Sickness

The only thing everyone has ever wanted is to fit in. Everyone at every age, in every era, has wanted to be wanted. The main role of the elementary school experience is to figure out how to be wanted. If you’re excluded it is because there is a clear and solvable toddler problem with you. You are snotty, you are stinky, you like chasing other kids around with bugs, you hit people, you scream. As a kid you get to be reckless. You get to scrape up your knees and laugh loud and eat with your hands because that is part of exploring the world. My classmates and I used to catch these huge muddy toads during the spring and launch them at the younger kids until we were told, rather bluntly, “No one will like you if you throw toads at them.” That is the job that toddlers do. Kids have no problem telling other kids “you’re gross” or “we don’t like you,” and, when this is done right, young kids lose the nasty habits of five year-olds to eventually grow up and have other, more complicated problems. That is the role of school in general, to be educated. So your peers, the people you most want to impress, tell you what your big, fat problem is before there are lasting consequences. 

In elementary school, it wasn’t really possible to be “popular.” You had to be friends with everyone, simply because there were so few of us (12 to a class). If you weren’t friends with everyone, you were friends with no one. I didn’t feel unloved or out of place…everyone was my friend…until we changed.  

One day we were playing “Infection,” a version of tag where the “sick” chases the uninfected to contaminate them until there is only one person left. (Surely this is a good thing to teach young kids: “when you’re sick make sure to get everyone else.”) It was a game we played frequently, but one day I tagged a male classmate on the arm, and he abruptly stopped laughing and looked at me with complete disgust. 

“Girls can't touch boys like that. It’s gross.” 

He walked off the playground and quit the game. The timeline in my mind is probably different than how it went down in real life, but I remember it as one great movement, like a sick game of exclusion. Suddenly, all of the girls were infected by something, but, instead of resetting at the end of recess as usual, we stayed that way. The boys separated from us, sitting away from us on the carpet. For the longest time, I thought it was something I had personally done to make them all weird around me. Maybe I smelled or offended someone, but I never got an explanation. Suddenly, every boy in my world knew something that I didn’t: that we were different.

After that, everyone, with the exception of one girl who was good at soccer, wasn’t “allowed” to play with the boys. If we asked to join in on a game, the boys would begrudgingly say yes, but as we played, they would yell and complain: 

“KICK THE BALL!”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” 

I interpreted this personally (even then, I was a prisoner of anxiety), so I stopped playing soccer, not because I wasn’t good (which was true), but because I had never felt so unwanted in my life. 

I don’t know what indicates to a young boy that he and the girl he sits next to are incomparably different. Maybe they are told, maybe by their fathers or brothers before our mothers can explain it to us, but girls are taken by surprise by the sudden separation of genders.

(I think this is because mothers try their very best to shelter us from the great tragedy of our future. As a generalization, men and of course their fathers, are myopic to the damage of telling their sons that “women and men are different” because they fail to realize that young boys will see that only men are presidents and CEOs. Parents don't realize that young boys are smart, underneath all the knee scraping and dirt eating. They don't realize that young boys will put two and two together and, being young, interpret that boys are somehow better than girls. Because there is no way to explain to four-year-old boys and girls the great big mess that sexism is because where do you even begin?)

In movies, boyhood is always so romantic. For as often as guys pretend to be macho and feelingless, they sure do make a lot of movies about missing their childhood. Growing up ruins us – that’s something we all understand – but it ruins us in very different ways. For men, it ruins that little boy in them. (My brother is sixteen now, and I remember how he used to be. I remember his little voice and the face he used to have, and that is the biggest heartbreak I will ever suffer. There should be a word for that realization, but there isn’t.)

In movies, boys are always with their friends. There are no movies about boys without friends. They fight, they play, they are reckless, and they usually have some kind of adventure. They run amok and put their heads out the car window. They don’t ask for permission or help. In the end, though, they never grow up. Those movies always end in those boys’ memories. Movies and books about young boys are always golden; they are soft and warm and nostalgic. Adulthood makes those young boys into men who are terrified to admit they were once children. Movies about little girls are almost always horror stories. A little girl alone, a little girl kidnapped. The center piece of those stories is that she often has no friends, which is sick.

The same year that boys suddenly decided girls and guys could never get along as equals, I endured a short bout of bullying. I could spend a lot of time complaining about it. I could waste even more time than I have the past seven years of my life complaining about it, but I think that’s a thoroughly dead horse. 

The long and short of it is that I spent an awful lot of time worrying about something that ultimately was not as bad as I made myself believe it to be. Since I was seven when it happened, it felt much longer and much more painful than it was. At the time, it felt like the worst thing that would ever happen. I went from having as many friends as I could hope for to sitting alone on the playground every day. The world might as well have been ending. I spent the next formative months of my life alone at the picnic tables, in the unofficial outcast spot. 

I watched as the boys played sports on the farthest corner of the playground, while the only other girls my age hung out with the pre-schoolers, managing building fairy houses and officiating fake weddings. 

The next year, I switched schools, from my perspective, to escape. My parents had other practical reasons for switching me. I came from a very small school, so they believed a larger environment with more opportunities would be better for my long-term development. (Add this to the list of “top ten moves my parents made” because I ended up pretty happy and probably significantly less anti-social than I could have been.)

Inevitably, I made friends and I suffered the same heartbreaks over and over of losing them and finding them and losing them again. I wished and hoped everyday that the boys would forget all this silliness and go back to being our friends, and in a way that did happen. Between the ignorance of childhood and after the stage of disgust and hate, boys and girls got back together because we all realized it’s silly. Besides, how are you going to go out with a girl if you won’t even let her tag you at recess? While the boys figured that out, I started taking things a lot less seriously and went back to who I used to be. I started laughing loud again, taking up space and reaching out. I went back to playing in the mud, poking things with sticks and putting my head out the window. I decided to run amok, explore the world, and be a kid again.