If I Could Go Back in Time and Tell Myself One Thing, It Would Be This

Here’s the truth no one tells kids about bullies and bigots

You know what your problem is? she says.

Which one, I ask. My attitude? My big mouth? That I don’t care about status or social convention? Take your pick, I say, it’s a long list and she laughs.

You’re too kind, she says.

What? I say. It’s not really a question.

I was expecting a dig at my feminist, equality, liberal-minded social justice bullshit, I say and laugh at my own joke. She doesn’t.

I’m not joking, she says.

A lot of people see kindness as weakness, she says. You are way too soft. You need to toughen up. Trust me, you’ll get a lot farther in this life.

I’m a little old to start being a mean girl, I say and she laughs.

Let me tell you an ugly story, I say. It’s true.

When I was a kid, an old man up the street used to hide behind his fence, just waiting for me to walk by on the way home from school. He’d hiss at me through the fenceposts. Go home, Jew.

Sometimes I’d run. It made him laugh and the sound of his gravelly old voice laughing at me chased me all the way home.

She raises her eyebrows. I know, I say. I’m not. I was a good little Catholic girl, back then anyway. It was because of grandpapa.

When I was little, the sun rose and set on my grandpapa. I’d curl up and he’d read to me, wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. When he got old, I read to him. Agatha Christie, I say and smile.

Here’s what he told me, once.

Long ago and half a world away, he fell in love with the wrong girl. She was tiny and fierce and her laughter filled up a room. Stole his heart instantly, but she was a Ukrainian girl and he was the Rabbi’s son.

You can’t marry her, his family said, you have to marry a nice Jewish girl. You can’t marry him, her family said. He’s a Jew.

So they fled to Canada with twenty-eight dollars and a dream in their pockets. Gave up his country, his faith, and his family and when the Nazis came knocking a few years later, he was long gone.

I found them on Ancestry, a few years ago, and I can’t find words horrific enough to tell you the way it hit me in the gut. All those names, gone the same day. I just sat staring at my screen. Couldn’t stop shaking.

Sometimes, humans are so inhumane it leaves a hole in your heart that can never entirely heal and you just learn to live that way. Walking, talking, and existing like that, with a gaping hole in your heart that hate put there.

It wasn’t just that old man. One day the prettiest girl in class showed up with birthday invitations for everyone. Except me. Sorry, Linda, she said, but my daddy said Jews aren’t welcome in our house.

Her dad was a cop. Came to class one day to tell us kids that police are our friends. There to help us. He didn’t mean me. Wouldn’t even look at me.

Because my grandfather was the Rabbi’s son, back in the old country.

A lot of kids weren’t allowed to play with me after that. Went through most of school with one little friend whose mom said those people are stupid. I’m a nice little girl, she said, and welcome in their house anytime.

It’s not just me, lest you think this a self-pity story about poor me getting bullied by bigots. It’s not that.

There are swaths of kids hiding in the shadows of their own potential because they have colored skin, or pink hair and black clothes. Because they’re gay or geeks or ugly or have a skin condition that makes the other kids say ew, gross. Or heaven forbid, they’re too poor to wear the right sneakers or the right jeans because their mom can’t afford them.

There is so much mean in the world it’s sickening.

In the early days of Covid, Asian people were bullied and harassed. Here. In Canada. People screaming at them about bringing the “Asia Flu” here, never mind that they were born and raised here, just like me.

Brown women regularly get their hijab pulled off by adults screaming go home, stop taking our jobs, while kids cower behind. Doesn’t matter if they came here to escape war. Just matters that they’re not white.

Little black girls get criticized for their hair like I did until mom let me thin and iron it because I was sick to death of the word jewfro. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, I say, with your blue eyes and blonde hair.

I stop talking and breathe. I don’t really know what the look on her face means, but what I see? I’ll take it.

You know what the kicker is? When a kid is getting bullied by other kids, you know what too many adults say? Kids are so mean.

No. They aren’t. We are born with kindness and empathy.

Those traits are innate. Tiny babies cry if someone is in distress. Toddlers bring you their blanket or their teddy bear and offer hugs if you’re sad.

Psychologists did a crazy experiment. They played a movie for babies. In the movie, a cartoon square was mean to a circle. Pushing and slapping. After the movie, they offered the babies two stuffed toys. A square and a circle. The babies pushed the square away and hugged the circle.

Babies. Rejected the bully and empathized with the bullied.

But despite that kindness and empathy are innate, they are mutable traits. Here’s what that means. Mutable traits are traits we’re born with, but we can unlearn. You know what that means, right?

It means bullies and bigots are broken.

Somehow, they’ve lost the very humanity they were born with. And I don’t know who did that to them, but here’s what I do know.

If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, that would be it.

It would have made so much difference. So much.

To know they’re the broken ones. Not me.

Several years ago, my brother and I hired a genealogy researcher overseas to see if the house my grandpapa grew up in was still standing. It was.

As he was taking photos of the house, an old lady hobbled out. When he told her he was taking pictures for the family who once lived there, she hobbled back to the house. Wait, she told him. Wait.

She hobbled back with an envelope full of letters and photos. Grandpapa had been sending them for years. To the last address he had for his family. They became friends over the years, him and her. Pen-pals.

So many photos we’d never seen, disappeared over the years. Us, as babies. Grandpapa smiling with his grandbabies, far away in Canada.

At the back of the envelope was a sheet of paper with the numbers tattooed on his family’s flesh when they were hauled to the ghetto and their house was given to her nice German family. She was just a little girl, then.

We hide these, she said. We hide. In wall. Many years.

A German lady. Saved everything for a once-Jewish man. Just in case, one day, his family might come.

If I had to pick a role model, she would be it.

“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” — Maya Angelou