Bullying Flashback

I planned to write today about the lilacs I stopped and enjoyed this morning.  I wanted to talk about the memories they brought back.  But this evening I began using my new tablet to read the Homeschooling section on Pioneer Woman, and the subject was Bullying.  I was reading through some of the comments and suddenly, I was back in France, hearing my second grader tell me that someone pushed him against the hallway wall at school and now his glasses are broken.

The principal said that the school insurance would pay for the glasses since it happened at school.  We filled out the paperwork, (all this is in french), but no money ever came of it.  Did you know that the optometrists in France keep only the expensive frames out on display?  If you can't afford what is on display you are supposed to say "I can't afford these.  Do you have any cheaper frames?" And then they pull open a drawer and offer you some others.  I didn't know that.  So we ended up with expensive frames that weren't really what he or I wanted.

Then one day in the spring I took him to his karate class.  The teacher arrived a few minutes late and told the children to begin running around in a big circle in the middle of the padded floor.  There were about 40-50 children in the group, all about the same age and size.  As they began to run around once, I saw a boy run around in the center of the circle, then dart through the group, hit my son on the back and keep running on past him, as if he had done nothing.  My son could only turn his head back and forth, trying to figure out who hit him, as he kept running around the circle with all the others.

Can you imagine this?  I saw it happen three times before the teacher came out of the side area where he was changing into his karate clothes in full view of the parents and children.  I looked over there to see if he was watching the children at all and of course he wasn't.  He was in his underwear, hopping into his trousers. 

I couldn't tell who the boy was.  They were all running around in circles, and there were so many.  I couldn't figure out how to say loudly in french, "He's hitting my son!" so that someone would help somehow. I had gotten right up to the edge of the padded area and was ready to grab that boy the next go-round.  Then the instructor came out and started the class, and I don't have any memories after that.  We did not continue in karate.

I'm certain that my son was bullied many times during the three years we lived in France.  The difficulties of expressing anger and exactness immediately in another new language are extreme.  We finally told him to go ahead and hit those bullies and we would deal with it later.  We simply did not have any other way of reaching out to the school  They just brushed off my concerns and said all children do these kinds of things.  I felt that, me being an American, they tended to see me as a controlling female who was sticking her nose into things that didn't really concern her.

I've even remembered times when I was bullied.  It's difficult to recognize the first time someone starts cutting you down...  I stopped reading the comments on the Bullying post.  I've had enough.