Armor

 

A few years back, while I was walking in my neighborhood, I saw a boy of about ten years old skipping along in front of me. He would take a few paces and then leap as if he couldn’t contain his energy. He wore a big smile on his face, and he broke into a spastic run and then stopped and started skipping again. His hands and arms flopped at his sides, his movements were ungraceful, lacking in coordination. I watched him for a moment, he was so happy, and in that moment, I was overcome with sadness. The reasons for my sadness were immediately apparent because I knew the type of uninhibited joy he was experiencing wouldn’t last much longer. Quite frankly, he looked funny. The way he ran and skipped like that would make him a target for other kids, which I knew from experience. And as soon as other kids started to pick on him, he’d lose his obliviousness, the ability to feel the pure joy that made him skip and break into a run. After the first kids pointed out how stupid he looked, he’d become self-conscious and feel ashamed. Whenever he felt joy coming on, he’d try to suppress it. It was the type of moment where you think, “Enjoy it while it lasts.” But a child doesn’t know what’s coming or how things will change. He doesn’t know to enjoy the feeling because he doesn’t know he’ll lose it.

It’s possible I felt this at that particular moment because of the confluence of location with the moment this loss happened to me. We were close to Grove Park, and I could remember in the fifth grade playing with a friend who lived nearby. I was eleven. My friend and I were both nerds. We liked video games. We liked sports but weren’t all that good at them. So after playing Nintendo, we decided to take a football out to the field and run around. We tossed it back and forth, and then I’d try to run and he’d try to tackle me and vice versa. It was late-spring and hot outside, and after a while of running around, I was sweating and decided to take my shirt off. I didn’t think anything of it until Monday at school. One of the other kids had been in a car with his mom and they’d driven by the field and saw us.

“I saw you and S. out in the field,” He said. “You had your shirt off.” I can’t remember exactly how he put what he said next. In my mind, he used the word fag, though I can’t say for a certainty that he did. This was probably around 1990 or so, and the word hadn’t become taboo in the way it has in subsequent years. Kids threw it around without knowing what it meant. But as soon as he said it, I flushed with shame. I had been picked on in elementary school. I was used to kids being mean. But the way he implied there was something sexual in taking my shirt off, that something aside from football was going on, something dirty, was different than the type of picking on I was used to. Sure, kids had called me names before, and that wasn’t fun. But I’d always had this fundamental sense of self-worth to fall back on that allowed me to brush off their taunts.

When we’d hit fifth grade, the four elementary schools in our township had merged into one middle school, and I was able to escape the assignation that had hounded me since first grade. I was still a nerd, but I’d made some friends, and the cruel nickname was gone. Now here was this kid, the one who’d seen me take my shirt off, alluding to something that made me question my sense of self-worth, that had made me question who I was at the most basic level, and if what he’d implied was true, it meant that I was a real outcast. Boogie boy was something you could shake off, but fag followed you into adulthood, it defined who you were always.

I didn’t know anything about being gay back then. I lived in the working-class suburbs of Philadelphia, at a time when parents didn’t sit their kids down to talk to them about homosexuality. All I knew was what I could glean from TV, and the images back then weren’t positive. I knew nothing about sexuality. All I knew was AIDS. Because that was on the news. I remember being wracked with guilt for what seemed like months. To an extent, I entered a youthful period of homophobia in which I didn’t know what I was scared of. I just knew I was scared of being an outcast, an outsider. And I became super-conscious of my body. I stopped playing with S. I didn’t go over his house anymore for fear that what this other boy implied was true. I worried my mom would find out. I worried the boy would spread this as a rumor, and the reputation I’d shed when the schools merged would be replaced by a new one. It didn’t happen. I guess he didn’t think twice about it, but I obsessed.

Two years later, my attitude would change. In the seventh grade, two things happened to this end. The first was I learned that my aunt, who I loved dearly and was close to as a child, is a lesbian. The second was that I made a friend whose parents had no qualms about talking to their kids about homosexuality openly, and when I broached the possibility that being gay might be wrong, he used his parents’ arguments to make me see that it wasn’t. From that point on, I was convinced that there was nothing wrong in being the way that boy back in fifth grade had implied I might be (I also knew the boy who’d implied this in later years and I’m certain his attitudes changed as well). But I never lost that self-consciousness he’d put in me. It might have happened earlier, but I pin it on that moment.

I was thinking of it yesterday as I sat on the soft and saw images of my daughter flashing by in the digital picture frame on the mantle. I saw a picture of her enjoying an ice cream cone on the boardwalk. She had chocolate and vanilla dripping from her chin, big cheesy smile on her face. It made my heart swell, and for some reason, the image of that spastic boy running along popped into my head. I’ve been a worrier all my life, and when I had kids, I stopped worrying about myself and started to worry about them. Kids do weird things on a fairly regular basis, and when you’re home with them it’s cute. When they’re little it’s cute. But then I read about bullying and the way it affects children, the way they can’t escape it now because of the Internet, and I get scared.

A few weeks ago, I brought my daughter to the park. My daughter is three, and she’s shy around new people, but I urged her to play with another little girl who wanted to play with her. “What if she’s mean to me?” my daughter sometimes asks when I encourage her to play with other kids. To this, I generally respond, “If someone’s mean to you because you want to play with them, something is wrong with them, not you.” Then sometimes when other kids come up and ask her to play, she’ll turn a cold shoulder, clam up. I try to talk to her then too. I tell her, “When someone wants to play with you, it’s a good thing. It’s a nice thing. One of the nicest things in the world is someone wanting to be your friend. So if someone asks to play at the park, you should play.” I won’t force her of course. I don’t want her to play against her will. But I want her to have a positive attitude toward making friends. Still, there are these moments of awkwardness that she’s allowed to have now but won’t be able to get away with for long.

The girl she played with the last time we were there was five. They were on the see-saw together, and my daughter blurted out, “I poop in the potty!” I was standing next to her, spotting, and I whispered, “Shhh! Not everyone needs to know that.” For now, this type of exchange is relatively benign, but I do feel the need to teach her. This is part of growing, learning to navigate the social sphere. We all know how the world is, the way as adults we come to use sarcasm and irony to avoid exposing ourselves to the ridicule of others, even if, as adults we should know better. My daughter is so earnest, and I love it. But other kids eventually make fun of earnestness. I’d like to protect her innocence as long as possible. I’d like her to see her skip down the sidewalk. I’d like to see her run without any inhibition and smile, at least for a little while longer.