Not So Nice

In 5th grade I was a terribly shy kid. I was also a really nice girl.What an awful combination.

At some point that year, a girl named Susan, a sixth grader, took notice of those two facts and decided to exploit them. Every day, I’d board the bus a stop or two before her. You’d know me because I was the only Mexican kid in my grade and because I was consistently decked out in lavender sweat pants and pink ribbon headbands. Oh yeah, I was also carrying a trombone.

Susan would manage to grab the seat behind mine. She would then begin her reign of terror on the back of my head for the rest of the bus ride. It started small with her throwing little rolled up wads of paper into my hair. Soon, she upgraded to flicking my ears and the back of my head. I would patiently wipe the crap off my hair and shoulders, turn around and glare and ask her, quietly, to stop. She did not stop. She pretended not to have done anything at all, meanwhile her friends’ half-stifled snickers gave her away. Then she’d ask me if I had a staring problem.

I stopped turning around. I hoped against hope that if I ignored her she’d just go away. I dreaded the bus with every fiber of my being. I tried sitting as far back in the bus as I could, which,  of course, invited other, more colorful, brands of horror for a nerd with a trombone. The year went on. Susan started smacking the back of my head with the full force of her hand every day. I did nothing.

That Spring I played softball. I loved baseball, and I was damn good at it. Once the Michigan winter waned, even just a bit, I was outside with my mitt, throwing a tennis ball against the side of our apartment building. Over and over, fielding grounders, fly balls, line drives for hours. But there was no baseball league for girls. Little girls got to play slow-pitch softball, with a giant unwieldy orb, laughably big for our hands, instead. So be it. I played every position, but mostly alternated between shortstop and 3rd base because I could throw to 1st and home reliably. Softball was everything that Spring.

And then we played Susan’s team.

Susan was intimidatingly good. When she stood on deck we all cursed silently, then took ten paces back as she walked to the plate. Between innings we passed each other and I hoped she wouldn’t recognize me. Fat chance.

“Hey, it’s Tropicana!”

Maybe Susan’s parents were raging racists who called every brown-skinned woman they saw, Tropicana. Maybe she just really hated orange juice. I had no idea what she was talking about. I still don’t, unless Susan thought I’d look good in a bikini, wearing fruit on my head.  But there doesn’t have to be a whole lot of logic to a nickname for it to stick. I was Tropicana to her and the rest of the sixth grade until the end of the school year.*

In all of 5th grade, I only remember one instance of someone sticking up for me. One day, my seatmate saw Susan’s hand dart over the back of our seat and smack my head. I ignored it, as usual, but the person sitting next to me that day turned around and told Susan she was being mean and to stop. I actually don’t remember who my protector was. I’m sure the red-hot burning shame did it’s best to erase my memory, but I still remember that someone tried to do something.

That’s the entire point of my writing this all down. I was thinking about what our job is as parents, and it occurred to me that my job is to make sure my kid is the kid that will stand up for someone else when they are being abused.

Recently, a family member that doesn’t spend a ton of time with my kid told me that M is going through a “mean phase”. Unless that phase is 7 and 3/4 years long, I have no idea what they’re on about. Lately, my kid has been 90% sunshine and sprinkles. She is so much fun. It turns out that the adult in question had a prolonged interaction where they were teasing each other, and the adult insisted that she was lying about a few facts, and then my kid said some not very nice things. This led me to think of the following:

Rules for Interacting with Kids

1) Don’t tease them. No really. Stop.

Listen to what you’re saying to the kid. If the same thing came out of her mouth on the playground directed at a younger, smaller or weaker child, would it seem okay? If not, you need to put a cork in it. You’ve got 3 feet, 200 pounds and 30 years on the kid. You are all-powerful, she is but a slight insignificant speck in your path. So why do you feel the need to make her feel smaller?

2) Don’t call them out when you don’t have the facts.

Kids lie, it’s true. Especially at this age, kids are testing boundaries to see what they can get away with. But do you like being called a liar? I take a cue from The Gipper, “Trust, but verify.” It just might turn out (like in the most recent case with my kiddo) that they’re telling the truth to the best of their knowledge, even if it sounds unlikely.

3) Be sincere.

This might be the hardest one for adults who don’t have kids to wrap their minds around because it goes against our impulses as cynical middle-aged urban dwellers. Do not be sarcastic. Research has shown that most kids don’t get sarcasm reliably until they’re about 10 years old. Yup. That means all that time you’ve been using sarcasm on your 5 year old friend, she’s been thinking you’re the big old liar. And she probably thinks you’re a little dumb. And not very nice. Because kids can pick up on tone even if they don’t get meaning. They know you’re making fun of them and they don’t like you for it.

But really, that last rule is the one that any half-decent parent would say is the most important. Dude. Kids are a pain in the ass, but they are also awesome. If you tease my kid about not being able to do a chin up, she might say that she doesn’t like you very much. But if you ask her about what books she’s reading she’ll tell you about how she’s really a cat named Hollypaw with magic powers. She might share what Harry Potter is up to with the half-blood prince’s potions book, and how her own wizarding club was banned from school for being too powerful. Or she might tell you about the fight on the playground where she stood up to a bully when her friend was getting picked on.

So yes, my kid should be kind, but she should also be fierce and brave. Because being nice and quiet didn’t do me too many favors as a kid.

 

*A post-script about Susan: Years later, in high school we ended up not exactly running in the same circles, but with some over-lapping friends. I held on to my dislike of her for far too long, until on her last day as a graduating senior we happened to end up at the same big, rowdy table after school at Big Boy. I brought up the Tropicana nickname and the way she’d harassed me for an entire school year. It won’t surprise you to learn that it took some jogging of her memory to bring it all back, but she finally did remember and she was appropriately mortified.  She had no idea where she’d gotten the idea for the name.