One of the mantras at work in first grade is this: You can’t say you can’t play. There is oh-so-much work that goes into making those six words come true! As I said, mantra, or perhaps more fittingly blueprint, they tell us how to act—you must include others—and without saying how the other person feels, there is the assumption that empathy is the goal. In another circumstance, you might be the one potentially not allowed to play.
My first grader talks about can’t say you can’t play a good deal. I think it’s safe to surmise that he wholeheartedly accepts—yet also struggles at times—with this tenet of first grade citizenry. The struggle comes from this concern: what about when you just really want to play with one friend? Everybody’s friends in first grade, after all. Sometimes, as I listen to him discuss concerns with me or with a buddy, or watch the early morning choice time in action in his classroom, where small groups tend to form around activities—and if a child shows up at a game or blocks or the drawing table, so long as there’s a physical space open, s/he is let in—I have such respect for the teachers’ steadfast guidance toward instilling and reinforcing such a bedrock for friendship and kindness. So often in the mornings, I leave Remy’s classroom aware of the tenderness and durability contained in these life lessons.
Bullying, though, is not simply the opposite of kindness—it’s so much more complicated than that—and it has been much on my mind these days. Last year, just down the highway from us, 11 year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover took his own life, apparently in response to homophobic bullying in his school. Even more recently, 15 year-old Phoebe Prince, again just minutes down the road from our town, took her life, reportedly in response to cyber-bullying. Further away, but personally closer to my heart, has been this extremely disturbing situation: a boy in my friend’s son’s class—second grade—threatened her little guy, promising to use his father’s gun (this child’s father apparently has one).
My friend and her husband took action. Within days of the threat, they were meeting with school officials (by then the classroom teacher and principal had responded to the immediate situation). This being the 21st century, one string of her “support team” took shape via email. This thoughtful chorus of parents and teachers (and admittedly, loads of verbose writers) weighed in. Spanning the country, ideas sprung forth about how tough to be, how to keep a tone that kept channels open, how constrained by threat of legal actions schools are, how to remain compassionate toward a seven or eight year-old boy tangled up enough to invoke even the idea of a gun upon his peer, and about a zillion affirmations of these friends’ bravery. Holding one’s ground peaceably (not passively, but firmly and without histrionics) is a huge challenge our friends met beautifully.
We all want to think things like this can’t happen to us (or in our communities). That’s our first, biggest mistake. For all kinds of reasons in all kinds of places, violence can occur. The challenge is to respond not from fear of the worst but from a wholly different place and impulse: it’s to teach our children (and all of us) how to be members of a community, to be friends, to embrace each person for themselves. Figuring out that what you do has an impact on the next person, realizing that you care about the next person, learning to hold your frustrations or hurts in ways that do not hurt others, well that’s all big stuff. This is to say, living by such six-word phrases as you can’t say you can’t play doesn’t happen spontaneously.
The big-ticket bullying often is stirred by difference, real or perceived, so along with everything else about learning to get along, we have to learn—again, because this doesn’t always happen “naturally” to accept difference. And by accept, I think I really mean try to embrace.
So often, we begin simply by not knowing what we’re seeing or how to articulate our confusion. Last year, when Remy was in kindergarten, one of his classmates came up to me for about a month nearly every morning to say, “I think Remy’s a girl.” The boy said this with a big smile, and he did not say it with malice. In fact, they played together quite a bit on the playground, and I knew Remy liked him, too. Remy has long hair. Long hair did not gibe with this boy’s experience or expectation of boy. I would reply: You know he’s just a boy who chooses to have long hair. And I’d shrug. We can make different choices. After a while, Remy’s longhaired boy reality became as much a reality as classmates having two moms or girls with short hair or adoptive families in which the parents and kids did not have the same skin color; new things became old things.
Because we all need to learn these lessons until they stick, I’m glad that Debra Chasnoff’s film, Straightlaced: How Gender Got Us All Tied Up is being shown locally on Sunday at the Academy of Music Theatre, with the special bonus of the filmmaker doing a Q&A after the screening. Chasnoff has been making films about difference (It’s Elementary) and the afternoon offers another platform. There are, and need to be, many such forums to grapple with tolerance, acceptance, and the move toward embrace of the reality that you may not look like or be like the person next to you, but you can still coexist peaceably. You can even play together.
