In which I get unreasonably angry at a four-year-old

The neighbor kids were all playing in my house. They, as usual, were managing to take everything off my shelves and to find everything that I had tried to find. (See: iPod Touch, Cocoa Puffs, back issues of Esquire) I, as usual, was trying to find my happy place, this time, with a Christopher Hitchens anthology in the corner.

I was interrupted by shrieks of laughter and Modeste (older and speaks French) asking me if I had heard what Migdel (the four-year-old in question and doesn’t speak French) had just said.

“He said, Madame,” Modeste explained to me, “that he was going to come to your house tonight because you’re his wife.”

This is the second time in two days someone less than 5 years old has called me his wife, (in French here it’s literally “his woman”) and it’s the second time that I’ve wanted to smack a kid for it.

I deal with sexual harassment on a daily basis. I’ve been proposed to at the market; I’ve had men try to pull me off my bicycle while riding and one man, who had just come back from the fields, tell me that it was now my time to get to work while gesturing to his crotch. I used to not be able to get my mail without the man who stands between me and my Crystal Light packets stroking my arm until I told him that I was married to my postmate.

What gets to me most about these interactions is the feeling that I’m a thing that someone is allowed to claim. That what I want has no relevance in these situations. That my job is to serve as the needs of someone else.

I will never be anyone’s woman in any language.