Did Your Cheater Regift Things?

This is a really important subject.

I think it’s clear deprivation affects children differently according to whether it’s circumstantial, due to a cohesive principle that the entire family lives by or simply due to neglect or punishment. It can leave trauma and scars all the same though the depths of the injuries may vary and aren’t always fully worth whatever positive traits can arise from outlier mentality.

But I suspect the positive legacy of this might be what drew us both to a forum like this one and to the underdog side of the whole epic battle over whether cheating is abuse.

In any case, you and I have a lot in common regarding being bullied in school, wearing second hand clothes and making my own toys out of scraps and cardboard boxes I scavenged from behind appliance store. Like you, I was very happy with it and vowed that, one day when I had kids of my own, I would encourage them to make their own toys as well. But personally I still feel like it’s a mixed bag of “blessings” and bullshit.

In my case, my parents really weren’t able to afford new toys or clothes since we lived on a starving artist budget. But, being artists, I wonder if they would still have encouraged the DIY projects on principle even if we’d had money. Likely so because my dad was a democratic-socialist painter and illustrator named after an Irish revolutionary who seemed to have some ancestral jaundice towards commercial culture and materialism. He regarded inundating children with material things rather than attention and experiences as a form of abuse that produced lost and empty adult conformists.

My dad wasn’t wrong and certainly walked the walk, only spending money on preowned books and tools for himself, not toys or bar tabs and he was also a consistent egalitarian whether it came to class, gender, race, you name it. But even good intentions can go overboard. In defending my right to be eccentric, creative and a “rugged individualist,” my dad inadvertently threw me to the dogs and I become the main class scapegoat in primary school.

For instance, because my dad worked from a home studio and my mother always took the bus to work very early and came back late, it’s on my dad that he let me go to school at age 8 wearing old Goodwill prom dresses over my snowsuit so I could have my own princess Icecapade on the school rink.

It seems some nasty parent noticed one of these vintage poofy gowns was stained, word got around and the kids invented a nickname for me based on “contamination.”
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t actually dirty or smelly. My clothes were always clean even if old and a bit tatty. I was also an AAU swimmer and ballet student and was probably the most soaked, shampooed and antiseptic kid in school. But gangs of boys would still follow me home screaming this taunt at me and sometimes physically attacking me. Some kids in class also had a fun group ritual of cartoonishly holding their breath and running away from me any time I was seated near them.

My mother was great about providing me with philosophical scaffolding against the bullying, probably because her brother and cousin were influential organizational psychologists who specialized in defending quixotic business strategies and novel organizational structures and aims against the dark forces of same-old and blah.

I think this really helped keep me from internalizing the abuse as much, though how can experiences like that not leave traces? My dad would also go all out to defend me though this didn’t always make things better. It seemed like twice a month he would lumber ruggedly down to the school and read the principal the riot act about the fact the teachers were idle bystanders to the bullying or even victim-blaming. Yet he still didn’t gently discourage me from wandering home carrying industrial sized boxes on my head to make doll villages or going to school on regular school days dressed up as historical characters.

Go figure. I think I was my father’s walking little FU to suburban conformists but it was my “money” that got put where his big mouth was unfortunately. I think the problem was really that, as a recovering Catholic, he’d unconsciously extended concepts of “sin” and “purity” to secular politics and even art. In his mind, turning me into a defender of free thinkers and underdogs was akin to my being “virginal” and favored by God.

It must have been really tough on him when, right around the time I started college, my parents’ principled investments in a family company suddenly made them quite wealthy. He still would never buy new cars and still only tiny economy ones he was too tall for.

Speaking of height, the bullying finally stopped when I shot up four inches and turned into Alt Garage Band Barbie by about tenth grade. Then rumors swirled that I was a “slut” just based on appearance. But I’d since learned that sexual defiance scares the tar out of bullies so I played up the “dangerous heroin chic” image and hung out with other girls who were using the same protective coloring.

In reality we were all complete nerds. Unfortunately, prop cigarettes still lead to nicotine addiction so that was a very bad idea. Still, several of those girls went to medical school, got PsyD’s or PhDs. I’m probably the biggest loser of the bunch since I went into indy media and worked on obscure social justice-y projects, still being my dad’s walking FU. Though even on the low-paying shoestring side of the industry, I still got so heavily “Harvey Weinsteined” for years (lots of attempts though none successful) that I eventually gave up the career I’d striven for and sort of meandered around working for advocacy nonprofits.

Regarding the “scars” of being scapegoated both as the weird poor kid and as a female-with-a-pulse in a rapey industry, there has to be some. Some of the little tics I developed because of this have been positive like fighting the good fight against victim-blaming and all that. But some weren’t entirely great. For instance not consistently earning that much money because… not sure (secular sin/purity??). Or, instead of dating the goofy sweet nerds I’d always crushed on since my tweens, by college I’d started dating men who were a bit tougher in order to have a personal security detail. But, of course, “Who will protect us from our protectors?” as they say.

One remaining “tic” is that, even if I seem to have some psychic resistance to being rich, I eventually learned to give up the alt hippie grunge gear and dress as if I’m stealthily wealthy. This was after discovering that women are really mostly just footballs to sexually aggressive men whose real targets are other men, particularly the perceived rival “owners” of the human “footballs”– boyfriends, husbands, etc. So dressing like my “owner” can afford to keep attack dog lawyers on retainer or have someone fired or bumped off is another form of protective coloring. I’ve also used it as a parent shielding the rights of nerdy kids with several health issues.

The appearance thing is probably a more neutral quirk but a bit compulsive. I literally can’t walk out of the house without being “fashionably” dressed even if it’s all Ebay bargains and I always made sure the kids looked like the artsy version of stealth-wealth. I jokingly call it “battle armor” but that’s what it really is.

The biggest remaining quirk is definitely a mixed bag that probably makes me more susceptible to certain forms of abuse on the one hand but also also makes me a little telepathic in guessing what abusers or bullies will do next which has helped me jujitsu and turn the tables several times. After seeing how indirect social aggression and negative gossip can snowball into genuine violence and Dickensian-lvel social ruin, I will always be hyper-sensitive to threats of social smear campaigns and “triangulation” favored by every stripe of bully from domestic abusers, sexual harassers, coercive employers and nasty neighbors.

Anyway, somewhere inside every former class scapegoat is a kid looking over their shoulders for marauding or triangulating bullies along with the mixed bag of upsides and downsides that comes with it.

Since there’s no statistical common denominator determining who will or won’t become an adult victim of abuse, I don’t think the history of being bullied on the schoolyard has anything to do with it. Nor is it more or less relevant whether past hardship was circumstantial, from overly dogmatic principles or neglect. So we can scrap being abused as one of the “downsides” of former bullied kid status. But, again, one of the upsides is definitely that we’re choosing the rugged, mighty underdog side represented by CL and CN.