It isn't easy to look back on one's life and be really honest about it. But after reading James Jones' story last week about kids bullying his daughter, I couldn't help but come clean. The fact is, I was a bully. This is my story. I hope it helps someone.
Her name was Missy Spain.
A tall, lanky girl with an uneasy, bucktoothed smile, Missy was never a part of the “in” crowd at our elementary school. Always the last pick for the recess kickball teams, her discount store jeans and tattered sneakers made for an easy target. No matter how hard she tried, Missy couldn’t catch a break. When she wasn’t sitting with Shannon Tucker, the resident fat girl, Missy mostly ate alone in the crowded lunchroom.
Missy endured spitballs, wads bubble gum planted in her chair, and constant hair tugging. She suffered in silence as her schoolbooks mysteriously flew from her hands. While other girls began sprouting breasts and enjoyed the attention of boys, Missy remained flat- chested and braless. A constant target of the “mean girls”, she spent much her time trying to fade into the woodwork and I spent too much of my time trying to pry her out of it.
Until a few months ago, I hadn’t thought more than two seconds about Missy or the torment she suffered at the hands of bullies. It was all too easy to forget that I was one of those bullies and that Missy was my chief victim.
Far too diminutive to light into her myself, I put others up to the dirty work. At all of 70 pounds myself I was masterful at getting others to do my bidding. I manipulated and cajoled my personal pack of minions to keep the action going, all the while convincing Missy that I was her one and only true friend. In another stroke of “genius”, I appointed her to be my campaign manager for the sixth grade student council president’s race. I won the race handily, but not before Missy got a bloody nose on the playground. I planted the idea that another student had called me the “n-word”. Missy went right after the “offender” who promptly popped her in the face.
Looking back now, I am deeply ashamed. I learned recently from old schools friends that Missy had a less than stable home life. While I will likely never know the whole story, I do know I had no right to do the things I did. I had the power to help Missy, to ease her acceptance and to keep her safe. I didn’t and I got away with it.
For a time.
The tables turned almost as soon as we hit middle school. There was a new cast of characters to deal with now, characters that found me an easy target. The new “mean girls” wanted no part of me and let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t in charge anymore. I tried new hairstyles, new clothes, anything my mother’s meager paycheck could buy. None of it worked. I cried myself to sleep at night as vicious rumors were spread.
When a girl thought I was flirting with her boyfriend, her friends surrounded me after a high school football game. I escaped that night with a few cuts and bruises, but never quite able to outrun the terror, I changed schools at least a half dozen times before the end of my senior year. I remember feeling helpless and alone.
Payback came in spades.
My mom worked nights and barely had the energy to show up for parent-teacher conferences, let alone visiting principals. Trapped in my own grief, I wasn’t able to tell her anyway. I didn’t have a father to run home to and my older brother was too busy smoking pot to care. My big sister was married and starting a family of her own.
Looking back now, I was paralyzed with depression. I spent most evenings with my cat “Lucky” and buried in a book. I wonder now what my father might have done. My guess is he would have been a lot like James Jones, the Florida father who stormed onto a school bus in search of the boys who were tormenting his daughter.
Jones got an unwanted 15 minutes of fame this week. A school bus video captured the Army veteran in an expletive laced rage, shouting threats at middle schools students and a seemingly helpless bus driver. His frustration boiled over after reports that his daughter, a 13-year-old with cerebral palsy, had been repeatedly harassed on the bus. Among other things, she’d been spat on and called names by a pack of boys.
Behind the damning video and 24-hour news coverage that followed, Jones quickly became “Exhibit A” for parents fed up with schoolyard bullies. For his part, Jones was remorseful if not angered that his daughter was not safe. That anger got the better of him, he said as his daughter sat weeping next to him. She told the world she was ashamed and scared.
Soon other stories shot to the headlines. Countless celebrities recounted their own experiences. Over recent months, a steady steam of horrific incidences entered the national discourse around schoolyard bullies—youngsters with nothing better to do than pick on their schoolmates. Some of the young victims felt so demeaned, so terrorized that they took their own lives. For the most part, in nearly every case, school officials hid behind well crafted, but seldom enforced, anti-bullying policies.
They wouldn’t have been able to hide from my father, who was anything but a peaceful man.
To hear my mother tell it, he had a hair trigger and a violent temper matched only by his good looks and intoxicating charms. When an older cousin foolishly robbed our house in broad daylight, my father tracked him down and beat him with anything he could get his hands on. Daddy drove him to the hospital, presumably because he was “family”, where he promptly paid the doctors to wire up my cousin’s jaw. My cousin survived and went on breaking into houses—just not ours.
Then there was “Big Red”, a man who had the misfortune of calling my mother a bitch when she turned away his drunken flirting. Daddy broke a long neck beer bottle over the bar, sliced the man’s throat and watched him bleed.
I never knew him that way. The daddy I knew showered me with gifts and doted on me like a china doll. He was always dressed in the finest clothes, his flowing shoulder length hair and thick mustache clipped to perfection. “So fine he could stop traffic,” my mother used to say. I wonder what my life would’ve been like had he lived. But mostly, this week, I wondered what might’ve happened if Missy Spain’s father had shown up on our bus. I cannot say that I agree with Jones’ actions and certainly there are facets of my father’s life that should not be celebrated. But I understand.
I understand what it’s like to be both the victim and the victimizer—the torment and the cheap thrills. As a parent, I know well the desire to keep my own children safe. Now grown, my children mostly escaped schoolyard torment for a variety of reasons—one of which is that there were three of them and nobody dared touch one without dealing with all three. Bullies, like me, pick on the weak and unprotected. We carefully select our targets, because we’re nothing short of power hungry punks. We are nothing short of common thieves, preying on others by stealing their sense of safety and self worth.
My father died when I was five and I’ve spent nearly every day since thinking about him, missing him– at least the one I knew. Putting aside his storied temper, I wonder what it might have been like to know a father’s love up close, to know his protective embrace. I wonder sometimes what life would’ve been like to have breakfast with him, to dance with him at my wedding. The father I see in my dreams is a wonderful provider, a stabilizing force steeped in patience and understanding–one who would’ve wasted no time getting to that school bus.
Cross-posted at The Goldie Taylor Project www.goldietaylor.wordpress.com