It’s true…there is a true bitch within.  My alter ego.  For the most part I do a good job of hiding her but every now and again she comes raging out ~ unstoppable.  I feel her bubbling to the surface and usually I can stop her but there are times I just can’t.  It is then I just have to let her have her way, try to do as little damage as possible and then rein her in as quickly and quietly as I can.  But when I can’t control her, I fix my eyes straight ahead wherever I am and I just roll as my alter ego.

She came to be, the bitch within, sometime in late high school and early college.  When my brother was dating the woman who would become his first wife he told me to “lighten up on her a little and stop looking down on her like a snobby, little, bitch.”  That’s when she was first born.  She became stronger as other people, people I didn’t know well, would tell me I had the look of a complete and total bitch until I smiled or they got to know me ~ then the bitch disappeared and, to them, I became my regular, old, silly Jenni ~ the one who could break down in a fit of giggles at a moment’s notice or dress up like a “hippy chick” with my room mates and head to Aggieville to strut our stuff through the local bar district at K-State.  But the “bitch within” stayed with me and there were times, in the days of way back when, that I used her to my advantage ~ times when she was a necessary evil. For the most part, though, I tried hard to be the silly, funny, light-hearted Jenni who smiled easily and who tried hard to draw others in rather than scare them away with my bitchiest look.

In the intervening years, I tried hard to bury the bitch within.  She’s not nice.  She’s snarky and mean spirited.  The nasty thoughts that stay buried deep in the recesses of my brain come flying out when the bitch within surfaces.   And surface she has ~ just in the past couple of days.  She came flying out the other day when a car didn’t stop at a stop sign for the cross walk as I was walking across.  The words came flying out of my mouth as the driver flew through the stop sign.  His windows were down and I said, in my bitchiest, most condescending tone “Nice stop, jack-wagon.”  He heard me.  I tried hard to suppress her for the rest of the day but it didn’t work.  She came out again and again.  So for that day, it was just easier to keep my eyes fixed ahead, embrace my inner bitch and roll. I buried her as soon as I could and put my sunshiny face back on and embraced the real me.

Luckily, kiddos rarely catch a glimpse of my bitch within.  She’s not someone I want them to know.  But I know where she comes from and how she came to be.  She comes from my dad who could be the nastiest, meanest s-o-b when he wanted to.  He always embarrassed the hell out of me when he became that s-o-b. I don’t want them to suffer through the same kind of embrassment I felt as a kid.  And I certainly don’t want to pass my alter ego down to my kiddos, especially Claire.  They don’t deserve to be saddled with any facet of my nasty bitch within.

Oh, for the love of my children….