The lessons that Margaret Rubega learns from her dad about fighting back are put to the test when he becomes the one she must stand up to.
Margaret Rubega is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. She has spent her career studying a diverse array of birds, with a consistent interest in answering the questions: How Does That Work? and How Does it Matter? She started her career getting crapped on in a tern colony, then studied a bird that's famous for going in circles. Those formative experiences probably explain a lot about her subsequent career. She's always been especially interested in feeding in birds --- the way they're built, the mechanics, the food -- because a bird that isn't fed is a bird that's dead. As the Connecticut State Ornithologist, she's had to counsel a lot of homeowners about whether woodpeckers are eating their houses (they aren't), and talk to a lot of journalists. Hoping to get better at it, via the log-in-your-own-eye method, she has taught science communication and writing classes along with biology classes for the last 10 years. She currently leads an National Science Foundation-funded research group studying methods of training graduate science students to talk and write for non-scientists. You can find her on Twitter @profrubega chatting about birds with students and others in her #birdclass.
This story originally aired on January 25, 2019 in an episode titled “Courage.”
Story Transcript
I am standing with my back against a tree and I'm surrounded by this circle of kids who have taken my book from me. They’re laughing and tossing it hand to hand just outside of my reach.
I'm five years old. My knees are bigger around than my thighs are. There’s a little drop of sweat inching down under the bangs that my mom cut too short, and my little round plastic rainbow glasses have slid halfway down my nose. I really, really want these kids to leave me alone and I really, really need my book back.
Finally, somebody shifts sideways and there’s a break in the circle and I bolt for the house, because my dad’s in there. My dad’s going to help me get this book back.
My dad is the classic up-from-nothing success story kind of a guy. Italian immigrant parents, his mom died when he was two from tuberculosis, and after he got out of the Navy post-World War II, he put himself through college on the GI Bill. Then got a full-time job and, while accumulating eight kids, got himself a PhD in Acoustics.
Now, at this point, I don’t actually know what a PhD is but I'm pretty sure he is the smartest guy in the world. When he comes home at the end of the day, he walks in, he kisses my mom, and then he goes, “Where’s my little angel?”
He kept the Blackstone, Massachusetts accent all the way through all that education.
I run in, he picks me up, we sit down together, he puts me on his lap and we read the newspaper mainly so that he can tell my mom, again, how I finished the front page before he did. So I know he understands why I need this book back. He’s going to help me get the book back.
I run up to him and I go, “Dad, Daddy, these kids, they took my book. They’re laughing and teasing me and they won't give it back and I need my book.”
He looks down at me and he shakes his head and he says, “That’s not nice. That’s not nice at all.” Then he says to me, “You know what I want you to do?” He puts out his hand, palm up, puts out his other finger like he’s pointing at the sky and like he’s chopping wood with the finger and the hand, he says to me, “I want you to go out there and tell them who you are.”
I just looked at him. I don’t get it.
He leans over a little more and he does it again. “I want you to go out there and tell them who you are.”
I look up at him and I blink, and I blink, and I try to swallow. He’s not going to help me? He’s not going to help me get the book back.
“Tell them who you are.”
So I turn around and I go back outside. I bend down and I pick up a rock. The kid who took my book in the first place is out in the middle of the lawn, prancing around, flapping my book up and down and I walk up to him. My knuckles already hurt but I squeeze the rock a little bit tighter and I say to him, “Give me my book back or I'm going to hit you with this.”
He stops prancing and he looks me up and down and he smiles. I stare at him right in the eyes and very slowly, his smile fades. Then he holds the book out and says, “Jeez, I was just kidding.”
I take it from him and, because I'm not sure that my knees are going to hold me anymore, I sit right down on the lawn with it. After that I don’t get less scared, but whether he says it out loud to me or I just hear it in my head every time, it’s, “Take this hand and this finger and tell them who you are.”
When we move mid-year, mid-school year, I get the sixth grade teacher, the six-foot tall guy, the only male teacher I’ve ever had, the one who whips the chalkboard eraser at boys who are fooling around. Every time he shouts, I flinch. One day, he asks me to go up to the board and do a long division problem.
So I get up there. And I hate the way a chalk feels in my sweaty hand but I squeak it out very slowly, carefully, meticulously, one step at a time just like Sister Agnes showed us back in October.
I turn around and he looks at the board and he says, “Jesus, that’s not new math. You couldn’t make that problem any longer.”
The bell rings and I pick up my stuff and I walk out.
The next morning I inform my parents that I am not going back to school until I can be in somebody else’s class. I got through two whole books while they were talking to the principal. Then they stuck me in an empty classroom with the teacher.
And he said to me, “I wasn’t making fun of you. I was just pointing out to the other students how complete your problem was, how completely you had worked it out.”
I just stared at him, looked him in the eyes, blue, a little bloodshot, and he cocked his head to one side and he looked at me and he said, “You’re tougher than you look.”
And I said, “Only when I have to be.”
By the time I get to college, I have figured out why I like reading books while sitting up in trees and I'm taking every Biology class I can get into. I'm thrilled, just thrilled when I get a work-study job skinning birds for study specimens for the school collection.
Now, this is the first thing I have ever done in my life, the first physical thing that I seem to be able to do instinctively, effortlessly, better than other people. My hands just seem to know how to get it done, to separate the skin from the bones and the muscle underneath and what’s inside is complex and fascinating and beautiful.
So I'm sitting hunched over a bird on the bench and the professor who I work for comes up behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders, a little low. He’s a guy with a really bushy moustache. He leans over and he says to me, “How’s it going here?”
And I swear to God, I can feel the moustache brushing the hair on the top of my head.
I just hunch over the bird and I go, “Fine. Everything’s fine.”
When I go to leave, he goes to pat me on the back but he puts his hand down the back of my neck and he leaves it there until I step away with my arms prickling. I go back to the dorm and have a really long shower and start thinking about applying for a work-study job at the dining hall. But I'm halfway through an owl. I can't just leave an owl.
So I go back the next day and I'm just sewing the bird up, it’s the last step, and he comes up behind me again, puts his hands back on my shoulders. I can feel his belt buckle in the small of my back. I straighten my back up so that his hands fall off my shoulders and I raise my hands up out of the bird, still bloody, one palm up, one finger pointing at the ceiling, and I say, “Please don’t touch me. There’s no reason for you to touch me.”
He backs up and he never touches me again.
Now, by the time I get out of college and do a couple of years of field work, my knees are no longer bigger than my thighs and I’ve learned how to blow dry my hair and I'm dating this really sexy cop. He’s got these brown curls and this tight muscular body and this cleft in the middle of his chin. Everybody likes him, and I touch him a lot.
We’re sitting in his car outside my parents’ house when I tell him that I’ve decided to apply to Biology graduate schools and that it’s going to mean moving to wherever I can get in, because that’s how a Biology graduate school works.
He says to me, “Well, why don’t you marry me instead?”
And I say, “Why instead?”
And he says, “Well, because I can't follow you around and you can't go on being a biologist after we have kids.”
I take my hand off of him and I say, “I am going to be a biologist and I'm not sure I'm going to have kids.”
When I go in the house, my dad’s the only one up. He’s sitting at the table in the kitchen. I sit down and I tell him that me and the sexy cop have broken up and I tell him why.
He shakes his head and he says, “You can't keep breaking up with men over this Biology business. Who’s going to take care of you?”
I'm stunned. Then instantly, I can feel pressure behind my eyeballs and my heartbeat in the palms of my hands, and I think, “Are you fucking kidding me? All these years, all these screwing up my courage and standing up for myself because you told me to, do you really think that I need somebody to take care of me?”
But I don’t say it. He must have seen it in my face, though, because when I look back at him finally, his eyes are full of tears. I watch him, he swallows, and then he swallows, and then he says to me, “I just want you to be safe.”
Just like that, I'm not mad anymore. See, at this point, I do not know about science, what my dad, the kid of the chicken farmer who has a PhD, knows about science. And what he knows is that science is a contact sport. It’s not about feeling smart. It’s about fielding your ideas and then your teachers and your peers try as hard as they can to knock you on your ass to see if you’ll get up again.
At this point, I have no idea how hard I'm going to fall and how often and how hard it’s going to be to keep getting back up. But I can see in his face he’s scared for me. I finally get it. He has always just been scared for me.
So I take this hand and I take this finger and I say to him, “I’m going to take care of myself.”
Thank you.