by Ronda Rousey
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.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE AN OPPONENT
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.
He turned to me. “Watch this. They’re going to fuck this order up. These idiots can never get a damn order right.” Then he turned to the speaker box and said, “I would like a kids’ meal with chicken fingers and a small coffee.”
“Will that be all?” the voice asked.
“Yes, can you repeat that back to me?” my dad asked.
“A chicken fingers kids’ meal and a coffee,” the voice said. “Please pull up.”
My dad looked at me and said, “No fucking way they get this order right.”
We pulled up. The guy working the cash register opened the window and held out the bag.
“That’s two cheeseburgers and a small fries,” he said.
My dad handed me the bag and gave me an I-told-you-so look.
As we pulled out of the lot, he turned to me, “Ronnie, just remember that. Be grateful you’re a sleeper and not fucking stupid.”
I unwrapped a cheeseburger and nodded.
LOSING IS ONE OF THE MOST DEVASTATING EXPERIENCES IN LIFE
I don’t lean on the old wins. I always need a new one, which is why every fight means the world to me.
I forget wins all the time. I forget entire tournaments and countries, but the losses stay with me forever. Every single loss feels like a piece of my soul has died. I’m never the same after a loss.
For me, losing is second only to having a loved one die. When I lose, I mourn a piece of me dying. The only thing worse than that is mourning the death of somebody else.
Dad’s spine was disintegrating. The doctor slid the X-ray onto the screen and told my parents that the deterioration was getting worse and that it would keep getting worse. Soon, he wouldn’t be able to walk. Then he’d be quadriplegic. Then he would waste away until he died. There was no miracle cure. No cutting-edge operation. Just a couple more years—maybe less—of excruciating pain and paralysis.
Though he hid his pain from us, my dad had been suffering since the accident; his back was deteriorating and the chronic pain was getting worse. My mom got a new job at a small college on the other side of the state, in Jamestown, North Dakota. We all moved back in together—Mom, Dad, Maria, Jennifer, and me.
My dad quit his job, saying the ninety-mile commute each way was too much, but that was only partially true. The reality was that the pain was becoming unbearable and sitting all that time only made it worse. The doctor had prescribed painkillers, which my dad refused to take and that he couldn’t have taken while driving anyway. I was just a kid; I didn’t question why he was home. I was just happy to have my dad around.
The summer before I started third grade Dad was always there. He sat on the front stoop as we rode our bikes up and down the block, made us snacks, and turned on the sprinkler for us to run through on hot days. While my mom worked, he piled us into the car, trekking us to our various activities and friends’ houses. When he was feeling up to it, he headed down to the basement where he had his woodworking tools set up. When I got bored of watching cartoons, I sat on the steps, peering down as the power saw buzzed, sending sawdust floating into beams of sunlight. Some days, when it was just the two of us, he and I would drive to our “special” spot, an out-of-the-way pond where we would skip rocks.
On August 11, 1995, Jennifer and I were home with Dad, watching cartoons on Nickelodeon. It was a summer day that blended into all the others.
Dad called Mom and told her to come home. Then he left.
I like to think he hugged Jennifer and me for longer than normal and told us he loved us and that he was going out, but honestly, I don’t remember. For years, I hated myself for having been such a self-absorbed eight-year-old that I had no clue what was happening. I’ve tried to remember something from the before part of that day—what my dad was wearing, what he looked like, what he sounded like. Whether he hugged us that day. I wish I could remember the words he said to me before he walked out our front door. I can’t. I just remember what came after.
My mom rushed in the front door.
“Where’s your dad?” she asked.
Jennifer and I shrugged. We had no idea how radically our life was about to change. My mom, overcome, sat down at the dining room table.
My dad
had walked down the four steps that led to the driveway. He got into the Bronco. He drove to the spot next to the pond where we skipped rocks. It was peaceful there. He parked the car, then took out a hose and put one end in the tailpipe, then brought the other end around to the driver’s side window. He got in the car. He rolled up the window. He sat back in his seat. He closed his eyes. He went to sleep.
A few hours later, a policeman showed up at our door. My mom and the officer spoke in hushed voices in the entryway for a few minutes. When my mom came back into the living room, she sat us down on the living room couch. From the look on her face I knew it was something serious. Jen and I glanced at each other, making that silent sibling eye contact that says, “Do you know what this is all about? No, me neither.”
“Dad went to heaven,” my mom said. For the first time in my life, my mother started to cry. I don’t know what she said next. The room was spinning too fast.
Everything in my life from those words on is part of the after.
I tried to stand up. I wanted to get away. I needed to leave the room, to leave the moment, but I felt my legs collapsing under me. It was as if they couldn’t bear my weight. Everything that followed is a haze.
Maria had been out of town visiting family and was rushed home.
In the hours and days that followed, our house was filled with people. Some stayed the night, helping my mom and us. Some just dropped off food. There were so many casseroles and everyone whispered, they seemed to think that was the appropriate thing to do. In a hushed voice, I heard one woman question whether Dad could have a Catholic service even though he committed suicide. The priest never hesitated. “Funerals are about the living,” he said. “The dead are at peace with God.”
The funeral home director was married to my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lisko. She was with her husband when he came to discuss service and burial details. It was weird seeing her in my house.
I remember sitting with Jennifer and Maria on the stairs and overhearing as he asked my mom what kind of coffin Dad wanted.