Helping the child understand WHY it’d happened, and helping her to let go, or in this case, it’s the child who’d, come to understand WHY it’d happened, translated…
After school, my daughter came home fumed, she’d told, that there was a female classmate that came to before her seat, picked up her pencil, and started, blacking out her desk. My daughter was in disbelief: “Why did she black out my desk?”, the other girl replied, “I want to see how dark the lead of your pencil was!” maybe, she saw, that my daughter is an easy target, the other girl picked up the eraser on my daughter’s desk, and, erase the markings.
“Thankfully she knew she did wrong, she’d, erased the mark off!”, I’d told her.
“But my erase became, black, and it broke in half!”, she was so furious. And I’d asked more carefully, and learned, that her classmate was, simply, too bored, that it wasn’t, an act of, bullying, and that’d, set my mind, to ease.
illustration from UDN.com
On the issue of bullying, we’d had, more than our, shares, since schooling years, to the workplaces. No matter if it’s the bullies, the victims, or the, bystanders, the entire experience is like an open sore, with the varied, level of depth; to the point, of causing someone not able to heal completely her/his, whole life, keeping guard over one’s own, injuries, hoping and praying, that they’re going to, heal someday.
But the adults find it hard to understand how “getting picked on for a bit, can cause that eternal scar?”, when my daughter was in the first grade, she’d started telling me something she’d, encountered back in her preschool days, and it’d, made me realize, just how deep the scars of bullying in childhood can, be.
She’d told me, “that day, a few girls were playing twirling around on one leg, I was excellent, and everybody watched me, as I continued to twirl, twirl, and twirl. Then, one of the girls blurted out angrily, ‘you’re wearing pants, not like the rest of us, in skirts!’, then, she took all the girls with her. I felt so very sad, and I’d still wondered, why did she do that to me back then?”
My heart ached as I’d heard this, turned out, she’d kept it all in. I’d listened closely, and told her, “when we were growing up, there would be things that upset us, that we can’t quite understand why. Maybe we hold on to these for the time being, but with us getting older, gaining more wisdom, we’d come to understand why what happened back when had, happened to us, and under what sorts of circumstances did those who’d hurt us do what they did, to hurt us………”
As parents, we can’t, stay by our children’s sides forever, to help them, block out all the hurtful things in their lives, to keep the world as kind as possible for them. But we can, be the steady and stable sort of supports our kids need, so they can view with a healthier attitude, to comprehend those, acts of hurt, to help them save up the strengths they will require, if and when, something bigger, and harder comes in their lives.
And so, this still just showed, how those, scars of, our own, childhood years, they tag along, follow us closely, and you don’t know WHEN they will, POP out those, ugly heads, and when they do, you would have to, deal with them, and like this young girl, who couldn’t understand WHY she was, singled out when she was in preschool or kindergarten, because of her limited understanding of the world, but as she got older, she’d realized WHY her female classmate was singling her out.
Life, the Obstacle Course 