I was a terrible child

Stories of the absurd, bratty, and downright terrifying things I did as a kid. My parents are saints.

“This is Mother Land”

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One of my grandma’s friends, Sally, was going through her old papers recently when she came across a scrap from September, 1998.  Apparently when I was little, my nana would take me with her to visit Sally, a retired schoolteacher who was fascinated by the stories that came pouring out of this jabbering toddler.  One in particular evidently demanded recording:

This is Mother Land – It’s a place for mothers with fevers. Would you like to have a seat on our bench? Rule number one is – I’m going to explain to you about mothers with fevers and babies with colds.  This baby has no cold.  This baby has a cold that is SO bad – This is a big sneeze – a really big sneeze.  The mother has a fever.  It started in her head.  The arrows show where the fever goes.  It went down to her belly button.  It went down her arms to her hands.  It went all the way down to her toes.

Age 4, 9/22/98

This subject matter probably had to do with the fact that my baby sister had been born not eight months previously.  I don’t know why I never explained what Rule Number One was, but I’m curious as to what my four-year-old self would have said!  Similarly, I kind of want to know if the bench was a real piece of furniture or just a figment of my overactive imagination, and if I was actually drawing arrows on some kind of diagram while I said all this.

My parents always said I was telling stories my entire life. As my mom liked to tell people, I didn’t start speaking in sentences; I started speaking in paragraphs.  I chuckled along, happy that my parents didn’t mind that I wanted to major in creative writing and work as a writer.  But to see it written down is to see proof that I really have been doing this since I could talk. Sally’s beautiful handwriting, left over from a day when penmanship was as important in schools as the Pythagorean Theorem, captures my four-year-old imagination’s ramblings, setting my sentences down far more coherently than I probably said them at the time.  Even though I can’t quite make out the narrative arc of this particular “story,” I can see the roots of one of my favorite fiction-building tendencies: fantasizing and describing new places and cultures, building a whole “land” out of thin air.  This is where the magic begins for me, the words that will spill over into every part of the rest of my life: a four-year-old jabbering away.

Lent

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1. simple past tense and past participle of lend
2. (in the Christian religion) an annual season of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday and lasting 40 weekdays to Easter, observed by Roman Catholic, Anglican, and certain other churches.

I grew up hearing a lot about what I should give up for Lent.  (By the way, guys, I’m Catholic.)  There were the traditional years where chocolate hypothetically never touched my lips.  When I got older and my mom introduced the idea of giving something to God instead of giving something up, I said a few rosaries before bed.  Lent was the technically-40-days-but-feels-like-forever season before Easter, when my parochial classmates and I had to sit through weekly Stations of the Cross and go to extra all-school Masses and I looked longingly at the Easter dress hanging in my closet that I couldn’t wear yet.

Meanwhile, I heard another version of the word, uncapitalized this time, in the old-fashioned books we read.  The people in them talked about having “lent” someone a book, or a cup of sugar, or a carriage.  Like “dreamt,” it seemed so much more romantic than saying you loaned something to someone.  So, naturally, I tried to use such vocabulary whenever I could.  (I probably sounded pretentious to my third grade classmates, but then again I could spell “pretentious” and they didn’t know what it meant, so they just called me a nerd instead.)

And yet I never connected these two meanings in my head, the capital L and the lower case, until recently.  The term for the liturgical season originally came from an Old English term lencten, which literally meant the lengthening of the daylight hours.  This is the part of the year when the days oh-so-gradually begin to stretch themselves out like cats elongating their spines in the sun, digging their claws in for summer.  (And yes, when I was younger, the Lenten season seemed to lengthen itself just to torment me.)  But, ideally, isn’t this time of preparation for Easter meant to help us stretch our spiritual muscles a little bit?  The idea of lengthening, to me, now calls to mind the idea of reaching out toward God, lending Him something precious to me and, having lent Him the time I used to spend on that Very Important Thing, perhaps realizing that the hours were always meant to be devoted to Him anyway.  It’s not really lending God anything, because I already believe that everything is His.  So maybe Lent is about stripping away the arrogance that leads me to believe that I am doing Him a favor.  Maybe it’s about realizing it’s He Who is doing the lending here.

Decidedly Neutral Face

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The Southern Belle and I couldn’t help but shake our heads at the tightness and shortness of the skirts in the crowd around us. One girl actually pulled her hem up as she wobbled by like a baby giraffe in sequined stilettos.  Considering this was a business etiquette dinner and the dress code was supposed to be “business dress,” I could only imagine what “business” these girls were aiming for.

“Oh my gosh,” the Belle said, turning to me, “what if we get to our tables and we have to listen to them all night?”

I batted my eyelashes at her and said with a smirk, “Then we will wear our Decidedly Neutral Faces and focus on the food.”  She grinned; this was a plan my dear Southern Belle could get behind.

You know the expressionless expression described in books when a character very determinedly lets nothing of his/her emotions show on his/her countenance?  Well, the Belle and I have that down to an art.  Usually the idea is to keep our true feelings under wraps – except from each other.  We can take one look at the other’s face and know precisely how hard she is working to keep that Decidedly Neutral Face on.  It’s particularly useful in situations where outright eye rolling would be rather rude and we need a moment to muster up some faux enthusiasm.

We’ve utilized it many a time, but we first put a name to it during our attempt at Yogalates (yoga + Pilates) last year.  We had decided to take another class at the rec to balance out the cardio of Zumba with some muscle toning.  However, within five minutes of the class beginning, I knew I couldn’t spend a semester doing this.

As soon as the instructor said, “Namaste” and dismissed us, the Southern Belle appeared at the side of my mat.  “So, we’re never doing that again.”

“Oh thank goodness,” I gasped.

She laughed.  “I was looking at you to see how you felt about it and you had this Decidedly Neutral Face the whole time.”

“I was trying to be polite!” I protested.

“I know, but because I know you I could tell you were just so done.”

That’s the nice thing about our friendship, I suppose: we can communicate almost telepathically.  We also let each other rant and get a little bit judgey sometimes, because we both know that ultimately the other is a perfectly nice person with a little bit of sass that needs to be relieved every now and then.  Unfortunately, taking baby steps into adulthood means that the even nearly audible eye rolls of our adolescence are now harder to get away with, even if we are well-mannered enough to keep the actual thoughts to ourselves (we did complete the etiquette dinner with flying colors, after all).

I’m trying to shift my default thought process from the negative to the more positive side.  I’m dissecting why I have the reactions I do, and working on reminding myself that I don’t know the whole story from just a glance.  And generally, I’m getting better at not reacting so quickly based on my snarky inner monologue.

But sometimes, it’s really useful to just hide those habitual thoughts behind a Decidedly Neutral Face – and have a friend who knows exactly what I’m thinking.

The Banning of “Kindergarten,” or, Acy Doesn’t Like New Things

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When I was six or so, my parents had to ban the word “kindergarten” from our household.  I kicked, screamed, cried, and basically had meltdowns every time the word was mentioned in the months leading up to my entrance into “real school,” so they finally just decided to stop mentioning it.  Ever.

I mention this as a benchmark for the first time my irrational dislike for anything new made me inconsiderate to those around me (to a point beyond normal toddler tantrums).  And I mention this because at lunch today, while discussing an exciting summer opportunity that just became available to me, I found myself complaining more than celebrating.  I complained about how people at my university were asking for press releases so they could put a blurb about me somewhere on the website.  I complained about how when my family and friends found out, they were going to ask me all sorts of questions.  I complained about how I would have to take a huge chunk out of my summer to participate in this Exciting Thing.  I complained about how I wouldn’t know anyone at the Exciting Thing, or even really what all was involved, and how I felt like at any point they were going to email me and say, “So sorry, so awkward, but it wasn’t actually you who got the Exciting Thing but the other girl with similar contact information and a vastly superior resume.”  And I would be half-relieved.

My boyfriend pointed out that some of those complaints bordered on being selfish; he said, as nicely as possible, that my reluctance to publicize the Exciting Thing could be construed as dismissive of it, as saying that it was so easy to obtain the Exciting Thing that I hadn’t thought it worth mentioning to others.  

My sister pointed out that the Exciting Thing is “one of those things you apply for, not something you actually get,” meaning, of course, that it’s one of those things that you meet the criteria for so you send in the forms and letters and essays and then you twiddle your thumbs and wait for the rejection email that doesn’t sting too badly because after all, you spent the whole time you were filling out the application telling yourself that it’s a Nationwide Competition for this one Exciting Thing, and only a Select Few can get it and, nice as you are, you are probably not one of those Select Few.

 

However.

 

I somehow got it.  And now I have to deal with that.  Because, as evidenced by this post’s title, I do not like new things.  I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.  

Preparing for my first high school dance?  Almost called all my friends and cancelled the plans we had already made.

 Starting my first job?  Stayed up all night worrying myself sick.  

Heading off to my freshman orientation for college?  Went nearly distracted with half-baked schemes to change my mind and take a gap year (or five).

First week of college before classes started?  Subsisted entirely on Goldfish and coffee with powdered creamer and Skyped my best friend from home for eight hours straight, never leaving my dorm room.

You see the theme.  When I am faced with a situation which involves uncertainty, in which I have no experience, I freeze.  I look around for the nearest exit.  And sometimes I do actually try to bolt.

This Exciting Thing, attractive and impressive though it is, has set me off on one of those phases.  I recognize the signs: I’ve thought of emailing them quietly and telling them I’ve changed my mind, then covering up with my family and friends; I’ve thought largely about the downsides, like not seeing or talking to my boyfriend for several weeks, as opposed to the aspects which drew me to apply in the first place; I’ve imagined scenarios in which none of the other Select Few like me and I am ostracized and miserable for the entirety of the Exciting Thing; I’ve avoided telling others about it in case I do chicken out.

As I’ve gotten older, regardless of the degree to which a thing is new, I still have this same reaction.  Perhaps the ability to identify this behavior and tell myself (however unconvincingly) that I’ve always survived before can be counted as progress, but at this particular moment, as I view furthers emails regarding the Exciting Thing and cringe, all I can see is how far I’ve regressed.  Yes, it’s ungrateful and a bit selfish and maybe even kind of hypocritical (I wasn’t exactly forced to fill out the application, after all) – but I’m scared.  

So I’ll try to hold in the complaining (despite my boyfriend and sister’s niceness about my Dislike of Newness) until I can face the Scary-But-Admittedly-Exciting Thing like any other fear.

 

Oh, and kindergarten?  Dashed away from my mother’s side on the very first day, calling, “Bye Mom!” over my shoulder.