My first two days of kindergarten marked my own creative and emotional silencing in school. On the first day, I boldly stepped forward, organizing the children around me to build something extraordinary out of wooden blocks. At the end of the day, my teacher took my mother aside and said something to the effect of, “What a wonderfully creative daughter you have.” My mother beamed at her middle daughter and saw promise. The world, through my mother’s eyes, believed in me.
On the second day, my mother was called to take me home early. I had done something wrong. I don’t remember what. Probably I didn’t listen to instruction well enough. Whatever the offense, my teacher believed expelling me from my new society of playmates was just punishment for that day.
As I passed under her crisp, disappointed gaze, my new teacher summed me up. No longer would she see my evolving self or the potential of who I might become that first day. Now I was “Kimberly, the troublemaker” at home and at school. Later, my mother would retell this “cute” vignette as if it perfectly explained who I was and how she understood me. So much promise but so much trouble.
And I carried this knowing with me.
And found that my first two days of kindergarten were replayed and replayed, again and again, throughout my school years. It seemed my teachers knew me before I knew them. In a small school, few did the work of seeing me with new eyes. A summing up preceded me. Each year, my hope for chance, change, and opportunity reverted to familiar script.
Yet there were exceptions who made the difference, naturally intuitive teachers like Miss Fort, my proper first grade teacher, who collected her hair in a net and wore pleated skirts, starched button up shirts, and ribbon bowties. Miss Fort was a firm but kindly presence for incoming first graders. She held my attention with a gaze that steeled me in place. Strict but never punishing, never did I feel she didn’t “see me.” Her eyes saw a child with expressive energy born of natural intelligence, not a lack thereof. Miss Fort was a great gift to my six-year-old self. Her wordless communiqués were an electrical current of affirmation.
My second grade teacher, though, grabbed my ear with her knife like fingers and yanked me into the coatroom where she’d whack my knuckles with the wooden ruler she kept on her desk. My third grade teacher sent me to the hallway to stand facing the wall. I would break free by inventing minor rebellions or escape inside private imaginative worlds. I was eight and had begun to see school as an emotional desert where no shade existed and water was illusion. Once I snuck into the unoccupied principal’s office to use the school’s intercom. Another time I lazily pulled the fire alarm when walking down the hallway. I was fighting the injustice of invisibility.
A more constructive way I expressed my building tension was through my imagination and creative play. During recess, I played under a great elm tree whose roots were an island of sweet refuge circled by a sea of black asphalt a few feet away. Under this tree my imagination was free. Each crevice carefully swept of leaves and debris, the brown earth tidy and cared for.
Lost in the doing of it, my friends faded away. Stillness settled over me as I stroked the earth with a small stick. I was the creator of this root world and it was my careful attention that made it right. This was soul therapy where the unconscious mind works the imagination’s rich soil. I could feel a dream unfolding, as I transformed chaos to order, my need for calm, order, expansion and acceptance being fully expressed in that moment under the open sky.
The bell would ring and I would not hear.
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Social Emotional Living 