Mother of an Angel

Are you all chuckling at my choice of titles? We all think of our children as angels, don't we. Well, my child really is an angel. He went to be with God at age 14.

So many regrets now. And so much anger over the bullying!!! I try hard to forgive and forget. He is in a better place now, but this terrible anger over it just won't go away.

There are a couple of points I really want to make here. I believe that a lot of the bullying by children is learned from adults. (Hold your gasps and stop shaking your heads.) Let me tell you why.

My son was such a happy little boy, from birth through kindergaarten. In Kindergaarten, he brought home perfect papers every day and couldn't wait to come and show them to me and tell my all about them. He most definitely understood everything on every paper and he let me know it.

In first grade, things went downhill from the very beginning. His papers came home with red marks all over them every day. Even on the rare occasion when he did get all the answers correct, there would be a big red nasty note about the penmanship. He never bothered to take them out of his backpack and show them to me. One day, about three weeks after school started, he got off the bus and broke down in my arms, saying, everyone hates me.

Soon, I began getting emails from the teacher, complaining about his abilities. When I told her that I suspected that it was a self esteem problem, mainly caused by bullying at school and on the bus, she told me that he was bringing the bullying on himself. I asked how. She said because he does things like only putting his shoes half-way on when they go out for recess.

Now, I have to ask you! If the students are listening to a teacher who can never acknowledge ANYTHING good about the child, not even the rare perfect paper, and they are seeing that she agrees with the bullying as something that he deserves, are they not learning to bully from her?

I should have followed my instincts and pulled him out of that school. I can't tell you how bad I feel for the Hell that he endured for the next 8 years at that school with those same classmates, taking that bullying and meanness day after day.

Teachers reading this can deny all of this. But some of those students actually showed up at his funeral to tell me that they were a part of "teasing" him and they were sorry. From the stories I heard from a few witnesses, it was more like terrorising than teasing. This most certainly was very real. They made his life HELL!

I believe now that this life is just not good enough for really special people. God took my son to save him from what he was going through.

And YES!!! I am angry and feel cheated. He was my only child. When he died, I was too old to have another. I will never be a mom or have a grandchild, and the memories I have are invaded by these!!!!