I remember it vividly. One of my earliest “best” friends, or at least in the top three, came up to me with a couple of other guys by his side. He looked at me with a face that I’ll never forget and said, “You’re a fag.” To this day, I don’t know why. I just know that as a junior high student, this devastated me.
You’ve been there; you know how formative those years are. It’s kind of odd that I remember almost nothing of junior high, but I remember this and several other times I was bullied. That’s the thing about bullying; you just can’t shake some of it off. What’s more; the effects don’t go away.
The story doesn’t end there though. I got some payback – or so I thought. We were in gym playing softball – playing ball was about the only sport I was any good at. My friend (or ex-friend) came up to the plate. I knew where he would hit the ball because he always hit it in the same place. He did; the ball sailed out to left field and I went after it. Unfortunately, another kid was there, but the ball bounced off his shoulder and I recovered to make a truly great catch.
I remember having a really good game that day. Afterward, in the locker room, the gym teacher who didn’t really say much to us, said, “Boys, Cross came to play ball today.” I was ecstatic because someone recognized that I could actually do something well. Then, one of the popular kids said, “Don’t let your head swell so you can’t get it out the door.”
My head never swelled because I considered myself a loser and never thought I did anything to be proud of. My moment disappeared in a poof of depression. One sentence ruined it.
People who bully need to be aware of something. The bullied victims sometimes feel so low about themselves they try really hard to do something great, but when they get bullied again, they often give up. Others don’t try at all. Some withdraw; some kill themselves.
It’s easy to kick someone down, but it takes a real jerk to kick someone when they’re already down, and a real ass to kick someone when they’re trying to get back up again.
I still remember the multiple times I was bullied, and I’m still trying to prove myself 50 years later. Don’t tell me and other people who’ve been bullied to just get over it. It’s not that easy.
Anyway, because of the bullying I still vividly remember and because I suffer from a mental illness, I wrote Drowning. It isn’t autobiographical, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t any part of me in it.
If you want to, purchase my book. If not, don’t.
However, I do wish you would think twice before you bully someone because you could be marking them for life. If you’ve been bullied, it may not feel like it, but you’re a great person who does great things. Remember that.
I’m an emotional eater. Since I am also bipolar, you can imagine the havoc that wreaks on my weight management efforts. Oatmeal brings up incredibly mixed emotions including love, hate, fear, shame, and determination. Yes, oatmeal.
For most of my adult life, I have not eaten oatmeal. Occasionally, I bought the instant kind with fruit flavors like peach cream, brown sugar cinnamon, etc. but I didn’t really love them. It was more of a “well, I have to eat some kind of food for breakfast,” and instant oatmeal kept me from getting bored with the usual breakfast fare.
When we went to the United Kingdom, however, I decided to embrace my heritage by eating “porridge” nearly every day as it was a staple of the English breakfast much as eggs are for Americans. (I couldn’t bring myself to eat haggis which was also ever present.) The porridge was pretty plain, but if you doctored it up with butter and sugar, it didn’t taste too bad.
To my point. The reason why I hadn’t eaten much oatmeal in my adult life was because of the emotional attachments I had and still have with it.
We were very poor when I was growing up. (I’m grateful because we always had enough, but usually there was no extra.) Oatmeal, however, was always around, and as I grew older it came to represent for me in some warped way the symbol of our poverty.
I ate oatmeal enough when I was a kid, so, dammit, I didn’t have to eat it as an adult. I can remember my mom even feeding it to our dog because we didn’t have enough money to buy extra dog food. He turned his nose up at it just as I did.
Here is where the shame comes in. I remember one time when I was hungry. (I was always hungry – in more ways than in the need for food.) I told mom I wanted something to eat. She said that she could fix me oatmeal. I remember telling her that I was sick and tired of oatmeal, and I wanted something different.
My mom started crying.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized that my mom offered to fix me oatmeal because it was about the only thing left in the house to eat.
This time of year, all kinds of memories of my mom pop up because she died the weekend before Thanksgiving eight years ago.
One of them is how instead of being thankful that my mom was willing to fix me oatmeal, I made her cry. I’m ashamed of that now.
Mostly though, the great memories of my mom come up. And yes, a lot of them are associated with food. One of the things I think about is how creative she was with the little bit we had. I don’t know how many of you ever ate pie crust with cinnamon and sugar, but I can tell you that when we were kids, the nectar of the gods couldn’t have been more delicious.
This morning, I fixed myself oatmeal that I doctored up with a brown-sugar, stevia mix; some cinnamon, some butter, and a cinnamon Fiber one bar. It was scrumptious, and as I ate it, I thought about my mom and how blessed I was to have her.
