me and purposefully shoved Kristina with his shoulder hard into the wall.

At that moment the tiny badass 80’s female action hero rose up within me like a phoenix from the flames, and I grabbed Andrew K. by the back of his shirt collar before he knew what was happening. Jerking him around to face me, I smacked that kid across his face with all the might of my righteous fury. 

Now, had I ever pushed my little sister before? Honey, please. I once pushed Kristina down a flight of concrete stairs in our garage. (Look, no badass female action hero is without her flaws.) But I was having 0% of someone other than me enacting physical violence upon my baby sister. Nah, bro. 8-year-old me will come at you like a spider monkey; principal’s office be damned.

Apparently my childhood was riddled with jackasses named Andrew, because our next scene also involves a boy with that name trying to intimidate a girl in the school hallway.

As we stood in line outside our classroom, Andrew F. turned to look at me. “You’re so short,” he said condescendingly, drawing an invisible line from his forehead well over the top of my head. “Don’t call me short!” I retorted, promptly shoving a sharpened pencil up his nose.

Did I intentionally injure my classmate’s face with a sharp object? No. It’s just that the sass with which I responded to his insult demanded some finger-wagging, and it so happened those fingers were already holding a pencil, which accidentally slipped up his nostril in my gesticulating. But purposeful or not, I’m pretty sure Andrew F. learned some valuable life lessons during this encounter with my tiny action hero alter ego…

1. Insulting women will result in pain
2. People who are smaller than you may not seem intimidating, but are actually better positioned to do certain types of harm to you… like shove something up your nose. (Or knee you in the balls. I didn’t do this, but I certainly could have, mon frere, and I hope that haunts your dreams.)
3. You’ll never know when a woman you meet is a secret badass. It’s probably best just to assume they all are.

At age 5 I acquired a totally badass facial scar, that I still bear to this day near my right eye, when my swingset tried to rip my face off. (Sure, you may assume Rambo’s scars are from war or something, but ask yourself: is there any actual proof he wasn’t too attacked by playground equipment??) 4 years later the furniture engaged in a sinister plot against me resulting in a fractured wrist. Sitting in the hospital, waiting for a doctor to come set and then cast my arm, the nurse asked me if I wanted drugs for what was going to be a painful procedure. I set my jaw and stared coldly straight ahead, “Just do it.” She looked as though she half expected me to produce a bottle of whiskey from my polka dot romper and start swigging from it.

Speaking of which, around the same age I actually did take a giant gulp of my neighbor’s dad’s beer at a cookout. (This may have been because I wasn’t paying attention and thought it was my Pepsi, but I definitely came off like a tiny badass either way.)

And it was important for me to appear as badass as possible to my neighbors, because they were not always very nice to me. I remember getting into a beef with 2 particular boys over… I mean, who knows? We were children. But at the time they were pissed and thought I was in the wrong. I wasn’t. When I dismissed their attempts at intimidation with some withering side-eye and silent treatment, they decided they needed some backup. Rounding up older brothers and some other boys, they all returned to where I was playing outside. As I took in the loud group of boys, some of whom were close to twice my age, surrounding me on bikes & roller blades, calling me names and yelling at me, I knew in my heart I was above all this. I lifted my chin into the air and walked straight through their blustering barricade to my garage, where I turned and stared directly into their eyes as the garage door slowly lowered in front of me, like “What’re you gonna do? Hit me?! I’m a little girl. I dare you to come at me, bro.”

My toughness wasn’t always derided by boys, though… not when there were games afoot. I was never particularly “athletic” in the sense of “being good at sports,” but I was considered reasonably strong toward the end of my elementary days when I was the only girl in our class able to do 3 pull-ups during that heinous National Phys Ed Make-Kids-Feel-Weird-About-Their-Little-Awkward-Bodies test they made us do. After that I was heavily recruited onto the New York Yankees of 6th grade field day tug-of-war teams: 3 of the coolest boys in our class, 2 popular, sporty girls, & yours truly tiny badass 80’s female action hero. We were stacked. No one even had a hope of beating us. It’s possible I could go back in time with 5 of my adult friends and we still wouldn’t beat 12-year-old us because that is how totally we ruled.

But tug-of-war wasn’t even my strongest field day event. No, the event I most dominated in elementary school was the Donut Eating Contest. I emerged champion from that event 3 years in a row, and the only reason my winning streak didn’t continue until they eventually had to retire my donut eating number was because the event was removed from field day competition. Sure, the powers that be may say it was because of “risks of asphyxiation and death,” but I think we all know it was really because no one could handle the exceptionalism of how fast I could eat a donut without hands. Truly, my skills were unparalleled.

My girlhood as a tiny badass 80’s female action hero laid a solid foundation for the rest of my life. As a teen, when boys in my class tried to harass and embarrass me by pointing out that my father (a physician who very graciously & generously provided free sports physicals for our school) had seen them naked, I was always able to cooly respond, “Yeah and he told me how small your penis is.” As a young adult I didn’t hesitate to slip my car keys through my fingers as make-shift brass knuckles when I was followed to my car in a parking garage, or to grab a pair of scissors off my desk to threaten the life of a man I thought was attacking my co-worker (no parties were injured in either of these scenarios). And now in my 30’s? Just lay a hand on one of my children and see how fast I transform into Sarah Connor before your eyes. Seriously. I dare you.

Cuz this tiny badass has been at it since I was a girl. And momma don’t play.