What Being Bullied Was Really Like
By: Tracey Folly
Tags: Nonfiction, Self, Society, Family, Culture

What Being Bullied Was Really Like

I still shudder when I think about taking the school bus

Photo by David Preston on Unsplash

On my first day of kindergarten, a little boy who was just as nicely rounded as I was bullied me for being fat. At least, that was the reason he gave me for trapping between a row of bushes and the wall of our elementary school during recess. He was brandishing a stick, and that gave him the upper hand.

I don’t think his bullying had its roots in his home life. My parents knew his parents, and by all accounts, they were a perfectly nice couple. He had a younger brother, but he didn’t appear to share my schoolmate’s penchant for bullying.

It was a mystery.

On another occasion, a little boy named Benjamin bullied me during school. The only other thing I remember about Benjamin was that his religion forbade him from participating in class Christmas parties.

It was a public school. There wasn’t anything particularly Christian about our Christmas parties, but rules are rules. So every year, while the rest of us ate cookies and drank sugary punch, he sat at the front of the room near the teacher’s desk and worked on his knitting. He always brought enough dreidels for the class, passing them out before resigning himself to his knitting.

Today, I can’t remember the details of Benjamin bullying me, but I told my older brother all about it in great detail at the time. My brother was nearly a decade older than me and went to the nearby high school. So when he stopped by my elementary school one afternoon to confront Benjamin, the younger boy nearly soiled his trousers.

Ironically, Benjamin himself was a victim of bullying in elementary school. While bullies always targeted me based upon my weight or my looks, Benjamin was bullied for his religion, and that’s a shame. Perhaps being a victim of bullying himself inspired him to bully others.

Benjamin never bullied me again after my brother confronted him, but there was always another bully in the pipeline. My brother couldn’t possibly confront all of them, even if he was a tall and stocky teenager who towered over my elementary school tormentors. Besides, I didn’t want him to get in any trouble.

Not all my bullies were male.

Our teachers often had students line up in the hallway by height and gender. The shortest boys stood at the front of the line on one side of the hall, and the shortest girls stood at the front of the line on the other side.

Although I frequently stood near the front of the girls’ line, I was never the first in line. I was fortunate not to be the shortest girl in the class. There’s nothing wrong with being short, of course, but I didn’t need anyone to find another reason to tease me.

One day, as we were jockeying for position in the hallway, I heard one girl say to another in a stage whisper, “Watch this. I’m going to push Tracey, and then I’m going to say, ‘Oops. I’m sorry.’”

That’s exactly what happened.

I felt hands on my back as the girl gave me a hard shove forward. “Oops,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I have no idea what she thought she accomplished that day, but I still remember the sound of her voice decades later. Oops. I’m sorry.

Then the teachers told my mother to put me in a private school.

“If you send her to the public junior high school, the other kids will eat her alive,” they said.

They were right, but they were also wrong. While the public schoolchildren were already in the process of eating me alive, the private schoolchildren were about to make my life a living hell.

Since the private school was in a neighboring town, my mother decided to put me on the schoolbus instead of driving me. That’s where a younger schoolmate announced she was planning to stick a pin in me to see if I’d pop.

Then they made fun of me for having a lunchbox with the words “I Love Lunch” emblazoned on the front of it. Then they made fun of me because my mother met me at the bus stop every day after school. When my mother started hiding around the corner from the bus stop in the hopes they would tease me less, they teased me more.

When my mother contacted the school bus company for help, they told her there was nothing they could do. It was a school bus, not a refuge for timid children. If I couldn't fend for myself, then perhaps I shouldn’t be on the school bus, they suggested.

My mother, who had prepaid for an entire year of private school bus service, began driving me to school. At least then I didn’t get bullied until I reached the school grounds.

The ride to and from school was a nightmare of cruelty so severe that I’d love to confront my bullies today decades later, and most of all, I hope they’re suffering now.

It’s 2020. They most certainly are. We all are.

I still have nightmares about that school bus.

I often ascribe my decision to be childfree by choice to those elementary school years. “I didn’t enjoy the company of children when I was a child,” I’ve often said. “Why would I want them now?”

I spent way too many nights crying and hyperventilating in my twin bed because I’d had the worst day ever and I knew the following day would top it. That’s what it’s like to be bullied: abject misery.

They say living well is the best revenge. Well, I’m living okay. I imagine I am doing better than some of my former school bullies and school bus tormenters, and I imagine I am doing worse than others.

Back in elementary school, I was way at the bottom. I don’t plan on being there again, not if I can help it.