Your Momma Wears Combat Boots!

I have this memory of my mom and me. I was quite young. Pre-kindergarten, I'm sure. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend Church again.

We had been living in his apartment. It was in a two story complex, I think. I know his level had a 6 foot wooden fence around a very small sitting space outside the slider door.

It had rained the night before. Everything was wet and sloppy, but the sun was shining. My mother had snuck into the "back yard" to collect the belongings she either threw out there or felt were entitled to her. She couldn't get into the apartment itself. Church must have locked it when he went to work. She didn't seem too concerned. We were picking through the stuff she had crammed into garbage bags. My eye caught a soggy, rolled back book of matches. I rubbed off the ruined chalky white heads before my mother confiscated them.

Suddenly a figure materialized on the other side of the glass. The door didn't go flying open, though. Rather, Church slid it purposefully, with a careful malice, standing with chest puffed out. Head down with a confident predator's grin. Ina flash he grabbed my mother's hair, rushed his face toward hers and growled some threat through his teeth as the spittle flew from his lips.

My mother had a look on her face. Same plane, opposite end of the spectrum. While his rage was hot and uncontrolled, my stereotypically dumb-blond mom had a steady, determined look in her currently abysmal eyes. A cold, calm rage.

She rammed her knee into his thigh, ripped her head away from his grip leaving behind a thick handful of hair, reached off to the side of the slider door and grabbed a flathead shovel that I hadn't noticed propped there. Without a verbal threat, just a quick menacing glare, she swung back and let loose.


KLANG!

Like steal hitting rock. She connected with the side of his head with the breadth of the shovel. Church went reeling into the slider door, bouncing off and landing ass and elbows into a puddle. My mom threw one of the bags over her shoulder, looked at me and handed me the shovel. Shovel firmly gripped in my one hand, she took the other. We strolled away, the shovel clattering as I dragged it behind like expired prey.