Since I’ve been writing my memoir titled LOST: a daughter navigates father loss and discovers what it means to belong, I’ve decided to post a chapter. For me, writing a memoir is like looking in the mirror and suddenly seeing what was there all along. It is an act of self-discovery.
The more I read about bullying and how it is bad for the bullies as well as those who were/are bullied, the more determined I became that I needed to write my story.
Outsmarting the bullies–and myself too
Since I had exchanged energy with my paternal grandmother after my father’s death, I was more in touch with the ancestors. My father was an extension of her. And I was an extension of him. I had a paternal line. This line extended back to antiquity when the Parthenon was built—the picture that was on my father’s childhood wall–and before that even. I extended from my father into the future. I may have never met my grandmother in real life, but without her, I wouldn’t exist. As her granddaughter, I was an extension of Florence Jones Mason.
In my condition of deep grief, I was more in touch with myself and yearned more than ever to find out more about this group of people—my ancestors. I was still yearning to have the feeling of belonging somewhere and I thought I must belong to my ancestors. After all, I wouldn’t be here without them. I thought that if I found out more about my paternal line, it would help me be more of my self. Maybe it did help me by scaring me into seeing a future that was short and horrifying. We are all given a set of genes and mine weren’t great—to say the least. My father may have lived to the ripe old age of nine-eight, but my grandparents died in their early forties. Still, the connection to the past was there. I remembered how strongly my father identified with his “old neighborhood” when he was in the rehabilitation home at the end of his life.
When we had been in the dining hall of the home, a resident who sat at the table behind my father found out the neighborhood in which he grew up and greeted him with “Hey Fishtown!” Jennie was probably closer to my age than his. I didn’t know what she was in for, but it was terminal or so I assumed after I overheard her adult children talking about planning her funeral. I observed that she looked like the one old black and white photograph that I had seen of my paternal grandmother. Like my grandmother Florence, Jennie was a large woman and always seated in her wheelchair.
Florence wasn’t in a wheelchair as far as I could tell, but in the one photograph that I had seen of her, she was sitting down. She was at least as large as Jennie if not more so. When I was a child looking at the photograph, my mother who was a former practical nurse, told me that my father’s mother had a medical condition called “dropsy,” which meant that her knee was swollen. “Dropsy” was a condition of having water on the knee, which in my literal child’s mind I grew to understand as meaning having water in the knee. Since my paternal grandmother died of a heart attack in her early forties, she had probably been a few decades younger than Jennie was.
Jennie had grown up in the neighborhood next to Fishtown called Port Richmond. I learned a lot about my father’s background in that dining hall since many of the residents had come from the working-class row house neighborhoods of Philadelphia. A few of the men had large American flag blankets that they kept with them as they sat in the dining hall in their wheelchairs.
I began to understand why the men (they were all white) who had come from working class neighborhoods in the City and moved to the suburbs voted for Trump in 2016. Like my father, they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and thought everyone else should, if they could. I can see the argument that the voters for Trump just cared about themselves. There was an “I’ve got mine,” mentality of the people who supported him. But I think the motives go beyond that. I think that not everybody who supported Trump was as well off as they thought. I still think that people were duped. I think that by identifying and voting for someone with Trump’s personality and racist values, they thought they were better off. But they weren’t. Many people who voted for him had more in common with the people he spoke (and acted) disparagingly to. This included his racist comments as well as his dismissal of women and the mocking of people with disabilities.
Once I knew a little about my family history on my paternal side, I wanted to know more. But even while I was determined to research my family history, I wondered about my own relationship with the neighborhood in which I had grown up and then, when I could, fled from. For good reasons, I had cut ties with the few childhood friends I had before my father died. My father was gone so there was no reason to go to visit him in Levittown each week.
As I sit and write, I reflect that I was still deeply grieving the death of my father during this time. Doing the genealogy on my paternal line was my way of staying connected to him after he was gone. On a very deep level I was feeling unmoored. I desperately wanted to find out that I belonged and where I belonged. I was thinking that if I did a search of my paternal family history, I might find some solid rock in my background to cling to.
All my life, I had never fit in. It occurs to me as I write that perhaps there is a connection between bully culture and the culture of a country to that elect Trump for President. It’s easier to bully others than to pursue your own dreams. Also, there’s no small amount of self-hate that goes into being a bully. People are more compassionate about the damage that being a bully does to children when they are still children. But children grow into adults. And most bullies don’t change.
The first time that I remember being bullied is when my parents and I lived in Northeast Philadelphia. I was a toddler and the events that occurred led me to thinking that I was a natural-born Buddhist. We lived in Northeast Philadelphia until I was five. Then my parents and I moved to Levittown. In Northeast Philadelphia, we lived on Woodenbridge Road.
When we still lived in Northeast Philadelphia, I tried to be friendly with the other kids on the block, including a girl named Rosie who was close to my age and who lived with a family across the street. Most likely, Rosie saw that I was an only child and decided that I was lavished with attention by my parents, while her parental attention was divided between her and her four siblings. One day she came lunging at me and I could tell that she intended to strike me.
Instantly, I hugged her, thus trapping her arms at her sides so that she couldn’t hit me. My mother, who was watching from across the street, later told me that I was a smart little girl to stop Rosie from hitting me by holding down her arms.
When we moved to Levittown the bullying continued. I would be walking down the street, on the cracked sidewalk in front of the identical ranch houses on their identical patches of lawn, just minding my own business, when the taunting would start. There were times when I thought it was jealousy–like when a boy on the playground said, “Get that–Mason wants to be a movie star” when he found out that I aspired to be an actress. I never thought I was unique in having dreams, but maybe I was. When I was a child, my mother gave me a book, that you could write in, for me to write down my dreams and aspirations. Early on—in first grade—I wanted to be a fireman. I didn’t think about changing the term to “firewoman” and no one corrected me. Later, I wanted to be a singer in a jazz band. I grew up thinking that I could do anything. In retrospect, I see that this is probably why that I thought a woman could be a U.S. president in 2016.
One day in elementary school, I was swinging on the corner swing of the playground swing set. The asphalt of the playground was set above the steep hill behind me. Another hill that dropped off beyond the playground’s edge was on the side to the right of me. The afternoon sun was slanting down. I stared at its rays as I swung higher and higher. It felt as if the sun was pulsing into me as the rays lifted me higher and higher.
A boy nearby said, “Look at that, Mason thinks she’s special.” I was so used to verbal teasing that I was able to ignore it. But one day I encountered a physical act of bullying that was impossible for me to ignore. It made me more compassionate—especially for other marginalized people and ultimately for myself.
I suspect that I was bullied because I didn’t have a pack of siblings to bash back. Maybe being bullied is “normal” in that it is a rite of passage for kids who grow up to lead vastly different lives from their tormentors.
Ultimately, I was bullied because I was different. In Levittown, the landscape was cookie-cutter. The houses, the lawns, the stores, the people. Everything, it seemed, was the same except me. I was growing like a weed and was soon taunted because of my height. “Jolly Green Giant” and “Wilt the Stilt” (after Wilt Chamberlain–the basketball star who was popular at the time). I got the message that any kind of difference was wrong, even if you were identified with a stellar professional athlete. I remember once when some kid on the street looked up at me, and taunted, “Hey Wilt. How’s the air up there?” I responded loftily, “It’s great. Too bad you can’t smell it.”
Of course, everything went downhill from there.
Even though my mother had responded in the right way in Northeast Philadelphia when I had pinned Rosie’s arms to her sides in a hug so she couldn’t hit me, I didn’t tell my parents about the ongoing scapegoating. I was always losing popularity contests. I didn’t want my parents to assume that they had a defective kid. I think I felt especially protective of them because they were in their forties when I was born and therefore much older than the parents of my peers.
As I sit and write, I am in my home office. When my partner Barbara and I first bought our house, this room had been a child’s bedroom. The room has glow in the dark stars on the ceiling. They have been painted over but I can still see them at night. My childhood room–the room that my father slept in at the end of his life–also had glow in the dark stars on the ceiling. Like my home office, the stars were in the constellation of the Big Dipper. I found out much later “the dipper” was Wilt Chamberlain’s preferred nickname.
Wilt and I both hated the nickname that drew attention to our height—Wilt the Stilt. Wilt was seven feet one inch. I am about a foot shorter. He preferred his other nickname, “The Big Dipper” –born from friends who saw him dip his head when he went through doorways. I always loved the stars that form the Big Dipper in the constellation of the Ursa Major. To this day, I search for the Big Dipper when I look up into a clear night sky and am delighted when I find it.
As a child, I had no idea that Wilt had this nickname or that he preferred this moniker to something that reduced him to his height. I would have loved to have a nickname that recalled a constellation. I imagine that Wilt felt the same as me: We were more than just our height, our physical appearance. But it was our height that brought us closer to the stars.
My astute mother–who knew that kids can be cruel and who may have witnessed me being called “The Jolly Green Giant” or “Wilt-the-Stilt” –taught me the rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.” But one day the bullying turned so physical that it nearly killed me.
Fourth grade was my first year in public school. I had been transferred the year before from the end of third grade in a private Episcopal school. The private school was in an old red brick building covered with ivy that was on the banks of the Delaware River in Burlington New Jersey –not far from where I had sat on the beautiful day that I had shared with my father later in life. My mother said that she took me out of that school because of money. She implied that it cost too much. Tuition to that school was expensive. But my mother also meant something else too.
The other mothers’ class status was too much for her. The mothers of the younger kids went to the birthday and pool parties. I was oblivious to the other mothers, but my mother told me stories. One of the mommies, who wore a fur coat in the winter months, still had blackheads. Another one wore dresses that were low-cut in the back and backless. “She acts like a sex symbol–even though she’s forty,” hissed my mother. The final blow came when another mommy hit my mother on the head with a pool skimmer. “She said it was an accident,” my mother had fumed. “She’s just lucky I didn’t throw her into the pool after that.”
That was the end of private school for me. My violin that I had tearfully taken lessons on in first grade was stored in the closet of what was then my mother’s sewing room. My French lessons that I had learned in first through third grades were stored in the recesses of my memory. This made room for the learning of other languages in the future. I learned some Spanish over the years as well as more French. Currently, I am learning written and spoken Greek.
I attended public school starting in the beginning of fourth grade. I had dreams and aspirations about the future that seemed much larger than the life that I led when I was a child. I had my entire life ahead of me. The possibilities seemed limitless. But in transferring from private school to public, I had entered a different world where boys my age or slightly older ran the lawnmower over cats and took off their tales. The boys then bragged about it which I found chilling in a way that made me feel oddly grown up. Other boys had fistfights with their fathers in the front yards. Now I see that we are all victims of victims. But then, when I was a child, I must have been terrified.
I told Barbara that I was writing about being bullied in fourth grade and that I had an enormous amount of compassion.
“For the bullies?!” she asked incredulously.
“No. For myself,” I replied calmly when she asked who I had compassion for. Then I added, “for the younger version of myself.”
“That’s good,” replied Barbara.
She went on to tell me she thought the concept of forgiveness was over-rated.
I paused and said I agreed but added that the bullies probably hadn’t gone on to live good lives.
Barbara didn’t say anything. She was probably thinking of something else.
But as I write this later, I reconsider as I think about the bullies:
Who knows, maybe they went on the become President of the country.
One day, at recess in the fourth grade, I was standing on the curb at the back edge of the playground, above the steep hill that led down to the ball field. This curb marked the boundary between the asphalt playground behind me. The sprawling one-story red brick elementary school was behind the playground. The hill was in front of me. I could hear the distant voices of kids behind me climbing on the jungle gym, swinging on the swings. The wind was at my back. I felt free–like I was a bird perched on the edge of a nest, about to take flight.
But then something went terribly wrong. I felt the heaviness of hands pushing on my back. Someone had shoved me–or multiple people had shoved me at the same time. I found out later it was a gang of boys from the playground. Instead of flying, I was falling. With a thud, I landed in the middle of the steep incline where there was a ledge. Suddenly, I understood the expression of having the breath knocked out of you. I remembered lying there feeling the weight of my body with no breath at all in me.
In Buddhism, there is great emphasis on the breath. The practitioner watches as the breath goes in an out. There is an awareness of thoughts that run through the mind, but the practitioner’s awareness comes back to the breath. We need to breathe for our survival. One Buddhist teacher suggests taking a breath when the phone rings–instead of just running to answer it. This completely changes the power dynamic. Instead of being like Pavlovian dogs responding to the stimulus of a bell, we direct our own destinies. Lately I have transferred this teaching of taking a breath too when I hear the little ping of the messenger on my smart phone.
In the ancient language of Sanskrit, the word prana incorporates the concept of breath with the lifeforce. Did laying there with the awareness of having had the wind knocked out of me, give me a sense of what the Buddhists call non-self? In Buddhism, this concept of the non-self means that there is nothing that is permanent, including the self.
But as I reflect on my eleven-year-old child self in a traumatic situation, I realize that I had no intellectual knowledge of the breath. If I thought anything, I was probably realizing that the world was a dangerous place where people want to kill your dreams.
Perhaps survival kicked in. Most likely I was thinking of nothing.
I am still grateful for each new day. Every day I thank the universe for allowing me to live in it. Maybe it was being pushed down the hill in elementary school that eventually made me grateful for each breath that I continue to take.
Miraculously, perhaps, the breath came back into me as I lay midway down the hill. As I gulped in air, the breath that was my life came back into me. I smelled the freshness of the air. The air smelled like freedom. It smelled like life. I was alive, but from that point forward I was afraid of heights. There was a connection, of course. But I didn’t put it all together until several years had passed after my father died.
This morning I was doing my yoga practice and listening to a Buddhist talk that focused on phobias. The teacher said that phobias are often connected to specific events. I flashed on the incident of being pushed down the hill in fourth grade. I never tried to suppress the memory and knew that the bullies had made me stronger. Yet, it made sense the phobia got stronger in the years after my father died. When we try to leave the past behind, it creeps up on us.
In my early twenties when I commuted from Levittown to Philadelphia to go to college, I would sometimes take the subway. I was afraid to stand near the edge of the platform. Even in the middle of the platform, I would make sure that I was standing next to something I would hold onto a pillar in case someone might come up behind me and shove me. I had read a news story about someone who was pushed onto the tracks and was killed by an oncoming subway train. I was horrified but I never connected the dots back to that day on the elementary school playground.
I have had no doubt over the years that the Levittown bullies made me stronger. As I write this, it occurs to me that the bullies made me become more of who I am. Maybe I didn’t fit in and struggled with a sense of not belonging anyway for most of my life, but I could not deny that I was different. For a while after I came out as a lesbian in my early twenties, I had thought I found my group. In the early eighties when I came out there was a kind of lesbian uniform of jeans and tailored shirts with the collars tuned up. We looked enough alike and dressed enough alike to feel like we were of the same “family.”
But that family turned out to have some major differences and I was again searching for that place where I could find all of myself. By the time I became a Unitarian, I was in my fifties. I had found a place for myself that honored difference because everyone was different. But I still had some realizations to make.
Then this morning when I was meditating everything became clear. My descent into drugs and alcohol was my way of letting the bullies win for a time. The bullying was the worst between fourth and seventh grade. Not coincidentally, I left private Episcopal School at the end of third grade and entered public school in fourth grade. My mother thought of this as a practical move, even if she was motivated by the behavior of the other mothers. She told me that she and my father would save a lot of money which they could then use for my college tuition. I’m sure this was true. I’m not sure what the private Episcopal school cost them each year. But if it’s anything like the tuition of most private schools nowadays then it must have been dear even then. But for me, it was a cultural shift. I entered the landscape of working-class America full-time.
In seventh grade, much of the bullying–but not all–came from the cliques of girls (from the popular girls to the clique of “bad girls”). Despite being in different cliques, the girls met the same fate of marrying young and having babies right away or of being young single mothers.
A boy named Michael, who was the class clown, made my life miserable in seventh grade. Ironically, his mother was my favorite English teacher in high school. I took care of Michael at the tenth high school reunion when I encountered him in the large dark room, squeezed his upper arm and told him to say hello to his mother and to tell her that I became a writer. “You did?” he had squeaked. Then his little smiling cheerleader-type wife smiled up at me and said she would be sure to tell Michael’s mother who would be thrilled to hear that I had become a writer. I couldn’t have been more grateful.
Karma’s a bitch.
What I realized after meditating this morning, is that a few years after the bullying tapered off, I began to internalize the hatred when I started using drugs and alcohol. I was so thrilled that I finally had a crowd to run with–instead of being a super unpopular girl–that I didn’t see it then or even later for a long while. But there was always a line that I didn’t step over. Looking back, I see that it was more than luck. But I had plenty of that too. It felt to me afterwards that someone had been watching over me. Years ago, I came to the conclusion that it was my maternal grandmother who died when I was thirteen. Now I think my paternal grandmother, Florence Jones Mason, must have been looking out for me too. And I now know that my good fortune in life is because I had parents who showed me that there was more to life than I saw every day: things like Art, Beauty, Vastness.
Still, in varying degrees, I have dealt with urges to self-destruction my entire life. This has dropped away over the years. But now that it has occurred to me that my self-destructive adolescent behavior was no doubt caused by my internalized message of the bullies, I see everything differently. Maybe when I was an adolescent, some part of me decided that I did not deserve to live. But I did go on to live and I lived as myself.
I outsmarted the bullies–and I outsmarted myself too.
To read another chapter of my memoir in progress click here.
To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT
The announcement was made close to the 35th anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk, who became the first openly gay official to hold public office when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.
Janet Mason, author 