A fat, violent biker-gang kid, about 11-12 years old, who lived across the street threatened my little daughters once - he was always pestering them verbally, but on this occasion, he came across the street and started swinging a heavy bike chain at them while they were playing on the sidewalk in front of our building.
I saw this out of the window, ran down the stairs and screamed at him so loudly he dropped the chain and started running. I ran down the street after him, grabbed him and pinned him to the ground and made him say he wouldn’t ever come near them again. He was crying, I guess mostly because he was so surprised. I’m small and he was bigger than I was, but never get in the way of an angry mother!!! Nothing stops us.
His father, recently out of jail, came over but then just shrugged and said the boy was misbehaving. Later, the kid was taken out of the home - which was totally dysfunctional, because as usual, the parents’ miserable lifestyle had everything to do with his behavior. He’s probably in a state prison or dead now, unfortunately.
Still, the moral of the story, is never mess with somebody’s kid if momma can find out about it. In the same situation, I’d do the same today, no matter what. It’s the only solution to “bullying.”
I’d graduated and left home but my sis, normally very quiet and studious, flat cold cocked a hoodlum that was bullying our much younger brother (the one I took to his first day of kindergarden when I was a senior). She put the little ruffian on the floor of the bus, told him to never lay a hand on or get near the kid brother again or she would put him on the floor again. Went back to her seat and never said another word. The old bus driver, the one who drove the hoodlum kids mom when she was in school was laughing about it more than 25 years later.
I think the legend is still told to this day. ‘Course that was in the days when we had gun racks in the pickup and carried our rifles and shotguns to school so we could hunt in the mornings or after school. I even bought a pistol from the coach and kept it in my locker until we went home on the bus.
I’d come around the corner at the parking lot sideways to skid into the parking spot and even got pea gravel inside my tires when the bead would break a bit. Took me a long time to figure that one out.
Those were better days than these. We got to be kids growing up in the country and we had freedom but we also had accountability, responsibility, punishment and consequences then it was over. We worked at whatever we could to buy our old pickups and cars and gas but we worked. None of this life haunting zero tolerance on your record for life crap.