What I Learned From The Darkest Incident Of My School Life: Parenting Tips For Unspoken Bullying
It was 7th grade, mid-October, and I was fumbling my locker combination after gym—12 right, 25 left, 8 right, a sequence I still remember by heart 22 years later. The hall smelled like floor wax and overripe bananas from the lunch line, and the radiator next to my locker hummed so loud I could barely hear the gym teacher blowing his whistle down at the other end. When the lock clicked open and the door swung out, I smelled it first: warm, rotty fish. Tucked between my crumpled math notebook and my hand-me-down flannel was a clear plastic bag, tied at the top, holding a dead goldfish.
Three girls from my homeroom were leaning against the bank of lockers across the hall. I saw them snicker and yank their friend away when I looked up. My hands shook so bad I dropped my math book, and the corner of the front cover crumpled when it hit the sticky tile. I didn’t scream. I didn’t call a teacher. I just pushed the bag further back on the shelf, slammed the locker door, and told my teacher I’d lost my combination when I showed up to math five minutes late. After last period, I fished the bag out, walked all the way around to the back dumpster behind the gym, and threw it away. I scrubbed my hands raw in the boys’ bathroom and didn’t tell anyone—not my parents, not my homeroom teacher, not the librarian who I started eating lunch with every day after that. I was the new kid, I’d moved three months earlier from a tiny rural town to this big suburban middle school, I wore sneakers with holes in the toe and got A’s on every test. I thought if I said anything, it would just get worse. They’d call me sensitive, they’d leave worse things next time. For two years, I didn’t mention it to anyone.
I didn’t think about that goldfish much until last month, when my own 7th grader, Lila, came home from school, dropped her backpack by the door, and went straight up to her room without stopping to steal the chocolate chips out of the pantry like she usually does. I knocked on her door twenty minutes later and asked if something was wrong, and she yelled through the door that she was just tired. I stood in the hallway, hand on the doorknob, and that dead goldfish popped into my head clear as day. I remembered how badly I didn’t want to tell my mom what had happened, how I didn’t want to be the kid who caused a problem, how I thought if I just ignored it, it would go away (it didn’t, not really, it just quieted down).
I almost pushed her. I almost opened the door and sat down and made her talk, like so many generic parenting posts say you should. But then I remembered what it felt like to be 12, carrying that gross, heavy secret around, and I turned and walked away. I grabbed her favorite peanut butter granola bar from the pantry, wrote a sticky note that said “I notice something feels off. Whenever you want to talk, even at 2 a.m., even if you just want to rant and don’t want me to do anything about it, I’m here. No rush,” and left it on her door handle. That’s the first concrete lesson I’ve carried from that incident: don’t force a kid to open up on your timeline. When I was 12, every adult who asked “what’s wrong?” in a loud hallway or a busy dinner table made me clamp down harder. Giving a low-stakes opening that doesn’t require an immediate answer takes the pressure off, and it lets the kid lead.
Three days later, Lila came down to the kitchen after dinner and told me what happened: a group of girls from her dance class had found her private art account, screenshotted all her unfinished drawings, and been leaving mean comments on her public Instagram. She’d been too embarrassed to tell me, because she thought she should have made her account private in the first place, that it was her fault. That’s the second thing I learned: kids almost always blame themselves for cruelty, even when it’s not their fault. When she finished talking, the first thing I almost did was grab my phone and call the principal, then the other girls’ parents. But I stopped. I said what I wish someone had said to me when I finally told my mom about the goldfish when I was 16: “That’s such a cruel, gross thing to do. It’s not your fault at all. What do you want me to do to help?” That’s a specific line any parent or teacher can use, instead of jumping in with a big solution before the kid even says what they want.
Lila decided she wanted to make her account private, block the girls, and have the school counselor talk to them without her having to be in the room. That’s what we did. For teachers who see this sort of thing, the same logic applies: if you notice a kid suddenly starts eating lunch in your classroom alone instead of with their friends, you don’t have to interrogate them in front of everyone. Just pull them aside for two minutes when no one else is around and say “This spot’s always open for you, no questions needed” and leave it at that. That gives them safety without forcing them to expose something they’re not ready to talk about.
I still have that crumpled 7th grade math book in a box in my attic. I don’t think we’ll ever stop kids from being cruel to each other, not entirely. A lot of the worst stuff is small, hidden, easy for busy adults to miss. I know now that my mom had no idea what I was carrying back then, because I was good at hiding it— I laughed at dinner, I did my homework, I got good grades, so she had no reason to suspect anything was very wrong.
It’s been a month since Lila told me what happened. Some afternoons she still comes home and goes straight to her room without talking. We haven’t fixed everything, and I don’t expect we will. But we’ve given her space to handle it on her terms, and that’s more than I had when I was 12. That’s enough for right now.
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