askyermom

Judging only on the way it felt, one of the worst things I ever did was to pants (or is it un-pants?) a classmate at school. I was not a bully ordinarily and I didn’t behave like one–ordinarily.

My backward glance at those days suggests I escaped serious bullying mostly by having an air of insanity. While I never experienced Stephen-King-style bullying, I was still bullied a bit, mostly by one kid who took the time to size me up as having nothing but verbal abuse in my tool kit.

In patiently working through her budding bully project, she escalated to the point of pantsing me and thereby kicked off the epidemic of fourth grade pantsing. (I may be off by a year or two, but we were old enough to feel shame about playground flesh. Little kids don’t care about such things, so we were definitely nudging into puberty at the time).

She invited me to cover my eyes for a surprise before yanking off my clothes without any permission whatsoever. I was furious and embarrassed and I scuttled away as if I was the one who had done something wrong. She laughed at me so much that I became confused. Was there some merit to this prank? Was I failing to understand the fun?

I do not believe there was any conscious deliberation at work in my reaction. I just took the earliest opportunity to spread the humiliation and pantsed another child in response.

It immediately felt like I had murdered a small animal. My victim never trusted me again. I lost some trust in myself, too. All of this behavior was beyond my understanding. It became another island of humiliation in the fog of my very puzzling experiences.

When people discuss crimes of impulse and opportunity, particularly child crimes, I think of this incident. I have no idea what I was thinking or if I was thinking. I also do not know where the immediate burst of hot shame originated.

How could I know so completely that I had done something heinous but not have had the foresight to avoid creating the horrifying experience? How could I have failed to predict that it would feel horrible for everyone? Something something developmental milestones, I guess.

This is probably why young humans are so random and un-trustworthy. They often have no idea what they are doing, much less what the results of their bad ideas might be.

And here they think we nag them too much. I don’t know if it’s possible to nag too much on the subject of safety. Watch your step! Buckle up! Protect the brain!

Bad ideas are always going to happen and I suppose we need to accept that as part of the human condition. If we tend to favor pessimism in our outlook, it makes sense to me that we would favor bad ideas over better ideas in the same way.

Cooking up a little mayhem could have been a winning strategy through history. How many times did being a little more murdery keep a family going? Why would people need rules for living that remind them not to kill people and so on? If nobody is coveting wives, there’s no need to make a new guideline about it, right?

The thing is, people will have bad ideas and act on them no matter how much we warn them or try to pad their environment. Some of us only learn how to manage life the hardest way. Stubbornly, we have to break a bone to appreciate gravity and we have to break a heart to appreciate safety.

Parents have a tricky balance to keep. We want to protect everyone, but we begin to notice that our protection can blunt all the edges of their lives. Without trying out some bad ideas, the kids don’t choose virtue. Instead, they are just tucked into virtue by default.

They have to do things, experiment, put some bad ideas to the test and jiggle all the knobs on the machinery of life. It’s really hard to watch, but that’s the deal.

Stay fortified and remember to celebrate the good ideas twice as much.

Love,
yermom

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