When Children Lose Hope

Our little city of Calimesa made the news last week, and not for anything good. Thirteen-year-old Rosalie Avila, a student at Mesa View Middle School, hanged herself in her bedroom. She was found by her parents.

This is a tragic story.
This is a familiar story.

This is a photo of Rosalie:

Kids at school told her she was ugly. Her parents had arranged counseling for her months before her suicide because they discovered she'd been cutting herself. They did everything right in their attempt to save their daughter. Sadly, forces greater than themselves intervened.

In August,  the Huffington Post ran a story on teen suicide rates--because they have hit an all-time high and continue to rise. Nowadays, more young girls kill themselves than ever before.

This is a gut punch to me.

I want to blame social media. I want to blame a society that reveres youth and beauty above all gifts, talents, abilities or strengths.

I want to blame the parents of the bullies, but I know that those parents love their kids and think they're terrific. Of course they do. It has been my experience that the parents of bullies are the last people to discover that their 'good' kids are going off to school and taunting, tormenting, and humiliating other kids.

I want to blame the bullies, of course. I want to pull them aside, sit them down, get in their faces with my harshest teacher voice and ask, "Do you understand exactly what you did here?" But... they're kids. They did what kids have done for countless generations. I was told horrible things in middle school, too. "Your teeth are crooked." "You walk funny." "You're ugly." "You're dumb." And I was depressed, though not suicidal. That depth would come later, in high school, when I was fifteen.... All those voices echoing in my psyche contributed, though, I have no doubt.

I want to blame somebody, anybody, because I'm just angry. I'm furious that another girl thought she wasn't pretty enough... thought that happiness would only be held out to the beautiful people in life. I'm sure she watched enough TV and saw enough online and heard enough at school to believe that this is so.

And so she simply lost hope. She was embarrassed by her crooked teeth. Her parents got her the orthodontia she needed, but then she was teased about wearing braces. She couldn't win. So she gave up.

We lost her. And I am so sad for that.

I went for a walk this morning around Mesa View Middle School. I took Thomas with me (because one should always take a beloved companion along when one chooses to immerse oneself in sadness). We walked the perimeter of the school, then found ourselves walking the athletic track, then discovered Rosalie's name scraped out in the dirt in letters as long as my shadow. I stepped back in order not to walk on someone's memorial and saw that a third of the track had been covered in messages:

Rosie, we miss you!
Rosie, we love you!
Rosalie (signed by Aubrianna)

And the last one pictured below. To that one, I say, Amen.

An Open Letter to the Checker at the Stater Bros. Market on Fourth Street and Vineyard in Ontario, CA

Dear checker,

I was just another shopper in your line, indistinguishable from other shoppers on this Sunday morning, waiting—you might have assumed impatiently—for you to help the Vietnamese man with his three sons.  Actually, I picked your line because of those boys… because the three-year-old in the cart dropped his right flip flop on the floor just as I was passing, so I picked it up and pulled into line, handing him his shoe as I smiled to recall countless shopping trips with my own boy-in-the-cart dropping a shoe.  That would have been thirty or so years ago.  It feels like yesterday.

And if you thought I was impatient—as you clearly were—you were wrong.  Yeah, I wanted to get back home to mow the lawn before it was too hot, but I didn’t begrudge this man, brave enough to shop with his boys, the few minutes it took to help him.  And yes, the whole ordeal would have gone much more quickly had he spoken English well.  When you looked at him with all that disdain in your eyes, in the set of your jaw, and then spoke with the same disdain dripping from your words, he didn’t know what you meant when you said “less fat.”  When your accusatory finger hammered the document indicating his federal assistance with certain grocery items, he didn’t understand your terse, “The milk is supposed to be less fat.  Two percent.  Do you want two percent?  It has to be two percent.”  The bag boy seemed cheerful enough as he trotted off to make the switch.  And at that point, we all knew—you, me, the boys, the dad—no one was behind me in line—that we had a bit of a wait on our hands, so you could have been a bit gentler when you told him, “These are the wrong beans.  The wrong beans.  Do you want red or black beans?  They have to be red or black.”  I heard your disgusted sigh as you stormed away from the register, and if I heard it, of course the dad did, too, as did his sons.  It wasn’t necessary; we all understood that you were intent on shaming him.

And suddenly, there I was, thirty years ago, a boy in the cart and three more on the ground, a single mother of four, shopping with food stamps.  Oh, I was shamed, too, in a Stater Bros. not far from this one, by a checker who refused to disguise her contempt for a young mother with all those kids relying on public assistance.  I didn’t hate her for judging me.  I just noted her pathetic ignorance.  She couldn’t know that I was a full time college student, that the minute I had divorced him my former husband split, for all intents and purposes abandoning his children—the so-called “special needs” children we had adopted together—refusing to ever pay a penny in child support—because his church leaders had counseled him to do so.  Would knowing this have made a difference to her?  Would it make a difference now, if she could see that I have devoted nearly half my life to public service, giving back not only in the taxes I pay but in the small attempts I make to change the world one student at a time?  I doubt it.

Just as I doubt that knowing this man’s story would have helped you wipe that ugly smirk off your face as you were shoving two bags of beans in his face, your head tipped sidewise, your eyes rolling as you demanded, “Do you want red beans or black?”

It was when the oldest son stepped up to the counter to help out that I noticed his soccer jersey.  The lettering said something in Vietnamese, something about Saigon.

It was at that point, dear impatient checker, that I almost lost it, almost began to cry in your line.

You seem to be my son’s age, maybe early 30’s.  Unless you had a passionate U.S. History teacher in your junior year of high school, I doubt you have any idea what “Saigon” means to someone my age, someone who lived during that war in which we promised the people of South Vietnam we would help them… because their Communist neighbors to the north were coming to get them, to murder and enslave them… and after we promised to protect them we failed… and then fled, leaving behind “the killing fields” of South Vietnam.  I watched the fall of Saigon from the safety and security of my comfortable home, saw the chaos at the U.S. embassy as hundreds pleaded for sanctuary, sat anxiously praying as cargo planes were loaded up with children who were brought here to escape the threatened blood bath.  We had begun the adoption process.  One of those planes could be carrying my future child.  And when one went down, killing all aboard… all those beautiful, sad, terrified children, I was sick with grief.

Who knows what this father is going through, trying to feed his sons, trying to make his way in a new world as he learns a new language—at his age, which I guess to be late 40’s, perhaps a decade older than you.  Who knows what he endured in his country before he came here, what he has had to sacrifice to come to the U.S., land of the American Dream.  You can’t know.  You can’t possibly know.

If you did, would it have made a difference?  Would you have been able to muster a bit more sensitivity to his predicament, his lack of English skills?  Could you have been just the tiniest bit more civil as you shoved the receipt and his modest change into his hand?

Could you, please, the next time he steps up to your register?