My daughter is small. Before her teen years, she was much shorter than her peers. I’m shorter than many of my peers as well. But for some reason, this fact seems to bother, not my daughter, but other people.
Starting second grade, the seven and eight year old children had grown more than they had in years past. They were big kids. They weren’t in preschool or kindergarten. They weren’t experiencing their first year of big kid school. They were starting their elementary career as kids who’d paid the dues young children have to pay. They’d learned the routines, where the bathrooms were, how to handle lunch money, and recess was about socializing and sports.
Second grade is where the little kids start their path to becoming big kids. My daughter didn’t grow as much in the summer between first and second grades. She didn’t grow much during the school year either. She was teased relentlessly for being shorter than her peers.
Second grade was also the year her classmates discovered her food allergies. For many of them, having food allergies was one more thing to tease her about. Was she not a whole person because she couldn’t eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? She was okay with not eating peanuts or any other nuts. I’d worked for years at home with her; I’d taught her how peanut butter smells, what peanut butter cookies look like, which candy bars contain nuts. She was well past fighting the facts. She had food allergies, and she was okay with it. But other kids were not okay with it. She was different, and that opened doors for relentless teasing.
Others were not okay with it – it is this issue that belongs not to us but to those who place their opinions about us onto us as if their feelings are our problems and in our control. We live in a world where we have to care what others think even when we don’t want to because opinions and judgments are constantly shoved down our throats.
I tried to teach my children to be unapologetically themselves – with kind hearts, giving hands, and open minds.
Her classmates teased her about her food allergies. They let her know she was less a person than they were because she couldn’t eat the same foods. Second grade was the year “hide the peanut” became a game in her classroom.
In third grade, her classmates’ “hide the peanut” game moved from kids putting a peanut on her chair while she was away from her desk to hiding peanuts in her notebooks, in her lunch box, and inside her desk. All I could think was how lucky we were her allergy wasn’t life-threatening if she was merely near nuts and how lucky we were these kids didn’t push the limit so far as to hide them inside her food. A cruel prank such as that would have sent her to the hospital.
Older Kids Means Bigger Kids
In third grade, the kids were even bigger. The usual teasing for her size continued. She was much smaller than her peers. Some even said she was the size of many of the first graders.
At recess one day in September of her third grade year, three boys, much bigger than she, two of them fifth graders, held her down on the playground. They placed a sweatshirt over her head and kept her pinned in the dark for several minutes.
For six weeks, she slept in my bedroom, afraid of the dark.
Her principal told me in a meeting about the incident, “Maybe you should teach her to be more assertive.”
I’m not sure how assertive a small young child should be on a school playground. I’m all for girl power. I’m in agreement we should teach our girls to stand up for themselves — but there are limits to what one small girl can do from under a sweatshirt five boys have pinned to the ground. And school is (should be) a safe place. For my daughter, it has never been a safe place – for too many other children, it’s even a place far worse than we’ve experienced.
Each incident after this, that particular school pointed at my daughter and let us know how she was reacting and how wrong it was, or how her behaviors were inviting this type of treatment.
I hope I am not the only mother to read those words with a mind that flashes a young woman in a bar wearing her sexy little black dress… or running through a public park in a high ponytail – “her behaviors were inviting this type of treatment.”
This is the moment this journey of my daughter’s also became my journey. As a mother, it was my job to prepare her for the world. I wasn’t ready to prepare her for late night at a bar in any outfit or on long jogs in a park alone just yet – she was eight years old. But I was going to empower her more to fight back – not the boys and girls who picked on her, not only the cruel kids who thought physical violence and hands on other people was normal… but the system.
If she wanted to be under a table to soothe a friend, dammit… enjoy your space under that table and be good to that friend who lets you into their private protections. Stand up from under that sweatshirt and don’t fear being exactly who you are.
I was determined to empower my daughter to search for the good in others but continue to be the amazing little girl she was. A new rule entered our house – You don’t have to be friends with everyone, but you do have to be friendly. Sometimes ‘friendly’ was replaced with polite. Be polite. To everyone – even those who are mean. Don’t let their actions change who you are.
During this time, my father passed away. My own journey as a mother turned from a determined pillar of strength to a weak young girl telling my father he’d done enough for me, and I’d be okay without him.
It was a tough journey. That transition through my eighth year as a mother.
I’d lost my father. My daughter was losing her innocence. And I was exhausted. Diving into those emotions of mine required me to dive more into my personal life, the support I yearned to have, the weekends of sleeping I longed for – this was the year I transitioned from motherhood is great to we are all just surviving.
It’s also the year I first said out loud, “She won’t see age sixteen. I don’t know why – but I do know she’s that kid.”
Until next time —
Be well
~Stella
**All images courtesy Canva Pro, multi-use license