On this Mother's Day, I will be thinking of one mother in particular.
Anne O'Brien.
"As I said goodbye to Phoebe at the crematorium, and held her in her coffin for the last time,"
she told a courtroom this week, "my little girl who was so full of life and was no so cold, I thought, ‘What am I going to do?' There is a dead weight that sits in my chest. it's an unbearable pain
and will sit with me until my own death."
She was tearful as she said this.
O'Brien is the mother of Phoebe Prince, the 15- year-old girl who committed suicide
last year after being relentlessly harassed by some students at her South Hadley, Mass. high school. The day Phoebe hung herself, one of the girls hurled a soda can at her from a car as Phoebe walked home from school. This was after they'd already taunted her that afternoon in the library.
This week those students--two boys Phoebe briefly "dated" who then turned on her, and four girls who taunted her on Facebook and publicly called the recent Irish immigrant an "Irish slut"--got punished.
The teens faced felony charges. They could have gotten prison sentences. Instead, five got probation and community service. A sixth teen, accused of statutory rape, received no punishment at all.
O'Brien could have insisted on the harsher charges, though some believed they were excessive. She could have refused to consider a plea. Instead she showed the teens the compassion they had never remotely shown her daughter. She agreed to the lighter sentences. For O'Brien, the fact the students acknowledged their guilt in tormenting Phoebe was justice enough.
How pervasive is bullying? I think more than we know. When my daughter was 14, her friends suddenly dropped her after one girl--the one everyone clamored to be like and slavishly followed--said my daughter was a lesbian. There's nothing wrong with being a lesbian, of course. But in their adolescent school culture it was unacceptable, and she was cruelly shunned. Now 18, my daughter still vividly remembers the pain. "It was the worst year of my life."
One of mine, too. I had never felt so powerless as a parent.
Teens are cruel, but not all of them. The question is, what can we do about it? Anne O'Brien spoke to this dilemma in court when she singled out Sean Mulveyhill, for his "predatory" behavior toward her dead daughter. When she wondered why he couldn't see the pain he was causing her. "Where was his empathy?" she asked.
Sean didn't have an answer. But thankfully Kayla Narey did.
"Phoebe, I wish we could go back to Dec. 10 and 11, when you bravely apologized to me," said Kayla, who was also seeing Sean Mulveyhill. "We had respectful words to each other and though I wasn't happy, I was kind to you. It was my hurt, anger, and jealousy that later changed my behavior. That's when I had the chance to be the person I was raised to be. I failed. That failure will always be with me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the unkind words I said about you. I'm sorry for what I wrote on my Facebook page. Most of all, I'm sorry for Jan. 14, in the library and in the hallway, when I laughed when someone was shouting humiliating things about you. I am immensely ashamed of myself."
There are lots of anti-bullying programs in place in schools. There wasn't one at South Hadley. I would assume there is now. Even so, we need to know which ones are working, which ones aren't. And we need to make sure schools are incubators of qualities like empathy, compassion, and acceptance. And that parents, teachers, administrators, and the adults involved in their lives emulate them.
To that end, maybe it would be instructive if teens watched the video of Phoebe's brokenhearted mom in the courtroom. And then heard the agony in Kayla Narey's quivering voice when she spoke to a girl who was no longer alive to hear her.
Now that the case is over, Anne O'Brien will finally get to do something she's wanted to do for more than a year. Take Phoebe's ashes back to Ireland. I hope she eventually finds some peace. For her sake and for Phoebe's little sister.
Happy Mother's Day.
copyright Mona Gable
