We were independent and resourceful, but we still had to depend on each other. My sister took full advantage of the situation, even though she was only two and a half years older than me. Until we got to her senior year in high school, we went to different schools, and she always got home before I did.
You know where this is going, don't you?
Stacy would get home, grab the key from underneath the doormat, let herself into the house, and then lock the door. She did this because, every single day, I would come running home because I had to pee.
“Stacy! Let me in!” I'd scream.
“What's the hurry?” she'd say. “It's a nice day.”
Or, she might just stand in the window and thumb her nose at me.
“Neener-neener.”
They'll probably have to replace my bladder when I turn sixty—I'm pretty sure I stretched it beyond capacity, dancing on the porch and begging her to let me in.
But I survived. I came out strong and independent, and I loved my mom and dad and wanted to have a relationship just like theirs when I grew up. No one ever told me I couldn't do or be something because I was a girl. It never even occurred to me that it was a possibility. I mean, my mom believed her career was as important as my dad's. So I grew up thinking that it was normal for women to excel and have career aspirations.
I went to Goucher College, and studied for my bachelor of arts with a history/pre-law double major while working full-time to put myself through school. I maintained a 3.6 grade point average while working forty hours a week at the mall. But when I was a sophomore in college, I attended a graduation at the Naval Academy. As I watched hundreds of white caps soar into the blue sky and then flutter back down, I decided I wanted to be a Navy officer. I immediately fell in love.
Unfortunately, I wasn't competitive for the Naval Academy because of my math score on the SATs.
No big deal. I wasn't going to quit at the first sign of difficulty, so, during my junior year of college, I went to see a Navy recruiter. He gave my SAT scores a cursory glance, and then he told me the same thing the Naval Academy had said: My math score was too low. He said I would never be selected as an officer.
That was the first time in my life I had ever been rejected.
I had been class president all four years of high school. I played four sports. I was voted Miss Popularity and Most Likely to Succeed, which is funny because I'm an introvert. But I was friends with everybody. I wasn't judgmental, and it was easy to be me just because I genuinely liked people. There was nothing cliquey about my world—I floated in and out of every group. It's a good way to be. But it wasn't good enough for the Navy.
I had been in all sorts of clubs, and I took the Advanced Placement classes I knew I would need to go to college. But I'm not super-smart, and I had never excelled at math or science, other than geometry and biology. My older sister? She was incredibly smart, but she lacked some common sense. I was the other way around. I was plenty pragmatic, even as a kid, but it took me a lot of effort to do well in school.
And then the Navy recruiter reinforced that: You're not smart enough.
When I experienced failure at TBS, all of a sudden, everything I thought I knew about myself fluttered away like those white caps. It was the first time I couldn't ace everything I tried. I began to believe that what I had heard about female Marines was true, and it affected how I perceived myself and my potential for service. Nowhere was this more evident than in my chosen job field.
By the end of TBS, I could choose to become a military policeman (MP) or an adjutant (human resource officer) when we graduated. I think if I'd had someone kicking me in the rear end—someone saying, “Hey, Germano, you are better than this. You need to stop doubting yourself and just do it, because it's not rocket science.”—I would have been like, “Huh…Got it!” I probably would have been a lot more confident, and I would have become an MP.
Instead of pushing me, my captain at TBS tasked me to do the administrative tasks for the unit. Why did he pick me and not one of the many capable male lieutenants? You see it all over the military, even today. Women who are trained in anything but typing somehow find themselves doing the administrative work in their units. There is a perception that women are somehow naturally better at typing and filing than they are at shooting. In fact, when I was at Parris Island twenty years later, I got fed up with my female officers constantly being cherry-picked to take admin jobs at the regiment and depot, even if they had trained in another field. When I questioned the chief of staff, a salty, old colonel, about it, his response was that he thought women were “naturally” better at administration than men. Seriously?
At the end of my time at TBS, my captain completed my final evaluation. He wrote that I was his “little ball of sunshine.”
That's exactly what every Marine likes to see on an evaluation. “Follow me, Marines! I'm a little ball of sunshine!” I hear that's what Chesty Puller said just before earning each of his five Navy Crosses.
In some ways, my experience with failure at TBS was good for me. It taught me how to bounce back, even if it took a year or two. But even when I was successful, I felt like an imposter. No matter how good I was
