Yes, I Ate Paste
Grade School bullies - 🌿A THREE-MINUTE MEMORY
In grade school I was constantly bullied by my classmates. I am not sure why. Were they disturbed by my homemade, patched-together, hand-me-down clothes? Or my Toni home permanents, administered by my mother, that made me look like I had poodle ancestry? Or maybe it was because I licked the paste. I don’t know, but the derision of other girls was relentless all through grade-school, and didn’t began to improve until high school.
I earned good grades, I could draw commendable pictures and I could find my way around the Dewey decimal library card-catalog like nobody’s business. I was not entirely without skills, but I was terribly shy, and an easy target.
When I would come home sniveling about the insults and the taunting, my mama, Katy, would hug me and say, “Honey, they tease you only because they like you. If they didn’t like you they would just ignore you.” What the hell does that mean to an eight-year-old? They torment me because they like me? Seriously? I found cold comfort in that explanation. But, still, she said it often, and I would roll my eyes and go into the back room to sulk. I never understood why she didn’t have any logical solutions to my misery.
Many years later, after my mother had had the nerve to die and leave me to face the world without her, I was reading a novel in which I found this sentence in German: “Die wir mögen, necken wir.” Wait a minute! What? I had to look it up just to be sure. It is an old German adage, apparently, that translates to “Those we like, we tease.”
So she hadn’t made that up! Her own mother no doubt said it to her. But surely Mama knew it wasn’t true, having experienced untold misery in school herself as a homely, impoverished, non-English-speaking child in North Dakota. So then why did she always say it to me?
It makes me wonder, now, as a mother myself. How many things do we learn from our parents — useless, or just plain wrong things, that we then pass down to our own children like so much DNA ?
Why do we do it? I don’t know, but maybe sometimes, when we are faced with the unsolvable, this ancestral “wisdom” is the only guidance we have to draw upon. Maybe quoting our parents’ helps us feel better when the right answers just can’t be found.
Those we like, we tease! Fortunately, that bogus lesson from my mom was actually a rare anomaly. She was our very best teacher, one whose lessons were true and important. She taught us to be good people. Principally, she taught us the importance of kindness and humility, and we never forgot that.
As Tim McGraw says,
“Hold the door, say please, say thank you, don’t steal, don’t cheat and don’t lie. And don’t take for granted the love that life brings you.”
What a great picture of Katy!
When I was in grade school, I had buck teeth and wore my pants like Ed Grimley. Strangely I don’t remember getting teased. Much.
Beautiful! And so true.