Tightropes and Wonder

October is Bullying Prevention Awareness Month here in the US, and I’ve been trying for weeks now to think of the right way to share our family’s story from the past year. Blogging about real children is a tightrope walk—you never want to share anything too painful or too raw, or anything that your child feels is too personal. But you do want to share those universal moments that might resonate with other parents and kids who are struggling. Because sometimes those shared moments weave together to form a net that catches people when they are falling, helping them feel a little less alone in the void. So here goes the tightrope walk (my son gets the final edit).

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A little over a year ago, our family moved to a small town just south of the suburb where we had lived for all of my 12-year-old son’s life. We had lots of good reasons for moving, and both kids were ready for the adventure of a new beginning. Our older son already knew a handful of kids at his new school through sports, and he quickly acclimated to his changed environment.

Our younger son—who is delightfully quirky and enthusiastically intellectual—found himself in a country grade school where he knew no one, surrounded by kids who were nothing like him. He delighted in reading. They delighted in kicking him in the shins under his desk when he pulled out a book. He loved to grapple with difficult math problems. They loved to sneer and mock him for loving what they hated. He had a malformed, smaller left hand, and he was surrounded by kids who refused to tolerate differences.

Day by day, they peeled away his confidence and his well-being and his sense of self. They carved him with whispered taunts, cutting away at how he saw himself, until all that was left was a shell of the boy he had been. Tears. Panic. Daily heartache. And that was before the day last spring when he was attacked on the playground. A single punch to the mouth left him bleeding and stitched and swollen, unable to eat solid food for over a week. The classroom teacher truly ached for him and tried to help, but she and I agreed that the best solution for my son was to get away from there, to start over in a school with kids more like him.

We found our silver lining in a new school this year in a district not far from here—another year of being the new kid, but with much different results. My son has found his tribe. When he brings up questions about wormholes and time travel in science class, the other students mull over and discuss his ideas, never even considering that the concepts might be unusual. He passes notes with a friend coded via the Periodic Table. He jokes with his pals about his “lucky hand" and shares the hallways with a stellar athlete who has no hand at all. He has friends. He is happy. We are happy.

But what happens to those kids who came so close to destroying him last year? How do they grow past their brutish tendencies when the people who are different from them are chased away? How do they learn to be anything more than what they are? What will they do in the larger world when they are faced with people who are disabled, or gay, or culturally different from them? The thought makes me almost unbearably sad.

Yesterday afternoon, I read a delightful book that could be part of the solution. Wonder, by R.J. Palacio is an exceptionally written middle-grade novel that captures the pain of bullying so poignantly, so beautifully, that the story and its message resonate long after the last page is turned. If I were still teaching (grades 4-6), I would buy a class set of this novel, and we would spend the month of October reading and discussing it to lay a foundation for mutual understanding and to facilitate a culture of kindness. Even if you don’t routinely read children’s books just for the joy of experiencing the quality literature being produced in that category today, you should make an exception for this book. But have tissues handy. Really.

            “… in the future you make for yourselves, anything is possible. If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary—the world really would be a better place.”

Wonder, by R.J. Palacio

Bullying is not just an October problem. It’s an everyday, everywhere problem that can only be solved when people consciously remove themselves from the neutral bystander camp and become protectors of the least of us. This month, and every day of every single other month, do what you can in your world to foster mutual understanding and compassion.

Please leave your ideas and comments below.

Re-Killing the Turkey

Most of you were done on Thursday, but I just waved goodbye to the biggest feast of the season after having twenty in-laws over for a belated Thanksgiving meal last night.

That shriek you hear is the song to my crazed morning-after happy dance.

I am not an entertainer. I want to be. I try. But while some people are born to lay out lavish dinners for multitudes with nary a batted eyelash, I was born to be the rolls and veggie tray girl. It’s not really that I’m such a bad cook (although the facts of last night may point that way). It’s more that I’m a worrier who frets for weeks leading up to the event, and then lets pots boil over onto the stove while the guests arrive. And no matter how much planning I do ahead of time (in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping), I always seem to find myself driving to the store thirty minutes before go time to pick up that one last ingredient that will somehow lift the party from stressed-out mayhem to Martha Stewart perfection.

Last night’s meal involved a turkey—well, a turkey and a ham, because I was sick of turkey after eating leftovers since Thursday, but some of the guests were averse to ham. Ham’s easy (hel-lo, you can get them already cooked and sliced), but I had prepared precisely one turkey in my lifetime, and I think it was about eight years ago (or, roughly, the last time I couldn’t somehow escape hosting duties on Thanksgiving).

Now, you may be thinking that turkey is easy, too, but I beg to differ. Cooking a turkey involves wrestling eighteen pounds of cold, rubbery raw bird flesh onto a pan (brand new, since—duh—I didn’t actually own a roasting pan, which you don’t need for rolls or a veggie tray). First you have to fish out the neck (thanks for including that, Butterball!), and then you need to stand there for ten minutes or so with your arm swirling around the slimy innards while you frantically search for the bag of giblets. I knew they must be there somewhere—I have actually cooked poultry before—but nobody warned me that I should be looking in the turkey’s butt!

Finally (and you might be able to skip this step), I needed to run to the computer to Google how to insert a meat thermometer into “the meatiest part of the thigh.” I’ve eaten chicken thighs, but I wasn’t even sure where to find one on that nasty raw-meat monstrosity. (I think this experience may actually be the tipping point that turns me vegetarian.)

With the thermometer in according to the package directions and the wisdom of the Internet, I set the bird in the oven to cook for the promised four hours while I finished making the rest of the food and setting three tables. (Hubby was away working hard at his very important coaching job and picking up Danger Boy from basketball practice, so it was all on me—yippee!). Forty-five minutes early, the temperature alarm beeped, and I took the now-golden bird out to rest. It looked pretty good! On a whim, though, I decided to check the temp of the suspiciously firm-looking turkey breasts. I know that “firm” and “breasts” can be good in some situations, but I don’t think Thanksgiving dinner is one of those. When I inserted the probe, the meat let out the barest dusty sigh as I discovered with the rapidly rising temperature gauge that I had indeed killed the bird (again!). Damn.

“Gravy, people, you should definitely throw on some gravy. Or try the ham. The ham is great!”

Finally, the work was done, the house cleaned, the borrowed chairs in place, and the food laid out for the hungry masses. My older son looked at the food spread out before him and, sagely, made the observation of the night:

 “The problem with Thanksgiving is that the food isn’t even all that good. We have a whole day centered around turkey. Why don’t we have a day centered around something that tastes good, like hamburgers?”

Now that would be my kind of Thanksgiving! I’ll bring the buns.

Two of three tables... the top one still waiting on the BYOC (bring your own chairs)

What I Learned from the Boy Wonder

The picture was taken about seven years ago, and I distinctly remember laughing as I took it. There, fighting the forces of evil in our suburban backyard, were Batman Beyond and his faithful sidekick, whose name (I discovered later) was “Not Robin”. It was even abbreviated in paper letters on his chest: NR.

When you look at the picture, the first thing you notice is the disparity between the two caped crusaders’ getups. Batman is dressed in the finest post-Halloween authentic made-in-China polyester costume, complete with a mask and flowing red bat wings (or whatever those are supposed to be). His poor little brother is dressed in what can only be described as… well… tinfoil chaps.

Not Robin (NR for short) was happy to be wearing his invented disguise, complete with a small stick (for what purpose, I can only imagine). The ragtag, second-string nature of his costume was a perfect foreshadowing of the years to come. He is a boy with a closet bulging with a never-ending assortment of slightly worn tee shirts, pants and pullovers. I take him to buy new things every year… I do! But we both get to the store and shrug, realizing that his brother grew out of the same exact stuff the year before. He doesn’t seem to mind yet. For a ten-year-old boy, a shirt is a shirt is a shirt.

On a deeper level, my second son is living his whole life sporting a not-quite-as-complete little boy costume. He was born missing some parts, a topic that I’m sure will fill other posts as I explore the many ways parenthood has been a surprise. The most obvious difference for my son is his little left hand. He has only three fingers, and they don’t bend the way yours or mine do. He is different, forced by the circumstances of his life to be the one not in the standard costume. But the great thing I’ve learned from my confident Boy Wonder is that it’s really OK.

He loved being different when he defiantly proclaimed that he was Not Robin back at age three. He loves being different now, as he waves his “lucky” hand at his classmates, knowing he will never be the kid they just can’t place in their yearbook.

When he was born, I thought he might be defined by what was missing. I worried that all the other kids had the expected gear and the right appearance to make their way as painlessly as possible in the world, but my son would have to struggle to find his place. I wanted to buy him the whole ensemble, to give him my own if I could. But I couldn’t, and he taught me—and I will share with you more in the future—that it is OK to delight in proudly wearing your own handcrafted tinfoil chaps. Every Halloween, you may see a hundred little Batmans, but I’ll bet there’s only one Not Robin.