Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?

I cannot say one book was my favourite but I can guarantee that there was a series that I loved growing up. The Babysitters Club was the absolute pinnacle of my younger reading memories. They were a bunch of teens who got paid for looking after little kids so adults could have a social life or working life. I just wanted to be like them.

The characters consisted of Dawn, Mary Ann, Stacey, and Claudia. Dawn was a blonde haired, blue eyed Californian, Mary Anne was a mousey, quiet girl, Stacey was a New Yorker with diabetes, and Claudia was a Japanese-American girl with a penchant for junk food with stashes all over her room.

These girls were my best friends throughout primary and high school. I was bullied a lot at school but when I got home, I could be with my real friends by reading until my mum would find me under the covers reading past midnight with a flashlight.

So, where do we start unpacking all this? The bullying? The stealthy reading? The countless hours spent in the primary and high school libraries?

Let’s start with the bullying in primary school.

Grade one it all started. I legitimately had one friend. She was a beautiful girl who was equally a bit shy and awkward so it was a friendship made in heaven. I remember stealing my mum’s pad one day to take to school. I did not know what it was but my friend fell over that day and I knew this pad would help stop the bleeding! Ah the embarrassment when I think back on this now!

I was a day dreamer at school. My mum had taught me how to read and write before I started grade one. I had only ever gone to day care now and then and never went to kindergarten or preschool. School was boring for me as I was not learning anything new and it was a slower pace than I was ready for. One day my teacher grabbed me mid daydream from behind under my arms and helicoptered me around the classroom to “wake” me up. I feel like this was a pivotal moment in me never speaking up. I was horrified and I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever fully recovered from that one moment.

Then grade two happened and my best friend left the coast due to her family moving away south. It was at that moment I had no one at all. Right now, I can’t even remember my grade two teacher. I must have buried that deep inside.

Grade three brought more grief. Some memory of two different teachers but not much more than that. Funny what trauma will take away from you. I do remember that I was in ballet at the time. I tried jazz too but I was never quick enough. I was always better at classical ballet, slow and meticulous. There was a grade three camp on the bottom oval for one night and I wet my sleeping bag. It was a horrible time.

Grade four was where I met Stacy and I bit her because she wouldn’t get off the swing. We became best friends. She was also awkward and shy and didn’t quite get social stuff. She was from the west on a farm and I spent time with her riding horses and waking barefoot stepping in cow patties. Her philosophy was it was masticated grass so it wasn’t gross. It was a liberating time.

From there, we had a little friendship group. It was Stacy, John, Michael and I. We would hang out and walk around the campus. We were all losers and loners and it felt safer to be together.

Then grade five brought me some massive trauma. It was still our little friendship group but a girl called Rachel was making fun of me in an empty classroom one day. I was sobbing because she was so horrible. She told me to throw myself out of the two story window. Could you imagine what would have happened if I actually listened to her? How can kids be that cruel and actually legitimise what they say to other humans? We did run into each other when I got a gift voucher for a facial and she was the therapist. She apologised. She knew she’d been nasty.

Its funny because we actually had gone camping together with her family, mine and another family. It was a nice camping trip and I’d really liked her parents. I always got along better with people older than me. I was an old soul and always connected on a higher level with people than my age dictated. Her father even became my favourite appliance electrician and I still have his phone number in my phone to this day. It does emphasise how there are truly six degrees of separation in this life. I don’t know how a legend of a man could have raised such a horrible child who could tell a person to kill themselves.

The other family we went camping with had a child I regularly hung out with from a fairly young age. She too was into reading the babysitters club and we would often go shopping together for books. The difference between our purchases though was her father had a popular building company and I worked from the age of eight in my families business. She would buy 4-5 books at a time and I would have earned enough to buy one. This may be petty but I realise I hold onto this one time where my family opened up another business and she helped lace shoes for a few hours. We both got paid the same for that job but I never had her buying power because her parents would just spoil her rotten.

She had a queen sized bed and I had two singles. She had all the mod cons and we would borrow the business VCR every school holidays and borrow videos from the store. She had all the brand names and I had op shop clothes or home made outfits courtesy of my mum. I don’t have a problem with the way we lived. I have a problem with people showing off what they didn’t earn. And to this day, she refuses to acknowledge my existence. All I did was leave the high school in grade 10 to escape the bullying.

I went into high school in grade eight and by then our little group of four had grown to five. We had a kid called Fiona who was sporty but decided she liked us. We all went into high school in the same college but Stacy went into boarding school. Whilst it was sad, I get that her mother wanted a better education for her daughter.

Fiona and I went into basketball and were doing quite well. I remember vividly the day I got a three pointer. I was not that good at basketball in my head but I had it going on that day. Fiona raced up to me with a huge high ten and a hug. It was the absolute pivotal point for me in basketball. I raced home and called my god sister. I had to tell her as she was heavily into basketball and I wanted her to be proud of me.

The coaches daughter was not always nice to me. She was a bit stuck up and popular. I ended up being diagnosed with Osgood Schlatters disease and my doctor told me if I didn’t quit basketball, I would end up not being able to walk. The coaches daughter then bullied me for quitting the basketball team. I had just gone through trials for the state team and been selected but could not commit to the team due to my knees and the consequences of continuing my beloved sport. She was not nice to me when I was in the team and then she was worse when I quit. How does that even work?

I have skipped a little bit that is relevant to the babysitters club but I will get back to Fiona in a moment.

When I was in grade six, I had a wonderful teacher. The only teacher I will in fact name in this blog. Mr Greenbank was formerly an IT teacher when IT was brand spanking new. In his class, we played “where in the world is Carmen San Diego”, we learnt about sex, we were allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission, and we created books for our grade one buddies.

My buddy was Jamie-Lee Kenny. She was such a beautiful child and not only did I create a beautiful book for her, but I also spent my lunch times with her and her friends, creating a safe space for them to play and not be bullied. I will take a moment here to say whilst I have danced and partied with Lisa Curry in later life and felt like that family was part of my life, I am totally heartbroken that my buddy Jamie was so unwell in the end that she lost her life, and mostly to depression. No one should have to torture themselves to the point of sickness and that is just a indicator of the type of society we live in now. If more people showed empathy and compassion, Lisa would not have lost her child. Empathy and compassion are the very corner stones of building up people instead of breaking them down into empty shells of their former selves.

I had Mr Greenbank again in high school. He had moved on from primary school into high school IT teaching. I would log in to the computers in his class, finish the tasks and spend my time on touch typing. The touch typing I did, however, was always the number keyboard on the side.

My father taught me how to bookkeep for his company at the age of twelve and I just continued to hone my skills in accounting from there. Always getting my work done early and then continuing to practice to perfect my skills in number crunching.

Back to Fiona however. In grade nine, I developed appendicitis and spent a week in hospital after an appendectomy. I spent several weeks recovering at home and the day I went back to school, Fiona decided to muck around and punch me in the stomach. She opened my internal stitches and I spent another 4-6 weeks recovering again. Honestly up there with the top 5 most painful moments of my life. Number 1 was definitely the ectopic rupture which felt like a knife going into my abdomen and I was lucky I didn’t die but the punch from Fiona was definitely up there.

To this day, I don’t know where Fiona is. I’ve tried to find her on Facebook but to no avail. I hope she’s ok out there and I would love to know that she’s having a good life.

So here we are at grade ten. Our school felt that the most appropriate grade ten thing to do for students was to send them on a camp out west for a month. By that stage, I had met my best friend Leila. We found out at the swimming carnival that we were born on the exact same day 12 hours apart. I was born at 7am and she was born at 7pm. She and I were also both given up for adoption at birth. We bonded and connected in a way that no one could understand.

Unfortunately, she and I were sent on camp in different groups. Not only did I have to go away for a month by myself but then she went away for a month and I was alone at school with the bullies. With my luck as the second group out of four groups to go away, I was placed with the known school bullies and we were not allowed to ride horses due to their behaviour. I’ve spoken earlier about my time with horses and my love for riding or stepping in cow poo. Not only did I not get to be free, but I was put in a situation where I had no one and no one cared about me.

That camp was the hardest experience I have ever had and it was made worse by Leila going on her camp the week after I got back. That is when I begged my parents to take me out of that school and send me somewhere else. They finally listened and I left. What made it more heart breaking was the very people that bullied me for my entire time at school or only my time in high school all signed a large farewell card giving me their best wishes for the future.

How are you supposed to take that when you knew that you had been tormented by the very people that said on paper that they were going to miss you?

Then to make matters worse, my dear Mr Greenbank told my parents that he should have told them to move me to a different school back in grade six because he saw everything that I went through. How could someone keep that a secret for five years? How could you not go and protect a child under constant trauma?

So the moral of the story… I lived to protect those younger than me because I knew how pain felt from peers who were supposed to take you in no matter who you were, what you looked like, what you could do or what your grades were. My grades were terrible at school but amazing in the standardised tests and obviously when I entered university as a mature aged student.

I did do some babysitting of my own in high school. We were fairly heavily involved in the church and there was a lady who was a single mother with two gorgeous sons. My dad pimped me out to babysit them and I had the most amazing time with them. Billy could burp the alphabet and his brother was just the biggest sweetheart. I tried to take that time into my own parenting.

My kids have the ability to be their own person whilst knowing I will give my everything to make sure they’re ok. The babysitters club books gave me ideas on how to be fun but stern and steady. I even took an elective of introductory psychology at uni where I learnt about child development stages and parenting styles. Early on, I decided I did not want to be an authoritarian like hitler. My chosen parenting style is authoritative.

An authoritative parent will set boundaries but allow the children to have input and be a voice in their own upbringing. I feel this is the very core of the babysitters in those books. Be fun, but don’t budge when it comes to the absolute rules in life. The absolute rules are ones around honesty, integrity, empathy, apologies and forgiveness. Behaviour can be subjective to the one who experiences it but there are some non-negotiables.

And before I finish, I want to say I once wrote to Ann M Martin. I cannot remember my letter, but she wrote back and it was the absolute highlight of my youth. I thought I had photos but I cannot find them. One day I will discover them somewhere but not today.

With that said, I will leave you with this thought…

“I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I’m trying to give a little of it back to others. It’s one of the greatest pleasures I know.”

Ann M Martin

Until tomorrow ~ KT18Ø