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She never dated again. She blamed it on having to find work and raise me, but the truth was a lot simpler: my father broke her heart – like he broke mine – and she never recovered.
But with me, things got a lot more complicated.
As I got older and started to develop, I began to draw a lot of unwanted attention from males. All women do – but my situation was complicated by the fact that I had inherited both my father’s and my mother’s good looks. I looked older and more worldly than I actually was.
Or maybe my situation wasn’t complicated at all. Maybe men were just dogs like my mother said, and I would have gotten the attention no matter what I looked like.
It’s not that I wasn’t interested in the opposite sex. Actually, I was obsessed: cute boys a few years older than me in school… Backstreet Boys and NSYNC…
But not the grown adults who catcalled me from the street. Not the creepy older men whose eyes crawled over my body.
I remember one overwhelming feeling from that period of my life:
I never felt safe.
Ever.
I lived in a rough area of London. Lots of crime, lots of poverty.
There was a martial arts dojo near my home, and whenever I walked by it, I stopped at the window and watched the people train inside. The place taught Krav Maga – a form of hand-to-hand combat used by the Israeli military – and I remembered watching in wonder as women fought and trained side-by-side with the men.
I wanted to be like those women.
I wanted to have that power – to hurt or even kill anyone who tried to harm me.
I begged my mother repeatedly to let me take classes.
“It’s too expensive,” she said without even asking how much it cost. “We barely have enough to live on, and you want to spend money to learn how to get into fights?! No.”
Eventually, I stopped asking.
But every time I passed the dojo, I stopped and watched through the window… but that was the closest I ever thought I would get.
Until the night it happened.
I was 14 years old. I was over at a friend’s house studying for school and it got late, so I said goodbye and took the bus back to my neighborhood.
As I got off the bus and headed for my apartment building, a group of teenage boys started catcalling me.
I say ‘boys,’ but they might have been as old as 20. They were much older than me, that was for certain.
I kept my head down and walked faster.
They started following me. They yelled out obscenities about my body… what they wanted to do to me.
I tried to shut it out and just walk faster –
But they kept getting closer.
I passed by the Krav Maga dojo and glanced into the window. There was a single light shining in a back room of the studio, but I didn’t see anyone inside.
I turned the corner and started to run down the alley towards my building –
But the boys ran faster.
They caught me by my backpack and used it to throw me to the ground.
They laughed and circled around me like wolves.
