Your pos/neg. childhood memories of parents going "Mamma/Pappa Bear" protecting you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The final part in the recent series:

Would you choose to sacrifice yourself to save someone else’s child?
Parents, would you sacrifice someone elses kid to save your own?
And the Pit-thread People who would strangle other kids to save their own are fucked up.

All of these are seen from the parent’s viewpoint of wanting to protect their kid.

In these threads, I have argued a contrasting viewpoint. I believe that in modern society, kids are more likely to be harmed by such an attitude then saved. That from the viewpoint of the kid, seeing an agressive angry parent is a profoundly negative experience, even if the parent feels he is fighting forthe kid in question. **In this thread, I’m looking for Doper examples and experiences to prove me either right or wrong. **

Let me make myself clear beforehand: I’m not talking about adrenaline filled parents who manage to snatch their kids away from fast approaching cars, or save therir kids from drowning, or out of burning buildings. I think we all can agree that’s heroic, even from the kids POV.
I am also not talking about a parent that defended you or took your side in a civilized conflict where no adrenaline was present; say, a parent who disagreed with a teachers opinion of you as a kid.

I am talking about the kind of adrenalin-rushed, agressive defending and “I’ll fight for my kid against the whole world, if necessary”-attitude pictured in these recent threads.

So, do you have any memories of your parents going in “Pappa/Mamma Bear” mode, to do what they perceived as protecting you? How did you experience that as a kid?

2

Nope. No memories of that at all. I do remember my mom saying, “What did you do that for?” when we got hurt somehow. I also recall “I’ll give you something to cry about.” And coming into the house crying about being picked on, and being told to go fight my own battles. Jeezus, what were my parents thinking, raising independent, self-reliant kids? Heartless bastards.

3

I think there’s an " I agree with the OP" somewhere in there, no?:).

As I wrote in that other thread, my own experience included one single “Mamma Bear” experience. I can remember being more scared of my mom rushing to the playground to beat up the bullies, then of the kids who bullied me. I can also remember her intervention to be worse then useless.

4

I have no such memories. I can’t imagine my parents doing such a thing, actually–that is, heading out to “deal with” some bullies. I was bullied as a kid, but mostly at school, and I’m not sure how much I even told my parents. I was not the kind of kid who told my parents everything, or even much at all.

5

I can not remember any such incident ever happening and I think I can say I am happy I don’t.

I do know my mother used her purse to beat down a big white goose who was attacking me when I was three because I got to close to her nest. I don’t think that counts here though.

6

There was a white trash family living in a rental house down the street where I grew up. All of the kids were screwed up. The oldest boy was the worst. I was friends with his sister. One afternoon I was playing in my backyard with the sister (the kids were usually unsupervised, she’d just wander over). She and I are 7 or 8. The brother’s 13 and not a small kid. He comes looking for his sister, and somehow there’s an argument. He hits his sister, and I get the brilliant idea to try and help.

My mom has come outside by this point and sees me laying on the ground with this boy sitting on me, punching me in the face. Now, my mother is 5 feet tall and about 100lbs at the time (well smaller than him). She leaps on this kid and wraps her arms around his neck, screaming obscenities at him. She choked him and I honestly thought she was going to kill him. When she got him off me and reached for some sort of garden implement, he took off.

The overall feeling I took away was, “Mommy will protect me.” Frightening, but entirely positive toward her. I asked my mother about it years later, and she said that if she’d happened to grab a knife or a bat on her way out, that kid would have been dead.

That night my father went to talk to his parents. I don’t know what was said, but he never came near our house again. Even stopped smashing our pumpkins. Considering both his wife and his daughter had black eyes, as an adult I have great respect for my father for not ending up in jail that night.

7

I recall no such incident - and I’m glad of it. I don’t think my young self would have reacted well to one or the other of my parents going ballistic, even to protect me.

8

Also never.

However, as I have mentioned in other threads in the past, my father was in politics so I was often put into the position of defending him to people who verbally attacked him while I was in earshot.

9

No such thing ever happened to me. If anything, I could have used someone to protect me from my parents.

10

Here’s one from the other side. We once had a father drag his son over to our house so that his son could “fight it out” with our child who had jumped him on the bus for picking on the little kids. When the father arrived, he found out some things his son hadn’t told him: the kid that whupped his ass was a girl, she was younger than he was and she was substantially smaller than his son. When my husband called our daughter to the door, the dad did some fancy backpedaling and tried to pretend he stopped by to ask about woodworking. I strongly suspect the son got an ass-whupping when he got home (not that I thought he should, but I do suspect it happened.) We never heard from him again and the kid stopped de-pantsing the kindergartners on the bus.

11

My mom never went mama-bear in a physical way; she has a muscular dystrophy, and has always been very weak, so I’m glad she never got into a confrontation for my sake. I was abused by bullies, but I’ve always had one or two physically imposing friends (even now!) who have protected me/backed me up. Despite being an only child, it’s like there’s always been a protective older brother there for me.

Now, my mom did go mama-bear to protect me in non-physical ways; standing up to school principals, teachers, employers (when I was a teenager), doctors, or other authority figures who she thought had not treated me properly. Full-on confrontations, long meetings filled with shouting, standing up and shaking fingers, legal threats, while I sat in the chair next to her, completely red-faced. It was often embarrassing at the time, but I came to appreciate what she’d done when I was older-- often there were underlying problems with the various systems that were affecting others as well, but she was the only parent with the nerve to stand up for her kid.

12

I remember very clearly my mom going Mama Bear exactly once, when I was four years old. We were at a college basketball game, and they did that thing at halftime where they shot basketballs out of an air cannon into the crowd. One landed right on my lap, and I was so excited, until the man next to me plucked it off of my lap and started celebrating for catching it.

My mom went OFF. “How DARE you steal that ball from a FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD? You should be ASHAMED OF YOURSELF. Now GIVE THAT BACK.” She did this loudly enough that everyone in the entire section was staring at the asshole holding the ball, who looked like he would rather die than suffer one more second of my mom’s outburst.

He gave the ball back. People cheered. Did I mention my mom was barely 20 years old when this happened, and the guy was probably twice her age?

13

I have one memory, when I was very young. I was in the backseat reading when the car spun out of control and we ended up sliding into a ditch. My mother had somehow managed to spin the car around before it went into the snowbank.

I asked her why she had deliberately spun the car around, and she told me, very matter of factly, if a car was behind us she was making sure it hit her driver’s side door, not me in the backseat. I was very young (4-5ish?) but I remember being totally floored at the realization that she was actually willing to die to protect me.

I even said that – ‘‘But then you could die!’’ To which she responded, ‘‘Better me than you.’’

I had a troubled relationship with my mother, but that memory is one of those that makes me remember she was doing the best she could. She was 22-23 at the time. Somewhere deep down, she really loved me.

14

When I was about 15, my mom chased off a guy who’d been harassing me for weeks. This time, he followed me in his car as I was walking to a friend’s house, and when I got to the house I called mom. She walked over (mom never learned to drive) and gave him what-for. Mom wasn’t a large person, and this guy was at least six feet tall and burly. But when mom was mad, you knew it. And this was in the 50’s, when kids still had some fear of adults.

When I was little, my stepdad chased down some teenagers in a car who’d been driving like idiots and almost hit us. He pulled his car in front of theirs to block them, reached in the window, pulled the keys and called the cops.

When one of my daughter’s boyfriends gave her a black eye (she was a teenager), her dad drove around the neighborhood until he spotted the kid. He held on to him while I called the police. I know he wanted to do more than restrain him.

Some people can’t be talked to – a physical response is the only one they understand.

15

I remember the incident, but not how Dad reacted. The story was told and retold over the years.

I was playing with a neighbor girl. We were less than 4 years old. We got into some sort of fight and we were standing in a face-off with some wooden toy raised over our heads. She brought hers down on my head and so did the same to her. Then we both went crying to our parents.

Her father was a big man, over 6’ 3" or so. Mine was 5’ 8". Her dad came storming over to our house, Dad went right out and squared off on the man. Don’t even *think *about coming onto our land he told the man.

Dad faced him off, the man backed down and left.

16

When I was about 7, I got a new bike. I knew how to ride a bike, but my first bike was the mini kind that looks like a toy and my new bike was a “real” big girl bike. So there I was, riding my new bike on the sidewalk in front of my house and wobbling a little bit.

As I was weaving along, suddenly I got a little overwhelmed and my bike took a big wobble toward the street. A car was passing and the driver slammed on his brakes. I came very close to the street, but managed to get back on track. The driver honked his horn and yelled something like “LITTLE GIRL, DON’T RIDE YOUR BIKE SO CLOSE TO THE STREET!” He didn’t use any swear words or anything, but it was yelling and pretty sharp. My father, who had been doing some yard work, came barreling out to the road and started screaming at this guy in the car to shut up and leave me alone, how dare he talk to his daughter like that, I have every right to ride my bike in front of my house, etc etc. It was quite lengthy. My dad was definitely the one escalating the situation. The guy yelled a few things back and then drove away.

At the time, I was very embarrassed and wished the whole thing would go away. I knew I had gotten too close to the street and the guy in the car had no way of knowing if I was going to wobble into his path. I was a little freaked out that he had yelled at me, but it seemed like he was going to drive away until my father started with the maniac routine. I was also worried the my dad and the guy would get in an actual fight and that someone would get hurt. My dad is a big guy so I figured the person who got hurt would probably be the driver, and then my dad would go to jail.

And as an adult, I completely recognize that the guy was probably just very freaked out because he saw a little kid on a bike suddenly appear on a trajectory toward his car. I know that’s happened to me, you’re driving along and out of no where there’s a kid and your heart is in your throat and you slam on your brakes.

So I would say overall, negative. I don’t know if there were similar incidents, but that is the one that I remember clearly and I know that for most of my childhood I was careful about what I would tell my dad because I knew he would have an over-the-top reaction.

But in something that is a little … touching, maybe? I work in NYC, in Greenwich Village and on 9/11 my dad was working in Montreal, Canada. Because of our location, we didn’t have any phone service at my office, and cell phone networks were overwhelmed. It took me a long time to actually connect with my dad on the phone. Apparently, he had tried to get in his car and drive to New York (six hours) to find me. He was turned back, along with everyone else, at the US border, which was closed. Obviously. It seems he pitched a fit right there in the border plaza. So again, the situation was unfolding with a strong possibility that my dad was going to end up in jail. When I did get him on the phone, he was like a lunatic, he had been so worried that he hadn’t heard from me. I still think it’s very sweet that he’s so ready to take on anything when it comes to his daughter, but I do still worry that some day it’s going to involve jail time.

17

I know my mother tore a strip off the local librarians for refusing to let me borrow books from the YA and adult sections, but it wasn’t done in front of me.

As much as I want to go Mama Bear for my girl at times, I remember the huge respect I had for my parents when they stayed calm in the face of huge provocaton.

18

When I was in high school (!) my dad stayed around to harass my wrestling coach after a match while I was showering. I’d been busted down to JV for the night because A) We had three guys at my weight class, one bumped up to the next higher one, one guy who was lighter was good enough to wrestle wherever he wanted, and so I got squeezed out; and, B) I was in 10th grade, so it was pretty surprising I was on the top squad anyway. I was clearly the #3 man in the group, so when the lighter guy decided to bump up, I wrestled him off, lost, and that was that.

The next day in practice, the coach went off on a blue streak about how we should all be man enough to fight our own battles. I put two and two together and was completely mortified. I talked to the coach after practice, but he steadfastly refused to acknowledge that it was my dad who had come up to him.

My dad and I had it out later that night. He had decided unilaterally that I was getting fucked and so it was his job to protect me. I was completely mortified.

19

I was probably a sophomore in high school and was skateboarding at the local community college with some friends over the weekend. My brother and I, along with another friend, were picked up by the campus rent-a-cops and taken to their office.

We had been there for about 30 minutes while they threatened us with ass-kickings, arrest, and various other pleasantries. Well, the doors bursts open and there’s my mom. She knew we had been skating over at the college and came by to tell us something. She saw our other friends who told her what had happened and how long we had been there.

She walks in and looks at the three of us and very quietly says “You three - outside. Close the door behind you.” As soon as we close the door she rips into them like there is no tomorrow. Mom had been a paralegal at one time so she talked a good game. It was unbelievable.

Of course, when we got home she ripped us pretty good for skating where we weren’t supposed to be but it was worth it!

20

I was about 5-6-7 and there was a neighbor girl a little older from a not so great family. I think she had been bullying me for a while, but that part is hazy. All I remember is my mom lifting this girl off her feet, holding her against an outside wall, and telling her “If you ever touch my daughter again, you’re going to have to deal with me.” I was like “Holy Shit!”

I have a pretty good mama bear inside of me, but it’s only even thought of coming to the surface once, maybe twice. I’m a firm believer in manipulating or avoiding situations before they get out of hand, and I also think that kids need to learn these skills themselves. But I do know how to finish the job, need be.