I Was Bullied As a Child

And I’m determined that won’t happen to my son.

-Jennifer Lubell

When I was 11 years old, someone held me hostage and bullied me. And the memory of that ordeal has made me all the more determined that it won't happen to my son.

The saddest part about this story is that my tormentor was someone my own age, a girl in my 5th grade class, someone I considered to a friend.

Jasmin (not her real name) had been the new kid at school. I remember the scared look in her deep brown eyes when she walked into my 4th grade classroom. I could tell she was shy. When she spoke her long and complicated last name, some of the kids laughed, and she began to cry. We became friends later that day.

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As the year passed, Jasmin, myself and another childhood pal became inseparable, an all-girl version of the Three Musketeers. We played at each other’s houses, hugged each other at the beginning of play dates, and walked to school together.

As these stories involving young girls too often seem to go, one of us became the odd man out. And that person was me. Maybe it was because I was smaller than my other two friends and they felt some sort of strange power over me. Or was it because my mother cut off all my hair after a bad bout of chicken pox? That left me with a frizzy roof of curls, ripe for teasing. Maybe there was no reason at all.

Whatever the case, I felt something negative developing between Jasmin and myself, and as a child, I didn’t have the insight to figure out what was going on. One sunny weekend day I propped my bike in the driveway of Jasmin’s house. After she greeted me at the door, her mother appeared and announced that she and Jasmin’s father were taking an afternoon nap and that we should entertain ourselves.

Within minutes of their bedroom door closing, Jasmin started shoving me. Then she began ordering me around, asking me to do crazy things, like jumping jacks and other calisthenics. I got scared and tried to leave, but Jasmin, a bigger and stronger girl, locked the front door.