Honey, there will come a day...

Here’s a conversation I had with my son a year ago:

“Honey, there will come a day when a friend wheedles for you to do something really dangerous or illegal. It is so important to learn how to stand up for yourself, to say ‘no’ and set limits.”

You stand there in front of me. Ten years old. Tears running down. It’s dark out. You’ve just come home after curfew and there will be consequences. The boys who live on a street that has streetlights taunted you for saying you had to leave because our street is pitch black at night. They wouldn’t return the nerf guns you lent them. They laughed and ran and shot at you from cover to draw you back into the game.

They aren’t bad boys. These are the nice ones, the polite boys who greet me (a friend’s blind, weird-looking, foreigner mother) and smile shyly when I get off the train, the ones who play with you no matter what color you are.

Creative Commons image by m-louis of Flickr.com

But they’re kids. And they’ll talk you into doing things you know will cost you. And everybody—I mean everybody—will someday have a “friend” who isn’t really a friend, someone who is bad news, who either thinks it’s funny to get you into trouble or wants to do dangerous and illegal things and finds you a convenient fall guy.

They’ll say they’ll be on lookout. They’ll have lots of reasons why you should do it first or take the more dangerous job. The shop assistant already knows them. You’re a really good bike rider. You’re taller than them. There will be “reasons.”

It will sound reasonable. It always does.

But you’re the kind who gets caught. You’re not a sneaky type. Your face is too honest. And you will be thinking about the other guy, trying to protect your friends, while they’re leaving you in the cop’s headlights. And you’re the brown one, the one more likely to get hit hard by the law.

Honey, there will come a day.

Not because you’re bad or not popular enough. You’re a good guy. You’re a good friend. And everybody has had at least one “bad news” friend. I’m not even saying it will happen because you’re too naive. I’ve had them. Everybody has had that kind of moment.

It’s what we do in that moment that matters. It depends on how used to standing up for yourself you are.

A lot of grownups will say—or even yell at you—”Just THINK! Before you do something, THINK!” That’s an easy solution for them. I want to tear my hair and rant at you too sometimes.

But you know how the doctor says those letters “ADHD”? Well, that’s because it is really hard for you to always think first. I know that. You still have to practice. Take a deep breath. Count to three… or ten. Think things through. Yup, you’ll have to.

But sometimes you won’t. Because that’s how brains are and that ADHD makes it particularly hard.

That’s why I say being able to punt the right way is important. That’s why you’ve got to have your core strong. You’ve got to know, deeper than even thinking what you will and won’t do. You’ve got to set your limits and stand up for yourself, even with friends.

This is a problem that kids have and grownups have. It never really goes away. I was about to say that it gets more complicated. But I’m not sure it does. For you, that call to stay out in the streets after dark with friends when you know it will mean you can’t come tomorrow is about as complicated as it ever needs to be.

“Come here. Get a hug. I know it’s hard. Honey, there will come a day when I will have to let go.”

In a year, it’s shocking at how close the end of my ability to protect him has come. I am reminded again and again how hard the judgements and hard edges of society fall on young, brown boys, especially those with neurodiversity.

I remember all the screw ups my brothers and I had and all the second and third chances we got, all the times we fell on soft ground and the generally softer world we lived in which had so much less in the way of addictive substances, bemusing electronics and bewildering complexity.

The chances now are just… well, a gamble, pure and simple. Give it fifteen years and I’ll tell you how the chips fall.

Gaslighting the whole world

A friend asked if it’s possible that Putin really doesn’t know what he’s doing in Ukraine and how badly things are going for his troops. He has the internet. He and his advisors have always been world-savvy. How can he just not care that everyone sees his crimes?

Well, now. That’s quite an interesting question.

I know Russia fairly well. I can predict how Putin’s restrictions will play out. Russia is still a country with inadequate access to media and information for most people. It’s also a country with a lot of tradition around the symbol of a strong leader/national father figure.

So, in short, at home he can put it over on a lot of people. Not all of them anymore, hence the brave members of the Russian intellectual and professional classes who have protested once and then been silenced. I root for them, but unless enough of Putin’s closest friends feel the same way, little is likely to change his thinking.

But beyond knowing Russia, I know his "type" all too well.

Putin has a double, you see. Not a physical double in this case, but a psychological double… in my life.

This is a person who is highly intelligent, immensely arrogant, physically self-controlled, consumed with inner anger and contempt for others as well as utterly convinced of his own righteousness. Both Putin and his psychological double in my life have at times claimed their crusade is about spiritual and moral purity. They also both show signs of a kind of hyper-masculine fragility.

Both regularly accuse others of the actions they have either just committed or are about to commit. Both insist that any casualties of their actions are the fault of those they are attacking. Both appear to be immune to all attempts at diplomacy or discussion.

I am sure I’m not the only one with a Putin double handy, but mine has been copying Putin in real time. This is a family member who has been waging a decade-long campaign to tear me down as a parent, much as Putin has nursed his personal grudge against Ukraine for years. First, when my kids were babies, it was always, “She can’t possibly be safe with kids when she’s visually impaired.”

Photo of a room reduced to rubble. Through the wreckage of a smashed television set, we see a gas mask amid other debris. -Image via Pixabay

Sometimes it was stated openly to discredit me in front of others. Other times it was a quiet jibe for my ears only, but in hopes that I would react and bring down the criticism of others for tainting a family get-together with drama.

It would have been irritating enough if this person’s opinion were just an opinion. As it was, it meant that my kids and I were more isolated from the rest of the family because unlike other parents, I was “never to be left alone with anyone else’s kid.”

Need I say it? But ok, nope, I didn’t have close calls in the safety arena. I fished an infant nephew out of a swimming pool before anyone else could react. I prevented a number of possible accidents involving babies and batteries, which I heard clattering in just that particular way that only batteries clatter. My kids were all-in-all physically safer than their cousins and even when I wasn’t allowed to babysit, I still managed to be handy in a few crises.

Then, when that outright falsehood wasn’t as easy to pull over on the rest of the family, the campaign switched to my “overly rigid” parenting methods. As you might already know, my kids were both adopted from Eastern European orphanages and had trauma and health issues as baggage. I went at parenting much the way I go about most things—with research first, exacting planning and then enthusiastic implementation.

I usually had one or two “attachment parenting” books under my arms in the early years and when doctors said, “Routine is so very important to children who have experienced attachment trauma.” I didn’t just blow it off. I first made a plan for meals and bedtimes and stuck to it. I also noticed the chaos that happened when I occasionally didn’t.

The long and the short of it was that both of my kids needed a lot of structure, routine and cushion to be emotionally regulated and healthy. So, there were a lot of family arguments when I insisted I needed to leave an event in time for my kids to be only one hour late for bedtime rather than four hours late, as other parents found acceptable. Or when I insisted that massive doughnuts at 5:30 pm are not a good idea, since I was giving them dinner at 6 no matter how inconvenient it might be.

And yeah, I insisted they not have sweets right before real food. I didn’t just mouth it. I meant it.

This Putin double was always criticizing and rallying others to blame me and my parenting choices for any difficulties.

Well, once my kids got older and my daughter was diagnosed with severe ADHD and a neuro-developmental disability as well as attachment trauma, there was extra fodder for the cannons. Suddenly, the Putin double went from someone who quoted studies to a science denier on child development.

“There is no dis-ability. Arie is pathologizing her kids. There is trauma behind these kids’ terrible behaviors to be sure. Trauma she created through bad parenting.” That is a lot more concise than the lengthy, berating, yelling lectures this Putin double regularly delivered, but it uses all the key words and phrases.

When asked what exactly caused this “trauma” or what was the “bad parenting,” I’m told it is things like “using the wrong tone” or “not setting enough limits” or “making an assumption.” Because the internet is full of a blame and shame culture, it’s dangerous to repeat this sludge, but I trust that even just reading about my parenting journey has given my readers some context for this.

Yeah, I’ve had my parenting moments. Who hasn’t? I guarantee you that no one parenting kids with attachment trauma and FASD can claim to have never used a harsh tone they regretted. When a neuro-diverse kid has an “executive functioning disability” as in this case, consequences and behavior modification methods don’t work the way they do with other kids.

A lot of consequences still happen anyway, but getting mad at the child because the standard methods don’t work on them isn’t really helpful. But there is no one I’ve ever met who can truly manage to never get mad when an otherwise reasonably healthy twelve-year-old colors on freshly painted walls again or throws a two-hour fit about brushing their teeth for the tenth night running.

But I digress… The heart of this post is about Putin and the kind of thinking that allows someone like my difficult family member to take things to open war “and devil take the civilian casualties.”

I guess the civilians in this case are the kids.

Putin spent the winter sending tanks crawling across Russian grasslands toward the Ukrainian border. His double spent the winter criticizing my tone of voice or yelling at me over conversations he misheard from the other room, since I’ve relocated back to his neck of the woods. Both were warned. Both claimed innocent intent.

“Just training exercises. We have a right to develop our defenses,” said Putin.

“I have a right to an opinion. I’m just giving valuable parenting advice,” his double said.

My eleven-year-old son who was adopted from an Eastern European orphanage had a hard time getting attached to our family when he was little. Hearing this constant criticism of his primary parent really confused him. He started repeating the same words, yelling at me, insisting he didn't have to follow any rules or do his homework because I am “bad at parenting.” Kids that age don’t generally use the word “parenting,” but they do repeat what they hear.

Then in February, Putin sent his troops storming into a sovereign country, a nation that had long thought of the Russians as their friends and called them “brothers.” They started bombing schools, hospitals and residential buildings as well as “legitimate” military targets, if such a term can be applied to an unprovoked war.

The Putin double near me started lecturing my easily manipulated neuro-diverse kids behind my back about how my parenting is “rediculous” when he took them and cousins on “fun” outings. He encouraged them to disregard any instructions I gave. He spoke of me and to me with contempt and hate. He yelled and demeaned me in front of the kids because I asked my son to look through a pile of cast off socks to pick out his.

The criticism, shouting and covert attacks on my children’s relationship with me was very much like bombardment. And while it didn’t kill, it wreaked havoc on my children’s psyches.

The world said “no” to Putin and demanded that he cease hostilities and stop wantonly killing civilians. Putin obfuscated, denied, twisted facts and blamed the victims of his aggression. He said the civilians were “human shields” because they had not left the war zone quickly enough. Then he closed humanitarian corridors for fleeing refugees, trapping them so that they could not escape. And when some did, his troops shot and bombed them.

Meanwhile, my family united to demand that Putin’s double stop the harassment. And the double obfuscated, denied, twisted facts and blamed the victims of his aggression. I supposedly wasn’t sensitive enough when my son said he didn’t want to sort socks. My kids’ have learning disabilities because I must not have used the right “behavior modification methods.” He had to step in because his conscience demanded he let “the truth” be known. If I said anything, he shouted over me, never allowing a word or phrase to be heard through the barrage.

And the children saw that a loud voice and a large, male body is what wins. They saw their mother shamed, treated with contempt and shouted down for no particular reason. And they learned from that. They learned what a mother is worth in this patriarchal world. They didn’t die, but they lost something immensely valuable as they repeated his words and screamed, “I hate you! I want a real mother! You’re disabled! You’re a bad parent!” for days after each family gathering with the Putin double.

As the weeks dragged on Putin accused Ukrainian forces of using chemical weapons. By now, many world leaders were savvy to his mind games and hazmat forces went on high alert. With no evidence that his accusations were anything but wind, another reason for those accusations was apparent. He was covering for and confusing the discussion about his own chemical attacks. And evidence of the use of white phosphorous by Russian troops has already emerged.

At the same time, Putin’s double fell in love with the word “abusive,” screaming the accusation at me over and over again. Allowing no word about actual events in edgewise. To confuse the discussion and to cover for his own abuse, the easiest angle is to accuse others of the actions he himself has committed.

Why do I belabor this point of comparing these two men?

Partly, it’s simply because they took their actions at the same time, and that made the comparison striking. I, like many who thought they knew Russia, was taken in for much of the winter by the insistence that while the criticism from Putin’s double was irritating and insulting, it was basically harmless, just an abhorrent and insulting opinion. Then, I got a rude awakening when my son started screaming hate at me, throwing objects and even pummeling me with his fists. We’ve already had to call the police twice to help him calm down and keep everyone safe, including him.

But more than that, with these two situations side by side in my life I can see them both more clearly. Putin’s actions are not just those of a war criminal. That is plenty bad, certainly. But it is important to understand that he is also gaslighting the whole world, engaging in a campaign of psychological warfare.

At the same time, every abuser who employs the tactics of gaslighting and psychological abuse is as dangerous to the people in their life as Putin is to the people fleeing his bombs. More than ever before, I have come to understand the pleas of organizations helping victims of domestic violence, asking that we take psychological abuse as seriously as physical abuse.

My family and I waited too long to act decisively. We are acting now. You need not fear for my children’s safety or call up an intervention on their behalf. But I see now that I didn’t act when I should have. As a result, my children suffered a retraumatization of the early terror they lived through when they were tiny infants in a faceless orphanage system.

I let an untenable situation go on too long, partly because I was distracted by volunteering to organize evacuations of refugees from Ukraine. I didn’t realize that while I was off putting out blazes, my own house was on fire.

I hope people hear me on this one. Please take psychological abuse seriously. If you are experiencing a barrage of verbal attacks, gaslighting, manipulation, twisting of facts, a campaign of denigration and contempt, these are classic signs. It can be very hard to take action when the relationship is close and there is often a cost of setting firm boundaries. We often love those who engage in this abuse and our children do as well.

If you see someone else under this kind of onslaught, I hope you will remember not only that but also how easily victims are blamed and issues are obfuscated by psychological abuse. There is often a sketchy narrative in which “both sides” are apparently guilty of misdeeds, but in reality, the misdeeds of one side far outweigh those of the other.

Putin alleged discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine and western support for right-wing groups to justify this war. There is some legitimacy to these claims. Still, while those may be concerns that need to be addressed, they are not war crimes that slaughter thousands upon thousands of people.

Putin’s double also accused me of raising my voice or being overly persistent in a rule with my kids. And for a time, my family was taken in by this and insisted that this was a conflict between two people who had both made mistakes. I even admitted that I had raised my voice and that it wasn’t good.

But finally, my family came to realize that the times I succumbed to frustration or exhaustion were a tiny fraction of my parenting, which has been almost entirely calm in the face of much difficulty, and even my worst parenting moments are not the kind of actions that create the type of internal trauma my children were acting out.

It is not easy to set limits on Putin’s double. For now, he has free rein at the extended family home and while he’s been asked to leave by the legal owners, no one is willing to force the issue in a way that could be traumatic for any of the kids, including his. For now, my kids may miss some family gatherings in order to be kept safe. We will have to find more things to do in our little basement apartment on weekends and we’ll miss the beauty of this spring in the mountains until Putin’s double either leaves or shows signs of working through his issues.

I only wish it was this easy to put limits on Putin, and despite the ordeal I’ve been through, I’m so grateful his double doesn’t have nuclear weapons.

Postcards from American social studies class

It has been a month since I pulled my son out of Czech school mid-week and put him in an American online elementary school. It’s been a month of complete reorientation. I even feel like I have jet lag.

Our living room now looks like a homeschooler lives here. We aren’t technically allowed to homeschool because of Czech authorities, but we have been able to enroll in an American online school, thanks to technology that has only existed for a few years. And even with school online the physical environment is starting to look different.

Now we are surrounded by three US maps (two of them in puzzle form), a daily schedule on the wall, science projects involving balloons, makeshift beakers and lots of rocks, a writing lab and color-coded notebooks with big bold labels in English. This isn’t how Czechs do school. My son’s previous school room had piles of identical gray notebooks—six or more per class—a couple of textbooks and nothing with color or three dimensions.

Image by Arie Farnam

In other rooms of the house, I am packing and stacking boxes. I came here twenty-two years ago with a single backpack, a laptop and equipment to make a documentary film. In a few months, I’ll be going back. One acquires things in twenty-two years—important things… and people. I’ll be heading back with two kids and about ten large boxes full of books, clothes, special dishes, candle-making equipment, herbalist paraphernalia, children’s toys, board games and much smaller electronics.

I’ll still be leaving behind a lot of value—the huge wooden table my Egyptian carpenter friend made for me, my antique sewing machine, my house, my garden, my animals, a husband. This isn’t all celebration. There is a lot of loss and heartache.

This morning I realized for the first time that we will technically meet the definition of refugees. We are leaving because of community harassment and particularly racially motivated physical and psychological attacks on my son, from which authorities refuse to protect us.

Sure, unlike most refugees, we actually have a pre-set safe harbor to go to. We have citizenship and an apartment already waiting, But still… this isn’t how I ever imagined going home.

The ever-intensifying Covid lockdowns here leave us in a limbo where we might as well have already crossed the ocean. A thick blanket of fine sifted snow has fallen and the temperature has been well below freezing.

We haven’t seen neighbors even poke their noses out of doors in days. But we are out and about, feeding animals, sledding, snowboarding, skating on a nearby pond and shoveling snow. It’s a wonderfully quiet and blissfully unthreatening world for a change with only the sounds of neighborhood dogs and a few engines down on the county road.

Our trans-Atlantic transition has already begun. I’ve got the measuring cups out and we’ve been baking—preparing for a world of cups, ounces, pounds, quarts, gallons, feet and inches. My son is justifiably confused.

“Why, Mama, why do Americans do this? Centimeters are lots easier!”

Oh honey, you have no idea.

The complexity isn’t just in units of measure by a long shot. Europeans don’t study fractions much, which are mostly a consequence of weird American units of measure.

And did you know that European and American cursive handwriting differ significantly? No wonder I haven’t been able to read handwriting for the past twenty years! I thought my eyes were just getting worse. But as it turns out, almost all the capital letters are different and many of the lower-case letters are quite different.

Of course, there is the whole language thing. I didn’t get out of home teaching by going for American school, even if the online teachers do actually teach concepts. My son needs vocabulary help roughly every two and a half minutes, and that definitely includes math class.

The most foreign class though is social studies. Czechs do have a somewhat similar class. It is called “homeland studies,” and is completely nationally focused. In fourth grade, American social studies is quite similar actually—just with information about a different country. A few concepts, like how to read an elevation map, are transferable, but all the facts are, of course, different.

Before enrolling in American school, my son could just barely find the United States on a world map, primarily because “Grandma lives there.” (Not to mention a passel of cousins.) But that’s as far as his knowledge of America went—to my dismay. I thought I’d done a half-way decent job, importing hundreds of American children’s books over the years, many of them about American history or regional cultures. But apparently my son assumed these were every bit as much fantasy as the fairytales and let them go in one ear and out the other.

The social studies teacher in our new school is also the weakest of the teachers, in terms of teaching style and even knowledge base. He’s a middle-aged guy from Ohio named Todd, and I was warned by reviewers that this school has a conservative bent.

But even so, I was disturbed when the first lesson was on the hemispheres of the earth and the teacher insisted that the earth has four hemispheres—northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest. “Hemi-sphere” means “half of a ball.” You can’t have four halves of one ball.

Next, the teacher just goofed. He was trying to explain to the kids how landforms have an impact on weather patterns. One of the simplest examples of this comes from my home turf in Eastern Oregon, where the Cascade Mountains block the wet sea air from the Pacific Ocean to the west and force it to rise, cool and dump all of its moisture before continuing on to the eastern part of the state. That’s why Eastern Oregon and Washington are mostly desert.

But Todd from Ohio got his mountain ranges mixed up and insisted that it is the Rocky Mountains that block the wet air from the Pacific, despite the fact that the Rockies don’t really start until you get into Idaho. And he put it on the unit exam.

But those things are non-controversial, just mistakes, that in reality any teacher makes. We just don’t usually have to teach our classes with parents looking in, analyzing and rewinding the video recording to harp on every little thing. So, I wrote to Todd and told him about the issue gently and I don’t hold it against him. (Well, the bit about the earth’s hemispheres counts against him maybe just a smidgen.)

But the real trouble started in the unit titled “Who are Americans?”

First, the teacher proclaimed that all Americans are immigrants. He made a point of calling out any Native American kids watching and specifically denigrating anyone who says Native Americans are not immigrants. He explained the archeological land bridge theory, though he neglected to mention that this is our best guess as to how Native Americans got there. Mostly it was his tone that was irritating at this point.

But then he made a point of insisting that those first migrating humans or pre-humans were also immigrants and thus “all Americans come from immigrants.” First of all, this isn’t technically correct. “Immigration” describes the movement of specific persons from one inhabited country to another inhabited country. An immigrant goes “in” among those already there and does it during their own lifetime.

The people who crossed the land bridge, if that is indeed how it happened, were not immigrants. They were nomads. They didn’t make the trip all in one lifetime. It took many generations. They didn’t go to live in another country. They just slowly moved around and eventually found themselves on a different continent.

Now, I’m not Native American and I don’t know if Native Americans care whether or not they are considered to be the descendants of immigrants or not. But I do care about the evident reason Todd was making this assertion—to prepare kids to believe that Europeans had every bit as much right to the land of North America as Native Americans did back in the 1400s. That’s a problem.

If that were true any invader could just declare themselves immigrants to any country and might would always make right.

Furthermore, If Todd were right about all Americans being immigrants, it would mean that Europe is a continent of immigrants too… and Asia and Australia as well. The only continent with any claim to having indigenous people would be Africa and all humans would either have to be considered indigenous Africans or African diaspora of various time periods. That is clearly unhelpful and not the meaning of the concepts involved.

This is where the fundamental building blocks of a vast social misunderstandings start—at least some of them. Conservatives in the US have long complained that teaching the facts of US history constitutes the shaming of the white portion of the nation. As a result, I had to learn much of this history outside school from reading and from experiences with people. The primary shame I ever felt over it was that we didn’t learn it in primary school.

This is a political ploy in the classroom. I’ve heard right-wing politicians say the same thing on TV, “we all came as immigrants and we all had the same opportunities.” It’s a comfortable falsehood to shake off uncomfortable feelings that arise from acknowledging historical and present-day injustices.

In the next unit, Todd opened up the topic of the economy of the United States. He defined “free market economics” as “a system where you can make as much money as you want. You decide how much money you will make.”

Creative Commons image by Kath B. of Flickr.com

He never hinted that you don’t just get to say, “Oh, I’d like to make $200,000 please,” and it’s done. Well, I suppose that Todd had that option because he’s an abled white man from a privileged socio-economic background, so maybe he actually thinks that’s an option for everybody. He does point out that he chose to be a teacher, even though it doesn’t pay as much as some other things. But he never hints that not everyone gets to simply point to a dollar amount and choose their salary, as if it is an ice-cream flavor.

Next, Todd addresses America’s political system. America is “unique,” he says, because it is a democracy. He digs deeper into the idea that America is alone in being a democracy when he defines the concept of a political region as “America is a democracy, so that is a political region,” as if the border around the United States was the border around the democratic region of the world.

This, despite the fact that the fairly conservative Pew Research Center found in 2019 that more than half of the countries in the world are now democratic.

And then this morning, a whopper that left me breathless. In discussing America’s borders and neighbors, the teacher claimed that the Mexican-American war was a border dispute over which river should be the border. It was presented as a silly little argument in which the United States proved that the Rio Grande was the right border. In reality the Mexican-American war constituted a massive land-grab on the part of the Americans. It was so unjust that there were quite a few Americans who fought on the Mexican side. And when the United States won anyway, the border was moved and the USA gained 500,000 square miles of territory, increasing the nation’s size by a third. This was no minor squabble over “which river the border should follow.”

One of the ways I deal with the problems with social studies class is to supplement. I brought out the world-map puzzles and eventually my son got the idea of cardinal directions and the hemispheres of the earth. I also got a topographical map of the US. so we could study. the real positions of the mountain ranges and their effects on Eastern Oregon high desert country. And at the moment, we’re reading children’s books about the historical labor movement led by young women in textile mills for a bit of perspective on our economic system. We have books about Native American kids—both present-day and historical—as well.

But now I see the divide in American social studies education in all its glory. To be on the side of facts and history puts me in the position of sounding like I am constantly harping on some injustice or another. This isn’t the choice of those of us who care about our children understanding the real world. I am not in fact against America or focused on complaint and gloom. I don’t even think America is really any more unjust than the vast majority of countries in the world.

But when teachers strip out any sign of the injustices of the past and focus on the myth of glorious European “Founding Fathers,” it makes it hard for facts to come across as anything else.

I find myself longing for a social studies class that would just teach the facts and the story of the country and its many peoples with integrity in the first place. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to homeschool my kids early on, a dream I gave up on due to bureaucracy, special educational needs and the wishes of my children. That’s why I have all these picture and story books on historical, geographic and social matters.

To counteract the sense that even my. blog posts are often a litany of complaints in a world of unrelenting hardship and injustice, I let myself dream about the way I would teach social studies.

We’d build maps where the equator was actually in the middle of the map, rather than in the lower third. We’d sing the oceans and continents. We’d make food from various countries. We’d mix the same paints to get the various shades of brown that color all the peoples of the earth, including those of very light-brown hue. We’d read real or realistic fictional stories about children in different countries.

When we turned, as we eventually must in an American school, to a more in-depth exploration of the United States, we would first spend quite a long time on the first several thousand years of American history and study the physical regions of the country in that context. We would have to search to find child-friendly books and materials on Native American civilizations and we would study their many discoveries and the development of mature democracy in some of them.

Then we would move on to all the history that came after and the nation of immigrants that largely replaced those civilizations. We would study the stories of those immigrants, including real stories of children in those times. We would not look away from hardship, desperation or exploitation. We would see how even good intentions sometimes brought tragedy and not all intentions were good. We would look at how people in the past viewed those of other groups and how that influenced what they did.

We would look at the founding of the United States and the Constitution as significant events, but not as the all-defining, most important events they became in the social studies of my childhood. We would look at exactly who designed the Constitution and why and how they hoped it would work and what worked and what didn’t and how it has been changed and whether or not it now works better. We wouldn’t be looking for saints or devils but rather at people, who were shaped by their times and circumstances.

As we moved toward more recent history, we would have more stories of real people to work with. We’d break down myths and tell the stories with nuance. Rosa Parks would take her rightful place as a savvy, planful activist, rather than just someone who was too tired.

We would learn that there are rarely easy answers, and that while there are sometimes people with dishonorable intentions, most people throughout history took the actions that seemed right from their own perspective at that time. And yes, this would mean in the end that we would not be able to cover everything in one year, because nuance takes a little while, but we could cover it all in the end, since we wouldn’t spend every year repeating the same tired myths.

I hope—I have reason to hope from what I haver read—that there are schools in America that now teach social studies more like this. I have no illusions that we are returning to a country that is truly safer or gentler than the one we are leaving. We are simply going because we must go, due to clear and present danger, and that is the place we can find safe harbor just now.

Do people who are bullied really turn into bullies?

There is a vicious, traumatizing and stigmatizing rumor going around about my son and kids like him on social media and even in the mainstream media.

I have run across the remarks and assumptions at least ten times in just the past two days, and I wasn’t looking for them or even aware that such a stereotype existed until very recently. This vicious, hateful and potentially deadly myth has it that people who were bullied as kids become bullies, anti-social adults and/or violent criminals.

A few real-life examples do exist and psychologists call them “bully-victims,” but they are far less common than the popular stereotype assumes.

Creative Commons image by Carolyn Langton

I have recently rejoined the world of social media after a nine-month hiatus prompted partly by a serious incident of online bullying (yes, it happens with adults too) and partly by the exhaustion of homeschooling kids with special needs during successive Covid lockdowns.

And this is what I found on my return. This vicious rumor against people like my son and like me, a stereotype painting people who were bullied as potentially violent and liable to lack empathy. It’s a myth often spread even by those who previously claimed to be allies.

Maybe the myth started with an incident or incidents of violence in which the gun lobby decided to make excuses about how the shooter was once called “wimpy face” as a child and thus the quick and easy availability of semi-automatic weapons had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it was just a way of blowing off steam about empathy-impaired people during the U.S. election. Either way, it is now a pervasive stereotype.

The comments are things like an acquaintance on Facebook posting under a story about a violent police officer, “No excuse for it! He was probably bullied as a kid and this is how he takes it out on others.” Someone else referring to white supremacists as “a$$holes who were bullied in high school." And a passing reference on the television news about the need for bullying intervention to prevent “victims” from becoming mass shooters.

The overall assumption is that a direct link exists between being a target of bullying and future perpetration of violence or cruelty. And that assumption is everywhere these days to the extent that admitting you were bullied as a kid is now more likely to result in distrustful glances than support and empathy.

My first reaction was hurt and irritation, when I heard about this myth. I was a target of bullying and social ostracism as a kid because of my vision impairment, my strange-looking eyes, my secondhand clothes and my family’s alternative spirituality and lifestyle. I had a lot of strikes against me. My son just has being a member of a locally high-profile racial minority, the only non-passing representative of such in his school. But that is plenty to get a kid knocked down and chanted at by groups of bullies.

I have overcome a lot of my past, but it is still hard to see my son going through it for something equally beyond his control. And now he’s saddled with yet one more stigma. Not only is he “a young brown male” and an ESL learner, he is now categorized as a potential perpetrator of violence and cruelty in the popular imagination because of something that was done TO him.

He’s ten and he’s at the tender and naturally open age where he reminds me to include our two cats when I tell someone how many “people” are in our family. Empathy isn’t something he’s lacking.

So, the comments hurt. But then my rational brain kicks in. OK, but maybe there is some significant statistical correlation between being a target and becoming a perpetrator. I sure have had enough rage at times to be able to relate. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge people who spread this stereotype. So, I go look up the stats.

The National Bullying Prevention Center has a page on bullying statistics. While the site says as many as one in every five kids is “bullied” at some point, there are a lot of things that they call bullying. Name calling and exclusion are considered bullying along side physical attacks. Those who experience pervasive and repeated bullying are a bit more rare, but still more common than most people like to think. Kids with disabilities and those who are identifiable as belonging to a minority race or religion at a given school experience much higher rates of bullying.

There is also a section on the effects of bullying. Unsurprisingly, kids who are bullied end up with increased risk of “depression, anxiety, sleep difficulties, lower academic achievement, and dropping out of school.” Kids who are both bullied and bully others are mentioned but only to note that they have increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems. So do kids who blame themselves for being bullied.

Another researcher, Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on “the bullying cycle,” claims that less than 10 percent of bullies can actually be considered bully-victims. Although she contributes to the stereotype somewhat by completely ignoring other bullying targets in her “cycle” theory, Vaillancourt, offers no guess, educated or otherwise, about what percent of targets actually turn into “bully-victims.”

The statistics don’t mention anything about being bullied making one more likely to bully others or more likely to become violent or anti-social in adulthood. In fact, despite a lengthy search, I could not find any study that hinted at this. Given the pervasive stereotype, the lack of any hard evidence makes me think the opposite is more likely true.

I do know from my own experience that being bullied has made me less likely to be a nice, quiet bystander who enables bullies. Hell hath no fury like getting a little light-hearted bullying in and then being hit crossways by a hurricane that was once an ostracized child.

But turn me to bully those even more vulnerable than myself? Not likely.

There was only one moment in my life where perhaps I stood on that precipice. I was huddled in an out of the way corner on a stairway during lunch in seventh grade when someone landed on top of me. I was bruised and my precious colored pencils were broken. I leapt up and grabbed the body of the intruder and started wailing away at his back with my fists. It turned out to be another bullied kid who had been thrown bodily down the stairway onto me.

I wish I could say that the two of us became friends and held out against the bullies together. I did let go of him and stop pounding on him when I heard the bullies laughing and I got a bit of a look at him. But he ran away and never went inside my short visual range again. It’s a story too often played out. Those who suffer from oppression and bullying are driven against one another to ensure that they remain powerless against their assailants.

But even in those worst years of terror and rage, I was never tempted to actually pick on someone else. There is an ingredient missing that I would have needed to make that even slightly appealing. One would have to feel that bringing someone else down or pushing them even further down would somehow raise you up. I know the theory, but none of the emotion behind it resonates. I never felt even a little tempted.

My son was in a tussle in preschool in which a friend grabbed a toy from him and he pushed the other boy. The boy lost his balance and fell over a bench and onto a pile of legos, which scraped his back. Because my son was the only child of color in the preschool and a member of a very controversial group in our area, some of the teachers and parents immediately labeled my son as a dangerous. There was even a petition to have him expelled, which failed without our intervention because there were also honest teachers who reported that my son was no more disruptive or violent than any of the other boys.

Since then, he has been the target of bullying by older boys in school, but otherwise he hasn’t been involved with fighting at school. I believe that after his experiences, he wouldn’t participate in bullying or harassing another kid.

I can’t be so sure that he would have the confidence to stand up to bullies on his own behalf or on behalf of another. Unlike me, my son has the temperament to be a follower or a bystander, but he also is the kind of kid to quickly empathize with another human or creature.

He is now in the period of childhood in which superheroes play a large role. He loves to fantasize about being a hero and stopping the bad guys. In our discussions and in our choices of bedtime reading, the topic is often real historical heroes who fought to protect the vulnerable.

I am not worried that my son may become a bully because he has been bullied. I do worry that he may follow others into unhealthy habits, including exclusion of others, because of his temperament and eager desire to make peace and be part of the group. But this is something that has been part of his nature since long before racist adults went after him in preschool.

Whether it is my tendency toward quick anger or his bent to go along with the crowd, neither of these are a result of. our experiences as targets of bullying, but rather natural characteristics which come from temperament. In the end, it is empathy that prevents people from becoming a bully and lack of empathy that may cause someone to become a bully.

There are actually life experiences which can impair a person’s empathy. Extreme rejection of a child by family, complete isolation from human contact and being raised in an institutional environment have all been linked to dysfunctions of empathy.

Even though I know some experiences can lead to disruption of empathy, I would not willingly participate in labeling those who have suffered such terrible abuse. Where there is real concern the focus must be on healing. The one thing science knows about redressing an actual dysfunction in empathy is that the only treatment is lots more empathy.

But there isn’t even a real concern when it comes to a link between targets of bullying and the perpetration of violence and bullying. There is no such link. Perpetuating such a stereotype is nothing more than piling on with the bullies to rain more blows down on vulnerable kids and the survivors they become.

Please stop it. Don’t make statements based on such an assumption. Don’t joke about it. Don’t speculate based on this stereotype. It does real harm.

Learning reciprocity the hard way

With Mother’s Day just past, it’s still on my mind. There was a time when I thought Mother’s Day was nothing but a saccharine, commercial holiday. I was unimpressed even with the cards teachers force kids to write to their mothers. And then, there were the years when I was battling infertility and Mother’s Day was like a knife twisting in my gut.

I have a new perspective now.

First of all, I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific, Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It has taken its place among the select handful of books that are my all-time favorites. It’s that good.

Image via Pixabay

The primary theme is reciprocity with the natural world. One of the big questions explored in the book is whether or not gratitude, including overt expression of thanks, is “enough.” Does our gratitude somehow repay the natural world for all that we take and for the great harm human beings are doing to the earth’s ecosystems?

The answer is complex. There are some ways in which Kimmerer argues that gratitude is a particular gift that humans have to offer and that all that is asked of us is that we give the gifts that come naturally. But then there are ways in which it is clear that most humans have lost touch with the cycles of reciprocity and this is a grievous loss.

That was kind of the theme of Mother’s Day this year for me.

For us it was COVID-19 lockdown day 61. Being trapped in quarantine for two months with any three other people will tend to highlight their shortcomings for you and strain whatever relationship you have. In our case, we are nearly at the point of psychological collapse.

That has a lot to do with various disabilities. I’m nearly blind and the other three people in my household are dyslectic, which entails not just problems learning to read but also lifelong struggles with organization and attention to detail. Anyone who lives with a blind person will know that organization and attention to detail are the keys to success. On top of that, one of the kids has significant behavioral and psychiatric problems.

I’m the mother in this zoo of needs, the one responsible for filling bellies, soothing hurts and ultimately imparting values. I have spent the past eleven years doing everything I can to raise children with the values of respect and reciprocity. And by any measure, at this COVID-19 moment, I have failed miserably at that, whether it is entirely my fault or not.

This past Mother’s Day, my kids, ages 9 and 11, were at the end of a three-day weekend, because May 8 is a state holiday here. They had been out riding bikes both of the previous days in the sunshine and had no responsibilities. On Sunday, they needed to catch up a few things for school and do a small chore each to help out around the house.

Several hours of screaming, cussing, hitting and throwing everything within reach ensued.

“You’re the worst parents ever!” “I wish I had a different mom!” “I wish you would die!” “I hate you!” “Every other kid in the world has an iPhone, except me!” “No one else has to do chores!” “You are supposed to be my servant!” The screeches bounced off the walls (but they are edited here to exclude vulgarity. simply because I don’t feel like repeating those parts)

In the end, I didn’t get any vaguely cubist pictures featuring hearts this year. I didn’t even get any hugs and my kids never did do kisses. I haven’t ever actually experienced breakfast in bed and it certainly wasn’t on the menu this year. I didn’t get flowers and instead my eleven-year-old pulled up the flower starts I had put in window boxes, taunting me through the kitchen window while she tore the tender roots to shreds because I wouldn’t let her have video games before her homework was done.

So, it wasn’t much like the way Mother’s Day is portrayed in popular culture.

I did overhear the phone tutor trying to get my children to draw me a picture for Mother’s Day. They didn’t. My husband is too overwhelmed to make them do it or to think about values beyond survival.

The whole thing made me think about reciprocity, the value of gratitude and the role of ever-giving, sacrificial mother. This is essentially how we treat the earth, isn’t it?

When I spend hours cooking from scratch only to have my family make gagging noises at the table and complain that other kids get packaged food, I think of the earth giving us endless crops, despite our abuse of the soil through chemical fertilizers and harmful monocultures. When I have to shield my particularly vulnerable eyes with my arm, while the kids throw pencils and toy cars at my face, I think of the rare-earth mining operations that gouge deep into the planet to make my phone and computer.

My children have a lot of needs and even more desires. Perhaps like the earth, I signed up to be a mother, but I couldn’t possibly have known what the cost would be. It isn’t so much the work, the gray hairs, the long nights, the exhaustion or the endless homework sessions that get me down.

It’s the words and the disrespect that hurt. I wonder if the earth feels the same way.

Of course, there are scientific reasons why the earth is hurting and none of them have directly to do with our expressions of appreciation, or lack their of. But Kimmerer makes a compelling argument as to why gratitude physically and biologically, as well as spiritually, matters to plants and ecosystems.

We know it matters in relationships. Despite my very unpleasant experiences of Mother’s Day, I’m actually a proponent of it. I know it is used and abused for commercial purposes far too often. But there is nothing like NOT getting a smudged picture of a stick figure mother and child to make you value one.

I am glad mothers are given at least one day of gratitude and appreciation. It may be too much like Earth Day, when some of us do the same for the earth without giving much thought the rest of the year. But either is a call for us to rejoin the circle of reciprocity. And this year, even more than most, I have learned how the earth must feel as an unacknowledged mother and my resolve to do right by her is renewed.

Would gratitude and appreciation be “enough?” If I did get Mother’s Day cards and “thank you” when I cook a meal?

Would it erase every other trouble? I doubt it.

But I think it might just be “enough” in a way. I have a lot to give as a mother. My well is deep. Just not bottomless.

The earth is like that too. She’s a mother with vast resources, just not endless resources. If we treated the earth the way we say people should treat their human mothers, with some basic appreciation and gratitude, as Kimmerer asks, there might just be hope for us after all.

Gratitude lessons

Seven fifteen on a Monday morning.

I’ve managed to get the kids up and dressed. I didn’t manage to do my meditation before dawn. It was another interrupted night, but I’m at least half awake.

My fourth-grade daughter is eating her cereal when she cocks her head, frowns and declares, “I forgot about some homework for today. I have to find out about the Age of Gold and tell about it in class.”

We don’t live in one of those kind, gentle school systems with lots of second chances. There are cumulative consequences and my daughter is already struggling. She cares a little but not much, and her multiple learning disabilities make it easy for her to forget. This time she asks for help… nicely for a change.

The kids’ encyclopedias are missing from their places and both claim no knowledge of their whereabouts. I rush to start the computer. She has to leave by 7:30 to get to school in time. And the research info has to be in Czech.

Wait… “The Age of Gold?” I didn’t know there was one.

I do a quick Google search and find dozens of advertisements for gold jewelry, endless gratuitous references to something being “the golden age of …. whatever” and nothing on a historical “Age of Gold.”

“MOM! I’m going to be late!” my daughter’s voice isn’t nice any more.

Creative Commons image by Liz West

I try another type of search. I am sure by now that no one refers to an “Age of Gold” in English histories, but that doesn’t mean the Czechs don’t have one. It could have been the era when royalty in the valley of Bohemia got a bunch of gold for one of those ridiculous crowns that make you pity young medieval kings—for all I know.

“Stupid idiot!” My daughter curses her younger brother in a loud hiss from the hallway, “Get out of the chair! I want to sit there!” There is only one chair for putting on shoes in our tiny hallway.

He shrieks in pain. It’s the standard thing that happens if I’m not there to physically separate them while they get there coats and shoes before school.

And I come unglued.

I tried to help her because she did ask nicely and the consequences of completely blowing off the assignment will be harsh. There are no accommodations for kids with learning disabilities. But I make a massive effort to teach my kids both responsibility and kindness.

My daughter regularly has to do “do-overs”. to speak nicely or do push-ups and squats for hitting and pushing or do “time out” for total freak-outs. She gets the consequences of poor grades regularly and we talk about cause and effect while tucking the kids into bed.

It isn’t the forgotten (or possibly blown off) homework that really gets me. It isn’t even the constant hitting, pushing and general meanness, it is the utter lack of awareness that someone is doing something FOR her. I’ll admit that I’m oversensitive to this at the moment because I find it to be a chronic deficit among the adults in my vicinity as well.

In the environmental organization where I volunteer, we had a crisis a couple of months ago We had several major actions set up but no one willing to volunteer to guide journalists around the site and answer questions. I would have done it myself, except it all had to be done in a language I speak with an accent (and occasionally creative grammar). No one wanted me in that role—least of all me—so I went looking for volunteers with the promise of my presence and support.

Finally, I found a petite young mother who wasn’t in a position to do the major organizing roles or to do direct action—given that she had a toddler in tow—but she was passionate and wanted a volunteer job. So, with a crash course in media relations she went into action. For two months she threw herself into the task. Finally, we had the media issue covered.

But then a competent professional came along. As a journalist, I’ll be the first to admit that he knows his stuff and he’ll likely do a great job. But there was one small problem. He didn’t thank the young woman, who had set everything up for him and held down the fort through those first rugged months. The organizers didn’t thank her for saving our bacon back in August. She was overstepped by the professional and dismissed.

I also worked as a full-time volunteer for two months last summer. I had some time off of work and time when my kids were with their grandmother. Instead of taking that time to write a new book or study medicinal herbs, I threw myself into the struggle for climate justice because it is the burning issue of our times and self-respect demands it of me..

I didn’t go into it because I wanted to be thanked or even appreciated, anymore than the impromptu press spokeswoman did. But I will admit that the respect I felt from other activists for the work I did was a major source of my intense physical and mental energy in those months. It was a much needed boost.

Through the summer, I welcomed, nurtured and trained hundreds of new volunteers. And I have been thanked at times, and once the people in my closest team commissioned a chocolate cake with my name on it when I stepped down as coordinator to give someone else a shot at the role. Thanks isn’t why you do it, but it matters.

As I breathe in the crisp air of late autumn in my withered garden, I discover something unexpected to be thankful for. The power dynamics I witnessed as an activist this time around have given me an unforeseen gift—just the plot twist I needed for a novel outline I’d been stuck with for more than a year now.

I come in with my cheeks burning from the cold, get some tea and head to my writing corner. While last year my writing muscles were exhausted and I could barely get through these blogs, let alone start on another book, I’m ready. Really ready.

That is something to be thankful for.

I am, of course, thankful for the tree just outside my door. I’m thankful for my husband, imperfect as he is who none-the-less means I’m not doing it all alone. I’m thankful that, after long struggle, our children are home. I’m thankful for mostly functional technology that makes the life of a mostly blind person much easier than it otherwise would be. I’m thankful for the literal fruits of my garden, my animals and this first blast of cold winter wind. I’m thankful for the warmth from my radiator and other small luxuries, for the very fact that I can write and my words do not stay silent in a box.

Gratitude is the most necessary element of relationship, even when it is the mere acknowledgement of a helpful presence or a mundane task done well for others. Gratitude is likely at least part of the key that we are missing in our disconnected world.

I am not a vegetarian for health reasons. But I am mindful in the way I eat and live. My thanks goes out to the animals and plants that I need to eat in order to live. And I wonder how the global crisis of meat production might be altered if everyone would take a moment to thank each animal consumed. It isn’t that often or that much for most of us. Many cultures used to do it and that one thing alone, might make all the difference.

P.S. There isn’t an “Age of Gold” even in Czech. She meant the “Age of Bronze”. or the Bronze Age but got her metals mixed up. Another frantic search in which the only purpose was caring for a child as best I can.

The unbreakable bonds: Who says animals don't adopt?

Three ducks and a pubescent hen waddle and peck their way around my yard. As I approach, one of the ducks--the black one--stands up straight and hisses at me. The other two ducks close ranks around the hen, which they consider to be a child, though she is quickly out-sizing them.

It all started last spring, when I surreptitiously deposited a few chicken eggs into the nest of the very broody black duck. I didn't have a drake, but I did have a rooster.

I also wanted baby chickens, but my hens are Australorps, which are perfect and wonderful in all ways, except motherhood. Somehow when their robust size, toughness and prolific production of large, pale eggs was bred into them, the mothering instinct was bred out. Most Astralorp chicks are raised in incubators.

I tried to buy chicks. I searched all over the country. My husband drove many miles, grumbling loudly about his wife's obsession with pale eggs that can be colored in the spring. No one was selling this year. I finally agreed to get a different kind of hens, which despite proper security measures managed to get out of the chicken run. And then they were too stupid to come back before a fox ate them, leaving neat little piles of feathers in the woods behind our house.

Hence my egg plot. And it worked amazingly well. The black duck not only sat on them and hatched them, but also became a viciously protective mother, keeping cats, hawks and humans away from "her" babies. Her gray sisters were indifferent initially but as time went on, they became her vehement hench-ducks.

They did eventually lose two of the chicks, however, through no fault of their own. The chicks simply got bigger and gained more independence than survival instinct. My large yard, which the ducks live in is not exactly chick-proof. It has a fence only around part of it. About an eighth of the perimeter is nothing but a short drop off of a rock wall to the road.

Some ducks have managed to fall or fly off of this wall into the road and if not rounded up in time, they have been run over by cars or eaten by neighborhood dogs. But these three ducks have proved smarter than most and thus have lived happily in our yard for a year and a half without falling off the wall.

Two of the chicks were not so lucky. First one and then another disappeared, once they got old enough to wander a few feet away from their adoptive mother.

So, my husband and I finally decided that we had to save the last chick before he set off for a three-week trip with the kids and left me home alone with the ducks and chickens. The place for the hen is in the chicken coop with her own kind. Clearly.

Not according to adoption law, it isn't.

We spent an afternoon securing the chicken run in every conceivable way and then herding poultry by scrambling through brush and facing down the angry, pecking adoptive mother. Finally, we managed to get the chick inside the chicken run with the ducks outside and close the small door between the chicken run and our yard. I herded the remaining two adult hens and the chick inside the coop, With a sigh of relief, we closed the hens into the coop for the night.

Whew! At last. We went home in the dusk and fell into bed, exhausted. The ducks were up all night though, crying, calling mournfully into the darkness.

I lay awake in bed wracked with guilt. I am an adoptive mother after all. The cries of the duck mother were heart-rending. My own children were away at grandma's at the moment and glad as I was to have a much-needed break, the old fears always lurk around the edges.

Once while I was in the middle of my battle with unexplained infertility, I adopted a stray cat, who promptly had six kittens on my porch and then disappeared as soon as the kittens were half grown. I found homes for five of them and kept the weak runt of the litter, a beautiful little female kitten. When she was old enough, I got her fixed. I had used up every friend and acquaintance I knew who wanted a cat and that IS the responsible cat-owner thing to do.

My cat was devastated. She mooned after the young of other animals and even tried to adopt a neighbor's kitten. I was consumed by guilt and fear that a kind of karma would ensure that I would never have children. Miscarriage followed miscarriage and in the end, I never did have biological kids. A little part of me still wonders.

But my cat had never successfully adopted a kitten and I read a few pseudo-science pieces during our own adoption process, claiming that adoption is unwise because it is "unnatural" and while humans pretend to ourselves that we "love our adopted children just as much as we would a biological child," we are just deluding ourselves and setting ourselves up for a lifetime of heartache and family conflict. These articles point to the high degree of marriage breakdown and attachment disorders in adoptive families as evidence.

And as my family struggled and foundered with first one kid with attachment disorder and then another with significant neurological disabilities, a small part of me sometimes wondered about those articles in the dark hours of the night. Was all this, our adoptions, our whole family, just doomed from the start? Was I fated to be forever alone without any children that were truly mine? Or had I somehow jinxed it by getting that cat fixed all those years ago?

If you've never faced hard family choices or built a family out of rubble and ashes, you may think I"m silly. But these are the things we don't talk about out loud very much.

My husband and I hung on through storms that do, according to statistics, tear the vast majority of families apart--infertility, attachment disorder and having a neurologically and behaviorally disabled child -- to name a few such rocks and shoals.

And now this. The crying mother duck in the night. By the next morning she was hoarse and exhausted but still crying out for her disappeared, last-surviving child.

I went up the hill and let the chickens out of the coop and into their enclosed chicken run. We had put a roof on it and secured every corner and nook. I was sure the chick was far too large by this point to fit through any of the little holes in the wire.

I went back down the hill to have breakfast. And after breakfast I went out into the garden, only to find the happy family, the mother duck, the overprotective aunties and their wayward adopted child, all pecking around the raspberry bushes.

Somehow--that chick had gotten out. That afternoon my husband and I grimly worked on the chicken run again, We closed pieces of mesh wire into the gate, so that even around the hinges there would be no way out. I also got a large pair of heavy sheers ready in my pocket.

We then herded the ducks and chick again. This time was much harder. They knew what we were doing and they protected the chick valiantly. It took a lot of scratches and pecks but we finally got all of them into the chicken run. Then, I grabbed the chick, while my husband herded the wildly squawking ducks out again. I then handed the sheers to my husband and let him clip the chick's wings to be on the safe side.

Again, we left the chick inside with the hens and again the ducks spent another miserable, grief-stricken night. The next morning, I let the chick and the hens out into the chicken run and watched for awhile as the chick tried to force her way into the space around the gate. Sure enough, that was how she'd done it last time. Well, with that mesh stuffed in there, she wasn't going anywhere.

I went down the hill again.

And when I came out to check two hours later, there was not a duck nor a chick to be seen. The adult hens were still there, but not the rest. I checked everywhere in the chicken run and coop. The chick was gone. And so were the ducks from the yard.

I was panicked, realizing that when their family was threatened, the ducks had done what any of us would do in the last extremity. They had gone on the run.

I started a desperate search of every inch of the yard and garden, including the street below the rock wall. Finally, in the last place I could think to look, I found them, all hiding together under the kids' trampoline.

I was just about ready to give up, but my husband was leaving for the three-week trip in the morning and the fact was--I will remind you--that our primary reason for trying to put this chick in with the hens was the untimely deaths of her two siblings. This adoptive home had not turned out to be safe.

So, one last time, we checked the entire chicken run, made a new and better roof and made sure that there was no way in the world an animal larger than a golf ball could escape from it. Then we herded the ducks and the chick with grim finality until we separated the chick and locked her inside the chicken run.

Then, I got my tablet with some work to do on it and sat on a rock near the chicken run to watch. I was taking no chances this time. She spent an hour on top of the chicken coop, trying to fly through the new roof and she wandered around to every corner of the chicken run, trying to get out. After another hour, I was convinced that she was stuck and I finally went home.

The next morning... You guessed it. The chick was back with the ducks and my husband was gone and herding unwilling poultry alone is a losing battle.

So, the unnatural laws of adoptive family solidarity have won for now. The chick has now grown into a young pubescent hen, ready to lay her first eggs. She follows the ducks through rainstorms, while other self-respecting chickens hide in their coops. She doesn't go swimming in the duck pond, but she watches from nearby.

She cannot physically survive this way much longer. Cold, wet autumn winds would give her pneumonia if she lived like a duck in the wet and rain. Someday, she'll have to get in touch with her trans-species adopted roots, just as my children will no doubt need to go their own way someday, but for now she is still convinced she's a duck.

Note to younger self

If you could send a message back in time, what would you tell yourself as a child being bullied?

I was recently asked this question as an intellectual exercise, but I had to wonder at the deeper reasons for the question. Is there something we can learn from adult memories of bullying or retrospective advice that might provide some practical help for those in similar circumstances today.?

My experience is only mine. It is particular and specific, possibly too specific to be applicable to others. But I do know this. There are things I did not hear from adults or peers that would have helped and some things I heard a whisper of but not enough. I know there are ideas that would have helped because I eventually found these ideas myself and they helped a great deal.

But I had to invent this wheel and the chariot that rode on it. No one gave ,me the pieces. It is possible, of course, that someone tried and I didn’t listen. Or that I wouldn’t have understood these things as a child, even if someone had told me. But I don’t think so. I think these words would have helped.

So for what its worth and in case someone out there must give advice to a child facing pervasive bullying or social ostracism, here is what would have helped me: .

Yeah, the kid in red and black with unmatched socks looking hopefully toward all the kids in pastel colors, that’s me in first grade.

1. It is not you. It is them.

2. It is not you. It is them.

3. It is not you. It is them.

4. Even if there is something you could do to make them bully and ostracize you less, it would only be less. You didn’t do something to “bring it on yourself.” Adults who say that want to believe it because they don’t want to believe kids will really do this to a disabled child for no good reason. It makes them really uncomfortable about the state of the world and the nature of humanity. And they don’t want to take responsibility for making ethics education a major priority. It is not your fault. You don’t have to figure out how to be more perfect. They are the problem.

5. “Social skills” are good. You should pay attention to well-meaning adults who try to tell you how to respond in ways that will help you. BUT those adults do not know what it is like. The social skills are a band aid to an epidemic. They are not worthless but your social skills are pretty average. You can figure out how to be a little more perfect, and maybe that will help. It will definitely help you win in job interviews someday. But it is still not your fault. It is them.

6. You are being bullied and ostracized because your eyes look different, because you are physically different and because of your family background. None of those things are actually bad about you. You are not the problem. The problem is in the minds of other people, in how they were brought up to be judgmental and bigoted and in the kind of society we have. It is not you. It’s them.

7. All the constant hype about how the most important thing in life and happiness is your friends, their number and their fun-ness, is wrong. People are only saying this to help kids who don’t get good grades feel that they aren’t a failure. There are plenty of ways to be happy without a bunch of friends. Find fun by yourself and with one or two friends. Being alone is not shameful or a failure. It can be lots of fun.

8. You are inherently an introvert. Even if you didn’t have a disability and you looked just like everyone else and you came from a typical family, you wouldn’t be the life of the party or the center of a crowd of friends. Some people get their energy from being with people. Some people get their energy from being alone. You will have fun with people but you need to be alone a lot. Being alone is not shameful or sign of a failure. Being alone will help you to be energized and to have fun with your friends when you do go hang out with them. Look at the things you actually like to do. Most of your hobbies, the things your really love, are hard to do in a big group and work better alone or with one or two friends.

9. Decide to be happy, even if no one will accept you. You will one day do this and you will be much happier. No one told me this, so it took me a long time to get. Maybe you could do it earlier and be happy sooner. Build yourself a happy life. Discover the joys of creating, art, writing and nature. Find work you love, no matter how little it pays. Focus on your passions and those good people who will stand by you, even if they aren’t perfect or if they live far away. You don’t need the rest of them to be happy.

10. Bullies shame themselves. Bullies destroy their self-respect. Self-respect is crucial to happiness. Your self-respect gets battered and bruised by being bullied but at least you still have yours. Theirs is gone forever, at least any honest self-respect. They can only ever lie to themselves about being a good person. I never did stoop to their level. but there were times I wanted to.

11. Don’t worry. Those adults who tell you that you have to fight back to stop bullying, even though you’re blind or one against ten and it is clearly a stupid idea—those people are just wrong and they think bullying is something completely different from what it really is. You really are worthy. Their sickness is their own problem.

12. You will be told to be quiet a lot. The people you trust most, your family and close friends will tell you to be quiet because it is hard for them to hear what is happening to you. When people exclude you, they will tell you to be quiet. They will tell you they are excluding you BECAUSE you are not quiet enough. They want your silence. A lot of people who have a disability or other difference have been silent. It does not help. Silence can help you to survive for a moment or two. Don’t be ashamed of the times you were silent to survive but know that it is not what you have a right to. You have a right to speak the truth. You have a right to be heard.

13. Those who love you need to listen, but it is hard for them to hear when you have been hurt so much that mostly what comes out is screaming. Start with “I feel…” State the feeling first. That helps them hear. When they still don’t listen, it is not your fault. It is not your fault that you are emotional or that your words don’t come out all concise and coordinated. Keep working at expressing yourself in ways people can understand. It is helpful. But there is no perfect. Being gentler and calmer will help sometimes. Sometimes it will make them comfortable with dismissing you. Being concise will help sometimes. Sometimes it will let them make their own assumptions.

14. You are enough. It won’t go away because it is them, not you. And you can’t change them without a major change in society. But you will escape from the power of bullies someday.

As i said, this is not a universal message. Bullying comes in different forms. For some kids it is only a few times. For some the physical part is worse than the psychological part, and for others it is visa versa. This is just my message to myself. It would have helped. Now I know what I needed to hear, what could have saved me a lot of dark years, but no one knew it then.

Those who meant well, meant well. They couldn’t know but maybe someone who knows a bullied child will discover a bit of transferable truth in it. I hope so. Feel free to share.