What Happens When You Are The Bully?

“My  wife said you you made them cry. When I grow up I want to be like you.”

It was meant to be a c0mpliment but I didn’t take it as one. I am not here to be a bully. I am not interested in building a reputation for making the mean moms cry, even if they deserve it.

I know How To Deal With Mean Girls & Mean Moms. I am not impressed by their money or the degrees earned but not used. But there is nothing special in being willing to tell someone they are acting like an entitled pig and that you won’t stand for it.

There is nothing laudatory about driving home the point because ultimately it was done in a manner I didn’t like. But at the time it seemed like the right thing to do.

Protecting Our Children

When the kids switched schools the majority of the mean moms and I lost the occasion to speak or interact. There was no need to talk about whether the room moms were being fair or nice. No need to wonder or worry about any of their behavior. They were there and we were elsewhere.

Except not entirely.

There was some crossover because of softball. There was a coach who tried to defend his mean mom wife by messing with my daughter. He did it when I was far away. He did it when I wasn’t close enough to call him on it in person.

It made me angry…very…angry.

I thought about flying home specifically to meet with him to discuss things but opted for an email instead.

It was strongly worded and it never received a response.  I didn’t threaten him physically or otherwise. I just picked apart an email he had sent earlier and pointed out his hypocrisy. I don’t know if he ignored what I read, if took it to heart or if it made him feel bad.

Face-To-Face

And then the same night I flew back in I ran into him, saw him face-to-face and for a moment I debated making an issue of things. It is one thing to mess with me but when you mess with my family it is different.

It is even worse when you involve my kids because my instinct is to twist your head until it pops off of your neck and I can feed it to feral pigs.

But I didn’t do anything, didn’t say a word.

When he said hi to me I gave him the thousand mile stare and walked by him.

My daughter seems to have forgotten about the problems he created so it seemed silly to bring anything up. I am bigger than he is. It would have been easy to have walked him over to the wall and spit out a series of invectives about his lack of common sense and the need for an attitude adjustment but I didn’t.

I didn’t want to have to answer the question of what happens when you are the bully but I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to slap him. Yeah, there is all sorts of testosterone flowing here and yeah I said slap because men slap men they don’t respect.

And more importantly my kids didn’t see behavior they and I might have been embarrassed by.