Bullying is a dark and painful part of geek culture. I related to Aisha Tyler who spoke out as a bullying survivor yesterday on The Talk. I hear you sista! Lately many people are sharing about bullying. It occurs to me that my stories about being persecuted as a child might have some relevance to someone.
As an abuse survivor I do maintain that violence breeds violence. Even though I had a horrible childhood, and I was abused by not only children, but family members, teachers and doctors, I have gained an insight over the years into why these people committed these crimes. Most of these people were acting out of their own pain. Except in the times when it was perverts.
I’ve never told my stories. There are just so many of them. In todays terms these events are more like assaults than bullying. What I am going to say here is not fictionalized in any way. It is graphic and disturbing. Read at your own risk.
By now most, if not all the perpetrators are dead. These events occurred in the 1960′s and ’70′s. The nature of the abuses, are all serious crimes today. Many of the things I experienced were part of the routine back then. The adults in my early life had a different sense of right and wrong, and none of the worship that children have gotten in these later generations.
When I started kindergarten at age five, I was very small for my age. I had never been socialized with other children. That is not to say I had not been around cousins of a similar age. But from as young as I can remember I was shunned by them. I must have appeared odd to them. An underweight, autistic child, clinging to her mother’s chair at family gatherings. These cousins, whose father was an acclaimed doctor, never once helped me. A pattern of self loathing was set in place permanently.
Looking back, I had many problems. Up first was from about four years old my father had been sexually molesting me. There were these odd child’s first person perspective memories of the shadowed goings on at night. As an adult I could see that I was used as a masturbation tool, and for oral sex.
Even prior to the personal abuse, were earlier memories of something that was also too disturbing for a child’s mind. Sorry Mayim Bialik, I love you, but sleeping with my parents did not work out for me.
“She won’t hear us, she’s asleep.”
“Why are you hurting Mommie like that?”
“Stop it she thinks you are hurting me.”
Equally important was that I could not see. I have a severe myopic condition. Without glasses I am blind. The world to me looks like it is passing behind coke bottle glass, unless I have my glasses to sharpen the picture.
I could not distinguish faces, or see facial expressions. I became very sensitive to colors. I could eventually tell who was who by the most distinct color or pattern that they had on, or the way they smelled. I concentrated mostly on what I could see which was myself, or a book.
By the time I reached first grade I had read the entire family library of a couple hundred books and the Harvard Classics collection.
And I read many things I shouldn’t have. The Sensuous Woman, left out in a drawer which I thought was intended by my father for me to find. I read his collection of Playboys, Penthouse and Hustler. Reading those at such a young age led me on paths to much confusion and abuse.
Arriving at kindergarten in my state, blind, tiny, self absorbed, pygmalion knowing too much and yet nothing at all. Too much knowledge about the seedy adult world and nothing about how to act in class or with children. I had never seen a boy before that first day of school. They wanted me to play with wooden blocks.
The teacher said “Ok I’ll put these two weird looking ones together in the back.” as she paired children up for some exercise or another perhaps dancing to her banging on an out of tune piano.
The other weirdie, whom I had no intention of holding hands with, or touching in any way, was a flaming redheaded french kid named Pierre. He had a snot crusted nose, a mad case of freckles and a wart on one of his freckly fingers. He was maniacally laughing at me and pointing. My olive skin, was tinged a greenish hue from the cheap fluorescent lighting. There was my unconventional hairstyle, and my odd mannerisms. The pointing turned into poking me. I punched him in the nose, which bled.
Then I, the tiniest person in the school was standing in the corner for fighting. My parents were called. My father came and took me away. I vowed never to return to that awful place. And just why were they putting me with all of these children anyways? I knew more than any of them, and I thought, probably than that off key teacher too.
I distinctly remember the sequence of events that led up to my finally getting glasses. I did not know I needed them. I thought that everyone saw the world as I did, all a blur like a runny Salvador Dali environment. Faces were a collection of dark and light splotches, an addendum to what was more importantly the voice.
I remember that I was in the basement laundry room in our house and my father was slamming the back of my head on the floor. He had me by the neck, and it was done in such a way that I would pass out, and not die, or have any visible scars. But it did have the side effect of ruining my vision. I don’t know exactly how many times this method was used on me. But I think it ended after first grade. That was when things really began to get weird at school, and never stopped afterward.
I was seated in the back of the class. Of course I could not see the chalkboard very well. I could read the books and do the classwork. For a while the fact that I could not see went un-noticed. After one particular head slamming in the basement session, I began to see white nets, or occlusions in my visual field. Then one day the teacher called on me to answer something she had written on the board. I did not really understand what the sounds were as she was writing on the board. I would memorize what she said, or mimic what the other children said if they read from the board all at the same time.
She realized that I could not see what she was writing and had me move to a desk in front. Then she began trying things. “Read this.” she handed me the children’s reader. Which I read out loud perfectly. In an adult sounding voice, too deep for my age and size. (I later made use of my voice on FM radio.) She was astonished. She handed me the next grade level books up, then a newspaper. While the other kids were still learning their letters I was tested as reading on a college level or above. Parents were called. I got glasses. None of this went over well with the other children.
The scary optometrist had the worst and most memorable case of halitosis that I have ever experienced. I received a pair of pink cat eye shaped glasses with rhinestones on the corner. And a pair of white prescription sunglasses also with rhinestones. I thought they were wonderful. The final ride home from the tortuous eye doctors appointments was well worth it. I could see!
I could see my mother’s face clearly for the first time, and her deep soulful brown eyes. I could see trees and buildings. I could see other cars, and other people.
Those happy moments came with heavy prices to pay. Because now I was hated. I was too small and too smart. I all ready knew anything and everything that the teachers could do in a classroom in the 1960′s. The classroom was usually the only place that I was safe. I was a teachers pet. I was allowed to leave class to help the art teacher, or to carry mail or notes for the teachers. I could read the other kids textbooks in one sitting and do all the handouts in a few minutes. If it wasn’t for “the new math” which was a failed teaching experiment in the sixties, I might have accomplished something in my life, because I had potential.
There are many, many stories I remember from grammar school, of the various bullies, and the weird things I did to counteract them. I had a long walk, or run home. I think in third grade, the long fever that I remember having, might have been the beginning of what became Rheumatic Arthritis. I had very weak knees and a weak body in general. My mother had me when she was 42, and she was a smoker. I got a weak defective heart from it. Again, those things were not known back then.
The fact that I had so much trouble running was a problem. When the bullies, hell basically the entire school hated me, it wasn’t very large, chased me home everyday throwing rocks at me, trying to take my glasses and smash them, I would inevitably fall on my knees. I had knee cap sized scabs on my knees from this treatment for years. I would fall and bleed and somehow make it home by running through the woods, or through sewer pipes. Treading where other children feared. Limping along, hiding.
The school would be called. But in those days they never told the other parents. The bullying was viewed as my fault for “being so weird”. I had the glasses. I was the only one who had them. I didn’t wear clothing that was like the other kids. My Mom liked fashion so she shopped for me at the mall, instead of Bradlees like the other kids. I would wear outfits, with matching shoes. She would braid my hair and put it up in loops. All of it would become common today. But then we were foreign, outcast.
“Just tell them that we are from France.” Seriously, I was told to say that by my parents.
Besides trying to get back and fourth the half mile to school each day without being killed, the other big problem was lunch. I ate pita bread. That nearly caused a riot. A liverwurst sandwich on Lebanese bread called khibis (prononced ‘khh Ebb zz’), wrapped in aluminum foil when opened, unleashed utter chaos.
“What is that?!” one of them said.
“It’s liverwurst on khibis.”
“What? You’re lying. What the hell is that?” Some of them ran for the teachers to report me. A couple of them were genuinely afraid of my sandwich and started to cry. The rest of them grabbed my lunch and whatever else I had and began smashing it. I ran for the door and ran all the way home through the woods.
Most of my grammar school experience involved me running out the door in the middle of a school day, to hide in the woods. Usually until late at night. No one could find me out there. And they hardly ever tried. There were no amber alerts back then. If somebody lost a kid, it was no big deal. You can just get pregnant again. That is how they thought.
One day when I was running home, alone, about six years old something more dangerous than usual happened to me. I was walking up the long hill that my house was at the top of. A man in an orange VW Beetle drove up along side of me. He began to drive slowly along side of me asking for directions. I was always outspoken.
“Go to hell!”. I said which usually worked for me in most situations. But this was very different. Then the guy began to ask where he could “Find some girls, find some girls to go with him.” Whatever that meant. Then I noticed something, what he had in his hand was not the shifter of the car.
I was too young to know what a penis was. Although I had been abused and molested, I had never actually seen the instrument. When things happened to me it was dark, without my glasses on I could not see at all, especially at night. Or the dick itself was not used without some disguise such as an afghan.
So there I was in the middle of no where, and there was a guy in Volkswagen with his cock out in the middle of the street. That time I took an immediate right turn and ran behind some random house as if I lived there. I was prepared to break right in the back door or window of the home of some people I didn’t know just to get away from this guy.
He began yelling – chilling to this day. “I know that’t not your house you little bitch.” But I continued around back onto their porch and opened their back screen door, as he drove off. I was glad that I knew my way around in the woods so well that day. I was able to go down behind this person’s house and down to a stream. The stream led to a large drainpipe that went under the road and deep into the woods a mile or two behind my house.
When I finally got home the description of the event to my Mom might not have made as much sense as it does now.
“A man in an orange Volkswagen asked me for directions. He wanted me to get in his car, but I told him to go to hell. I felt sorry for him because he had an extra thumb or something wrong with him because he had six fingers or some growth in his lap.”
My Mom hit the ceiling. Now I can remember her being impotent with rage.
That event passed. It seemed there was little that could be done to keep me safe from the constant attacks from other children. The daily rock throwing. The constant skinned bleeding knees, and elbows, the cuts, expensive broken glasses. Eventually word got around that if the glasses were broken the lawyers would be called and the glasses would have to be paid for by parents.
The principle suggested finally that my parents drive me to school in the morning, where I was to enter the school through the front door and go directly to class, and not wait for the bell outside with the other kids. After school an eighth grade boy was hired to pick me up and walk me home from school.
There were many, many more events. Including abuses by teachers. Times change, along with culture. The respect or disrespect for the lives of others changes with the culture. In those days, I was viewed by other kids, and the teachers as being too smart. Too different. Creativity, was a word that wasn’t even used in regards to children yet.
One thing that has not changed is that children are still punished for being different. Successive generations have continued to reinforce the same stigmas. Anyone who stands out with a talent, or a handicap is savagely pushed down. It comes from the parents. Kids are taught from an early age by most parents that they must conform.
The bullies as well as the special kids are responding to a bad situation in opposite directions like the poles of a magnet. The pressure on children to conform is too great. They are pressured like sardines into the confined areas of space within school walls, and it drives both the best and the worst kids literally out of their minds.
The administrants have not adapted properly either. ADD prescriptions are on the rise. Children who have initiative and a zest for life are drugged with ritalin. Instead of letting these kids go outside and play music or do art to blow off steam the adults in the administration and politicians have taken as many short cuts as they can.
When I was a kid the U.S. was at the top of test scores in the world for math and science and we had just landed in the fricking moon. Where are we today in terms of education? Backwards. Last in math and science in the world.
American kids have been coddled to the point of having an obesity crisis, and a stupidity crisis. Coddling and being forced with drugs into conforming is not the answer. Lining kids up to slap each other is not the answer.
The answer to bullying is HOMEWORK! Multiplication tables. Bullying should equal mandatory math homework. And social homework for not only the kids, but the parents too, and the teachers. And I mean home – work. More kids should be allowed to home school. Parents should be able to choose schools for theirs kids, and not be restricted by school zones.
Bullying begins at home. Kids are told that they have to behave the same way as others, and dress all alike. There is tremendous pressure to make teams, and wear those uniforms. All of it perpetuates a mob mentality. Parents need to inform their kids from the start that everyone is different and that is what makes life good. The goal should be to be an interesting person, not a bland conformist one. Dropping kids off and letting other people do a parents job hasn’t worked has it?
When a kid is bullying the answer is not more violence. The bully needs counseling, detentions at school, and additional homework. Especially math and science. Bully’s usually have a problem. They act up because they are pissed off about something. In my experience it was usually connected to an abusive father who is a problem or the lack of one. Kids who are mad take it out on others because they don’t know what coping skills are. Most of the time, they didn’t know that their situation needed healing either. They especially did not want to hear that from the skinny smart kid.
The bullying issues will continue to propagate as long as parents continue to send their kids into these cesspools. These hypocritically over protective parents in the last two generations have paid lip service to family values. While at the same time voting in republicans, on the local and national levels who have made education cuts. The way I see it, the bullying epidemic is all on the Bush years, which made classes that are too big to be handled by over worked and under specialized teachers. You need someone who has training in psychology along with an educator in every classroom.
My epilog? I swear like a sailor. I have lots more stories to tell. I still hate pianos. I remember those shoves and falls with every step I take. I have every sort of arthritis and very bad knees. It never leaves you, no matter how old you get.