Loafing late in bed of a Friday morning (nya nya nyaaa! I don’t hafta go to work!!!), I find myself wondering about a peculiar behavior of my mother’s. She was scared, y’know.
Not just scared. But absolutely fukkin’ TERRORIZED. All the time. Any time she was alone in the house. Any time after dark.
One evening she came down to our house in Phoenix’s middle-class, rather boring Encanto district, having decided to spend the night. So we pass a nice day and watch TV all evening and then we unfold the big ole’ sofa-bed (queen-sized, it was) so she can hit the sack.
Make the bed, get everything all nice for a good night’s sleep, and, as she’s getting ready to climb into the sack…what does she do?
She opens her purse and pulls out a pistol! This, she sets on the TV table next to the bed.
No…
Kidding….
She was SO SCARED that even though she was at my house, with a German shepherd at her side, she felt she needed a gun.
I was just floored.
No, she wasn’t putting me on. She really and truly was so frightened, of life the universe and all that, she needed a pistol at her side.
Trying to reassure her did nothing to help her to feel any braver. It just convinced her that I was crazy and not too bright.
****
A lot of women feel that way. I used to be scared to death all the time, too. That, as you might surmise, was the reason for the German shepherd room-mate.
Had something happened to her? Dunno. If it did, she never told me about it. But on the other hand, I’d never been seriously attacked (harassed, yes; but actually attacked, no), and I wasn’t scared witless in my own house. Scared: yes. That’s why we had the GerShep. But scared enough to be waving a pistol around? Not so much.
That German shepherd did earn her keep one night, after some poor wretch got into the house while she and her humans were sound asleep. Unfortunately for him, she did wake up…and got between him and the door he came in.
LOL! He found a door he could get out, just as the fangs were about to rip off his rear end. Last I heard he was still running.
It brings you around to the question of whether you really do need a gun in the house. And that question brings up a whole slew of other questions:
* Do you know how to use it?
* Would you use it? Really? On another human being?
* How are you going to recognize a false alarm? Hubby coming home late at night, for example. The teenagers roaming around in the wee hours….
* Can you (or can you not) get out of the house safely if some jerk comes in a door or window?
* What are you gonna do if you shoot some schmuck and kill him? How will you prove he didn’t belong in your house and you really didn’t know who he was? How DO you prove a negative, anyway?
* Wouldn’t you be better off just to close the bedroom door and lock it when you go to bed?
On and on.
I tend to feel that keeping a gun at hand every night is probably a bad idea. Definitely a bad idea if you have kids in the house.
Do I feel safe alone in the house here in lovely North Phoenix? Hell, no! It’s a dangerous area, no question of that.
But EVERY place where humans live is a dangerous area. So you can’t get too paranoid over your own neighborhood. Nor can you barricade yourself in the bedroom every night, armed to the teeth with pistols and shotguns. That just doesn’t make sense…and serves only to scare you more.
My own guess is that your best defense is an alarm system: whether the kind that runs on batteries or the type that runs on four feet. If someone’s around, you want to know it in time to get out, or at least to barricade yourself inside the bathroom. A phone in every room, including the bathrooms, is de rigueur.
***
I’ve lived most of my life now, and lived it with few truly dangerous incidents. I’m not a pretty young girl anymore (thank Gawd). With my boobs lobbed off, that’s one fewer attraction.
But that was true of my mother…well…she still had boobs, but she also had lots of wrinkles and stank to high heaven of tobacco smoke. And she was scared half to death: alll the time. As for me: well… Dude! Make my day!
Seriously: I don’t feel especially scared. I don’t recklessly put myself in situations where I might be at risk. But neither do I forget that there is NO situation where a woman is not at some risk.