;)
Etude: Accident, First grade fear
Monday, June 6, 2011 at 9:27AM Another expansion of an entry in last Wednesday’s episode of 10 Things:
In the first grade, I changed schools part way through the year. I was small and quiet normally, and on the first day in my new school, I was terrified of everything and everyone. The classroom was bigger, the desks were different and bigger, the other students seemed bigger than my former classmates. My new teacher seemed nice enough (she did, after all, have a Dorothy Hamill haircut like mine), but she had giant owl-eyed glasses.
The boy who sat in front of me that day was named Marc Soto. On that day, Marc Soto seemed a little bit mean, or at least brashly confident — and why not, *he* wasn’t the new kid. He knew where the pencil sharpener was and how to get to the bathroom.
In my old classroom, if we needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of class, we knew to look for the pass — a big block of wood with “Mrs. Jaramillo’s bathroom pass” painted on it in red fingernail polish. If the pass was in the chalk tray, we could take it, walk two doors down the hall from our classroom, do our business, and come right back. In this new classroom, I didn’t see a big block of wood with “Miss Jackson’s bathroom pass” painted on it in any color of nail polish, or anything at all resembling a bathroom pass. So when I needed to pee, I had no idea what to do. Was there some sort of hand-raising protocol? Was the pass hidden somewhere and I had to find it?
I suppose I must have pondered the possibilities — all except for the obvious, ASK the teacher — for some time. For so long in fact that not only could I not pay any attention at all to what Miss Jackson (who was later confirmed to be very nice and who changed to Mrs. Reynolds the next summer, prompting me to wonder if she was actually the same person and if she’d remember *my* name if hers had changed) was saying, but also could not hold it anymore. So I peed quietly, hoping no one would hear it, thinking that if I peed just a little, maybe no one would notice and maybe I’d be able to hold it long enough to figure out where the pass might be (not to mention where the actual bathroom might be).
Unfortunately once I started peeing, quiet or not, I could not stop.
In spite of sitting as still as a statue, the pee didn’t stay in the chair with me. It spilled out onto the floor in a silent puddle that spread out around me. And of course Marc Soto was the first person to notice. He half stood in his chair and pointed and said something very loud to draw the attention of Miss Jackson.
I don’t remember what happened next, but I know that I survived. I also know that Marc Soto also sat in front of me in second grade and sometimes I thought he was mean and sometimes I thought he was not mean, and once he confused me a lot because he and his family didn’t celebrate birthdays. Mostly I thought that Marc Soto was ok because he ran faster than most of the kids, and, though he once called me four-eyes, he didn’t seem to care that he’d once caught me peeing in the first grade.
Reader Comments (4)
This EXACT SAME THING happened to me in the first grade. Mid-year move to new school, too shy to ask the teacher what the bathroom protocol was, peeing in class. Except the other kids never really forgot about it, and I was a pariah right up through the fifth grade. They finally mostly moved on by the sixth grade, and then it was time for another move to a new school, where I was a pariah by virtue of having the sort of personality that being-a-pariah-during-childhood produces, as well as being from *stage whisper* California. Which, everyone knows, is where snobs and hippies come from!
Oh Sarah, we know you're really a hippie at heart. Right? The pariah part sucks though, because it's quite clear to me now that all kids have some kind of bowel or bladder failure at some point in their lives. Unfortunately that shared experience often doesn't inspire empathy but dredges up panicky fear and troll-like judgement. I'd still sit next to you in class.
It's true. Here is the conversation I had in the car on the way to the CSA pickup after work today (I know, I know):
Me: "What do you want for dinner?"
SO: "Falafel! Oh man I can't wait to eat hummus! I love me some hummus."
Me: "Ha! Who's the hippie now, hippie?"
SO: "You. You will always be the hippie in this relationship."
Me: "True, true."
Incidentally, I later discovered a secret hippie enclave in my (2nd) new town and had a ball doing hippie things like planting trees, protesting mining developments and recycling stuff.
You had me convinced at "on the way to CSA pickup." lol How about seed bombing? Rope sandals?