On Bullying. On Wonder. On the Narrow Road. And on Ovations of the Standing Kind.
I opened
his backpack only to pull out 4 individually foil wrapped chocolate chip
cookies, stale and crumbled. “Why?”
“I
thought I ate those.”
“Well, clearly Joe, you didn’t. Why?”
Silence.
“Please just tell me.”
“I
thought I ate them.”
“The
truth!”
Silence. Then.
“Someone made fun of me for bringing in a cookie. He said it was weird.”
My
oldest son. Bright, funny, fine in all
respects has been bullied since the start of the school year. Something he never even talked about, just
swallowing the sadness of isolation and uncertainty until it started showing up
in likely places: stomach pain that wouldn’t go away, sloppy errors that have
cost him in his favorite subjects, staring off into space, books left
untouched.
I
consider myself a vigilant parent, but I didn’t see the signs because I wasn’t
looking for them. I saw them clearly in
his younger brother, and Sam also will tell me when something is bothering him. But Joe?
He’s getting older. The lines
that divide fitting in and not, appearing cool and not being are becoming
cloudy and unclear.
Small
for his age with a smile that can take on the world, he has always made friends
easily. Not altogether that strong, but
eager to participate, he’s always picked for games outside. But the factions that I thought would come
later, and to be very honest, I believed would not affect his gender this
early, have come and Joe has found himself on the outside of the 4th
grade in crowd.
Joe is
my introduction to motherhood. And it
isn’t easy. Missing my own mother, used
to being entirely on my own, finding myself responsible for a child who would
never sleep, and couldn’t nap unless he was held, was an exercise in daily,
relentless torture. Some days we’d have
a staring contest, me looking into eyes that resembled my own, eyelashes that
WERE mine once, and wondering if we’d ever be on the same side.
That day
came. And fast, and I’ve found him to
be exactly like me, but the souped-up version.
The better one, the more compassionate, the more
forgiving, the
smarter. Every day he amazes me with
his mind, his insight and his uncanny ability to read people with a precision
that he doesn’t just save for books.
 |
| "Just lean on me Mommy, when it hurts." |
This
child. Extraordinary. This child has been isolated. Told he’s weird. Told he’s “too pretty.”
Told he’s not wanted. His
difference has struck constantly, as swift and painful as any weapon in the
wrong hands….
“They say I must be one of the wonders of God’s own creation.
And as far as they see they can offer no explanation.”
Natalie Merchant, "Wonder," Tigerlily
When I
heard “Wonder” for the first time off of Natalie Merchant’s 1995 album, I loved
it. Because it gave voice to something
not often spoken, and that was of an exceptional child who could manage and
better, inspire and transcend any limitations given. R.J. Palacio was inspired by the song too, and moreover an encounter with just such a child, outside an ice cream shop in NYC. An episode that left her shaken due to her
own visible and unkind reaction to a child with Treacher Collins syndrome and
how she was ever, ever going to be able to address it and teach her sons how to
as well. (In fact, her chapter called
“Carvel” in the book narrated by Jack Will is an almost verbatim rendition of
that real life scene that planted the seed for Wonder, the
novel.) It
was a sum of experience and song, I guess that gave rise to what I think should
be required reading for every parent and child and others in this family human.
 |
| Wonder |
The
novel is supposed to be about August Pullman, who enters the 5th
grade as a regular middle school student.
Until this time he’s been homeschooled; while Palacio doesn’t make it
clear whether or not Auggie has TC, she seems to allude to the fact that his
condition is even more rare, a combination of TC and something else that cause
his abnormalities to be extreme. But
that’s what Auggie’s got on the outside.
On the inside he has a devoted older sister Olivia “Via,” parents who’ve
remained together and love him to distraction.
….and new friends at this hive of absolutely shocking displays of
bullying, fitting in and puberty called Middle School.
You can
imagine the story. You can imagine the
backlash. My heart hurt just to consider
it. And your own flashbacks of
instances when you were left wanting come back in a ferocity of needing the
injustices to come to be righted immediately.
Because it’s clear that he’ll be bullied. And you hope the young children chosen by the administrator, Mr.
Tushman, will ease August’s way through.
And for me, well, I would hope that my child, if placed in that
circumstance, would be one of them.
My son
Joe is 9 and a voracious reader. We are
kin in more ways than one. So this
summer before he started 4th grade, I started him on Wonder. Because we talk often about the moments when you can choose what
is right instead of what is easy. And
this book amplifies just those choices.
For Summer Dawson, a pretty and popular girl, it is negotiating that gap
between childhood and girlhood with unease.
She simply refuses to go blindly into conformity. She’s chosen to remain true to herself,
which means sitting with a kid who’s different just because she likes him. And still believing in unicorns, and
escaping a popular kid Halloween
Miranda,
Via’s former best friend opts into the in-crowd just as Via is standing on her
own. But what she finds there among the
bright shining stars is vast space and emptiness. No comfort. No love. So she winds her way back like an errant
slack yo-yo to the Pullmans. After
severing your friendship, finding there a hopeful soft spot on which to land
takes not a small part of grit and none of it graceful and yet, Miranda
navigates between the two.
For Via.
So long in the shadow of a sibling who needs so much. A crusader and mouthpiece for her family. But also a teenage girl. She never had to make a choice, it was made
for her. And the daily amount of
audacity needed to brave the world not of her choosing, where nothing is quite
that easy and everything requires patience and compassion, that is something
else altogether.
And Jack Will a popular, good-looking boy, it is a struggle to fit his new
feelings of genuine friendship with August over his discomfort in aligning
himself with the school “freak.” He’ll
put himself in direct opposition to Julian, the wealthy, popular child
who runs a pretty tight crew. And his
innate understanding that in choosing August over Julian meant that he wasn’t
going to be popular. But he didn’t know
that the “entire grade would be turned against” him for doing it. As he says, “It just feels so weird to not
have people talking to you, pretending you don’t even exist.”
The cast
is set against a progressive private school
“When given the choice between being right or
being kind. Choose kind.”
So
that’s what we see. The characters
trying to navigate what it means to not be right and be kind and realizing that
most often, they coincide. Wonder
strikes a deep blue soul chord because of this. Because we, as readers, as people, as family, know this is all
true. I think it is amazing that Jack
can take the ostracism. More so that
Summer marches to her own unicorn beat without thought of the perception of
others. That Miranda finds herself back
into the fold that is unpopular but better for her soul. That Via finds balance. But I never thought truth would play out of
the fiction. And I never thought that
my bright, beautiful, engaging and compassionate boy would be on the receiving end of
unkind. And I am broken for it.
It
started innocuously enough, at one of the two events that make up a young
child’s entire social component of school: lunch (recess being the other). Table seating is assigned and Joe started
hearing jokes and stories that he still refuses to repeat. He wouldn’t join in the mocking of teachers,
students and the curses that other children threw into the air like confetti. He didn’t want to engage in it, so he
remained silent, then when pushed, "I don't think that's right." Condemning the action without hurting another. And that was
enough to get him blackballed, marked from the outset.
Before
too long, even though he would go up to the ringleader, my own son’s “Julian,”
and say, “hi,” he heard the boy say to others, “Did you hear anything? I didn’t hear anything?” Just like what happens to Jack Will, the
campaign of slow freeze had begun.
We’ve
talked about this, constantly. I want
my children to be the ones to stand up for the lonely. Befriend those who don’t have anyone. Sit at the lunch table with the new
kid.
Stand on
the side of what is “right” rather than “what is easy.” Because I remember how much I would have
longed for it as the teasing for me increased in elementary and then the
horrors of middle school boys whose collective torment is still enough for a
quick heart stop nightmare of remembrance.
I wish I’d had the courage to do it later, but suffering under my own
cloud of difference I didn’t want anything else marking me as other, even if it
meant standing with someone else who was.
But I suffered, and I wanted to be sure that my children wouldn’t
instigate or participate in the othering, choosing instead to be better. Take a higher road, consider the person
rather than the cool.
So Joe,
obedient and cognizant, did. Just like
Jack. But it was a failure because I
didn’t prepare him. I didn’t prepare
him, and didn’t consider, the loneliness that accompanies the right side.
And I am
sorry for that. So sorry Joe. Because being right isn’t like the movies or
in books. It can be very, very, very
lonely.
It’s
easier to go with the crowd. To say
that you don’t like someone, or say nothing at all while someone else spews
venom at another. It is the complicity
in hatred that causes all the hurt. And
it hurts. It hurts to know it and it
hurts to do nothing about it. And it
hurts just as much to do the right thing for it. It will require courage, tremendous courage to stand in the face
of what you know will hurt you and say, “no.”
It will
require even more courage to try again after being told no in return. That’s the more difficult, the narrow, the
harder path. It’s what you’ve been
taught. It’s what we believe. Our family follows the instruction of a God
whose son walked that same
When
your life is spent with a maximum height of 5’, your perspective necessarily
shifts that way, and a school’s concrete walls can seem like insurmountable barriers
erected for the sole purpose of loneliness.
Left alone in the lunchroom, ignored at his table, not invited to play
at recess, Joe looked around to eliminate anything else that would mark him. And he never told. Not once. Bright and
quiet, he retreated to a shy spot. His
teacher hasn’t had long enough to get to know the Joe BEFORE. He just is not equipped with the language of
exclusion. It’s a country that no one
wants to be in.
So I
told his homeroom teacher, and she has taken decisive and quick action. Because she gets it. And because she’s compassionate and kind and
amazing and made sense of my stumbly words.
We made a plan. She changed his
lunch table in front of me. She
understood just what this is. I asked
his math and science teachers to allow him to sit with friends until the acute
crisis had passed. While their sluggish
response, for whatever reason only known to them, has lagged longer than I would have liked, Joe
has squared his small shoulders and told me that Friday was a “better
day.” We talked and talked and talked
about anything but that this weekend allowing his personality to shake itself
off on the shores of what is familiar.
But this
morning, I pulled out those cookies.
And I realized how deep and dark this place is for him. How treacherous the terrain is for a child
once
I could
have told him to retreat. Allowed him
to stay in front of a computer or another flashing screen to lose himself in
virtual reality. But that’s not life;
that is not reality. Life is a gift
meant to be lived. Virtual simulation
holds no candle to it. And that’s what
God wants for Joe. And for all the kids
in his class.
And living life means
standing in the face of it: the brutality and the beauty of it. It means engaging more with other children,
no matter how scary, rather than less.
It means ripping off the shielding bandage so the sun and light and air
can begin to heal the wound. Those
scars are going to fade over time. It
doesn’t matter that you know that I wish they had never been made.
 |
| "It's a beautiful evening when you can be sitting on a stone step and looking up into the night sky." --Joe, a very wise 9. |
The fact
is that I cannot spare him what is to come.
I can meet, talk and plead for understanding. But I cannot take away the children who choose to place my son on
the outside of the circle. He will see
it again, and again and again. This is
the first of many moments where he will have to find words, and use them to
rent his way and stay his ground and fight for his right to be there. “Tell them,” I say, “tell them that you love
cookies and it’s completely fine to bring them.”
He looks at me. “Offer to bring
them in one too.” But Joe is
cautious. “I’ll try the first one,” he
says uncertainly.
At the
end of Wonder, August is given
an award for outstanding student. He finds himself called to the podium by the
awesome Mr. Tushman who quotes the American social reformer and abolitionist,
Henry Ward Beecher, “Greatness lies not in being strong but in the right using
of strength…. He is the greatest whose
strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.” August deserves the
Because
I think the medal isn’t for August, the standing ovation seems to be for him
but it isn’t. It’s for all of them. For Jack and for Summer. For Via and Miranda. For the kids who chose to be right when it
isn’t easy. An ovation for living your
life despite what may be hard and going through with it anyway. For having the confidence to push through
the dark corridor and to the other side.
Quiet acts of bravery that are amplified in childhood and set a luminous
stage for growth when the choices become more difficult and fraught with
consequences unforeseen.
 |
| “Everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their life because we all overcometh the world.” --August Pullman |
The
novel closes with the children’s precepts and the last one is Auggie’s,
“Everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their
life because we all overcometh the world.”
Joe is still in Jack’s chapter when he was mean at Halloween, but I am
hoping he makes it to this part soon.
When I got up last Friday after a knackering day of conferences and
plans and worries and emails and an equally exhausting evening of reliving a
greatest hits album of school rejection, I saw that my morning birds were still
soundly sleeping. I turned on the light
and curled up next to Joe, tracing his nose, and kissing his cheek, singing his
name off key. “Time to get up. Are you awake yet?” He nods and smiles. Hugs and even a laugh. Lately, he’s clung to me in the
morning. Burying his head in my side of
a fuzzy blue robe that’s certainly seen better days and breathing me in the
same way I used to breathe my own mother.
Her very smell would calm me and that fragrance memory is barely there
anymore; it’s a heavy loss. So I
understand it. Some smells of love and
security are strong and unique and unknown.
I am that for him. Maybe a day
will come when he will not need this.
But I am glad it is not today.
“Will
you wake me up every day just like that Mommy?”
Yes, Joe
I will. Because you have to know, you
just have to know in your marrow that every time I see you, hold you to me,
hear you speak there is a resounding chorus.
I hear it over, and over and over again because you Joe, you, are my
standing ovation. You are my
wonder.
