My Fight / Your Fight (4 page)

I nodded, and we both scanned the ground for large rocks. I found one the size of a large grapefruit. I reached down and put my hands around to lift it up. It wouldn't budge. I tried again, mustering all my three-year-old strength. Nothing.

“Here,” I called to my dad.

He came over carrying two rocks the size of cantaloupes in one arm. My mouth just about dropped at the feat. I pointed to the rock I had been trying to lift. He scooped it up as if it was nearly weightless.

“Great eye,” he said, with a smile. I beamed with pride.

He took the rocks and put them as close to under the tire as he could get them, and we spent the next half hour repeating the process—me pointing at rocks and watching, awed, as he lifted them as if they were nothing.

“Let's see if this works,” he said.

We got back in the Bronco. He started the engine and pushed down on the gas. He shifted back and forth. The car lurched in both directions but didn't dislodge.

“Well, shit,” he said. “It was a helluva try. I guess we're going to have to walk. I'll have to get John Stip to get his truck and help pull me out later.”

The Stips lived the next farm over from us. We got out of the Bronco again. It was hot and I was tired. I could still see the car license plate, when, red-faced and sweaty, I looked up at my dad.

“Can't make it,” I said.

He scooped me up as effortlessly as he had the rocks. I put my head on his shoulder as he walked through the tall grass and I was soon fast asleep. I woke up to the crunching sound of my dad's footsteps on the gravel road that led up to our house. The Bronco was a barely visible speck in a faraway field.

As the sun set over the prairie, we ate dinner on the porch, overlooking nothing but fields for as far as we could see.

That evening as we made the quarter-mile walk down the unpaved road to check our mailbox, I looked up at my mom.

“I like North Dakota more than California,” I said. It was the first complete sentence I ever spoke.

Summer in middle-of-nowhere North Dakota is beautiful. Winter in North Dakota is another story. There is nothing but subzero temperatures and snow. Lots of snow. But that first winter, the novelty of snow had yet to wear off. So, on a completely ordinary day in January, Mom and Dad bundled us up, and we waddled out into the snow. The Stips joined us.

My dad went down a completely ordinary hill on a completely ordinary orange plastic sled. He went down first to make sure it was safe for me and my sisters to follow. I laughed as I watched him shoot down the hill. He hit a bump, an ordinary log covered with some snow. The sled skidded to a stop at the bottom of the hill.

But my dad just lay there. Mom thought he was joking.

We waited.

He didn't get up.

My sisters and I sat at the top of the hill watching as Mom ran down the hill, then knelt beside Dad.

There was a blur of snow and flashing lights. An ambulance showed up but got stuck in the snow. Another ambulance came. It took about an hour before medical personnel got to my dad.

My mom rode with my dad in the ambulance. Our neighbors took us back to their house for hot cocoa. We waited for Mom to call.

The news was not good.

My dad, who was the strongest person I knew, I mean he had superhero-level strength, had broken his back. The first time I saw my dad after his accident, he was lying in a hospital bed, unable to move. I kept hoping that the next time we walked into his hospital room, he'd be up, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, slapping on Old Spice aftershave and looking at us with a smile as though nothing had ever happened and announcing—as he had every morning as long as I could remember—“It's showtime.” I kept waiting for him to jump out of the bed. But he didn't. He was in and out of surgery, narrowly escaping death on the operating room table again and again.

The first time Mom took us to see him after surgery, the lights in his room in the intensive care unit were dim.

“You have to be quiet,” she said as we stood outside the doorway. “Dad is very tired.”

We nodded solemnly and quietly filed in behind her like baby ducks. The steady beeping of his heart monitor filled the room. Every thirty seconds or so, a machine whirred.

“Ron, the kids are here,” my mom said in the soft voice she reserves only for when you are really sick.

My dad was lying flat on his back. He opened his eyes. He couldn't move his body, but he shifted his gaze toward us.

“Hey guys,” he said, his voice a whisper.

I edged closer to the bed. My dad was bandaged around his torso, where the doctors had cut into him to operate on his broken spine. There was a large bag of blood next to an IV, dripping into his arm. Hanging from the side of the bed was another bag. A tube connected to some place beneath the blankets that I could not see was filling the bag with blood as it dripped out of his body.

A nurse came into the room and as she got close to Dad I launched myself at her. Mom caught me midair as I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Why cut my daddy in half?! Why you do?!” I hated her. Hated her for hurting my dad. Hated her for the pain he was going through. Hated her for the pain I was going through.

I swung my fists and kicked my legs as Mom carried me into the hallway and blocked my path to the door. I gulped for air. Tears streamed down my face as Mom tried to explain that they were helping Daddy.

“He got hurt,” Mom told me. “The nurses and doctors are working to make him better. They are trying to help him.”

I was not sure I could believe her.

“You can ask Daddy,” she said. “But we need to try to help him too. That means we need to be quiet when we're in his room. OK?”

I nodded.

“OK then. Let's go.” She led me back into the room.

My dad spent more than five months in the hospital. Every day after school, my mom would pile the three of us kids into the car and we would make the 130-mile drive from Minot to Bismarck, since our local hospital wasn't equipped to deal with an injury as severe as my dad's.

There is not a lot to see outside of a car window in the North Dakota countryside during the winter, just endless stretches of white. White is actually what I remember most about that period of my life. The white hospital halls. White tiled floors. White fluorescent lights. The white bedsheets. I also remember the blood; there was a lot of blood.

My dad had a rare bleeding disorder called Bernard-Soulier syndrome, which makes it difficult for the body to form blood clots, and blood clots are an essential part of how our bodies stop bleeding. Minor injuries can result in bleeding complications, and major complications can result from traumatic injury. People with the disorder often suffer prolonged bleeding during and after surgery. My dad had suffered a traumatic injury and major surgeries: There was so much blood.

Mom talks about how my dad would be crashing and how nurses would run into his room with the bags of blood you see hanging from IV stands, normally dripping into people's arms at a slow trickle. A nurse would connect the bag to his arm, place the bag on a table, and put all of her bodyweight on it so that the blood would shoot into his veins.

The nurses would usher us out of the room before they changed his sheets and dressings, hoping we wouldn't see it. But that much blood is impossible to miss. It would saturate his bandages, stain the sheets. I stared at the blood as it spread. Red dots blooming into huge circles. All that blood left me feeling helpless. Even as a four-year-old, I knew that much blood meant things were not going well.

There were lots more surgeries. Lots more bags of blood. The doctors inserted a metal rod in Dad's back. We spent a lot of time in the waiting room. The nurses would put cartoons on the TV for us. I ate a lot of soup from the hospital cafeteria. I drew a lot of pictures.

All through the winter and spring we made that long drive. On the way down, I would stare out the icy windows and draw pictures in the condensation on the windows. On the way home, my sisters and I would sleep while Mom drove in silence.

Dad was never quite the same after his accident. No one in my family was.

The moment you stop viewing your opponent as a threat is the moment you leave yourself open to getting beat. You start thinking you don't have to train as hard. You cut corners. You get comfortable. You get caught.

When I was little, people didn't take me seriously because I could hardly get a sentence out. When I competed in judo, I was discounted because I was the American and Americans suck at judo. When I got into MMA, people brushed me off, first as a girl, then as a one-trick pony who only had a single move. I have carried other people's lack of confidence in me around for my entire life. Even when I am the 11–1 favorite, I feel like I'm the underdog. Every single second of every day I feel I have something to prove. I have to prove myself every time I walk into a new gym, onto a new movie set, into a business meeting, and in every fight.

There have always been people who have written me off. They're not going away. I use that to motivate me. I'm driven to show them just how wrong they are.

My dad was released from the hospital at the end of the spring of 1991. Medical bills had mounted, so he needed to go back to work. He found a job, only it was at a manufacturing plant across the state. The arrangement meant he had to live two hours away and commute home on the weekends.

By this point, I was speaking relatively clearly. Well, clearly might be a stretch, but I was intelligible beyond my small family circle. Speech therapy had paid off and I advanced from being nearly two years behind (a pretty significant delay when you're not even four) to being on the low end of average. However, in my family, average wasn't going to cut it.

My speech therapist suggested I get more individualized attention to force me to work on my speech further. As people often do when they are faced with physical or neurological limitations, I found a workaround. Somehow my sisters always understood me, and they would step in and translate.

“Ronda is crying because she wants to wear the red shirt, not that blue one you put her in.”

“Ronda wants spaghetti for dinner.”

“Ronda is looking for her Balgrin.”

My speech therapist thought this help was hindering my improvement. When I struggled speaking, I would just look to one of my sisters to jump in and assist. My therapist told my mom that I would be best served in a situation where I had no other option than to speak for myself.

As much as my parents hated the idea of having our family living on two different sides of the state, this arrangement would provide an opportunity for me to find my voice—literally. I hadn't started grade school yet, so I went to live with my dad, while my sisters stayed with my mom.

In the fall of 1991, my dad and I moved into a one-bedroom house in the tiny town of Devils Lake, North Dakota. Our house was small and old, the carpets were thin, and the linoleum in the kitchen was coated in permanent grime. We had one of those TVs with rabbit ears that got four snowy channels, so we rented a lot of videos. We watched animated movies about talking animals and R-rated movies that my mom would have disapproved of because they involved a lot of swearing, a lot of people being shot, and a lot of things getting blown up. Every night before bed, we watched
Wild Discovery
, which explains why to this day I possess a wealth of random animal knowledge. There was a pullout couch in the living room that was my bed, but we only used it when my mom and sisters came to visit. Otherwise, I crawled into bed with my dad and fell asleep in my footy pajamas.

Domestic life wasn't my dad's specialty. The contents of our kitchen included milk, orange juice, a couple of adult frozen dinners, a box or two of cereal, and several Kid Cuisine TV dinners (the ones with a cartoon penguin on the front). My dad pulled back the plastic wrapper, popped the meals in the microwave, then mere seconds later handed me a small black tray containing compartments of soggy pizza, wrinkly corn, and dry brownie. Other nights, we got fast food, picking up a pizza at Little Caesars or a kid's meal at Hardees.

“I know your mom is worried about how you talk,” my dad said one day as we pulled up to the drive-thru at Hardees.

I shrugged.

“But don't you worry about it. You are going to show everyone one day. You're just a sleeper. You know what a sleeper is?”

I shook my head.

“A sleeper just waits and when the time is right, they come out and wow everyone. That's you, kiddo. Don't you worry.”

He turned to me.

“You're a smart kid. It's not like you're some fucking moron. You think you got problems because you're a little slow to talk. Let me show you what stupid looks like.”

We pulled up to the window. “Hello, welcome to Hardees,” came the garbled sound through the box.

“Heeeellllooo,” my dad said, using the slow and loud voice he reserved solely for the Hardees drive-thru speaker.