Senior Manager in the City Administration

Children get scarred when parents divorce, but for some children, divorce is just a stepping stone for shutting down completely. Tomislav was happy living with his parents in Banjaluka. They went places, had fun, and the world was painted in bright colours. Introverts like Tomislav are never very popular among their peers, but Tomislav had no reason to complain. The kids he played with were enough for him. His parents would sometimes invite guests over, and among those guests there was a married couple with a son much older than he was. Well, at the age of five he saw Mate as much older, because the boy was thirteen at the moment. Not a lot of thirteen-year-olds enjoys company of five-year-olds, but Mate was patient enough, probably because his parents always reminded him that Tomislav was just a small child, and he should be careful with him.

It would be far-fetched to say that they really played, but they did find pleasure in each other’s company. Being an only child, Tomislav subconsciously saw Mate as his big brother, even though they didn’t see each other that often. He spent more time with his school friends, but Mate was someone special, like an image of what he wanted to be like in the eight years that separated them.

When Tomislav was eleven, his family moved away to Zagreb, Croatia. At first, the Modrić family and the Babić family stayed in touch, but the connection was gradually lost. Not that there was a grudge. Simply, both families had their own pressing matters to solve, the Babić family having more pressing matters and issues to address. Tomislav was still a little sore from losing Mate, his big brother figure, when he had a more crippling blow coming his way. His father cheated on his mother, and, apparently, that had been going on for years. Hearing this at the age of thirteen was a blow he never fully recovered from. His mother would take it no more. Horrible domestic fights followed, fights that could not be escaped from or ignored under the covers in his room. His pillow was not thick enough to muffle the noise that filled out their apartment. Name calling. Things breaking. Screams. Police sirens. Ugly divorce rubbed in his face everything that can go awry when people no longer care about each other.

The only thing he could come up with, obviously illogical to everyone else, to protect himself from such events in the future was to shut himself down. By no means was that a conscious choice, much more the only reaction his feverish and petrified body and mind could conjure up. So he shut down, even from his parents.

Screams and noise decreased in volume. His parents noticed he was not as responsive as before, thinking it was just a phase. Three months into his state of barely speaking a word they took him to a school specialist, who observed, rather accurately, that Tomislav still processed input information as before, but stopped producing output information almost completely. He simply did not bother to speak a lot.

Not much after his fourteenth birthday, his parents got divorced and his mother took him to Osijek. Most kids there were quiet and kind, but the quiet and kind offer no protection from the loud and aggressive. As soon as he was enrolled into his class the first day trouble started. A vicious boy looking three years older and followed by a small group of similar-minded boys picked Tomislav as his next victim. Tomislav’s sandwich was snatched from his hands as someone pushed him in the back on the recess. Tomislav stared in bewilderment, thinking it was just for that day, so he just passed them without saying a word or doing a thing. Had he known it would not be just for that day, he would have reacted differently. Unfortunately for him, excessive force, taking things and name calling continued for months. Soon everybody knew he was living with mom only and that his dad was a cheater. The bully boy took special delight in talking all sorts of things about Tomislav’s mom. Other kids, kids that were nice to him in the beginning, started avoiding him, not to get caught between him and the bully. He was completely alone, and irreparably lonely.

His mother missed his mood getting worse day to day, struggling to make the ends meet. His dad sent some symbolic child support, not nearly enough to cover for everything that lacked. Over-worked, over-stressed, over-tired mom had no idea what was happening with her child until she got a call from the principal to come see him the next day.

She got called because Tomislav tried to push a boy under a car, after he failed at pushing him out of the window a few days earlier. Suddenly numb, the woman found it hard to focus. The story made no sense. Why would her son, who was never a bully, do something like that to another boy? Soon things started unwrapping, when school psychologist started talking to other kids from the class. Pieces of picture started piecing together. A bully there was, only not Tomislav.

The bully boy was at first frowned upon, but his father donated a large sum of money to school chemistry lab, and the matter was less and less talked about, until it completely faded from the collective memory. He would not pick on Tomislav later on. A glance or two on a hallway from time to time, but nothing more. His father was a prominent figure in that society, a successful entrepreneur who became rich from scratch. Everybody loves a success story. A conclusion Tomislav reached the day when the bully boy’s father made a donation was brutal in its clarity: it pays off to team up with someone on a high position if you do not have someone to get your back.

The bully boy soon regained his former popularity. Tomislav on the other hand was silently ostracized, and that period lasted until the end of the high school, which meant for almost three years.