The words stung. I know it wasn’t meant that way, but, still, you know how words can bite unintentionally. And so when he told me that I wasn’t brave, I bristled.
Whaddya mean, I’m not brave?
I began a 20-minute explanation of how brave a woman I was.
There was the solo kayak trip in the Apostle Islands — paddling through 25 mph winds, staying alone on an island where I stared down a male deer in rut and a night wind that whipped through my tent so hard that I stayed up reading an entire Barbara Kingsolver novel just to avoid being found frozen in my sleeping bag in the morning.
Then there was taking my two children under the age of 7 to Disney World alone, and then, if that wasn’t impressive enough, taking them to Universal Studios, where one had an asthma attack — isn’t that the epitome of bravery?
Or the recent trip to Bryce Canyon by myself where I hiked at 8,000 feet altitude with a knapsack full of camera equipment and then drove to Zion National Park the wrong way without GPS o r a map. Totally brave.
And then what about the fact that I got certified for scuba diving in my 50s and found a new kind of happiness and wonder that occurs as deep as 70 feet, where the barracudas, octopi and moray eels wander — and it all happens when I’m not able to talk? So brave, my friend, so brave.
So what exactly do you mean, I’m not brave?
Oh, he said, that’s not the kind of brave I was talking about. I was talking about things like emptying mouse traps. Noises in the basement at 4 a.m. That sort of thing.
I responded with silence. It was the kind of silence that happens when you are counting to 10. Or the kind of silence that happens when you realize that your friend has mistaken your lack of bravery for that very subtle reverse chivalry that takes place when a woman (like me) has a man around.
Ah, yes. I could tell you that I have a keen sense (when useful) of the old-fashioned sense of men’s roles and women’s roles. Sometimes you’ve got to let the men do this kind of thing and let them help.
Or I could tell you honestly that I simply dislike — or rather, detest — the emptying of mouse traps. Let me be more specific. For my whole life, I haven’t enjoyed the whole mouse thing. The wooden Victor snap traps — just the sound of them snapping unnerves me. Then, waiting to be sure the thing is dead. Then lifting it up and dropping it, sometimes with the entire trap, into a bag … while wearing thick winter gloves … and then going out to the trash to rid the house — and my mind — of it, knowing full well there’s no such thing as ONE mouse.
Or the live traps, the silly live traps that are really mouse hotels, as I found out one time, when I realized they were traveling in and out of it, gobbling up the bait. Or the green poison pellets that you place in the corners, and you know they eat it because it disappears, and one day you smell something dead in the basement, maybe in the walls. I have even perfected the art of “desiccated mice,” which involves letting them stay where they are in the traps until they no longer look or smell like mice.
I just don’t like ’em. But when I’m alone, I deal. I handle it. I either set the traps or put out the poison and make it work. Because I’m brave that way. As brave as can be.
But when there’s a fella around — I am not brave. So sue me.