If I added up all the posts I've ever made on forums and social media, it wouldn't reach 25,000. And even that feels like it's taken way too big a chunk out of my life.
What happens when you add in all the sockpuppet posts that you "did not make?"
Just curious.
I have enough trouble pretending to be one person at a time.
That is why I made a personal pact to never lie at this site, except for lies of omission.
I think many of us are very uncomfortable with lying. How many times have we been deceived and taken advantage of by people we thought we could trust, and we never even saw it coming? I tend to lie a lot less often than most people, not because I have impeccable moral standards, but because I'm so bad at it.
That's a bloody awful story about your daughter, probably should have included a trigger warning (seriously). I'm so sorry and upset to hear about that. We went through something similar with my son. We moved to a new area and he went to a new (and much bigger) school when he was about 8 years old. We knew that he loved his old school and didn't want to leave, but we didn't have much choice. Not long after he started at his new school he started asking if he could go back to his old school. I asked him why and he said that the boys at his new school were stupid.
My wife met his teacher one day and the teacher asked my wife if there were problems at home, because our son sometimes seemed upset at school, and once or twice he had started crying. Our daughter, who was 5 years old at the time and in kindergarten at the same school, spoke up and said "there is nothing wrong at home, he is always happy at home". We asked our son if he was upset about anything, but he just said he was fine.
A couple of months later my wife was waiting outside the school and started talking to one of the other ladies who was waiting. The lady also had a child in our son's year and told my wife to be careful as some boys in that year were very nasty. That, in fact, they had bullied one boy so badly that one girl was traumatised and had been unable to eat properly or sleep properly over a period of several weeks because she was so upset. So you can probably see where this is heading and yes, it was our son who was being bullied. Our son is so oblivious to the capacity of others to actually deliberately hurt... he did what stupid adults often tell kids is the best solution to bullying: "just ignore it". Of course this just encourages the bullies to try harder.
So the usual script would be that we would talk to the school, and the school would do f*** all and we'd have to find him a new school. OR we could be the sort of dickhead parents who tell their bullied kids to man up and ignore it. And this is where it gets weird. My wife dropped our kids at school the next day and asked if she could make an appointment for both of us to speak to the principal. As it turned out the principal was in the office and said "no need for an appointment, come right in!". So my wife told the story and the principal was a bit doubtful about whether it could be true, but promised to investigate.
So the principal called the girl in and the girl told the principal what she had seen and which boys were involved. And the principal, lovely lady in her 60s, called those boys in one by one and tore them a new one. And each of the boys pointed the finger at other boys involved until it became a larger group and the ringleaders were identified.
And so the principal gave each boy with any level of involvement a final warning: any further reports would result in their parents being called to come and collect them from the school and they would not be permitted to return to school until further notice. And the teacher? The one who was effectively blaming our son? Well, she got to keep working at the school. They needed a new librarian anyway.
So the problem is that the principal told our son to come to her if he had any further problems, but of course that was never going to happen. This is a kid who goes swimming in the ocean in the middle of winter and says the water is hot. Who has no concept of things like "hungry" or "thirsty". Wears a jacket in summer and gets around in his underwear in the middle of winter. The girls in his class started looking out for him and threatening any boys who looked like starting up again with being reported to the scary principal. My son ended up being best friends with one of the ringleaders of the bullies (he isn't the grudge-holding type, as you might have guessed by now).
We did put him in a martial arts class, but he was so disinterested in it that we didn't push him to continue. I had a few conversations with him where I explained that he didn't need to win every fight, he just had to make the bullies think twice. Like me he has a big, hard head and I told him that all he needed to do was to get close enough to hit that kid with his head, then just tell the teacher that the kid was hurting you and you got dizzy and fell towards him and you must have accidentally bumped him with your head. He never did end up doing that, but he occasionally jokes about it even now.
We know the world aint all sunshine and roses but going through this sort of thing with your kids.... it's bloody hard.
**** EDIT: Sorry DD, I've followed your hijack. I went back and removed your story. Personally I think that we do Odeon no greater honour than rising above the silly nonsense that we go on with sometimes and using this place to connect over things like this. ****
