A Click

Like Zoom, coming to call myself a feminist was more of a process. I can't remember when I first heard the word, though I'm quite sure that as soon as I heard it, I knew it was me.

When people ask me that question, which is rare, since in my circles, it's rather assumed that one is and probably always has been, but still, it happens sometimes, I hem and haw and think "Oh, well, there's no one, oh wait-"

I don't remember a lot of my parents' early fights. Traces.

The thumping feet of three scattering children, blue velour. The wallpaper pattern blurring to streaks in my peripheral vision as I ran up the hall to the room I shared with my sister. My mom, red-faced, grabbing her keys, gripping them white-knuckled to her chest, turning her back and fleeing from the kitchen out the mud-room door.

I remember a few sentences from one of the big ones, mom standing by the dishwasher, the cupboard where the chequebooks and bank statements lived wide open.

She was saying she wanted her own bank account.

My father was demanding to know why she wanted one.

Well, he had his own.

That was different.

Really?

Of course.

I remember being baffled by this. I had a bank account.

Mom had taken me when I was 5, the signature on my account printed in uneven block letters with a backwards e for nearly two decades.

I had my own money, seemed a fortune, and I was proud of it, already saving it for something good.

If I was big enough to have a bank account, surely my mom was big enough to have a bank account. That wasn't right. Not right.