Over the years (of long winters) living in New England, spring has become my favorite season. We’ve had a couple of springs in recent years that have kind of hovered, cool springs, springs that preserved the relatively early flowers for longer than usual. I loved those springs most especially. I realized yesterday when the breeze blew coolly and my eyes filled with the start of spring sights—daffodils, fuzzy starts to leaves, pink buds, forsythia siren—that this moment is my “it” one. Just beyond precipice and still teeming with anticipation, I feel, as I walk about, so very amazed and hopeful and happy. It’s as if my senses are delighted by the moment.
I notice that when I am out in this particular glory, I am so besotted, so engaged in the fuzzy new leaves and the music of the birds, I kind of lose my grip on all else. It’s in that vein parents of newborns experience: not all that many deep thoughts are happening, too distracted by sleeplessness for such cognition. I can’t say I’ve got spring fever (I really don’t); I can say I have reverence for this moment, though. I am in awe.
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A year ago, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover died. This boy, an eleven year-old Springfield boy in sixth grade, was being taunted and teased—bullied—by some schoolmates, and he took his own life, so distraught by the homophobic barbs and the relentless harassment. Anyone who has ever been deeply sad in springtime knows it’s the most isolating feeling ever. The world is offering up its most glorious colors, its tiniest beings, its warmth, and all this makes people smile. It’s the hardest time for sadness.
Earlier this winter, Phoebe Prince, a fifteen year-old high school student in nearby South Hadley took her own life, also a bullying victim. The media—and law enforcement—have taken this story further, somehow (there’s been some interesting analysis of this).
There are many things to say about both of these tragedies. On this anniversary of Walker-Hoover’s death, as parent this very moment to an eleven year-old boy in the sixth grade, I am going to say this very simple thing: schools, but not only schools, adults, as in parents and grandparents and whomever else are around kids, need to make getting along with others the priority.
I do not believe we just magically know how to deal with difference or conflict or frustration; I believe we have to learn how to get along peaceably and kindly. Think of all the hurtful things kids can say not in order to be hurtful, just as part of the figuring-it-out process (you can add your example here: that can’t be a girl, she has boy hair or of an adopted child where’s his real mom?). Think of the very real frustration kids might feel about having to include others when they are in the middle of a great game for two. Think of how hard it might be to be the child who doesn’t speak the language and have a new kid swoop in and capture your hard-won friends’ attentions. Fill in your own example(s) here.
As a parent, this is something I want to talk about much more. As a parent with children in schools—preschool, elementary school, middle school and next year, high school—I want the schools my children attend to talk about: with the kids and with the parents, and I want the topic to be brought up in different ways—and constantly.
Especially during these times of change—for adolescents, their whole selves, that science fiction worthy puberty debacle—acceptance of self and others becomes even tougher right at the moment when adults are receding (fewer teachers or parents watching over the playtime scenarios any longer, often, adults give up on trying to engage with monosyllabic ‘tweens and teens). Carol Joseph Walker-Hoover and Phoebe Prince both would have benefitted from our—us adults—determining that we can find ways to foster independence without letting go of our responsibility to engage. Adults have to expect more of kids, but we cannot do that if we are not listening to them and out for them. We have to hear them. We can never rest on some explanation of how kids can be cruel; we have to push ourselves to figure out how to help them learn about kindness.
Kindness is tough and it’s not always the natural impulse. A world without war, though, that world will have a helluva lot more kindness in it. A world we’d want for our children will have more kindness. It might not have more love. It might not even have less hate. It would just be a lot kinder. Like those leaves about to open, the process of what could be termed miraculous—if you really learn about it—is complex, and there’s a lot you can learn about it. That is not to say spring isn’t inexplicable, too. I think love is a miracle. I think along with our hard work, there’s plenty of room for reverence. But we cannot, where children are involved, simply hope for the bud to bloom.
