Beaten Down and Broken: Part I
November 9, 2010 at 10:42 am (bullying, childhood, friends, school)
I couldn’t believe it. I know people say that a lot – it’s an overused expression – but I really could not believe it. I read the blog post several times before to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. I’d really only clicked it to read because it made references to size/weight, and I was curious as to what she’d have to say; after all, she had always been on the larger side, not really heavy per se, just tall and curvy. But in the middle of her blog post, she veered suddenly in a direction I never expected.
Let me explain.
You see, like most of the world at this point, I have an active Facebook account. It’s actually fairly useful; I am in more contact with family now than I have ever been. I see what my cousins are up to on a regular basis. We can all be passive-aggressive to each other without ever having to make a phone call. Très convenient, no? But I also fell into the same old trap that most Facebook users do: I added one or two old friends, and suddenly every classmate I’d ever had wanted to be my Facebook friend. And it’s not all bad. I love seeing old friends, how they had grown up and their beautiful families. Even though most of us had grown so far apart in personal ideologies that we occasionally butted heads over a political comment here and there, it was still nice. I even accepted friend requests from the not-so- nice people from my past, the kids that I never thought I’d see again and was quite happy with that, thank you very much.
Because I thought I’d grown up enough, changed enough, and let enough of my past go to be able to look at these people and smile at their happiness and be glad that they had settled into a life that pleased them. And for the most part, I have been. Even people I had actively avoided for years, I was able to look on in this new light. And then one of my former grade school classmates posted a blog post she had written, and suddenly my faux-enlightened outlook came crashing down around me.
Nerdy, awkward and fat, she called herself.
Eating lunch in the bathroom alone, she said.
Foreign, she called herself.
A victim, apparently, of rampant bullying.
Excuse me, but did we or did we NOT go to the same school?!
In the past year, startling cases of extreme bullying have reached our newspapers and television screens, making a very old problem suddenly seem very new and very important to the country at large. Young men and woman, pushed so far towards the brink by abuse at the hands of their classmates, taking their own lives. I was glad to see this finally getting media attention, forcing parents and teachers to recognize an ugly truth: children, teens, young adults – they could be so cruel to one another that, for the targets of daily taunts and violence, it would just become too much. I suppose that is why she wrote the blog post that she did, cashing in on a media hot button issue while it was still hot. The thing is, this girl – I’ll call her Patricia*, for the sake of anonymity – wasn’t bullied. Sure, she might have had the occasional scuffle with one of the nasty little boys in our class. Lord knows we had a few. But at the end of the day, Patricia wasn’t a victim. She was a bully. She was one of my bullies.
I was nine years old when my parents separated and I was uprooted from the only home I’d ever known in upstate New York and brought to the sprawling Midwestern metropolis of Chicago. Everything changed for me, not just the location. My father stayed behind; my mother, the sibs and I moved in with an aunt and uncle. It was a lot to adjust to; we left New York in August, and in September I would start at a new school, with children who had been together since preschool and were not keen to look kindly upon newcomers. I went from a public school to a Catholic school. I had to wear a uniform for the first time, and unlike my old school, there were no school busses or hot lunch. I carried a sack lunch and had to walk to school. It wasn’t far, but it was so different. I can still remember that first day so vividly. The morning went by easy enough, the teacher was nice and everything was fairly mundane. But then it was time for lunch.
At my old school, there was no recess. At St. Adelaide’s**, we were dumped on the ‘playground’, which was known on most days as ‘the church parking lot’. I was confused, and terrified. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know where I’d get my lunch, since I’d had to drop it in a basket when I first arrived that morning. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I wanted to go home. Even writing about it now, I get a knot in my stomach. Sad, isn’t it? 19 years later and that vestige of fear still remain somewhere deep inside my psyche.
I don’t know what I’d have done if not for the Annies***. Two girls, one ridiculously thin with a wild puff of fiery red hair and the other large and round with a high blonde ponytail approached me, as I stood near tears by the lone tree that skirted the parking lot playground. They had seemingly appointed themselves the welcoming committee, and the thin one introduced them: “Hi. I’m Annie, and this is Annie. Want to sit with us at lunch?” I was saved! The teachers and staff had done nothing to help me, but these girls had! I would have friends and someone to tell me just what exactly we were doing standing on a parking lot! Perhaps my new educational career wouldn’t be as bad as it had seemed!
Yeah. Fat chance.
St. Adelaide’s was a school like no other I had encountered. Even that young, only in the fourth grade, they were strictly divided into social strata that couldn’t be crossed without great effort. The Annies, my playground saviors, were the bottom of the barrel, standing just above a group of three little boys, close friends, who had seemed relegated to the very last spot in social standing due to nothing but the apparent somewhat large size of one of them. There were two other girls who seemed somehow separate from the rest: they sat exclusively together, speaking back in forth in Polish. Patricia was one of these girls and maybe, just maybe, way back then, she felt lonely and isolated. But that was soon to change, because it wasn’t long before the social hierarchy of St. Adelaide’s began to shift, and there was only one person standing at the bottom: me.
I suppose I was doomed from the start. I wasn’t necessarily ‘popular’ at my old school, but I got along just fine. I had a few good friends, I got good grades – with the occasional C in handwriting and a notation on my report cards that maybe I talked just a little too much during class – and didn’t really have any problems. Maybe it was because I was new, and hadn’t been there from the beginning like the rest of my St. Addy’s classmates. Maybe it was because I spoke a little different, with a different accent and I said ‘sneakers’ instead of ‘gym shoes’ and ‘soda’ instead of ‘pop’. Maybe it was because they started me in the normal-level Reading and Math classes and soon bumped me up to Advanced. Or maybe it was because I was severely asthmatic and, with a uniform with no pockets, had to carry a small purse with me throughout the day containing my rescue inhalers. I can’t really say for sure. All I do know for certain is that one day, without my really noticing it, I became a target.
I know that I changed. Within the first six months, I went up several clothing sizes. I was suddenly withdrawn. The ‘too talkative during class time’ girl from New York was suddenly sullen and silent, all of the time. I had friends but we were never really close. The Annies had been besties since kindergarten, and it seemed Skinny Annie’s star was on the rise; she would soon have vaulted into a higher place in the social strata. Round Annie blamed me; everything had been find before I came. By the sixth grade, Round Annie had become so oddly bookish and bizarre that she was in a class all her own, with me left as the class punching bag.
I suppose I brought some of it on myself. With three working adults, a working young adult and three high schoolers in the house with me and a single working bathroom, it was a struggle just to brush your teeth in the morning. Having my father’s greasy Italian skin and hair, I needed a good scrub down at least every 10 hours to avoid looking like I’d styled myself with a tub of Crisco. As depressed as I was back then – because now, looking back, I can recognize that I was in fact seriously depressed, even at 11 years old – I didn’t care to fight for mirror time in the bathroom.
That only led to make things much, much worse.
TO BE CONTINUED.
* = Name changed cos the broad grew up to be a lawyer.
** = Name of the school/parish changed because several city alderman are heavily involved there and I don’t want any trouble.
*** = Names changed simply out of respect.
