When looking back at every year of my education experience, I don’t know that any had quite the impact on me that Fifth Grade did. To set the scene, the school year was 2000-2001. I was 10 and preparing for everything that came with that age bracket. For those who aren’t familiar with the preteen effect, it’s that time when you “put away childish things” and decide to become that edgy teen who liked everything that your parents hated. You smelled. You grew things out of different places. It’s a real hellscape before you add anything else into the equation. I say this because even as I question pointing an accusatory finger, I recognize that so much of the conflict was self-driven as it was a byproduct of growing up in an environment that didn’t want me around.
Up to this point, I had four great years at OLOR. There aren’t that many complaints to share during this time, or none that can be chalked up to trivial youth issues. But in Fifth Grade, I had an interesting turn of events. Given that I was already one of the kids who wanted to be perceived as “doing good,” I was attentive to education and did my best to feel included. I’d share my stories and artwork with the teacher who in return shared them with the class. On one occasion, I had a picture of N*SYNC’s “No Strings Attached” album cover that I drew. I’m not sure how great it was, but it didn’t win me any favors.
I was doomed by the fact that I was a creative child in an environment that didn’t feel like it catered to that. I remember other students coming up to me and being confused because she had told them “Nothing is a noun.” Me being a beginner wordsmith understood immediately what she meant, but maybe they were just thinking she wasn’t cool. I still read “Goosebumps,” though by then I’m sure that J.K. Rowling had come along with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and changed my life. I had rarely been more enamored by a book in my young life. My Nana, whom I had visited the previous summer, tried to get me into fantasy with some book called “Year of the Griffin,” but it didn’t take. Whatever Rowling had done worked and few could compare.
Given that this was 2000, we were at an odd time culturally as well. I think I noticed it mostly from observing Marco when we began to hang out again. While we played basketball like normal, there was a change of attitude on the playground. Older students would put your arm behind your back in a painful lock that I’m convinced almost broke my arm. It was speculative as to whether Pokemon was cool… though I found a rare Charizard card on a bench once.
I was not into the “cool” stuff. While Marco and I had gotten together over the previous summer to see Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), it may as well have been the going away party. To say that I know when things snapped would be farcical. I think there was the sense of me being affectionate and wanting that naïve friendship was now seen as “gay.” The type of stuff you could get beaten up for. It was cool to just drop insults because that’s what manly men men did. You were to be aggro and disrespectful. You were to do everything that my family didn’t want me to do.
To provide some greater context, Marco is what I imagine the stereotypical preteen of this era was. While we waited for our parents to pick us up, I’d look over to see Marco and a bunch of classmates acting out wrestling scenes from WWF. There was the clothesline, the pile drive, and all these other things. He’d do his best to sneer and say “You can’t smell what The Rock is cooking” while acting like a bad-ass. I didn’t get it. Even more, I was stuck in a peer group that quickly shifted from N*SYNC and Britney Spears (or, in my case, a heavily Radio Disney playlist) to Limp Bizkit and 2Pac. I still can hear Marco telling a guy at the pool about how cool he thought 2Pac was, as if this was the easiest way to be deemed manly men men. Other bands like Kid Rock and Marilyn Manson made the playlists, but I never listened to them. I’d look at BMG catalogs that came in the mail and wonder what would happen if I got them before realizing that my parents resented metal and rap. It was bad for the soul.
I can’t really speak as to when things shifted, but up until middle school, my parents were very protective about things. When Britney Spears became sexy with “I’m A Slave 4 U,” my sister was banned from getting the album.
I also think there’s something to assessing who my father is now that was probably influencing who I was then. When you’re a child, you try to imitate your parents because they are seen as the righteous figure in your life. They can’t be wrong. Well, my father wanted to raise manly men men. He’d wrestle me unexpectedly as I watched TV, tickling me as I cried for him to stop. He was cool with harassing our pets, which I think created a sick expectation on my part. I have recently come across an essay I wrote decades ago all about The 2nd Amendment with a terrible Photoshop of a gun over The Constitution. To quote Ethel Cain, he was the type that I felt taught me, “If someone hits you, you hit them back twice as hard.” Somehow WWF was inappropriate but his self-defensive nature was encouraged. If I was annoyed by you, then I was going to stand up for “my honor” or whatever a 10-year-old had. In previous grades, I got in trouble for that stuff, but I don’t think I ever was fully deterred.
That, and I think my dad is very insecure around a lot of things. He doesn’t take criticism well and actively spouts conservative beliefs that can be construed as rude. Because this was a school of predominantly Mexican culture, I think something about it upset him and it was reflecting in ways I couldn’t fully process. Maybe it was seeing me as a minority on campus. I had no issues with any other student or faculty. In fact, we’d have cultural day assemblies and they were very interesting. A lot of girls would get up and dance in these big dresses to mariachi. Cindy would get up and play her accordion. I, meanwhile, got up dressed as a hippie to sing The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” very poorly. There was a reason that it didn’t become a career.
Coming out of this moment, Crystal D. told me that when I flashed the peace sign, someone had stuck up the middle finger. Being sheltered in a sense, I found it way more intimidating than it probably was. Kids were just rude, and this was one of those signs. When I shared my copy of The Beatles’ “1” with other students, they flipped to the back cover and immediately called Ringo Starr “gay” because he was sporting flowers in his little box. I’m convinced someone told me that the color purple was “gay” as well and that kept me from liking it for a long time despite labeling it as an alternate to my other favorite color blue. Then again, I was reading books about O-Town when I wasn’t plowing through biographies on American presidents, so I wasn’t exactly cultured in the same way.
Shifting to the actual year of school is a bit difficult because, again, it was almost a quarter century ago. The best I can do is recall it in fragments.
The one thing I can begin by saying is that our teacher, whom I’ll call Melissa, liked me but I think realized how much of a hopeless case I was. Given that my father maybe indoctrinated me too much with “In this country, we speak American” levels of backward patriotism, I was having trouble seeing greater nuance. I didn’t understand why it was acceptable to speak Spanish in the classroom. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t fight back if somebody pissed me off. When my father was annoyed at me, he insulted me and spoke in a harsh tone. What was I doing wrong?
Melissa is someone who exists in odd contrast to every other teacher I had up to that point. Whereas most of them were either nuns or seasoned professionals, Melissa was very much a newer teacher. At one point she told the class that she used to be a Lakers Girl. While I could never confirm it now, I also think she was on Who’s Line Is It Anyway?. There’s an episode where Ryan Stiles walks out into the audience and carries an audience member, “Melissa,” back to the stage. The only downside is that this poor woman was thrown over her shoulder and had her skirt pulled far enough up to see things. During the wrap-up song, Stiles completed the recurring joke by saying “Every Thursday night, you can see Melissa’s underwear.” It’s not totally estranged to think it was her because her name was Melissa.
But the conflicts slowly emerged because of how the boys had changed so much. Not only were they not as motivated by education, they were being rough and abusive in ways that I wasn’t comfortable with. I’d hear them saying insults behind my back. Instead of simply letting it be, I’d turn around and push them. So many days of school started with me pushing back. The only way I really gained any support from the boys was by calling Marco, upon a rough falling out, “Mexican trash.” I’m not proud of a lot of it, but it was predictable how quickly I was demoted from being allowed to play with the boys.
I didn’t serve myself any favors either. I remember one day that the bell had rung and we were held after because of some odd thing that happened. I was so mad at people in my class that I actively retaliated in small ways that pushed a five-minute extension into a 20-minute one. I could hear the other students moan, and I was mostly fine with it because something about them bothered me that day.
Melissa would try to talk to me and I think I had that stubbornness that my father had when he spoke. I didn’t care about the other students at all. They were so different from me and didn’t care about things I liked. I’d go with my father to Fun Services and spend the rest of the day around grown-ups, never really getting to have a childhood outside of watching TV in an upstairs room or maybe Jumpstart video games. By then I was being trained to do on-site work by helping to pack boxes of toys for Santa’s Secret Workshop. I learned to set up booths. One of the perks of working in a warehouse was having access to a miniature basketball game – the one where you tossed a ball through a hoop to a timer. Small things like that were fun, but it quickly became clear that Fun Services was a prominent place I spent my youth when my grandparents weren’t home to babysit us.
I’m sure my work suffered because of it. For years since, I don’t think I could be called a “good” student. I passed, but it came with this antagonism of trying to win friends over by occasionally screwing things up. When I would cheat, I feared giving myself away so I’d intentionally miss a few questions in hopes to get teachers off my scent. I think it was as much drawn by an experience I had in science class with Mrs. Gensemer where I turned in my assignment a bit too early and she recognized that the students who did weren’t doing their best work.
Ms. Gensemer is one of those strange connections from where this story starts and ends. On the one hand, she was a good teacher, if a bit kooky in the way that science teachers usually were. However, the thing that made her stand out is that the school my parents were looking at, St. Cornelius, was where her son went. There was some assumption that I’d go there and immediately be friends with him. However, that was way off and at the beginning of the semester, I was just going to her class looking through microscopes and being in awe of the scientific world. Not since we had computer labs the previous years did the world hold greater wonder.
Because of my falling out with the boys, I think Sister Anna the principal decided that the next best step was to stick me with the girls. Don’t get me wrong. There was a great group and I liked hanging out with them. However, by that point, I was becoming unruly and very socially awkward. I’m sure that I smelled and didn’t invest in good hygiene. I was a gross child, but there were a few good months there.
With that said, I’m not totally sure if Crystal D. ultimately took pity on me or actually liked me anymore. While I’m not done talking about the Marco fallout, I feel like Crystal’s was swifter. There came a point where suddenly I was the target of most of the grade’s criticism and my reputation became notorious. I was accused of doing things to students in the bathroom that weren’t true. I was being threatened to be beaten up because of how much I didn’t take insults. At one point, I had a student tell me that Marco’s dad, who I took to be a nice man, wanted to take me out to a field and beat me up. That in itself was so traumatic and indicative of a formation of trust issues because it made no sense for a parent to assault a child. At some point in all of it, Crystal took me aside and said flat-out, “I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”
Being 10 is weird, especially when you’re socially at odds with other students. While I have mostly been talking about the ways that I have been defending myself, I do so to suggest that in years since I’ve accepted that the animosity was mutual. The other students weren’t making me feel welcome, and I didn’t take it well.
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| Note: Unrelated church pew |
There was a point where my father decided that the way to potentially “cure” this issue was to spend more time in church. He meant specifically altar serving at the 6 AM mass. I’d sit in the pews and wait for the priest to emerge. If he waved at me, I knew that I was needed. I’m not sure how long this went on for, but I’d go and try to experience whatever atonement my father believed in. The Spanish priest would walk me through the ceremony and by the end, I’d be disoriented because it wasn’t time to attend school for another few hours. Was the extra time supposed to help me process something that I wasn’t clued into?
At the time we were still going to mass every Sunday. I think my parents believed that Catholicism was a useful part of our identity, and I couldn’t complain. However, I want to believe there was something about this year that ultimately made it easier to break free of simple assimilation later in life. I don’t believe that the people themselves were evil, but when you’re bullied and punished at a Catholic school, it’s hard not to correlate these ideas in a significant manner. The principal was a nun. The teachers couldn’t teach the students empathy. I was on my own and somehow forced me to form an independent view of myself that was as much the feeling of perpetual disconnect as well as distrust that ran in different forms. For long periods, I was so rebellious that I allowed myself to be the butt of jokes and let people abuse me in the years since because I believed it was the only way to win their friendship.
When all else failed, the school came up with the final decision that lingered in my mind. I couldn’t play basketball with the boys. The girls didn’t want me. Where do I go? When I got in trouble now, the principal forced me to run laps around the entire school. Otherwise, I was excommunicated from recess and lunch in that I was forced to sit by myself on the patio overlooking a statue of Mother Mary. I’d bring books, notably the biographies of presidents, and just sit there for the half hour and read. When you’re 10 and have that forced on you, it’s an unbearable lesson that ends up having a damaging view.
Because here’s the thing. Reading is not in itself bad. While it reflected my divide from the others, having it be what you’re forced to do when small things go wrong helps you develop an unhealthy coping mechanism. Because of sitting there, I developed a belief that when you’re sad you just consume information. Maybe it was a distraction, but it taught me that I could learn my way out of my emotional struggles. I don’t know if anyone’s tried this, but emotion and logic are not the same thing, and as a result, you can only get so close to answers. Every now and then the janitor would stop by and be friendly, but for the most part, I was evading punishment from the principal and realizing that I didn’t want to play with anyone at this school.
Because of all this, some things are triggering. I tried to “enjoy” nu-metal when I transferred school but found it profoundly uninteresting. I also had trouble enjoying any form of wrestling because it reminded me of waiting for my parents to pick me up and watching the boys bully themselves into injuries. There was a random person who once said I should try out for football because of my size, but I have been staunch in my opinion that football is a boring, messy sport where nobody knows what they’re doing.
Which should mean that I’d shift into the other conflict of the time. I remember Crystal D. asking about it, but I didn’t notice it within myself. Fifth grade is when my weight issues really became an “issue.” I had impulse control problems and had no awareness of metabolism. Because I worked with my father, I was encouraged to drink two liters of sodas (you read that right) while doing on-site assignments. I’d eat candy. At night I was notorious for eating too much of dinner, and often ate it while it was being cooked. Everything added up and even as my mom bought larger size pants, I wasn’t clued into the idea that this was a bad idea.
There are many people to blame for the impulse eating that would spiral for a few more years. I would definitely include myself in it because other students did comment on my size growth. I was becoming ugly and lost my skinny pole look that I’ve been trying to get back to for over 20 years.
When you’re fat as a child, things feel different. You’re more prone to insults from other students. They wonder what happened to you. Everything is awful. I already smelled and wasn’t behaving in a socially pleasing way. I didn’t catch onto trends. I was so different from the others, and I wound up alone. My dad couldn’t convince me to lose weight without turning to a fat person on TV and saying “You don’t want to end up like that.” Meanwhile, he’d be watching The Nutty Professor (1996) in the garage while painting. The Simpsons glorified slovenly behavior and chances of me living the happy life seemed to fade… and all at 11. Everyone was skinny and I was fucked.
I don’t wish to speak about every change that happens to a child’s fat body, but it’s even different from adults who form the beer belly later in life. Because you are still growing, you have the weight more distributed so it looks more “natural,” but even then you look at beer belly people who wave their naked torsos around and think “That doesn’t look like me.” I am still uncomfortable about fat people displaying themselves in any “glamorous” way with skin showing. I think it’s because I never felt right in my own body. Not since I was 9, anyway. At 10, I started to develop things that haven't left which makes me feel deformed and ashamed.
With that said, I was not going to be on a football team. All I would be was self-conscious of being a bigger person. Because of that, I wanted to make sure that I was never mistaken as slow. I would never run as well as other people, but I was not going to walk slowly. I would have a brisk pace when I walked somewhere. I would try to maintain some level of strength. I didn’t want to be seen as weak, even though I’d argue many probably saw me as dumb.
This is a lot for a child to take in when you’re starting to experience the world. Even then, having a father who maybe introduced some bad ideas to me didn’t help. We were, after all, virtuous. We went to church and did all the sacraments. My uncle, a drug addict his whole life, was in a good period and we’d see my dad’s parents on the weekends. The church they’d attend, St. Cornelius, was partially chosen because that’s where they liked to go.
I can’t recall much about looking for new schools, but I was invited to at least two or three. They were all the same. I’d get a walk around the campus before the principal or staff member (I don’t remember) would have a conversation with my parents. There was something about St. Cornelius that just felt right and I was very intrigued to go there. On the one hand, it’s wild to think that I was the child who decided where everyone was uprooted to. I get not staying at OLOR, but who’s to say my sister didn’t want to go somewhere else?
While we’re outside of the classroom, I want to focus on something that has intrigued me a lot as I’ve grown older. Because of the problems that were forming in my life, somebody (I assume the school but who’s to say) paid to have me attend therapy. I remember sitting in the lobby often reading “Harry Potter” and just waiting for this woman to ask me questions about my life.
I’m unsure if this is where my love of therapy came from. Maybe it was the idea that somebody was talking to me like a human and respected what I had to say. If they had any negative thoughts, they didn’t share them with me. I was eager to see her because she was polite and gave me a chance to express myself. It could just be that I was lonely and desperately wanted anyone who made me feel seen, but it was a nice month or so.
Then… it stopped. One day I went into the meeting and we did everything according to plan. When it ended, she said that she was curious to have me have a session with other children. I remember being curious to see how that went. The tragedy is that it never happened. I never learned why, but I am willing to bet that it had more to do with budgetary issues, especially since Catholic schools weren’t free. Something stopped us from going further and I’ve longed to have another therapist in some form, if just to understand why this feeling has lingered with me, why I felt so much comfort in sitting with somebody and just talking. It’s why I love the TV show In Treatment.
The final story that I want to share from this period was probably the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. I forget why, but one day I was forced to go to the principal’s office where I sat for a few hours across from the front desk. I just waited for something to happen. When it was announced that I could go back, I was met with a surprise.
Everyone had given me a personalized, handmade card. I’m very sure Melissa meant well and probably some of the students were sincere. Still, reading “You’re cool” in so many ways was enough to make me cry. I’d look at the letters in disbelief that so much positivity was being given to me. Was this going to be the start of mending friendships?
I would like to specify that I’m confident that a lot of the negativity from this year is in my head. Every student couldn’t have been terrible to me, and yet it felt like they were. I would run into Oscar sometime in my 20s and he’d have a gleam in his eye suggesting that we had good times together. Then again, I don’t remember having issues with Oscar. At another point, I remember going to a quinceanera for my sister’s friend and Crystal D. said hello. When I ignored her, my dad gave me an approving remark. Something was keeping me from noticing that not everything was a vindictive attack on myself, and yet I still considered a lot of those people awful for reasons that have deflated the more I’ve actively addressed it.
The reality is that I never talked to Marco again. I still can’t listen to Limp Bizkit because of how much it reminds me of that time. Still, as everyone shifted back to their old selves, I went back to not being allowed to play with the boys and the girls didn’t want me. I’d just have to ride out the rest of the year on that bench. When I was forced to be “punished” by being sent to the sixth grade classroom, the teacher liked to joke that I was leaving the school because I was scared of her. I should say that I have no qualms with her or any teacher upward.
I think it was just that by that point, OLOR had lost its charm and I was eager to get out of there. I had felt isolated and there was no way to really redeem that. I learned that faith could only do so much and the only way to make friends was to be self-effacing. It would take way too long to not just give into behavior my father would do because I have come to accept that it draws people away. They don’t want me to be my father. They don’t want me to have an aggro sense of humor where I behave rudely for some shock humor. They want something genuine. I just had to get through fifth grade when it felt like that was all you could be… hostile.
Because of those letters, I have never been able to hear a comment without holding some skepticism. Unless you’re telling something directly to my face and reassure yourself, I will convince myself that you’re lying. Nobody likes me even if they say otherwise. There are those I’m willing to bypass this for, but it’s why I’m cautious about getting close to many. When they say that you develop a lot of key traits as a child, they are not wrong. As much as I’ve spent the time trying to break this behavior, I remain antisocial and skeptical on some level. I may have broken from the more bitter elements, but I still can’t shake the regret that now makes me anxious when the world is not watching me.
I know that I have mostly focused on myself in this post, but I think it’s very much a response to the behavior around me. I didn’t exactly have a great guardian watching over me and those that were maybe were molding me in ways that did me no favors. There are embarrassing things that I don’t wish to discuss here, but puberty was rough. Everyone seemed to change over the summer and I didn’t know anybody anymore. It made no sense. Whereas I once had people to talk about Britney Spears with, I was now having them call me “gay” for liking pop music. Much like the color purple, I think I repressed liking that stuff in the years to come to seem cooler.
Fifth grade is a tough year for me to write about and I hope that I did it justice. Had I done so even a few years ago, it probably would’ve looked a lot rougher and more accusatory. It took years for me to find any greater meaning in who I was then.
It’s largely because I struggled with identity from then on. I have been spending 20+ years trying to connect with my inner child. However, because of 2000-2001, I was not able to access my younger years as easily. I knew this time frame was bad, but I left it at that. By forcing myself to address the trauma, I was able to look further back and see things clearer. I still don’t know how truthful this all is, or if my memory crapped out because of how long ago it was. Even then, forcing myself to confront this has led to a lot of pain but it has also led to a lot of acceptance and peace.
It was a terrible year, but probably not as terrible as I remember. I’m thankful for transferring to another school because what followed was a pretty great friend group that, for three years at least, did plenty to restore my faith in humanity.
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