It's strange how the smallest of events can affect our futures for "forever". I haven't been a very competitive individual since elementary school. This is partly due to being more of a reactive than proactive type. It tends to show in my taking a seat in the back row of the classroom and attempting to make myself small during class participation. It shows in my too relaxed attitude about grades.
Most probably it pertains to getting the fight knocked right out of me at an early age. There was no one thing that caused my reticence to thirst for the jugular, but one event does remain toward the top of the list.
While in high school, I was very active in my church. I have memory of the pastor's wife and one of our girl's group leaders orchestrating me into leadership roles. I would like to think they were fostering some spark of leadership they saw in me. However, truth be told, they probably knew that if I were a leader, my mother would see to it whatever work there was would get done.
I don't know how long I was president of the young women's organization. It had been more than one year. The routine was for my mother to instruct me to tell all the girls we would pick them up. I would tell them. Then she would drive around all over our small city picking up people whom she deposited at someone's home for the meeting. Then, she would drive us all home. One particular night, every stop we made, nobody ran out to the car. I was sent to the door to enquire and was told that another individual had picked them up. Same individual each time.
My mother's wrath increased with each stop. I still feel the knots in my stomach as I pressed up against the car door trying to escape her flailing hands. Of course, it had to be my fault they were not there. They could not possibly have been the ones who were wrong.
Once we arrived at the meeting, it became a no brainer we were in the throes of a coup. It was the night of our annual elections. My cousin nominated me, but to a person every vote went to the individual who had picked up the group. I don't know if she actively campaigned for the office, or if it just turned out that way. I do know that the one hundred per cent rejection of my peers, coupled with the toxic temper of my mother, did keep me from ever wanting to hold office again. Even since retirement, although I transcribed the minutes of a group where I served, I refused to bear the label of secretary. Responsibility without authority has become my way of life.
Don't get me wrong, the girl was more than welcome to the gavel. If she had asked me for it, I would have given it gladly. It was the pain inflicted by the group rejection that turned me off. Ever since, I have deemed competition off the ball court or out of the business world to be an act of unfriendliness.
For a while, the trauma resulted in a reluctance to achieve. Thankfully, I recovered. Now I take the attitude to heck with them. I am whatever I am and they can like it or lump it. I will not sacrifice my achievements, assuming I have some, to get along with the crowd.
I don't remember what happened after that. I don't recall deciding not to go to further meetings, but I don't remember attending any either. I did start working that year and it may be the group fell to the need to study once in a while. Possibly my mother was just so grateful not to have to waste her time and gas driving around everywhere that she finally quit making me go. The feeling that the new president was not really my friend, after all, was one that never left.
It's not everyone who gets an extra look -- with hindsight -- into a past event. When my paternal grandmother died, quite a few of my mother's friends came for visitation. The girl's mother was there. After she elicited the apparently satisfying answer that I, as well as her daughter, was divorced, she moved in for the kill. She wanted to know if I did anything other than being a divorced mother of three. I will never forget the vindictive look on her face when I said I was a school psychologist.
Of course, by this time, the whole country was aware of poisonous cheerleader mothers. At least one was so sick that she arranged a kill on her daughter's competition.
The backward glance did show me the "new president" may not have been so two-faced after all. She may have been following directions of a hateful, spiteful mother who couldn't compete with her own generation, so took it out on the next.
It does make me extra careful in my interactions with young people today. I know what out-of-control competitive parents can do to the future of impressionable kids. I believe we should encourage dreams in others, especially the young, wherever we can.
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