School must've been hell, right?

I am often asked, in some variation of outright or implied - and often with a sympathetic voice - "School must've been hell for you, right?" The answer to that question might seem obvious. Indeed, the people who ask me always seem to assume my formative years were spent hiding in hallways from bullies. The short answer is no, my school years weren't hell. But the long answer is a bit more complicated than that.

I've been larger than my peers all my life, ever since I came screaming into the world at over 9 pounds. "Big-boned", one might call it. Taller than even the boys till some of them caught up with me in high school and the total opposite of petite, I definitely felt out of place among my female classmates.

However, I was fairly "normal" - for my big-boned self - from kindergarten through second grade. Little boys still didn't want to hold my hand at recess, though. I just wasn't the kind of sweet, shy little girl that attracted boys. My idea of letting a boy know I liked him was to toss him across the room. Yes, I really did that in second grade. I even got paddled for it! I mean, screw the whole note-passing, "do you like me, circle yes or no" crap. Who had time for that?

I really don't know where I got this weird, loud and obnoxious personality. Both my parents are very nice people, I swear!

I started changing in third grade. My school photos show someone who looks totally, completely different from second to third grade. I blame the acquisition of glasses and the cutting of my long, blonde hair. Well, not really. I was blind as a bat and refused to let my mother brush out my curls. Steps had to be taken. Both my grandfathers died that summer; my maternal grandmother was battling leukemia. Now, I was certainly too young to understand all of this but I have a theory that I sensed great amounts of tension in the house. So maybe....just maybe...that's when I started comforting myself with food.

Then the trouble started.

There was a girl who rode my school bus who started giving me grief. Now, she was also no string bean but this didn't seem to deter her from attempting to make my life miserable. My older brother cold-cocked her in the head with his metal lunchbox one day, defending me. There was also another older girl who lived near my maternal grandmother and delighted in riding her bike up and down the road, shouting insults at me. Again, my older brother came to my defense. He shot her in the ass with a bb gun as she rode away one day. Yes, he really did.

Even though there were occasional problems with idiots like these, overall I was doing fine socially. I always had lots of friends - I had a few very close ones but honestly, there were people I called "friend" from every social strata at the school. I was not a "prep" (a.k.a. the rich kids, cheerleaders, jocks). I was not a "hood" (which is what we called those who liked to wear black, listen to metal and party). But I got along with everyone. My little group of friends called ourselves the "in-betweens". While we watched the many Molly Ringwald movies of the time and identified with a lot of the teen angst bullshit in them, the whole "us vs. them" theme didn't affect us very much. I would say the experience was different for those who wore the other two social labels, though.

It helps to understand that I grew up in a very rural area where everyone knows everyone's family several generations back. The same faces stare out from my kindergarten and high school graduation class pictures, just 13 years older. We all always knew each other and they always knew me to look the way I did. It's just the way it was.

But every now and then, someone would come along and seemingly try to make me feel like shit. It was always someone who didn't know me very well. There was a duo of guys in 6th grade who were suddenly in my class and man....that was a tough year. They were relentless. Ever since third grade, I just kept getting taller and bigger. By age 12, as I've mentioned before, I was at least 5'6" and 200 pounds. I looked like no one else at my school, not to mention Mrs. Rice's 6th grade class. It was like these two boys wanted to bring me down to size.

In science class one day, the teacher had something he wanted to show us but wanted us to guess what it was (I have no memory of what it actually was). Our desks were arranged in a circle, so we could all see each other. Kids were shouting out guesses. I said "I know! I know!" and one of those two boys said in response to my enthusiasm, LOUDLY, "Cindy, it's not food." I dropped my head in shame. The outcry from my other classmates was fast and furious. Their immediate response was to scowl at him in disgust and, well, they kinda boooed him! I think he was shocked...he had expected them to laugh with him. One girl - one of the cool kids - said "Don't you say that! You don't know her! That is so mean!" I will never forget that she did that for me. She was and is such a kind person that it was automatic for her. The teacher, to his credit, let the other kids take up for me for a minute then he demanded an apology from the boy, who reluctantly gave it.

It didn't stop him or his buddy though. Like I said, that was a bad year and didn't end until I didn't have to deal with them every day because we were all shipped off to the junior high school. We would be merging with the other local elementary school. I was nervous about how these other kids would react to me, for sure. But it was ok. Junior high was pretty much like elementary school - I made friends and it was fine with the occasional asshole thrown in. High school was the same.

Notice I haven't spoken much about boys. That's because there's not a lot to talk about till my senior year in high school. I met the boy who would become my first husband and finally got to experience normal, teenage, high-school life. We went on dates. We went to dances. We swapped class rings - most girls wound yarn around their boyfriends' rings in order to shrink them enough to wear on their fingers. My boyfriend's class ring fit my size-nine finger perfectly but oh well. He was two years younger than me so I ended up going to a few proms, too. Normal high school stuff.

Boys were my friends. I've always gotten along well with guys. I laugh at the same things they laugh at, I "get" them in a lot of ways. Always have. So I was definitely one of those girls the guys thought of as one of their own (and still am) - not girlfriend material. Did I have a few dates here and there? Yes, but not the normal high-school girl experience until I was almost done with high school.

But school was not day-to-day hell. No hiding in the bathroom waiting for the bullies to leave. My large network of friends was something I could always cling to when the occasional freak came out wanting to hurt me. They didn't stand a chance. I knew the people who liked me vastly outnumbered the people who didn't. Obviously I took some of what the freaks had to say to heart. Words hurt a lot more than clenched fists and weave themselves into the fabric of who you are, no matter what.

I had more problems with strangers on the street than kids I encountered every day. I guess I never realized how lucky I was - or at least, how much worse it could've been - until I lost all this weight and people started asking me about school and how it must've been so rough for me! Honestly - yes, I was the fat girl in school. Always. But it's just who I was. And most of the people I saw every day didn't give me shit about it. To them, I was just "Cindy". I might've been the fat girl but I was also funny, smart and kind. Luckily for me, for most kids I grew up with, that was good enough.