Feeling the Truth: 10 Years After My Daughter Was Bullied
By: Donna Barrow-Green
Tags: Schools, PTSD, Bullying Prevention, Parenting, Bullying

Feeling the Truth: 10 Years After My Daughter Was Bullied

Would you believe that even now I’m afraid to admit it? I’m afraid that my child will be harmed, that there will be retaliation. I’m afraid to write the words that my daughter was bullied. I’m afraid she’ll read it, I’m afraid one of the parents or children from that old school community will see it and find a way to harm my daughter. I’m afraid that if I say the truth, that shame will swallow my daughter, that it will make her somehow at fault.

I can say with all sincerity that it all came rushing back this morning. It’s still there. The fear still resides inside of me. The pain.

The pandemic is swallowing me. I can’t deal with the empty hours. Even with work, managing my home, and writing till the days are interminable. So often I plummet into time sucks: Tik Tok, Best Fiends, Facebook. Rabbit holes falling deeper into social media, the gravity of curiosity. I am in and out of time. The past, lost contacts.

This morning I was descending into one such rabbit hole.

On schedule with my -every five year or so- google search for estranged or forgotten family members. I looked up the Clarks’ (a psudonym). The Clarks’ are a large family of cousins (8), Evangelical, self- righteous, and in sharp contrast with everything I am/ believe. I won’t lie. I have years of anger and disdain for the Clarks. Yet, I search for them. See the lives they created for themselves. Most of the Clarks are not on Facebook but I find them in different places. Five or more years ago now, I located the only Clark I really ever liked: Niky. Niky’s spirit was still the same when I found her. But, she was still in the same home town, living in my grandmother’s house no less. Today I searched her brothers. Six in total. Two girls. One passed away, almost twenty years now. I’ve read that obituary many times and that’s how I found out the home towns of the surviving siblings. That’s how I found Mark. That’s how I found Mark, his wife, and his two kids on facebook.

Mark. How many years since I’ve laid eyes on Mark. I’m not kidding. Likely 35. There is no longing or fondness. There is no feeling for Mark one way or another. I always think it’s funny.Those family members who did not leave much of an impression. Who shared your life experience so briefly, with so little in common that nothing emotional is summoned what so ever when you see them. Well maybe that’s not entirely true. Maybe if I tried there would be a recollection stirred, connected by that invisible tether of genetics — or something.

I somehow found Mark’s wife on Facebook. I could see Mark immediately in the family photos. He’d be 57 years old by now. The age shows as it does with me. But what remains is his same posture, stance, the bowed legs. His smile, a sort of crooked smile. The cover picture is of Mark, his wife, and his two daughters. Their page is not full of ultra evangelical memes. The kind that make my blood boil. They look normal. Yet, I can see something immediately. It’s in the oldest daughter’s eyes. There is a blankness and surrender. I judge immediately. I know a bit about the Clark’s family history (from Niky). I know there was sexual abuse. I look at Mark’s daughter, then at Mark. I look at Mark’s wife and then their youngest daughter. I remember Niky telling me how she’d feared for her younger sister. “Dad looks at her the way he looked at me before he started coming. into my room at 4:00 in the morning.”

There it is, I think to myself. Mark’s empty and tired eyes match his daughters. It tugs at my heart because I too went through that trauma but I survived and managed the baggage over the years. Some years better than others.

I scroll the wife Lila’s newsfeed. It’s what you’d expect: the two girls over the years. Halloween, pumpkin carving, family get togethers with young children. It is what you expect: that phase of parenthood. My daughter is 19 now and I lament, sometimes, how fast it went. How much I miss the privilege of being a mom and how many times I didn’t meet the mark. I think often now, how I wish I could go back and be more. More patient, more present, more actualized. I also think back on how I could have been less. Less protective, less worried, less anxious.

I scroll and see their life. Just as mundane as mine. That is until I see the tombstone. It’s a ruby marble. It’s got carnations in a vase beside it. “Missing my daughter so much today.” It sends a burning and sense of searing sympathy through me. I look at the date and it’s 2002 to 2019. My own child was born in 2002.

At first I don’t really do the math right and I think it’s 2009. 2002–2009. I think there was cancer. My heart breaks over what I imagine days and weeks and months (years?) of chemo. But read the dates again. No. It was 2019. It was two years ago. It was when her daughter was 17. So. I know. Somehow I know it’s not cancer. Some how I know it is suicide.

I think back on Mark and the look in his eye. I think back on the girl’s empty expression. The smile-not even a smile-just a pose.

I read on.

I find a facebook group in memory of the daughter. I see a fundraiser. I see the proceeds go to an adolescent mental health treatment center.

I know the child committed suicide.

I scroll and see a despondent post by the mother, my forgotten cousin’s wife. We are old. We have lived.We have raised children. We are maybe not opposites.

She writes how much she misses her daughter. She writes that her daughter brought so much light and joy into her life. Every day she thinks of her daughter. She says she wants to share a recipe, or a memory, or an idea. She wants to turn and find her there. Her little girl.

The mother then goes on to write about how her daughter had been bullied, starting in elementary school. She described how the bullying followed her precious girl into middle and then high school. She wrote that her daughter grew to hate herself and that self loathing was too existential to bear. She writes that her daughter’s struggle with depression was relentless and the only peace is that the suffering is over. She describes dreams family members have reported to her since her daughter’s death. In the dream her first born is in a white dress, she’s ethereal. She’s smiling. And it’s a real smile. It’s peace. She says her child has found joy.

I believe she has.

Last year my own daughter attempted suicide. She was seventeen at the time too. She had been plagued by depression too. It runs in our family. So that is ours. That belongs to us. But, that’s not all of it.

After reading about my cousin’s daughter, it dawned on me that if my daughter had taken a different handful of pills, or made some other reckless choice she would be dead too.

In another post, the mother pleads with parents to take their kids out of school-even start homeschooling — that she wishes she had. We all know it’s not as easy as it sounds. We all know how much the mother (and likely my cousin and their other daughter) were tormented along side their child. We all know the trauma of bullying and the pain / damage done to the child breaks the heart of every other family member. We all know it is not easy or even possible in many cases to remove the child from the school. And now, with social media it’s even harder to extricate a victim from the abuse. And adolescence-by it’s very definition- creates an untenable situation. Teenagers are biologically wired to “belong.” Individuation/ separation from their parents and home is their imperative. We want to remove our child from abuse, protect them, but at the same time they feel isolated and further rejected when we do.

I can tell from her posts, the mother really did what she could. More so. Yes, we want to protect our children. Yes, we want to go back and “do over.” Do more or do less. Edit and re-write so our children will have had a perfect childhood with the right mix of happiness, healthy stress, resilience, and self efficacy.

But this mother is not to blame.

This father is not to blame.

This child is not to blame.

Why is it so hard to face the truth? Why are we so ashamed of the idea that our children might possibly be weak? I’m not talking about the victim here. I’m talking about the bully. I’m talking about the institutions that deny and sometimes promote bullying and the will of the parents of bullies.

It’s been 10 years since my daughter was bullied. It was a bad time in our family life. I was depressed. I’d had several miscarrages and resulting postpartum depression. My daughter was 7. I was trying so hard to supress the overwhelming pain I was in. I had been estranged from my abusive mother for over 20 years and she was back in my life. She was dying of cancer and being in contact with her dredged up unbearable PTSD. It was triggering mental illness in me. It was a storm. A perfect storm. So, while my daughter was at school I would be consumed with heartache and pain. I pulled myself together and tried to be a good mother. Keep things in while I was with her. There were other problems too. A neighbor had started harassing me and then turned another mom against me. The other mom began stalking me, parking outside of my house, trying to run her car into me. The cyclone picked up energy and I picked up energy. I was practically manic. And of course it played out in my parenting. When my daughter -a creative, sensitive, funny girl by nature- when she became anxious I attributed it to how dark my internal reality was. Of course she would pick up on it.

Then, one day -one morning- I went to wake her up for school. She was 7 years old at the time. I went into her room, her curly red hair so soft and beautiful against the pale yellow sheets. So cute. When I woke her, she opened her eyes and silent tears fell.

I sat on the side of the bed and touched her little arm. “What is it baby?”

“I don’t know what they’ll do to me today.”

Then she started crying. And crying.

Later that day my husband and I sat in our basement, in the family room, and I remember clearly my daughter was sitting on the couch, me beside her, and her dad across from us in a chair.

It poured out of her.

It was only four or five months and in that time, my child had been the victim of viscous bullying.

I wrote everything down.

It was bad.

Immediately I began to advocate for my daugher. We had been friends with the family — indeed my daughter had been best friends with the girl. More often than not our entire family’s social life was entwined with the mother of the bully, the brother, the bully, and the father. More often than not, our larger social circle of families with young children included both of our families. I had put all our eggs in one basket. The basket of the school community. And, now it was about to react to our attempt to fix an obvious and dangerous problem.

I honestly didn’t know how powerfully malignant school bullying is. I imagine that most parent’s don’t. It’s so entrenched in the school culture and group psychology that as a parent you are David and the victimization is the Goliath.

Time. is not on your side. There’s a meter ticking away. The harm that comes to a young child accumulates quickly. Yet, as someone who’s child is being bullied, you often have to navigate blame and gaslighting. We are only human as parents and for some time we will not know about the bullying. Then, when we do find out we engage predictable strategies. Strategies that should work because we are reasonable adults and supposedly all want to support children’s healthy social emotional development. We outwardly want to make our children empathetic good citizens. Yet inwardly some parents are so invested in their children being on top (I suspect this is because of their fear of shame and harm of being weak) that they shield their child from taking responsibility. Their are inadequate in their parenting because they don’t know how to scaffold self esteem and budding integrity. They are afraid their child will be hurt or seen as bad if they use natural opportunities to hone self awareness and concession. They shield their children from seeing they can be at fault, that other points of view are valid. These parents are the bullies.

It might surprise you to discover that you very likely will be alone, on an island when you try to advocate for your child. It might surprise you that a community that you felt you belonged in (or not) can all rationalize and justify the victimization of one child. How do they do it?

Blame the child: claim the child has emotional problems or social incompetency.

Blame the parent: say the parent is over protective and not letting their child handle their own problems.

Make the situation worse: shun the child by creating opportunities for the child to fail or flounder. Making a spectacle of what a fantastic failure the victim is at social competency while they engineer the very context for abuse.

Circle the wagons: turn the community against you and your child. Often the parents will subtly or not so subtly exclude you and use relational aggression to make you feel shamed.

After that morning when my daughter was numb, tears falling down her face. I woke up to reality. It wasn’t my PTSD and depression causing my daughter’s trauma (of course it’s a part of the picture) but my daughter was being bullied. Even at 7 years old.

I immediately went to our friend, the bully’s mother. I talked to her about what was going on. I tried to frame it innocuously, without judgement. “How can we help the girls separate in a healthy way?” Indeed our daughters had spent almost every day together for two years. This was selfish engineering on the mom and my part. We wanted to be best friends and we wanted our daughters to be parallel little best friends.

We were at Starbucks, sitting across from each other. The mother’s blue eyes turned steely. “I try to tell Lizzy that Katie has social problems and to be nice to her.”

“Katie has social problems?” I was taken aback. And, a fear did descend on me at that moment. The fear of this woman’s power. If not for my daughter she would never have power over me. She knew it. I knew it.

“Are you kidding?”

“You know how anxious Katie is. And I get it. Lizzy is the popular girl and Katie wants to be just like her. Lizzy doesn’t want to have to take care of Katie any more. She needs some space.”

I honestly didn’t get it at first. I didn’t understand what investment this mother had in her daughter’s appearance of social competence and dominance. I would come to see that Lizzy’s mother was jealous of the friendships that other classmates had. If Lizzy wasn’t popular enough, according to her mother then her mother would go to any means necessary to fulfill this expectation. Lizzy’s mother volunteered in the classroom or school upwards of 20 hours per week, engineering class seating so Lizzy would be with cliques of girls. Lizzy’s mom made friends with the young teacher. Lizzy’s mom engaged in relational aggression with the group of moms. Before the end of 5th grade six girls would be bullied by Lizzy’s family, require psychological counseling, and leave the school. Only one parent complained to the principal. Me.

At the time, I didn’t know or realize that within this family’s own home life was a larger secret. A secret of domestic violence. I did know that the Lizzy’s older brother was brutal with the child. He’d walk up to her, unexpected, and punch her hard in the stomach. I also walked in on Lizzy’s dad hurling a threatening guttural demand “watch what the hell you’re doing!” to the mother. And there was the time Lizzy’s mother called me, worried. “Katie may have mentioned that there was a little issue over a backpack at our place today. It was one of those time that you hit one child for something and then have to go find the other so it’s fair — it looked worse than it was.”

I wanted to make things better for my daughter.

This was only the beginning.