There’s a certain kind of stillness to an animal that’s trying to be invisible. When you startle a squirrel or a rabbit, before they decide that it’s safe to run, they’re so immobile they almost shimmer.

I know what it feels to will yourself to be imperceptible, to stop breathing, even thinking. I remember doing it in grade school, whenever the subject of the class turned to whales. Or cows. Or the Titanic. Anything really big.

I willed myself to be invisible because if certain classmates remembered I was there, they would say, “Hey Amy! Is that your mom?” “Hey look Amy! It’s you!”

They would say those things because I was fat, of course, and they didn’t want me to forget it. They didn’t want me to forget that my fat body was wrong and I was wrong for having a fat body.

I was bullied for other things, too – for having an accent, for wearing glasses, for being liked by teachers, for being the new kid. But fatness was the recurring theme in all the Commonwealth countries I got bullied in. The colonial world is united in its hatred of fat kids.

There was no help for me

The adults in my life didn’t do anything to stop the bullying.

My mother gave me advice about not letting the bullies see that they were bothering me, and reassurance that I was loveable despite what they said so I should ignore them. Her advice was limited to how I should respond; she didn’t know how to change the situation.

I don’t remember a teacher or principal being any more help. If they did anything, it didn’t have any effect.

By the time my children were in grade school, there was a lot more talk about bullying. Today’s kids attend anti-bullying assemblies and and see anti-bullying posters on the school walls. Once a year the children of Canada observe Pink Shirt Day to raise awareness of bullying. (As if children aren’t aware of bullying.) One of the things children are told to do if they fall victim to bullying, or see someone else being bullied, is to tell an adult. But my kids noticed that when a kid told an adult about bullying, nothing really changed. Maybe a small lecture would be given, or two kids would be temporarily separated, but soon the teacher’s attention would be elsewhere and the bullying would continue.

You might argue that it’s just too hard for adults to do anything about bullying, but consider the process that swings into action when a school nurse spots a single nit in a child’s hair. The child is sequestered from the rest of the student body and forbidden from returning to school until they’ve completed an expensive (financially or time-wise) course of treatment and been deemed clear of nits and lice by a school adminstrator.

Lice are basically harmless, and yet children with lice are forbidden from the classroom, even though it interrupts their schooling.

Bullying causes anguish in the moment and permanent damage in the long term, and yet it’s effectively accepted in schools. The truth is, childhood bullying is treated as an unchangeable fact of nature.

The effects of bullying

The first thing I learned from bullying was to become invisible. I was “shy”, I didn’t speak up in class, I didn’t try new things or sign up for teams or extracurriculars. I didn’t take risks, for fear of drawing attention to myself.

The bullying stopped in grade 9, for reasons that are still unclear, and gradually I started to come out of my shell and express a point of view, however mild, in my appearance and behaviour.

But my choices would be steered by my childhood tormentors for years to come.

In October of my first year of university, I hooked up with my first boyfriend. Apart from the fact that he was 22 and I was 17 (which I thought, at the time, was pretty cool) he was an okay guy. In retrospect that was very lucky, because the truth is after years of being told I was disgusting, I would have gone out with anyone who showed an interest. I thought this was my only chance to have a partner.

I studied math in university. Even back in 1992, women were being pushed into technical fields, and there were few enough women studying math that I felt special and superior for doing it. After years of bullying, it was intoxicating to feel special and superior.

Nevertheless, a few months into my first year I admitted to myself that I was miserable in math. I wasn’t interested in it, and I wasn’t good at it. It was wrong for me.

For a few agonizing days I thought about transferring into the technical writing program. (In retrospect, I should have studied literature or psychology, but I was very career focussed and wanted to do something “practical”.) However, there was a significant seam of disdain for “artsies”, students in the Arts department, among the students of the University of Waterloo math department, the “mathies”. And for all its practicality, the tech writing program was under the art department, and transferring would make me an artsie.

After years of being disparaged and denigrated, I couldn’t give up the belonging and superiority I felt as a member of the math department, and I couldn’t face the disdain of my fellow mathies. I stayed in math.

Fast forward six years. I had traded in my starter boyfriend for another boyfriend, superior in every way. I had somehow squeezed out of the University of Waterloo with a math degree. I had a job in tech — not a great job, but a job. And my boyfriend and I were talking about getting married.

My mother had gotten married because she wanted to be a mother, but after it became clear she wasn’t happy in her marriage
she couldn’t find her way out. She was married for 35 years. She reminded me, often, that I didn’t have to get married to have children. She wanted me to find my own way, and keep my independence, so I wouldn’t be trapped the same way she was.

I knew, in a vague, unformed way, that marriage was an institution that wasn’t designed in my favour as a woman. But that idea was drowned out by the siren song of conventional success, and so I went ahead with the marriage, and it worked. I got what I wanted: children, a family, and a feeling of safety and legitimacy that I’d never had before. I felt like I’d arrived, and as a (straight, white) wife and mother, I felt unimpeachable.

Did I literally get married to prove to my childhood bullies that I was worthy of love and a place in society? No.

Did I get married to prove to myself and the world that I was acceptable by the same rubric of conventionality under which my bullies deemed me unacceptable as a child? Absolutely.

Childhood bullies are doing adults’ work

Kids, for the most part, do not invent new things to bully each other about. Children bully each other for being fat, for not conforming to gender expectations, for having the wrong skin colour and unfamiliar lunches and odd clothing, for having disabilities and physical differences.

These things continue to cause grief in adulthood because they are adult concerns, downloaded onto children. Children are not born thinking that fatness is gross or that people in wheelchairs are to be pitied or that other races are less-than – they are taught these things.

Bullying works

When my kids were small, in kindergarten, they had trouble getting their winter boots on the right feet. I assume this is a problem that would correct itself eventually, because I don’t know a single adult who finds themself out and about with their boots on the wrong feet. At least, not when they’re sober. Nevertheless, as with so many things that adults really don’t need to bother with, at the time this seemed like a big concern to me and the other grown-ups in my kids life.

And then one day, one of my kids told me about “banana feet”. That’s what the kids called each other when they put their boots on the wrong feet. Sure enough, after being called banana feet, my kids got their boots right.

Bullying works.

I lived in England when I was eleven and twelve years old. England is a world centre for bullying — it’s pretty much the national sport. The great thing about England is the grown-ups will bully you, too, so there’s no respite.

Along with all the usual topics of torment the children of Norfolk introduced me to a new and inscrutable epithet: slaphead

It took me a while to realize that I was being singled out for not having bangs (or a fringe, as they called it in England back then). Any girl who dared to pull her hair back and expose her brow instead of having bangs would be called slaphead. This was not a subject that concerned the children of Canada or South Africa, and I still don’t know why it was so important to English children.

But I do know that a lot of English women have bangs.

Bullying works.

Bullying is permitted (because it works)

Bullying exists on a spectrum of social control, somewhere between, at one end, disgusted looks from strangers and pointed questions about your career and relationships from relatives, and at the other, hate crimes and murder.

Bullying is not something that adults can’t affect because it’s an inevitable fact of children’s behaviour; on the contrary, bullying is modelled and permitted because it serves a purpose.

It teaches children that things will be easier for them if they fall in line, conform, and behave. It teaches them that those who don’t can and should be made to suffer, and the complacency of adults teaches them that that suffering is acceptable and appropriate.

Those lessons aren’t just for the bullied: they’re learned by the bullies and the bystanders, too.

And bullying works. Being bullied as a child steers adult choices in ways that one might not recognize, at the time or ever.

Thirty-five years after the bullying finally stopped, am I still making choices to appease my bullies? Probably. Because my bullies were not speaking for themselves, they were the mouthpieces of society at large, and the lessons I learned from them are echoed and reinforced every day.