Princess Di

DG was a bully.

Actually, I tend to think of the word "bully" as applying to someone who is a peer of the victim. That is, kids can bully kids and adults can bully adults. Is there a word that better describes when an adult harasses a kid?

Whatever. We’ll use "bully" for the purposes of this post.

I was friends with her son, IG, from the age of five. IG was the same year as I in school. Their family lived around the corner from us, and we shared a backyard fence. DG, an Australian woman, only occupied the role of "my friend’s mother" in my mind—the one of whom you ask to use the phone or the one from whom approval must be sought for sleepovers. I came to learn early in my friendship with IG that his mother was not someone you cross. She was big on respect—more specifically, being shown respect, or whatever she defined as respect. She was the dictator of the household, prone to argumentation and anger. This image of a matriarch stood in stark contrast to my own mild-mannered mother.

I’m not sure when the targeted bullying of me started. The first instance I can remember was one morning following a sleepover with IG at their house, probably in the summer between fourth and fifth grade. After eating breakfast, DG told us to brush our teeth. I did so, then walked outside to find her as she was gardening and tell her that I finished. Apparently, it was not long enough for her standards. She launched into a several-minute tirade about plaque and long-term dental health, ultimately demanding that I go back and brush my teeth again. Humiliated, I slunk back into the bathroom and repeated the task I had completed minutes earlier. I brushed for much longer than I otherwise would have because I knew she was monitoring me. She was satisfied. During all subsequent sleepovers at that house, I brushed my teeth for longer than normal.

Sometime in fifth grade, IG and I were at his house, and he declared he wanted to go to my house to play my family’s computer game Age of Empires II. Now, my mother had raised me to believe that inviting yourself over to someone else’s house was incredibly rude. But, in addition, I had no interest in Age of Empires II. Going along with IG would effectively spell a death sentence for our hangout that afternoon. When I protested his suggestion, he physically charged at me with his typical threat of "tickle torture", which he deployed frequently in the years of our friendship to force me into compliance with his wishes. In a Pavlovian manner, I shrieked, "Aaaahh, okay, fine!" and he relented. I went inside to use their phone to call my mother and ask if we could come over. "Hey mom, can IG come over to play Age of Empires? I don’t really want to, but he does." DG overheard me. After I hung up, she pulled me aside for a ten-minute lecture. All I remember is that she kept saying to me, "You need to be open." I think she meant that I was at fault for not going along with what IG wanted to do. As I sat there and nodded, I kept thinking, "How is this my fault? Why am I the one being punished for this?" IG’s behavior was not addressed or reprimanded.

But the bullying really came to a head in middle school. Our families were in a self-organized carpool program with three other neighborhood families. On the mornings when it was DG’s turn to drive us to school, I was supposed to walk around the corner and meet them for a 7:15 AM departure. On each of these days, DG always said, "Good morning," to me. I started off by saying, "Hi," in response; but then she began insisting that I say, "Good morning," instead of "Hi". I complied, despite the fact that the other three carpool kids were not held to this standard.

One morning, IG was running late in packing up for school. So DG drove with me to pick up the other three carpool kids, returning for IG afterward. While DG and I drove together in the car, DG gave me a lecture about respect and how I was disrespecting her by the ways in which I greeted her in the morning. I cannot recall the thrust of her argument, but the takeaway was that she thereafter required me to say, "Good morning," to her first before she said it to me. I was enraged. What the hell was her problem? Why was she singling me out like this? My eyes looked around as we drove; I caught sight of myself in the rear-view mirror, and I realized that my jaw had dropped open. She must have seen the same thing; she next said, "I’m not saying this to upset you…" Perhaps she thought it was her duty to train me in the ways of whatever arbitrary social rules she felt like imposing upon me, her target.

None of the other carpool kids ever received a similar chastisement. For the next three years, every other person in the carpool program was able to get away with saying, "Hi," or "Good morning," to DG after she said it to them first.

Mornings of DG-driving days were instantly transformed into high-pressure performances for me. I parroted, "Good morning," devoid of any cheerfulness and full of fear. What would happen if I failed to say it to her before she did to me? What would happen if she didn’t hear me? What was the next DG lecture lurking around the corner for me?

In seventh grade, the advanced-track science classes—which included IG and me—went on a field trip. DG was a parent chaperone, and she drove her minivan. IG was not in my period, so DG was not my chaperone; however, because we returned in the evening and missed the carpool, DG took me home afterward. As we entered our neighborhood, IG and DG began to get into an argument. It was an incredibly uncomfortable situation for me to be sitting mere feet away from them as they bickered—a spectator. As DG stopped in front of my house, the argument did not pause. I waited for a break in the conversation to bid farewell, or for DG to initiate the goodbye proceedings. A goodbye was not exchanged. Silently, I opened the van door, grabbed my backpack out of the trunk, and went inside the house. DG and IG seemed oblivious of my presence, continuing to argue the entire time.

In the carpool ride the following morning (DG was not driving), IG handed me a note. It was a handwritten note from DG, the thesis of which was that she was upset that I did not say, "thank you for the ride" to her the previous night. She beat the disrespect drum again. When I read the note, I was furious. I had complied with every one of her absurd, nit-picky demands for how to address her up until that point, and yet she felt the need to criticize me for neglecting to adhere to yet another requirement that I didn’t even know existed. Besides, I probably would have acknowledged the ride if she and IG were not in the middle of an argument. What did she expect me to do, interrupt them?

I added, "Say, 'Thanks for the ride,' any time DG drives you anywhere, even if you have to interrupt her" to the ever-growing list of rules I had to follow when interacting with DG.

I could not understand why DG honed her aggression on me. Perhaps her children had heard the lectures she gave me dozens of times; but no other kids were targeted in the ways that I was. It did not seem to bother her that none of the other carpool kids said, "Good morning," to her first, or that they did not say, "Thanks for the ride," every time they exited her minivan. I wonder if she thought she needed to teach me to be respectful; that she saw me as her "project" to turn into what she defined as a well-adjusted person. What if her micromanagement of my speech was a twisted way of her actually caring deeply for me?

That, or she was exploiting my deference to authority figures which my parents and church had taught me. Her kids frequently argued with and talked back to her. I did not have nearly as much gall. Perhaps she got a rush from watching me shrink as she lectured me. Did she get pleasure from seeing me adjust my behavior to satisfy her wishes?

DG was unpredictable, her moods volatile. I never knew if what I did (or didn’t) do would set her off. But I learned a handful of behaviors that had near-perfect cause-effect relationships with her mood. In a strange way, I had control over her in this manner. I held a few puppet strings which I could pull (or not pull) to pacify her or to sour her mood. But I was a benign puppetmaster, albeit inadvertently—because I perceived the puppet as directing the master, rather than the other way around.

Thankfully, these elementary and middle school encounters were as bad as it got. When I was in the latter half of high school, the family began regularly attending our church, and DG got involved with the high school youth group. She hosted student small groups, went on mission trips with us, and joined us in group prayer. She seemed to mellow out quite a bit in those years. Perhaps coincidentally, her hair seemed to reflect this change in temperament; she let her natural brown hair color grow out, overtaking the bleached blonde she used to sport the entire time I had known her (which I had always interpreted as vanity). Part of me was indignant at her change. I wanted people to know that this was not the same woman that I grew up with; she used to be a monster. Perhaps this indignation would have dissolved if she had simply apologized for how she had treated me for many years before.