For my first month of kindergarten, we had a substitute teacher because our real teacher was on maternity leave. I don’t, at the moment, remember our substitute’s name, but I remember that she was nice. After her stint subbing for us, she went to work in the office. If you had to go see the nurse because you were sick or needed a Band-Aid, she’d smile at you on your way in and say, “Oh, what a sweet baby.”
Or maybe she became the school nurse. I don’t know; I was five.
Thirty years later, her “sweet baby” talk seems oddly cloying, but at the time, it felt like the kindest thing anyone could have ever said. Once, later, I accidentally put my hand down on a tack, and I didn’t really mind because I knew I’d get to see the nice lady in the office.
The day before she was to return to work, our regular teacher, who I will call Miss D., came to the classroom so our substitute could introduce us. She gathered us all into a giant, packed group so she could hug everyone at once. I don’t remember this at all, but my mother has told me that I told her about it when I came home from school, and that I thought it was neat.
I don’t know how much time passed before I became afraid of Miss D. But I think it had something to do with a boy, who I’ll call M., who wet his pants more days than not. After Miss D. came back, M. wet his pants, and her response was to make him carry a magazine around with him to sit on, in case it happened again. But first he had to sit in the corner, and the rest of us were to call him a baby, because only babies wet their pants.
I don’t think I appreciated at the time how horrible it was for a teacher to shame a child who either hadn’t been taught to control his bladder or was for some reason unable to. But I knew it was a mean thing to do. I cried. Her response was to put me in the corner, too and to tell the class to call me a crybaby.
I also, as I remember it, still sucked my thumb, which now I know I did because I was anxious and upset. But only babies sucked their thumb, and babies had to sit in the corner. (I’m not entirely sure whether I was still sucking my thumb in kindergarten, but I vaguely recall my parents coaxing me to stop before joining the big kids in first grade.)
It spiraled from there. It seems like now all my friends’ children started reading before kindergarten, but in rural North Carolina in 1980, I was the only kid in my class who could read. Miss D. wanted me to go to the library and ask the librarian to get a book for me, since there wasn’t really anything in the curriculum for kids who could already read. In an adult’s eyes, the library was a straight shot down a short hall. But to me, a fretful 5-year-old, it was a long and terrifying journey that I would have to make alone, ending in having to ask a stranger for help. I’d cry. And I’d have to sit in the corner.
Miss D. told my mother I had emotional problems, so my mother took me to a child psychologist to be checked out. The child psychologist assured my mother that I was fine and I was right to be upset by my teacher’s behavior. My mother talked to the school administrators, who were reluctant to take action against my teacher, so my parents went to work trying to get me to go to school without tears (and to stop sucking my thumb, although I don’t remember those two things happening simultaneously).
My dad would try to make me laugh while he drove me to school in the morning. I had visits with the school guidance counselor, and my mom hid surprises in my lunch box. And there was a reward — if I didn’t cry at school for some amount of time (a week? two weeks? I don’t remember) I’d get some Colorforms. I feel like they were Wonder Woman Colorforms, but I may be making that up.
I got the Colorforms. Sometime around that time — it came out in 1980 — I also got a Pac-Man board game for not sucking my thumb anymore. It started a long and successful tradition of changing my behavior through rewards, or, looked at it a different way, bribes.
I don’t know whatever happened to M. While my mother was making me peanut butter and honey on homemade bread and cutting out stickers to slip into my lunch box, he was coming to school smelling like pee every day.
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