Friend #46 - Gigi

Gigi wanted to meet up and do something fun so I suggested Rustler’s Rooste, a cowboy-themed restaurant with amazing views.  She’d lived in Phoenix her entire life and had never been there.  Looking around as the cotton candy and balloon animals were passed from table to table, Gigi proclaimed the restaurant wasn’t a place where a little Mexican girl would normally go.  Gigi’s father is Caucasian and her mother is Mexican…but she wasn’t the only person of color in the restaurant that night.  I thought the statement was odd.

Gigi was recommended to me through another friend.  Physically, she is a solid woman but even dressed down in a tshirt and jeans, I could see she had a loveliness buried under a hard exterior.  Of course, none of that was my first impression.  The first thing I noticed was that when she sat across from me, even though the table was very small, she seemed very far away. 

I babble when I’m nervous and in an effort to make Gigi feel more comfortable, my chatterbox wound itself up.  I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it but I wanted to see what was on the other side of Gigi’s wall.  Slowly, she began open up and as she told me about her life, venom seeped around the edges of her stories.  I don’t think it was intentional.  It was poison that had been held back for a very long time.  I don’t think she even knew it was there.

“People don’t like what I have to say,” Gigi blurted out.  But I did.  I like blunt people.  You don’t have to wonder if there is a façade they are hiding behind. 

Gigi is a school teacher and once, not long ago, a male teacher was teaching his students how to build a playhouse.  Gigi could tell it wasn’t going to work so she told him the way he was doing it was wrong.  The man was so offended that she’d questioned him, he took the disagreement to the principal.  He yelled and screamed while she sat angrily silent and in the end, she was the one who was asked to move to another classroom. 

I could tell by the way she told the story she was angry no one had taken her side.

When Gigi was in college, she had gotten a scholarship for track and field.  I wasn’t surprised.  She exudes strength but she admitted she has a tendency to giggle, particularly when she is nervous.  She was tossing the medicine ball back and forth with another girl at the gym.  The coach had already yelled at her, thinking her giggling meant she wasn’t taking her training seriously, but the scolding only increased Gigi’s involuntary laughter.  Finally, the coach threw a medicine ball at the back of Gigi’s head in frustration.  The impact caused a tearing of her tendons and muscles, a particularly painful injury…yet there was no apology, no retribution.  It was if her pain and suffering didn’t matter.

 A math degree was the quickest way out of her scholarship and away from that coach, so that’s the path Gigi chose.

When Gigi was a child, she asked her father what the most valuable thing in his life was.  He thought about it for a while, narrowing it down to four items.  After debating back and forth for a minute, he told Gigi he couldn’t possibly choose between his house and his car because they were both valuable in their own ways.  Innocently, Gigi looked at him and asked, “Why didn’t you say your family?”  The verbal lashing she received afterwards was second to none.  Gigi learned right then never to ask sincere questions again.  Or at least not to ask questions when she already knew the answer.  Yet she never heard him apologize.  It’s no wonder Gigi has spent a lifetime believing she doesn’t matter.

But the cherry on top of all of the wrongs done to Gigi was when she was a child, she was molested by a priest.  Gigi held in that secret for a long, long time.  It ate away at her.  It changed her as a person.  And when she finally worked up enough courage to tell her mother, her mother said, “That’s too bad.”  TOO BAD???  Out of all different types of unfairness, that one deserves the most outrage!  But that isn’t the reaction Gigi got.  In a climate where a potential Supreme Court justice is accused of sexual assault and then still gets to sit on the highest court in the land, there’s a lot of people who begin to feel as if they don’t matter.  And the hate that is spewed is a natural reaction from victims never heard.  And there are a lot of victims.

And that brick wall Gigi has up?  The one I felt immediately when she sat down?  It’s there for a reason.  There’s been so much unfairness in her life that if I were in her shoes, I’d be distrustful of people too.  I didn’t pity her because she doesn’t call for any.  She’s a tough chick.  She teaches in one of the toughest school districts in all of Phoenix where she receives some of the highest teaching scores in the entire state.  She’s smart…and if people were more sensible, they would be listening to her.  And the anger?  I’m no therapist but sometimes, I think people just need to get all of that crap out of them so they can live a lighter, more productive life.

In Gigi’s classroom, sixty percent of the kids are Hispanic and forty percent of them are white.  One day, Gigi could tell the Hispanic side of the classroom wasn’t paying attention so she said to them, “Listen, you are bilingual.  If I can just get you through school, you will make more money than your white counterparts.”  One of the little boys on the white side of the room then blurted out, “Yeah…at McDonald’s.”  The class started laughing.  Gigi turned to the Hispanic side of the room and she saw the looks on their faces.  They believed the white kid.

Gigi matters.  Those kids matter.  People matter.  Instead of being so quick to judge, maybe we should just listen…because we never know what other people have been through.  And that night, saying goodbye to Gigi in the parking lot, I really just wanted to hug her tight and tell her there are good people out there in the world.  But I can’t promise that.  Gigi has to find them on her own.  But maybe I can change a little of her perception by just showing her the good in me.