Kindergarten Blues

Kindergarten Blues

She was definitely frustrated, perhaps even perplexed by my behavior.  I was certainly nothing that her student teaching experience had prepared her for, so after a full morning of listening to me cry, she threatened, "If you don't stop crying, I'm going to put you in that pencil sharpener and I bet you'll stop crying then!" (Decades later,  I wonder if she would have been reported for child abuse?)

I don't know how or if I truly processed what she said as a threat or promise, but it was enough to reduce the torrent of tears to sad sniffles that dried in salty streaks down my face.  I never cried that much again, ever.  In fact, I stopped crying, period.  I never told my mother, dad, or siblings.  Somehow, crying had become a shameful act, a disgraceful, distasteful and disagreeable evocation of weakness.  Enough of that.

The rest of my elementary school years passed by in a blur.  I remained in kindergarten for the remainder of that year, but spent only a fraction of first grade actually in first grade.  Educational testing had enveloped public school systems nationwide and changed their "modus operandi."  It felt like everything changed overnight.  My test scores propelled me to third grade, a "Double Promotion," it was called.  I guess I became test "savvy" because I completed third and fourth grades before the next testing cycle.

My fourth grade scores landed me in sixth grade, another Double Promotion.  Somehow, I graduated from grammar school in June of the year I turned 12, and entered high school in September of the same year.  Not a tear had been shed since the first day of school.  Instead, fear had found me.  Yet, I told no one; that would have been the equivalent of crying uncontrollably.

Only decades later,  have I been able to trace the genesis of the fears that often send me back to my first day of school.  Sometimes a promise and sometimes a threat, like a low-grade fever, fear has lurked like an emotional cesspool that fuels my behaviors, actions, and even inaction.  What probably helped throughout those years was that my sisters and brother preceded me in elementary and high schools.  As the youngest, I would tag along with my siblings and their friends and try my best to blend in, careful not to bring attention my way.  After all of them had graduated, I found my best friends, solace, and safety in books. My imagination took flight and has yet to land.