Diary of a Former School Bus Rider

Today, as most days, I get stuck behind a school bus on my way to pick A up from school.  The school bus - ugh!  Seeing a school bus, no matter where I am, makes me cringe.  Seeing a school bus always invokes painful memories of being made fun, picked on and taunted.

In Jackson, Missouri if your mom did not stay home all day, if you did not lived close enough to walk or had an older sibling pick you up, you rode the bus.  Everyone rode the bus.  This was the thing I dreaded most from 6th grade until I was a freshman (my sophomore year got better - I had friends with drivers licenses :)  I remember at least one day a week I would come home and cry after getting off the bus.

See, I was the fat girl on the bus.  Looking back, I was not big at all by today's standards, but I seemed to always be the biggest girl.  As like a majority of them, middle school boys can be mean - very mean.  I was always the target of fat jokes and the such.  I vividly remember buying a candy bar (okay, I know) from someone selling them for a club fundraiser and these 2 boys - Travis and Mark - started up.  It took everything I had to act like I couldn't hear them and try not to cry.  These are the same 2 who taunted me for a week after falling down on the way to the piano in the 6th grade Talent Show (I went on to play a perfect "Fur Elise" by Beethoven with a room full of happy applause, thank you very much :)  

I'm sure everyone has those moments from school they can't forget no matter how hard they try.  We aren't perfect.  We've made fun of people and have had people make fun of us.  I think this just helped me develop a thick skin for that kind of ridicule.  It's funny though, once we got past 9th grade (which was located at our junior high/middle school) everything stopped.

The 2 boys?  I don't know what happened with one - he just kinda faded into ordinary.  The other, he started dating a girl 2 years older than us, "fell in love", they ran off from their parents bound for Vegas to get married (he was 16, she 18) but got apprehended by the cops somewhere in Colorado (I think it was...) after their parents alerted the police.  They broke up a year later.

I'm thankful that A goes to a school that they only way you would ride a school bus, is on the way to a field trip.