Bully Bully...

I was a petite kid. I was always one of the smallest kids in my class. It wasn't until high school that I starting growing to normal heights.

My short stature caused me much grief when I was in elementary school. I don't know what it was, but somehow being short and Asian meant it was okay to pick on me.

"Baby Carina! You're so cute!" said the girl from my class as she pinched my cheeks to numbness, all the while talking in a voice that you'd use only on babies and dogs.

Of course, I was also plagued with the shyness disease, so my only response was to blink a few times and suffer through the pain.

Definitely not one of my fonder memories.

Or the time in second grade when a girl in the class down the hall decided that she just didn't like me and grabbed me by the chin to threaten me. "What are you looking at? Don't sit next to me!"

I don't remember doing anything to provoke her...I just sat next to her because the teacher told me to do so. Needless to say, I was scared of that girl for the rest of the time she was at our school...

...or the sixth grade girl who would constantly tell me to change lockers with her because she was so much taller than the eighth grade me who happened to have a top locker above her...and her friend who threatened to beat me up after school because I got fed up with the ridicule and used a few choice words in turn...

So it doesn't surprise me that Bear isn't even close to being one of the tallest in her class, but it does surprise me that no matter how many decades have passed, the same issue always rears its ugly head.

A couple weeks ago I watched as one of Bear's soccer teammates came up to her and pinched her cheeks and patted her head and told her how cute she was. I watched warily.

Tonight, after practice, two of the girls decided to play "keep away" with Bear in the middle. Even when Matt and I called for Bear to come, the girls wouldn't give the ball back and kept passing the ball between them with Bear running in between.

She's a good kid. She smiled through the whole thing...

...but I wasn't smiling, that's for sure.

In my head I was debating whether my second grade memories were clouding my judgment of the situation making it bigger than it really was or whether I should just let the incident go as a first time thing and bring up issue if it happens again. Luckily the coach stepped in and deflected the situation (not resolving, mind you) and helped Bear go on her way.

In the car I had to ask Bear what she thought of the situation...she remained quiet for a while before responding, "I don't know." As her parent, I know that if it didn't bother her she would have then asked, "what do you mean?" Instead, her quiet, "I don't know," told me that she really was bothered but didn't want to say anything about it because she didn't want to upset anybody.

So we chatted and we talked about ways that she could get out of situations like that...Chipmunk piped in his two cents as well..."You should tell them to stop! If they do mean things, you have to tell them to stop and walk away!" He was very cutely emphatic about it.

The problem with sending our kids out into the world is that they have to actually be in the world and deal with the issues the world throws at them. I keep telling myself that these "blips" and how we deal with them will make them into better adults, but sigh...it hurts to know that their innocence is being chipped away little by little...

So next practice, I'll be watching like a hawk, and before then I'll be praying and praying some more, and in the meantime, I'll be sure to continue the conversation with my children in hopes that they'll have the courage to act accordingly if the situation should arise again.

It may only seem like a little thing to most people ("kids will be kids, right?"), but seeing how I vividly remember my memories after almost thirty years...I'm not taking any chances with my own kids.