Joke of the Week

My best friend in Indy recently put up a Facebook post that said “girls are mean” referencing 8th grade girls.  Her friends in the know replied with “Yes they are” and went about commenting on other things. 

I just have to wonder – have we become so accustomed to cruelty that we have come to expect it?  Why are we so mean to each other?

Thinking back to my 9th grade?  I was no exception to the girls Steph described.  A friend and I created a weekly newspaper we called “Love Letters.”  We’d write our reports on heart-shaped sheets of paper stapled together at the top.  That one copy somehow made the rounds not quite as virally as today’s applications, but rather impressively still.  We wrote on who was dating who, featured the ‘couple of the week,’ and titillating break-ups.   That part was all pretty benign.  The part that was so mean was our joke section.  There were the standard funnies that were going around or that we’d heard somewhere and sometimes we'd clip a comic from the Sunday paper, but we always had “The Joke of the Week.”  The mean part was that sometimes that was followed, quite simply, with someone’s name. 

I know why I was the girl that wrote Love Letters and who featured a fellow student as The Joke of the Week.  You see, I’d been The Joke of the Week on more than one occasion.  My mother, who never understood how ‘modern’ girls behaved, often dressed me out of style at best and in my brother’s hand-me-downs at worst.  The clothes were ill-fitting, or unflattering and always too short.  To this day I won’t wear ankle length pants.  I have flashbacks to the teasing as soon as I see my pants fall short of draping over the tops of my shoes.  It really did hurt my feelings and what made it worse was that I didn’t choose it.  I didn’t have a job and couldn’t get one at that age; therefore I had no money and had no control over what I was given to wear.  The teasers, though, never took that into consideration. 

So, in response to my pain, I picked on some poor kid that was socially awkward and made him or her The Joke of the Week.  Did it make me feel better?  I suppose.  It at least put the spotlight on someone else for a while.

I wish I could go back and do that year over again. 

Today I was checking myself a bit.  Do I still do and say hurtful things?  Right off the bat, I realized I have the reflex to be mean to anyone who ever hurts my children.  When the beings I love the most are injured, I just want to lash out and make that other person hurt just as much.  But, here’s the thing.  Even though that seems somewhat justified, what purpose does it serve?  If I apply logic, it fails.  Justice is one thing.  Revenge just perpetuates the problem.  After all, isn’t that the very reason they hurt my kid in the first place?  Someone gets their feelings hurt, they hurt back, that person hurts, they hurt forward…  on and on.

I have always felt that my job as a parent is to get out of the way and let the kids become who they inherently are.  My job isn’t to ensure they become a doctor, lawyer, or head cheerleader.  My job isn’t to lord over their homework and lock in those good grades.  My job is simply toward their character.  They are under my guidance to become kind, gracious and compassionate humans.  If they fail at that, I have failed. 

When I have to explain to Dia that something she did wasn’t kind, I always remind her that we don’t need any more hate in this world.  There are enough bad guys to last us.  This world needs love and the best we can do is provide that, one person at a time.