Paradox of Life: Offenses Must Come

I used to have a recurring fantasy in grade school. I would sit in history class, next to the window, look out at the hills, and I would imagine a gunman, a sniper, hidden out there in the grass, taking aim. I’d pretend I was the sniper, the hairs of the scope lining up on a certain child, and then I’d shoot.

I’d take aim and fire upon myself.

That’s what I wanted to do, I thought, I wanted to grow up, and then go back in time to shoot myself. A paradox? yes, but I hated every breath I breathed in that damned place.

Now I have a little niece, and as I watch her grow, I wonder what the schools will do to her. I think back to that time and I realize how lucky I was compared to some of my friends. I was bigger than most, and no one wanted to fight with me. I lived in a good neighborhood, and despite all my complaints against my grade school, I know they gave me a good foundation in math, writing, and computers (entering college, I was surprised to learn that many of my peers were just learning things that I was introduced to by the age of ten, like how to make a spreadsheet).

Here’s another paradox: I love and hate my education. I got to take advanced math courses giving me such a head start that later the high school I went to ran out of math classes to give me; I could read Shakespeare without help (though that was more my mother’s and father’s influence than the school’s); and too many other things to count. It was not the education part of my education that made me fantasize about killing myself; it was the school.

It was not fitting in. It was you and everyone else being punished because someone in your class deserved to be punished. It was being punished because a teacher wasn’t a good teacher. It was the inane happiness of adults that were so excited to see you jump through arbitrary and idiotic hoops.

I have taken in my life to writing nightmares, to exploring dark dreams. Many years after grade school, I was invited by a friend to return to that building. His younger sister was a student at our old school, she was in a play, and it was a chance for he and I to see each other again. I went back to that building. I walked those halls. I even snuck out back to see the playground. All the while, it was as if something invisible was standing right in front of me, speaking words I couldn’t hear. It was like a memory that I couldn’t remember.

Hate tempers with time, and the studious may sharpen that metal. I don’t want my niece to live through the horror of my childhood. My mother sometimes lets me know a little of her childhood, of the hell she went through in foster care. Her story makes my little complaints mean. She was determined that her children would not go through what she did.

I think of myself, wanting to kill myself in grade school; wonder what depravities public schools may have fallen to since I was there. I think of my niece, already walking, saying a few words. The paradox of life: I know that for her to grow up, she will go through something. Like all of us, something in her will eventually be hurt, destroyed, and I can’t stop that. I can only pray that she will have the same grace given to her that was given her grandmother, that after she leaves the Garden of Eden, however that happens, she might find her way home again.

I know that for how much I hate my old grade school, I am who I am because of it. There is a paradox, to hate the thing that made you you. If I could go back in time, I don’t think I would save myself, either by killing my younger self or by getting that younger self into a different school.

Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

Luke 17:1-2