Chapter 10

When I first started school, my family was renting a house in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood in Santa Rosa.  I attended the first couple months of kindergarten in a classroom where Spanish was spoken as much as English was, even though the other families in our particular housing complex were predominantly white.  I do not remember a great deal about that school, but I remember looking forward to going to school each day and having friends.  I remember that the teachers were warm and friendly, and showed caring concern for how I was doing, both inside and outside of school.

I believe it was shortly after Halloween of my kindergarten year when Mother and Father informed my brothers and I that we would be changing schools.  Despite their tight finances, they had made an arrangement with a private Lutheran school, and we would be going there instead of the public school.  They insisted that it was a higher quality school, so the expense was worth it to them, to give us the brightest possible futures.

Some years later, Older Brother told me about events he witnessed preceding the change in schools.  Mother was approached by a couple adults from the public school who were concerned about our home life.  Mother confirmed this on a single occasion when I was a teen, simultaneously admitting that she overreacted, while also blaming them for being “overly aggressive”, and saying it was their faults that she feared they would try to take her children away from her.

So, my parents put themselves into massive debt that took them until my teens to pay off, just to avoid the possibility of anyone realizing there was an abusive situation going on at home.

Despite Mother’s attendance at various Christian churches around town, as a family we never once attended the church associated with the private Lutheran school.  Since we were not part of their community, and instead there on a bizarre form of “charity” (debt plus interest vs. up-front payment was a generosity in that community), my brothers and I were all singled out for bullying.  There was no overlap in activities between the grades, so we did not even have each other for support at recess.

I learned to keep my head down constantly.  I learned to expect complete exclusion.  I learned to expect incessant bullying.  There was not a single soul among my peers who was neutral to me, let alone friendly.  I was the pariah.  There was no missing it.  All the adults knew it was happening, but they refused to even provide lip service to stop it.

This was when I first encountered the advice to “just ignore it.”  This is probably the most common advice given to children who are bullied, and it is probably the worst advice a bullied child can receive.  It is a form of victim blaming, because it absolves the bully and all adults of any responsibility, and places all the pressure on the victim of the bullying.  It implies that if the victim just does a good enough job of ignoring it the bullying will stop, but that is never the case.

Worse than that, it can cause the victim to believe they deserve the abuse, or that abuse is an inescapable condition in their life.  It takes away their agency to defend themselves, and their ability to place boundaries, leading to eroded self-respect.  It teaches them to tolerate and excuse abuse, not just from obvious bullies, but from family, friends, and loved ones, making it harder for them to recognize when they are being abused and take steps to remove themselves from abusive situations.

When the situation is such that the victim will be punished if they do take action to stop the bully, as is usually the case in zero tolerance schools, these problems are further compounded.  The bully has free reign to bully, and if the victim fails to ignore it or makes any attempt to tangibly reduce the bullying, they are punished for that, making the victim the bad guy from start to finish.

I have no doubt that adults tell bullied children to “ignore it” because it allows them to wipe their hands of the situation.  They get to call that their due diligence, and then do absolutely nothing to deter the bullying, let alone stop it or punish the bully.

All the pressure was on me.  If other children were bullying me, I needed to not do whatever they were bullying me about, even if that thing was something I could not help, like having freckles.  If they said mean things, it was on me to ignore it.  I could not begin to even estimate how often I heard, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  The teachers said it, and made me repeat it.  The bullies mocked me with it, sometimes actually throwing small sticks and tiny pebbles at me when no adults were looking.  As long as they did not touch me, there was not a thing any of the adults were going to do about it, because it did not count.

One of the male teachers in particular was fond of telling me I should smile more.  I was beyond miserable, so I am pretty sure I almost never smiled.  He told me my face would freeze like that, and someday when I was happy, I would not know how to smile anymore and would still look sad.  He also gave me the sage advice that if I smiled even if I was not happy, then I would naturally become happier, because smiling makes you happy.

His words also became fodder for the bullies, especially the boys, who would mockingly repeat what he said about smiling.  They knew just as well as I did that smiling would be lying.  It was not for my benefit in any way.  It was for the comfort of the adults.  As long as I frowned, in some small way the adults had to witness that I was miserable and abused, but they preferred to ignore it.  A fake smile on my face would have made that easier for them.

I did like my first grade teacher, because she was the only person in the entire school who ever showed me any compassion at all.  I do not remember anything about the schooling itself.  I just remember my interactions with the other children, and the fact that in her classroom they could not directly target me for bullying, making it a semi-safe space.  However, I was not welcome to hide in her class during recess.

One of the other girls came into class one day and introduced her imaginary friend.  The teacher and all the other kids accepted it like that was completely normal.  I was so lonely that I thought, maybe, if I pretended hard enough, I could have an imaginary friend too.  But the thought of me having a friend, even an imaginary one, was so hilariously ridiculous to the other students that it just made the bullying worse.  The teacher pulled me aside the same day and said I should give it up and stop lying about it.  She said it was hurtful to mock the other girl by pretending I had an imaginary friend.  I did not mention it again, crushed and wondering if I really was incapable of friendship, even the imaginary variety.

The boys in particular were allowed to do pretty much anything they wanted.  There was a small group of the cruelest boys who tended to sit at a table by the window at the back of the class, mostly ignore the teacher, and do awful things.  One unfortunate day I ended up sitting fairly close and had the displeasure of watching them spend a good chunk of the morning catching flies, pulling off their wings, and then further torturing them while they suffered on the windowsill, taking hours to die.

I was, frankly, horrified.  It did not matter to me that flies are disgusting and filthy.  Nothing deserves to be tortured like that.  So, I raised my hand and told the teacher what they were doing.  I was told not to be a tattletale, and to ignore them.  They gave the teacher puppy-dog eyes and said they were sorry, snickered, and went right back to torturing flies.

They probably bullied me over it later, but that part just blended in with the rest of the unrelenting bullying.  Like Deadpool says, how do you step it up from round-the-clock torture?  They could not step it up to physical bullying without getting in trouble, so at every possible opportunity it was verbal and emotional bullying.

We may not ever have attended Sunday services as a family, but all students at the school attended services at noon on Wednesday.  Mother and Father said it was a requirement of the school, and that we had to go even though we were not Lutheran.  I remember enjoying singing the hymns, but the rest just seemed weird to me.  It was more formal than the majority of the churches I had been to with Mother, and also significantly less friendly, which is saying a lot.  There were no welcoming smiles for us at that Lutheran church, no chatter, no real sense of community.  I was an outsider being lectured at about their perception of the nature of God, and it was clear they believed I was going to hell for not being one of them.

I had been to enough different churches to realize that every church had a different take on the nature of God, so even though they presented their teachings in an absolute manner, I contemplated the lessons in search of my own conclusions.  I have always been bad at keeping my opinions to myself, even when mercilessly bullied.  After giving it significant thought, I remember telling one of the adults that I believed reincarnation was real, and not just for Jesus.  I was not aware of any religions other than Christianity, so my reasoning went like this:

All churches say God is Good, and heaven is perfection.  However, for something to be perfect it must lack difficulties, and thus is boring.  It is the difficulties and challenges in life that make things interesting and provide contrast, so we know how good the good times are.  If you never experience difficulties, you can never truly appreciate the good and beautiful things in life.  Since perfection is boring, and heaven is perfection, it is bound to get boring up there.  That means after a nice vacation in heaven, a soul might want to return to the earth and have another go at living.  If God is Good, there is no reason he would want that soul to be bored and unhappy, and he would allow them to be reborn, even if it meant being judged again at death.  As far as I was concerned, that explained why some people seemed to be born with innate knowledge and wisdom, or picked up skills like they were just reminding themselves how to do it.  They had known those things in previous lives, and it just took a little bit to bring it back out, without having to learn it all completely from scratch.

I was told simply that what I said was sacrilege, and I should never think things like that, ever, lest I go to hell.  That particular church was very big on the absolute Truth of dogma, and discouraged any independent thought, especially in girls.  It did not matter what they said, though.  At that point in my life I faced constant disapproval from all sides, so there was no point in stopping my contemplations just because one more person disapproved of me.

I developed a habit of pretending I could not wake up in the morning, because if I did not wake up, I could not get dressed, and I could not go to school.  I think this was the first time in my life I experienced hatred for Father, because instead of being a reasonable, compassionate human being about it, he would mock me.  Day after day he would sit on the edge of my bed and sing me cutesy wake-up songs, or tickle me, feigning friendliness that felt like another dose of emotional bullying.  For the rest of my life, if I heard him sing anything in a cheerful tone, it made me viscerally angry remembering those two years.

I always did get up and go to school, because I had to, because my parents preferred to pile on the misery rather than allow the slightest chance someone else might interfere with the way they wanted to raise (neglect) their children.  A school which encouraged and supported bullying was definitely not going to notice problems at home, let alone report my parents to Child Protective Services.

As an added bonus for my parents, the two years of unrelenting bullying, lack of any friendships at school, and meltdown of the one friendship I had in the neighborhood meant that any behavioral problems I had were guaranteed to be pinned on bullying and a lack of social skills, rather than chronic emotional abuse and neglect at home.

As an added, added bonus, I was conditioned to put as much effort into ignoring abuse as I could.  I became rather adept at the mental gymnastics required to excuse and ignore the less obvious neglect, manipulation, and abuse I received at home.  It was a necessary coping mechanism, because the more obvious abuse at school was already more than I could handle.  As much as I detest the advice to ignore bullying, doing exactly that as much as I could manage it made the weight of all the abuse easier to bare when I was too young and too neglected to be capable of changing my circumstances.

Some years later, Mother told me that she felt guilty about how awful that school was, but she also metaphorically threw her hands up in the air and said that she did not know what else to do at the time.  Father never expressed any regrets.  Regardless, they clearly believed the benefits they received from having us in that school outweighed all the obvious misery and trauma that school caused their children.  Also, their overarching justification remained that it was a “good school”, because any public school with that many brown kids in it could not possibly provide a good education, and a school they were paying money for had to be providing a quality education.

I suppose it is entirely possible that both Mother and Father were too wrapped up in their marital problems and near divorce, careers, and whatever other personal things were going on, to notice exactly how miserable their children were.  But that still does not excuse it.  If anything, that makes it worse.  I cannot even imagine being around a child day in and day out and either not noticing, or not caring, that something I was inflicting on them was making them so miserable they no longer felt joy.  There is no excuse or justification that can be given for what they did, especially when all they needed to do to make it stop was enroll us back in public school.

In the summer between first and second grade, my parents were able to purchase their first house in Rincon Valley, a relatively idyllic suburban neighborhood in Santa Rosa.  You know, the sort that in the 1980’s was 80% middle class white families, and 19% lower class white families, with little true poverty and almost no color.  It had “good schools”, so my brothers and I could finally stop attending the much-reviled private school.

All three of us continued to experience bullying in school for years.  Even though we were not around any of the same children, I am sure the way we behaved threw out signals that we were ripe for picking on.  It was not nearly as pervasive or severe as it had been at the Lutheran school, but it still hurt.  I usually managed to have one or two casual friends each year, and often there were at least a couple others who were friendly or neutral parties.  Yet, I still remember a bizarre game of “tag” which started because I got too close to a kid who did not like me, so they jumped back and said I had cooties, and to not get near them.  It was both disheartening and empowering at the same time to be capable of making the bullies skitter away by simply lunging or running at them, because they thought I was that repulsive.

On another occasion I remember snapping on a girl who had been relentlessly bullying me.  My ears filled with static, my eyes welled up with tears, and I started kicking her in the shins as hard as I could.  Over and over and over again, the only thought in my head was that I wanted to hear her yell, to give some indication of feeling pain the way she had been causing me pain.  She did not make a sound.  She did not even run, although she did silently cry.  I finally stopped, emotionally and physically exhausted.  It seemed like forever, but we were not in a secluded area of the yard, so it could not have been very long.  This was in the days before zero tolerance policies, so the adults at the school saw both of us were crying, knew I was chronically bullied, and could not decide on an instigator.  They told us to avoid each other, which we did.

I do not even remember her name, but sometimes I wonder about her.  The way she reacted to my anger was anything but normal, so I cannot help but worry that she, too, was experiencing abuse at home, but on the physical violence end of the spectrum.  It does not excuse the way she bullied me, but I do hope she turned out OK, and I feel bad that my temper snapped like that.

When I was no longer attending the Lutheran school, but still too young for Mother to let me be home alone, I had almost perfect school attendance.  I looked forward to school because I enjoyed scholastics, various teachers would let me hide in their rooms when I needed to, and the bullying was so much milder that I genuinely could ignore it most of the time.  I did not realize it at the time, but I was avoiding the emotional abuse at home, preferentially choosing the bullying at school, because at least the bullies were honest about wanting to make me miserable.

Once I was in junior high and old enough to be a latch-key kid, I started missing an average of one day a week from school.  I had several casual friends, but the only close friend my age I had during grade school had gone her own way.  I was not allowed to do after-school activities because those were inconvenient for my parents, which hampered the normal avenues for developing friendships.  I was painfully bored with repetitive classes and had been for years, so even with frequent absences it was easy for me to maintain high grades.

Mother liked to mimic progressive enlightenment, so all my brothers and I had to do was claim a “mental health day”, and we could stay home.  I completely agree that sometimes you need a day to not deal with the stressful shit that life throws at you, but at that frequency it was a symptom of something larger.  However, there was no world in which Mother was willing to look for the genuine source of my stress.  If she realized she and Father were a good chunk of the cause, she did not show it.  My parents were clearly never willing to change themselves or anything about their behaviors for me or my happiness and wellbeing.

I remember one of the school councilors asking me into his office to talk about my attendance record.  I had good grades, so he did not have any threats for me.  Instead, he appealed to my maturity, and pretty much begged me to come more frequently.  I was clocking a bit over 20% absences that particular semester, and that lack of attendance counted against the school when the district calculated funding.  I told him I was sorry, but if I was still getting good grades, I did not see how that was my problem.  That sounded like a really stupid way to calculate funding anyway, and that system was what needed to be fixed, not my attendance.

I usually called mental health days on days when my brothers did not.  It gave me time to be genuinely alone in the house.  I could watch whatever TV I wanted (not that I could usually find anything worth watching in the middle of the day), have time on the computer other than the middle of the night, and generally entertain myself in peace.

I do not think I will ever entirely get over how badly I was bullied or how poorly I was treated as a small child.  I have always wanted to have friends, and I treasure the truly amazing friends I have made as an adult, be they close or distant.  But, part of me always feels uncomfortable around large groups of people.  I usually give minimal concern to whether or not other people approve of me, because I know some people will never approve, and seeking their approval is an exercise in futility.  Yet, I get nervous when the interactions are friendly.  The honesty of disapproval is clean.  Unconfirmed approval is fraught with potential pitfalls, and that knowledge will always be with me.