What it’s like to raise a child when you were once a bullied kid

Your son is now four – although you could swear it was just weeks ago that you held his tiny bare form in the delivery-room twilight – and you are standing in a schoolyard telling yourself that he will be safe here. You are joking with other parents while scanning the faces of their children for proof of kindness. Women burst into laughter behind you and your pulse quickens, a reflex honed long ago in a schoolyard of your own.

You stand straighter and muse about the heat. You watch him run with new friends before the bell rings, his face lit with laughter. You have taught him to be kind and you tell him to be strong. At home, you repeat the phrases meant to stop a bully in his tracks.

Stop that! I don't like that! You're being mean!

Okay, mama, I know, mama, I know.

The kids start a new game, pushing and pulling, and a smaller boy gets shoved hard to the ground, his face nearly hitting a wooden ledge.

"That's too rough!" a father calls out.

The rough boy's mom goes over and tells him to stop. "Other people can't tell you're just playing around," she says, tousling his hair.

Your tongue gets caught before you can respond because she's slinking back to her friends now, tanned and toned and rolling her eyes and you know that she's never known what it's like to be schoolyard prey.

You are accomplished and strong and funny but still, now, you can flash back to the girl you were, picking at grass as the kids surrounded you, their words tearing through your Benetton shirt to the self-doubt that pulsed like a beacon.

You can flash back to the John Hughes moment at your prom where one of the boys stopped you to say you looked beautiful, which reversed nothing at all, and still, now, you can't bring yourself to say the name of the animal they called you and still, now, you wrestle with the insecurities they unearthed and affirmed.

You want to believe the posters that line the hallway, declaring this school a bully-free zone. You want to believe that the teachers are still triggered by an overused word nearly scrubbed of meaning, that they're scanning the schoolyard with laser eyes for a group of kids encircling a child picking grass. That they will blow a whistle, break it up, punish for a first offence.

You can tell me anything, you know that, right?

I know, mama, I know.

But you know that a child who is bullied will often say nothing in order to protect his parents from the pain and shame he is feeling. And despite the love he gets at home, he'll reach a stage where the acceptance of peers is paramount, and its negation will brand a smoking new truth on his spirit, forever singeing his self-worth.

And you know, a bullied kid will do almost anything to make it stop, including joining the ranks of his perpetrators. Like when your own tormentors trained their sights on a boy with an accent and you crumpled a paper to throw at him at the designated time, so relieved the target was off your back. Still, now, you feel ashamed and know you could have done something as you watched him cower.

You have read that Finland is making real strides, that they're teaching kids to come to the defence of peers being bullied and show them empathy. You've read that this is working. You imagine what that would have meant to you, what you could have meant to that boy.

The bell rings and your son runs to you for a goodbye hug.

"Remember," you say, quickly, "being kind is also about being strong. Stand up for your friends if –"

"I know, mama, I know. I'm a superhero and my superpower is kindness."

He lets go and joins the current of bouncing backpacks and you wish there were a million of him. And as a friend takes his hand, it occurs to you that, maybe, there are.

Sarah Meehan Sirk is the author of The Dead Husband Project and a mother of two