Your Child’s Bullies Don’t Think They’re Beautiful
The damaging impact of, “They tease you because they have a crush on you”
I am pulling my soaking, fully clothed body out of the lake. A boy who is a couple of years older than me just pushed me into the water off the pier. For a moment, as I am falling through the air, about to make impact with the water’s surface, I see his face. He’s laughing.
“That wasn’t cool, man,” I say. My perfectly backcombed hair now hangs limp in my face. “I don’t have a change of clothes. I’m going to have to walk around soaking wet now!”
“That’s okay,” he replies, “I like the look of your fat ass in those wet jeans.”
I then proceed to develop a year-long crush on this boy because of his rude comment.
I am 13 years old, and it will be many years before I learn that cruelty and fondness are not intertwined in some way.
The best house I ever lived in was a tiny one-bedroom located across the street from the cop shop in my hometown. There are two reasons why it was the best place. One, because it had this cute little windowed patio that I decorated with plants and brightly coloured knickknacks. I would spend hours reading in this space — desperately trying to escape my everyday life.
I also loved this house because of its proximity to the police station. It made me feel safer knowing that law enforcement was only a 20-second walk away.
After all, I was living in a highly unsafe environment.
When I was 9 and 10, and 11 years old, I remember the grownups in my life telling me that boys were bullying me at school because they liked me.
“Oh, those boys don’t mean it when they call you ugly; they have a crush on you,” they’d say as if I should be excited about this.
It seemed suspicious that someone would verbally abuse a person they liked, but I was just a stupid kid, so I took the adults at their word. I adopted the belief that it was normal for boys to treat me poorly because, in some sick and twisted way, it meant they liked me.
Cool, cool, cool.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that by the age of 17, I was in a committed relationship with an abusive partner.
The thing about abusers is that they are sneaky buggers. They will tell you how much they love you one minute and then, in the next breath, remind you how fat, stupid and ugly you are. This is to enforce the idea that if you did leave them, you’d live out the rest of your life alone and lonely.
Abusers have the lowest self-esteem of all, so they project their insecurities on you and then gaslight you when you try to stick up for yourself.
“Nobody will ever want you. You’re such a pig,” the bad boyfriend once said to me after an argument over what to name the new cat we had adopted from the SPCA.
He wanted to name it something stupid like Roofus (who calls a fucking cat Roofus?!), and I wanted to name him Romeo because he was a lover-cat.
I won that argument but at what cost?
It was my time with the bad boyfriend that taught me what those adults in my childhood never could — what bullies really mean when they tell a girl she’s ugly.
As a parent, I can understand why my adults would tell me this seemingly innocent white lie about why my bullies were so mean.
They wanted to spare my feelings.
I’d come home, tears staining my plump little cheeks, wondering why I had to be the target for these cruel kids in school.
Of course, no adult wants to see a child in that much emotional pain, so what’s the easiest way to remove that pain? Tell them that it’s all a big misunderstanding.
“Oh, Linds, don’t even worry about it,” they’d say, hugging me close, “those boys just have a crush on you — that’s why they say those mean things.”
And because my brain was small and could not analyze this type of fuckery, I took the adults at their word. I believed them when they told me that I wasn’t, in fact, ugly, but instead that I was so unbelievably beautiful; these boys in my school couldn’t possibly express this to me and instead would bully me to try to work out their confused adolescent emotions.
In essence, though, telling a child that someone’s rudeness and name-calling equates to love is truly the cruellest thing of all.
It creates the deep-seated belief that only those rotten enough to make you feel bad deserve your love. This information in a growing adolescent’s head becomes gospel in the way she chooses her future spouse.
The best house I ever lived in was fine for a time. It allowed me to understand what it meant to live on my own, without the watchful eye of my parents always keeping tabs on me. I was happy to clean and cook, work on my high school correspondence courses while also maintaining a full-time job.
At 17 years old, it seemed that I was holding my hodgepodge life together pretty well.
Then bad things started happening. The things that no 17-year-old should have to deal with, but sadly so many do.
The worries about rent money. The cheating boyfriend. The loss of a child. The pain that comes with the understanding you have irrevocably selected the wrong life plan.
The looming reality that your life will henceforth be problematic because of the decisions you made yesterday.
My grandmother died, and on the same night, Romeo, the cat, ran away. Both of these events devastated me equally. I was working at a fast-food joint, usually putting in more than full-time hours because oftentimes it would be up to me to make the rent and pay the bills.
The bad boyfriend was pretty sketch when it came to holding down a job.
I don’t know what it was about my grandma passing away and my cat running away that made me realize I had to leave. Maybe because everyone else was getting the hell out of dodge, I figured I should too.
When he arrived home that night, he was drunk and rowdy. He came in the door singing happily about how he had sunk some guy’s car into the lake and how hilarious it was.
I was in my plant room, colourful knickknacks creating a shield of security all around me, the book in my hand unreadable due to my trembling hands.
“What’s your problem?” he asked.
“Grandma Ruth died,” I said coldly. “Romeo’s gone; you left the front door open when you left yesterday.”
“Don’t you fucking put that on me, you little bitch,” he said, taking a step closer while ignoring my news about Grandma Ruth. “I loved that stupid cat too. Get off your high horse.”
“I’m going to go stay with my mom and dad,” I said.
“To hell you are!” he screamed.
I had set off the bomb.
I expected the name-calling, those words that told me in a roundabout way that he wouldn’t allow me to leave. He’d say anything to brainwash me into thinking that I was not good enough for life after him.
I also expected the pleading.
‘After the verbal abuse came the “I’m sorry” and the “I don’t know what I’d do without you!”
He must have seen the seriousness in my eyes because eventually, after exhausting his manipulation tactics, he attempted to physically hold me in the best house I had ever lived in by pinning me against a wall and loudly screaming in my face that I wasn’t allowed to leave.
Go figure, it was at this moment I realized that no person who truly cares for you would ever treat you with this much disrespect.
It’s sad, now, all these years later, as I look back on this event, to think that it took me so long to understand this. It took me too long to escape those preconditioned ideas from childhood.
Every day, as we continue to tell our girls and boys that their bullies are just crushing hard, we engrain this backward notion that abusive partners are okay and normal.
Here’s a thought: instead of telling kids that their bullies probably have a crush on them, let’s start actively taking the onus off the victim and instead begin teaching bullies how to communicate and feel their damn feelings in a positive way.
Let’s start looking into the homes of these schoolyard bullies and see what kind of bullies they are surviving on a daily basis.
I eventually escaped the best house I had ever lived in. Sadly, it wasn’t during this event. It took more planning, more private confidence building, a few friends and the loss of a pregnancy to fully understand the terrifying situation I had gotten myself into.
18 years ago, as I was pinned against a wall by a man who was angry and telling me I’d never be good enough for anyone but him to love and I finally understood that it wasn’t about me.
It was about him.
This realization changed my life. In the way I looked for a partner. In the way I raise my children. And in the eternal love, I continue to shower upon myself and my people.
My daughter came home crying yesterday because a boy at school was calling her ugly. I hugged her and told her I loved her endlessly. We sat down to a plate of crackers and goat cheese with quartered pears, and we talked.
We talked about how these words made her feel. We talked about options on how to make it stop. We cried together and then laughed at one of my bad jokes.
The words that were most important were, “You understand that his bullying and comments have absolutely nothing to do with you, right? Maybe he has problems at home. Maybe he can’t talk with his mom or dad like you can. Maybe he’s just a jerkwad and likes making people sad. Any way you look at it, though, his words have nothing to do with you.”
She hugged me hard (a rare occurrence from my pre-teen girl) and said, “I know, Mom, I don’t have time for those kinds of people in my life anyways.”
I knew then that we had started off on the right foot.