On Thanksgiving
My son goes to a wonderful public school, has a great teacher who truly cares about her students. To say that I am grateful for this would be an understatement of epic proportions. Of the many blessings that I have, today, I am deeply thankful for Høvik School and Vivi, the wonderful teacher of my sons’ 3rd grade class.
My bizarre childhood was extra difficult because of all of the moving around, and changing schools. But one of the most detrimental experiences took place in one of the three schools I attended in Rome.
I was in 4th grade my mother and I lived in Rome and I had two of the most evil teachers ever spawned, Celeste and Natalia. They made the chain smoking, backhand to the forehead Signora Diamante (who let me sleep in class) seem like the embodiment of love and light.
These were terrible, angry, bitter women who took their pathetic resentments out on the kids and for the most part me in particular.
I was a different kind of kid, raised in the mother of all hippy-dippy places, Big Sur and Berkley California. Kids were encouraged to take part in conversations to have opinions and questions to be both seen and heard. This apparently was not the way little girls were supposed to act in Rome in 1978.
I remember with absolute clarity the day Celeste and Natalia revealed to me that I was retarded; they guided me unceremoniously to the desks where the truly retarded kids sat, plunked me down with them and told me that I was among my own kind. They told me to never expect to amount to anything, that with my limited understanding, all I would ever have was a pathetic life.
My memories of the years in that school with those mean teachers are blurred and vague, the snippets too painful to dwell on, but I have moments of clarity where I was singled out in front of the class, laughed at and ridiculed, forced to sit next to kids who hit themselves and babbled and drooled, shunned by the other kids and hated by those two women. I can still feel how tiny, how lonely, how insignificant I felt in those moments.
But I knew they were right, I knew they spoke a truth – “the” truth.
My stomach hurt, ached and revolted, sending me running to the school nurse, Flora where I spent a good deal of time. She saw me, and took me in. She adopted me into her family, taking me securely under her wing while my mother traveled. I remember the kitchen in her apartment, the wonderful smell of her cooking, and the richness of the tomato sauce with brisket so tender it fell off the fork. The biscuits dipped in warm milk with a touch of coffee in the mornings, watching cartoons lying on the living room floor. I can see the apartment in my mind’s eye, smell it, feel her bony hugs, and see her as if she were here now. My deepest regret is not seeing her in the years before her death.
For the life of me I can only remember tiny fragments of that school, the few pleasures; school plays, recess where you could buy square pieces of pizza with and without sauce (though never with cheese) and milk chocolate bars that we’d eat sandwiched in those pizza squares. And I can feel the shame of being so different like a coating on my skin.
I very nearly failed 5th grade, I remember thinking that as I was retarded there was simply no good reason to do my homework, so I pretty much stopped doing it.
I did pass 5th grade (by the skin of my teeth) and it was Floras doing, she loved me, she coaxed, cajoled and bribed me into studying promising me that I was smarter than I knew, than I believed. I know my mother must have been there too, and I’m sure once she reads this she’ll tell me what she did, but I just remember sitting at the dining room table with Flora and sometimes her daughter Daniela studying.
For most of my life I struggled hearing Celeste and Natalia’s voices, telling me how stupid I was, how inept. And fighting against them was exhausting, the path of least resistance always won out, I quit, hid behind my banner of stupidity whenever things got hard, school became a battlefield to be avoided at all costs.
I no longer believe Celeste and Natalia, I know that I am smart. But seeing my son nearing the age I was when all this happened brings home how little I was, how destructive their behavior, how great the consequences to my life.
I am so very thankful, grateful for Vivi who sees my son and treats him with fairness, kindness all the while expecting great things from him. Kevin does not doubt his smarts and I tell him every chance I get how smart he is, and how wonderful, beautiful and empathic.
The wounds of our childhood never really heal, they just fade into the background, throbbing every now and then making themselves felt.
