Does He Know Me Angry?
Note: This essay was originally published in 2019 in The Honeypot (which has since moved to Substack)
A few weeks ago I yelled at a 12-year-old boy with more anger than I’ve ever yelled at a man. Sam had ignored me three times in the hour since I’d met him and his sister at school for pick up. Each time he disregarded my request for better behavior, my patience dwindled exponentially. All I could think was not today.
When we finally got off at their bus stop, Sam ran ahead, darting through a side street, and stepping inches from the scariest crosswalk in Chicago — one that has no stop signs and features cars trying to beat a stop light not 10 feet away. In what can only be described as a primal scream, I told him to “get back.” He didn’t, so clutching his sister’s hand I ran up to him and got very close to his face. And, using what then could only be described as poorly written dialogue from a 90s family movie, I angry-whispered into his ear.
“When I’m not responsible for you, do I bug you?” He shook his head. “Do I?” I went on to explain that I’m not always responsible for him, but when I am, he has to listen to me. “Do you understand me? Do you?!” Thankfully I stopped short of “Do you know who the fuck I am?”
Two hours earlier, I’d tweeted “Enraged today, may delete later” with sparkle emoticons on either side of the phrase to show that I was angry, but still fun and self-aware. I was angry because of the usual reasons. Angry because Kobe Bryant died and it took 24 hours for me to see anything about the rape allegations and case from 2003. Angry because I watched the Aaron Hernandez documentary and was disturbed by the apparent shock that a man with athletic skill and success would ever be violent, abusive, closeted, gun-toting and drug-fueled. How dare anyone be surprised, I’d thought. And I was angry because Cameron — my kind, thoughtful, and also white hetero cis partner from small-town Wisconsin — was sincerely mourning Bryant, a childhood hero, and was the person who told me to watch the documentary.
When Cameron saw my Tweet he’d responded “You’re enraged?” I didn’t understand the question. Perhaps he thought I was being hyperbolic. I responded, “Yes baby, I told you that.” I had. Two nights prior, after watching the docu-series, I couldn’t get to bed and I told him. “I’m just so sad and angry.”
It’s not that I think he didn’t listen — I think he didn’t understand what I meant. For 9 and half months, I’d rarely been outwardly mad. Not because everything was perfect, but because, like a lot of women, anger isn't often my external reaction — crying is. And it’s not a put on. If I were to yell, it would feel like an act.
But, that day, nothing was performative about my fury with Sam. I yelled at him from the gut with no consideration of the optics. And I cannot describe the real power I felt. Power I should always feel when dealing with someone 15 years my junior, but that I don’t. He’s 12 and already knows he can ignore me. I’m a blonde woman and my entire life’s savings would only cover two month’s of his private school education. He knows he has more power than me. He may not know he knows. But he knows. And because of that, he could have done whatever he wanted — even if that meant running into the street to get hit by a car. Not because he didn’t know I’d react, but because he didn’t care. The entitlement. The entitlement and audacity, and danger. Of course, even after I yelled, he did what he wanted. And, instead of the power lingering in my veins like a kettle cooling after the whistle, I went from white hot to cold. I felt bad. Guilty for making him take my frustration which had everything and only a little to do with him.
Cameron is moving into my apartment in less than two months. A couple weeks after we decided on it, we got into an argument and he very gently tried to end it by saying, “I know you're trying to be nice, but you’re starting to sound judgemental.” I was alarmed. Did he not know that I am judgemental? That I have about a thousand opinions about everything? And that led me to much scarier questions. Why didn’t he know? Had I been too kind? Been too easy on him? Did he only know the version of me that wants to kiss his forehead and make him dinner and show him love all the ways I’ve been conditioned to?
Because I’m a feminist, the real me is really angry all the time. No one should be surprised. Believing in the equality of sexes, and, thus, the fight for equity between all sexes, is like being shown a new color on the spectrum. You see it everywhere. In the color of the curtains, your food, advertisements. So, you have to choose not to look too hard sometimes. Or else you’d be angry all the time. And I don’t always want to be angry, sometimes I want to kiss his forehead. But still there are days when it feels like no one is thinking about that color and my partner asks if I'm angry and I think to myself, I can’t believe this man is asking me if I’m seeing this color and if this color is making me mad. Has he never looked in the mirror and seen it all over himself? And of course, if he’s a good man, and I think Cameron is, then he has looked in the mirror. He just didn’t know that’s what I’d been staring at that day. And I wonder if I’ve forgotten to look at it for too long, forgotten to show him how angry I am. And that leads me to the scariest questions of all — the ones that make me want to cry and scream. Does he know me angry? Will he recognize me? Can I stomach it if he’s surprised by the way I look?