Life lessons

What would you … should you … do with the bully at work?

Remember his rotten childhood, his harsh father in the back country farm,

A mean So and So to his little boy, like his own Dad’s Dad’s Dad…

This family pattern of abuse has been going on right back to the Ark…

The boy’s sleep so often punctuated with drunken curses,

The kicked door, and the loud slap in the dark.

Next morning his Dad grimly filling a rifle with salt, comes looking for him…

Shooting him in the face to teach him ‘A lesson he won’t forget,’

The salt stinging his eyes, over the box he accidentally dropped.

He grew up into this loveless bully, short on moral authority.

Needing to lash out at perceived privilege,

Thinking I’m some rich English bitch with privileges denied him.

He hates this idea of what he thinks I am.

And I’m so stupid, too, dyslexic or dyspraxic, a thick English bitch,

Who should be stopped, too disabled to do anything right,

Who can’t instantly do as she’s told, who is too old...

Who tries too hard to fit in… where she isn’t wanted.

I’ll get you, rich uppity bitch, stop you dead in your track.

He wants to use me to pay it all back,

Every last unshed tear, all his buried shame and rage and fear…

How do I repay his bullying, his cruelty to me?

Not by dwelling on the way he made me cry.

Not by constantly reliving his total, utterly pointless abuse of power?

Should I turn up at his door and kick him to the floor?

He essayed to ruin my life, lost me my career, wasted my degree,

Tried to destroy my reputation with his glib, fluent lies…

I could make his hatred my own purgatory.

Carry my hatred for his wanton cruelty for the rest of my life…

But my family, my children are carrying me forward with love, into the future!

However dark this moment, I do not have to stay here.

This too will pass, this dark moment of utter defeat.

I do not have to tie myself to futile regrets, the dead end of fear.

Life is more than this bitterness … I must not escape the lesson,

The need to understand, to forgive, to forget, to move on,

Acknowledging my own mistakes, trying to grow into the best me

That I can possibly be, by growing through this grief.

His tragedy does not have to become mine.