Episode 3: Apple Chucking
Imagine being just 3 months into your first year of Middle School, in the 6th grade. You are skinny, under 5 feet tall, and have a stutter. Some 7th grade boys have been harassing you for a couple of weeks, and no matter what you do to try to stop it, they continue to taunt and harass you throughout the school. You don't want to tell your parents about it, because they will storm into the school and report the bullying, and that will make the bullying worse for you. You will be called a "snitch." So you devise a plan to handle the boys on your own. You decide to take on the leader of this group of boys with an ambush at lunch. You know that if you punch him, you'll be suspended, and barred from the end-of-year band trip to Knott's Berry Farm. You decide to take an apple from the lunch room, and you use your 5 years of baseball experience to throw the apple right at his head. It hits his shoulder, and he punches you several times. All of a sudden, the school monitors show up, break up the fight, and the rest is a blur.
Imagine being the parent of a 6th grader who is skinny, under 5 feet tall, and has a stutter. You get a call from the school nurse who tells you that your son is in the office because he got punched by a kid. He got punched by a kid because he threw an apple at the kid's head. "I'm sorry, say again?" When I first heard that Devin threw an apple at a kid's head, I could not even imagine why he would do such a thing. "What were you thinking?!" were the first words I said to Devin when he got home. But when Devin relayed to me what happened before that, and why he devised this plan, I began to understand. He wanted to establish himself in the Middle School pecking order that he was not a kid to mess with. When you are a kid who is getting bullied at school, you have very few options that will benefit you. If you go to the school or your parents, the other kids will retaliate against you. If you ignore it, it will get worse. If you take matters into your own hands, like Devin, you'll get lunch detention and lose your electronics for the weekend. You will also completely baffle your parents on how to handle all of this.
As we spoke to Devin about the circumstances, and processed it over several days, we realized that what he came up with was quite ingenious--the kid was suspended for punching Devin, and when he returned to school, he apologized to Devin. They aren't friends or anything, but they are okay with each other.
Devin is really lucky that it turned out that way, but we really had to think about the very limited options kids have if they are being bullied. As parents, we want to think that our kids should tell us or someone at the school, and let us deal with it. It should be simple, right? Certainly, the best answer would be to train all of our kids to be good humans, and kind, but, sadly, that is not a realistic expectation. Kids go through all kinds of things in Middle School and High School, and act out for different reasons.
The only realization I had through all of this, besides that my son is a creative, evil genius that is capable of defending himself, is that sometimes our kids have to deal with things on their own. I told Devin that we would have liked to know, even if we couldn't have done anything about it. Otherwise, I do not know if I could have done anything to help my boy in this case. I told Devin at least to tell us what is going on, so when we get a call from the Dean of his school talking about how he threw an apple at a kid, we'll know what that is about. Please, Devin, let us know of any planned fruit ambushes in the future.
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