More About Sixth Grade: Holding onto the Hurt (Part II)

Originally I wrote yesterday’s post on the three sixth grades to lay some groundwork for my next post in my Holding onto the Hurt series, but it turns out that in thinking about sixth grade, especially that third year at the new Christian Private School, I opened a can of mental worms. Just like in the first post where I said:

Sometimes, months, even years later, after I think I’ve forgotten all about some wrong, someone or something will trigger a memory and the hurt will come rushing back just as if it had happened only a moment ago and usually the pain is just as sharp and disabling and twisting and there’s anger and sorrow and frustration and it’s all so fresh and it won’t subside.

I had intended to write about something that happened in 8th grade, referring only to one thing that had occurred in sixth grade as an example of a past history between myself and another girl. I didn’t want to have to explain in depth about the whole complexity of the three six grades in the middle of my exposition on The Great Betrayal. However, in writing about sixth grade, in remembering that one humiliating incident with that girl in sixth grade, the blocks in my memory began to unravel. Things long forgotten, long buried have come rushing to the surface.

And the hurt, as silly (and perhaps as petty) as it may be 25 years later, still feels fresh and traumatizing and hateful.

I’ve said for years that my time at that school, all seven years, were miserable, that there never was a really wonderful time there. There were some good times, some good friendships, yes, but when people talk about how much easier or better life was in their school days, I don’t ever agree. I look back on my years at that school and see the flashbacks Josie saw in Never Been Kissed, a movie I quite literally watched in the movie theater doubled over in my seat with a sharp pain in my stomach.

And it started in sixth grade.

Remember, I didn’t go to 7th grade with my intellectual equals so I could hang back and continue my education with people my own age. However, the children my own age had been in school together for four or more years together in a small private school so they had already formed cliques and pecking orders — a new arrival, particularly one dressed in hand-me-downs from her neighbor’s 70’s wardrobe purge, in an established upper middle class private school setting in the grade that “rules the school” (elementary was separated from the junior and high schools) was like a wounded bird to a pack of hungry wolves. All I ever wanted was to fit in and make friends but I never actually figured out how to do that there. The first year, even the kids at the bottom of the pecking order didn’t seem to like me. Oh, and I tried, believe me, I tried, but it was one of those pitiful things that you know if they made it into a t.v. show, viewers would watch and wince. One girl in my carpool actually stole a pack of gum out of my desk and then not only did she chew it in front of me, but she offered a piece to everyone in my carpool but me.

The girls I so wanted to be, the popular, pretty girls, my mother allowed me to invite over for my birthday, which was a skating/sleepover party. I remember being very excited about the whole thing though my mother had made me limit the party to something like six girls in my class, which was very “uncool” and very “unpopular”. Anyway, after they thought I fell asleep, they stayed up and said horrible things about me right there on my birthday in my own living room in my own house.

I can’t say that the boys were any better.

This was the year my mother took me to see a child shrink and then pulled me out when the shrink started thinking the problem had to do with family though my troubles really were with people my own age, with trying to fit in, with adjusting to a third year of sixth grade. I was a wreck that year.

And last night as I was attempting to sort out the pain of years of having repeatedly chosen the wrong friends and wanting to write about those mistakes, how those unapologetic hurts come unbidden back to me again and again like fresh stabs in the back with each reminder, the door I opened to the past in just thinking about sixth grade was like a portal for hurtful memories I’d long ago forgotten, memories that should be nothing to me now, and yet, I still want to cry at the very inkling of them. They still torment me. I still wish I could go back somehow and change whatever led up to those moments. I still want to know what it is that I did that brought about these things, that made me so unlikable, so unlovable, so hated. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still that person.