By: Cynthia Litman
Pearl of the Day: My Name Is Rudolph
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| All Hands In! |
My sixth grade teacher taught me a most invaluable pearl when she said, “Cynthia, you need to grow thicker skin”.
I was a super sensitive kid and really needed to stop letting everything affect me so deeply. My knee jerk response was to sway to the other side of the pendulum and test my forte at being a biaaaaatch and wearing impenetrable armor. My shield became so fortified by 8th grade, that you couldn’t even ask me for a piece of gum.
It took me time to work out the proper balance and I still get hit with zingers. We all do.
We all have our trigger points. Those chords that if you touch, near, poke or call out will set us right off. What might strike me may roll off your back. What might roll off my back may settle inside you, fester and ignite a long fuse which will make you go postal one day at the office when your boss calls you the same name.
When I picture the typical bully, this is the movie scene that plays in my mind.
A large kid on the playground, named Butch, slowly approaches a little kid with glasses, named Rudolph, who just found his way out of his locker, and demands his lunch money or his jacket, calls him names, threatens him with a peanut (he’s allergic), all the while a group of kids circle around them to watch, witness, take sides and egg on “fight, fight.” The girl Rudolph likes is there. There’s not a teacher in sight. All eyes are on Rudolph, how will he respond, does he take it (again), wimp out (again) or does he finally snap and unleash wholly hell onto his nemesis. The suspense builds.
And scene. It’s a great scene, except when Rudolph the runt was you or worse, is your child.
I have played both Rudolph and Butch and seen others as well. I remember being in a position of seeing someone’s “weakness”, calling it out and wielding it as a sword. One particular instance involved a girl with a hearing impairment. We were sitting on the camp bus and I talked to her quite often and considered her a “friend”. That is, until we had a disagreement and I, in a very “Mean Girl” way said something like “uh, your deaf.”
No matter what I said or did after that it didn’t matter, it was out there and I couldn’t take it back and obviously still a regrettable utterance and a very uncomfortably numb moment.
We all have regrettable moments on both sides of the pendulum.
In my high school yearbook, I quoted Shaun Prowdzik’s pearl “I’d always knew I’d look back on the times I cried and laugh, but I never thought I’d look back on the times I laughed and cry.”
Words can be your greatest sword striking deep and most comforting shield.
It’s the subtle nature of words and how they play on a person and reverberate. You can fortify yourself with all the comebacks in the world but ultimately you need a lot more than rubber and glue, especially if you’re allergic to adhesives.
Some never learn how to build a shield, for me, my shield was and is reinforced by my family and friends. Yet no matter how strong the shield at first, it can get worn down after some persistent chaffing. You get pushed down enough soon enough you don’t bother trying to get back up. It’s all fun and games, that is, until it isn’t.
It may not be enough for Rudolph, who finally builds up enough courage to share his playground tussle with his father to just get a swat on the back and say, “hey, that’s how it is, toughen up kid.”
That’s the world my dad grew up in, where being bullied, picked on and beat up (and vice versa) was a rite of passage. He is a Brooklyn boy after all.
The world now is a bit different, sensitive, if you will.
We must not only adapt but be conscious of how our words and actions will and effect another. In other words, think before we speak/act. Or, re-constitute what we are saying/doing. What is socially acceptable? Except that sometimes you really don't realize the impact until you say it or test it and then you learn "why." That's great, a valuable lesson learned, but in your test case, there was a crash test dummy.
Social interactions will test our limits and we constantly live in a laboratory.Just watch toddlers interact in the playground and when they lose it. Usually it’s pretty clear, “that's mine” “he took it”. The playground can be a breeding ground where bullying tendencies are first tested. The kid who always takes the toy to invoke a response from his peer or parent. A parent may intervene and stop his little Ben from earning the name "Butch", encourage him into it or be a silent passive observer.
The playground morphs as we do into a park, school (elementary, high school, college, graduate), work, home, camp, foreign country, old age home or the new frontier – cyberspace. A bully can wear many guises and may come forth as a friend, family member, lover, colleague, peer, employer or a complete stranger.Is it really our nature to prey upon and exploit the weak?
The bully senses an insecurity, ahhh fresh meat. Targeting systems locked on the "hit me" sign on their victim's back. Our bullies prophetically know how to take a mirror and reflect exactly what we don't want to see, what our shadow parts have been working so hard to hide, mask, tuck away. If they play on that card, our house of cards crumble.
We all work to feel secure in the skin we are in and with the hand we are dealt particularly as those cards keep shuffling throughout our lives. We all take our lumps, some, unfortunately more then others.
Even if you or your child is Rudolph and wears the seemingly worst ensemble ever known to human kind consisting of all 52 cards in the good old abominable stigma deck, imagine him loving himself for all the 52 socially good reasons not to and regardless of whether the world understands him or better, the world he knows and experiences accepts him perfectly as he is and he is a most welcome participant in the reindeer games regardless of his skin density.
That is a bulls eye.
Copyright © 2010 Cynthia Litman d/b/a Tigris Imprints. All Rights Reserved.
So what do you do if you or your child are a bully or being bullied? We’ll be exploring this week on our Radio Show and M’S Gems….
RESOURCES:
BE KIND CAMPAIGN
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