Thread by @UrsulaV

My dad honored a bet with me once when I was about eight.

Okay, this may take a minute.

https://twitter.com/amandadeibert/status/1345773607750811648

My first stepfather was a piece of work, in that sneaky way some men have of ferreting out weakness, and he enjoyed telling me I was wrong. Which, I mean, I was a kid, obviously I was wrong A LOT. No question! But if I was right, which did happen occasionally, it didn’t matter.

Now, it may come as a shock to you, dear reader, but I am a trifle argumentative by nature. I would fight my corner every time. But my mom hated conflict and would tell me to drop it, which meant he got in the habit of starting crap just so that she’d tell me to drop it.

Dude had issues. (I don’t blame my mother incidentally, she was in grad school with a small child, a really nasty evangelical church, and a husband who was seriously messing with her head, and they had not yet invented antidepressants.)

Anyway, what I was glumly internalized from this was that kids are always wrong when they argue with adults, even if they’re right. You were just not allowed to be right until adulthood. But I am stubborn and I kept fighting my corner despite the futility.

Anyhow, I visited my dad one summer and we were talking about Star Trek, which we both loved, and the episode with the giant space amoeba. I said Spock went in the shuttlecraft and he said it was McCoy and we had no internet to solve this, so he said “I will bet you a dollar.”

I gravely accepted this bet and then immediately forgot about it because I was eight.

He came home that evening, I believe having checked with a colleague, told me that I was right, and paid me my dollar.

Tiny. Mind. Blown.

An adult—a male adult, no less!—admitted I was right? And went out of his way to acknowledge it? Holy crap.

I don’t know that counts as safe or loved or cared for or whatever, and maybe I should have written about making cookies with my grandmother or something, but honestly, as a small stubborn child bashing my head against the world and refusing to stop, that meant a lot to me.

(And now, of course, I will worry at a point like a starving wolverine gnawing on a frozen deer carcass, so we can debate whether that was a GOOD thing or not...)