It's all very well being funny and all that, and making light of a bad situation. Finding the humour in things can literally keep you alive I've discovered, as someone living with chronic pain, and it's a habit that I've developed on and off-stage. Humour is quite simply the antidote to all life's ills.
But what I left out of that post was the part of me that didn't find it funny in the slightest.
Because the reality is that the discovery the other day that someone had gone to the police nearly two years ago, is actually just further horrible illustration of the pervasiveness of years of attempts to destroy our reputation that originated in a secret meeting that the Steiner School held about us, barely two weeks after their expulsion of our bullied child and her sisters, in June 2009 (and now continues on supposedly Steiner 'critical' sites).
We knew about this secret meeting because a few staunch parents in the class told us about it before they went. They also took notes of what was said and gave them to us afterwards. This was a meeting designed to give the parents in the class, a mixed age group class of 17 boys and 5 girls, a release valve for their feelings about what had happened. There was a lot of vitriol directed at a family that had almost succeeded in properly bringing up the notorious bullying, until they were literally axed - some of the mothers of the boys in that class are from the school's most powerful families - how else would it have gone on for so long?
The meeting was held on school grounds one evening. During this meeting parents were actively encouraged to vent about us. We were not invited. (This venting thing is still going on right now on Alicia Hamberg's blog where others are encouraged to express negative thoughts and feelings about us while we are not invited, and inaccurate information as well as downright lies are stated as truth, in spite of the facts being checkable - but why let the facts stand in the way of a good kicking?).
During that meeting lots of very nasty things about us were said, rumours were begun involving fictitious visits from the police while a child was having a sleep-over at our place, and the caution not to let children come over to our house. At the time, parents of the school were contacting us saying things like they'd taken the 'adult decision' not to let their children see our children anymore. I may have left out of my last post how intimidating it was to know that people were spreading such vile things about us.
Obviously all this was traumatising for the children and for us as a newly immigrant family. It also had very negative effects on our family dynamic. Our middle child, the one later vetoed by Charlie Kingston, had had no problem whatsoever at the Steiner school and not two weeks before they flung her out, she'd had a birthday party at the school, parents not invited, where her teacher had given her personally made gifts, but that didn't stop her turning her back on the child in an instant.
It was certainly hard for my little girl to understand why she'd been thrown out of the school, and lost her friends, when she had no problem there, and it didn't make family relations easy to say the least.
Following six months of "home-ed", which is what we called the period following the expulsions, our situation was seriously effecting our income, especially in view of the slanderous material coming from the school, including about Steve's professional integrity, and undermining our attempts to gain NZ residency through self-employment.
Largely due to the support of the excellent people at the Waitakere Trauma and Abuse Centre, we were able to ground ourselves enough to enrol the children at another school, the one Charlie is a parent at. Our house was in the middle of Steiner territory - so we moved. There was a huge amount of upheaval for a family that had only been in the country less than two years. This is all classic Steiner mobbing stuff, and you can find many similar stories on the internet, mostly anonymous. These stories also echo our experience of how weird it was to approach another school at all, it felt very strange to be in a standard type playground after the lush bush setting of the Steiner School and six months of home-education. Perhaps I left out, in my last post, how intimidating it was to be there at all.
This was the background to the children's enrolment in the new school, I can't pretend we didn't limp in, but once there, we and the children entered into school life in the most positive way we could. The school knew that the children were in counselling and were fully aware of the situation, at times liaising with the counsellor.
One of the best things about the new school situation, was being able to go into the class as a parent helper. Steiner schools do not allow parents into class, so this was something I had not done since being in the UK.
In contrast to the Steiner ethos, New Zealand schools generally have a pretty relaxed attitude to parent helpers and also to them bringing in little ones - they see it as a positive socialising experience, so I was easily able to take my two year old in with me, which we all enjoyed. The teacher was fantastic, a young woman who was genuinely so excited to be teaching in the same school she herself had gone to years before - it was one of those situations that warms your heart as a parent.
But one morning, while being a teacher's help, there was one child who wouldn't speak to me. She just point blank refused to answer when I spoke to her, and when I looked nonplussed by this, my own child helpfully offered an explanation in that very matter of fact way kids have: "oh her mum says she's not allowed to talk to you". I was gob-smacked.
I mentioned this to Charlie in the playground later. Although I was certainly not forward in approaching mums, after my recent awful experience, I did tentatively see her as a friendly person, and she had encouraged me not to give up on justice about the Steiner situation, even lending me some of her legal books to help me understand the New Zealand system better. When I told her about the child who couldn't talk to me, however, she just commented that "kids are like that aren't they?" and although she was incredulous she said she would check it out with the mother involved. (As an aside, no I don't think that kids are just like that at all, and certainly my children would know that it was 'rude' not to reply to an adult speaking to you in most situations.)
I wonder if you can imagine how intimidating it was to be told so innocently that a child had been forbidden to speak with me. I didn't mention in the last post the cold feeling that went down my spine when I realised that something horrible had entered this new place from somewhere else.
When I saw Charlie bending her head low with the mother on the way out of school as she asked for, and received the information, I had no idea that it was so serious that she would never basically speak to me sincerely again.
My child's birthday party was in May, when she turned six, but Charlie didn't go to the police until September, a full four months after the birthday, which in itself was significantly after this 'information' had been passed on to her. During that time, I had to go into the school playground not knowing what had been said about me behind my back, or why my child was being ostracised.
I eventually found out that Charlie had complained about me when I mentioned something to the teacher one day about the fact that my child wasn't allowed to play with Charlie's daughter. The teacher looked very upset and said "I knew this would happen", but she wouldn't be drawn on what, or why, saying she was out of her depth, and sent me to the Senior teacher. That was when I learned that Charlie had gone to complain, weeks before, after her false promises regarding a play date with the kids.
What was it that Charlie had been told that made her behave like this? I don't know, she didn't tell the staff at the school, but I don't know who else she told, or has told since.
Every single time I had to talk to any member of staff about it, as the situation caused distress to my daughter, as well as to me, I would find tears of humiliation constantly interfered. It was terrifying to have to go into a school where rumours were being spread around, where my child was being ostracised by parents, and to hear that there was nothing the school could really do. I couldn't manage any meeting with any member of staff without dissolving completely, and I didn't feel much better for their reassurances that there was no judgement.
Obviously the rumours were/are very bad because, having heard them it was so very important for Charlie and her child to have nothing more to do with our whole family, and given that she had such destructive 'information' about us, maybe it was hard for her too to go into the playground and see me there. Apart from a couple of texts to try and find out what had happened, when our daughter couldn't cope with it anymore, and one phone call we didn't really have any contact and any impression that I was constantly trying to communicate with her is ridiculous.
The truth is that after all that I didn't have the nerve to even speak to her. How could I really? I hated even seeing her or the other mother, and after that I found myself unable to speak to any parent in a relaxed manner - not knowing what they'd been told about our family.
I'd already been through one situation at the Steiner school where the many parents who'd been encouraging me to address the bullying turned against us, with one friend threatening to expose how I'd advocated for my extreme premie, if I went to the press. I think she did this out of desperation that her child might have to go to an ordinary New Zealand state school; the proportion of foreigners at the Titirangi school is very high.
It's true that New Zealand's statistics on bullying and on abuse in general are pretty shameful. They tell the true story that the glossy brochures don't. In four years of being in New Zealand, we personally knew, at a remove of at most three people, of four primary school age children who had committed suicide (none of them from the Steiner school).
That's somebody we know's grandchild, somebody we know's friend's child, that kind of thing. Four children.
And that's as new immigrants who had also been shunned by a whole community that we spent a year and a half in. We really didn't know that many people. Perhaps this explains to some extent why the glossy advertising exists, and the levels of denial. That's pretty scary.
It was well-known in the Steiner school that the gang of boys was totally out of control. In fact, several months after we left, the school got in a psychologist, shortly after another mother, having been told that there was no bullying at the school, had enrolled her son in the same class my bullied daughter was expelled from, only to find that the bullying was worse there than at the bullying school he had escaped from!
This is what it cost us to send our kids to a Steiner school in New Zealand where Steiner schools have mostly been state-funded for decades. This is the background to the Human Rights involvement as we have followed due process through the only channel available. This is the background to many critics' original assessment of us as brave and funny as we did make some humorous material, stuff which made the kids laugh too.
It's also the background to what I recently referred to as "funny" that a mother would go and talk to the police about a six year old's play-date. It is funny in retrospect as a cartoon image, but I hope this account shows that it was far from funny at the time.
Because I'm talking about my feelings in a more direct way than I usually do on the internet, and because I'm still fighting severe attempts at reputation destruction (now by soi-disant 'critics' as well), I'm going to say that I'm quite prepared to go back to that school, which as far as I know Charlie's kids are still at, and ask the headmistress and that Senior teacher to corroborate everything I've said here, if need be.
In the face of the slander and name-calling I'm just going to keep right on doing what I know annoys bullies so much, that is calmly standing up for myself and my kids in the most evidential, assertive, polite and humorous way I can. In this post, however, I've tried to show people that in spite of that, I am just a vulnerable human being like anyone else. It shouldn't really need saying, but perhaps it does.
When I found out that Charlie had complained to the school weeks before, just because of the false expectation she'd created by lying to the children about her intention to give them a special play-date, which led to an unclarity that we had politely tried to understand, the playground, and the staring eyes of Charlie became too intimidating for me altogether and I would often just beg Steve to go to school in my place.
These are the facts, that I, known generally as a brave woman, felt so intimidated by the manipulative back-stabbing complaints, the rumour-mongering, passive-aggression and hostility, that I was unable to cope with even seeing Charlie, the woman who is now telling all the 'bystanders', willing to drink in the misinformation on Alicia's blog, that it is my small children that were manipulative. Those that will buy into such facile attacks on children, ignoring or unable to see the transparency, are either not very clever, or inclined to nastiness (or both) and there's not much anyone can do about that!
I'm so proud of the way my spunky kids went to school that whole year, starting again and doing their best to make new friends, in spite of the bullying Steiner school and in spite of these parents being so nasty to them and all on the other side of the world from their established friends and family too.
The complaint Charlie lodged with the police was never followed up, which is telling, because it shows that there was no need to follow it up but it was simply done in order to put something about us on record with the police - pure manipulative spite and intimidation in other words.
So what was the complaint Charlie Kingston 'had to' lay with the police nearly two years ago, that she's telling the world about now? Well we went to find out, because up until then, we had no idea whatsoever that she'd even made it.
Here's what the duty officer copied from the book:
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