The Wrong Room, Part 2

by Charity

We calmed down by playing  FreeCell for a little while.  I thought it would be best to put aside the triggering feelings for now, especially because it seemed to be a child feeling them.  But after a while Mary said that it would be better not to leave that child and her feelings in limbo.  So we return to it.

Oftentimes when the specific child isn't readily identifiable, we end up doing the process of elimination.  We were four and a half, perhaps even five, when the incident happened.  It would not have been a child younger than three, nor would it have been abby (age 3), who specifically came about to avoid going to preschool.  And while jody and nell are four and three respectively, they are both happy children and would not have been triggered. 

Yet....now that I think about it, maybe one or both of them were the one(s) happily fingerpainting.  It's never occurred to us that this may have happened.  All we know is that whoever was fingerpainting was whisked away by the child who took the trigger.  nell originally had no siblings and therefore nobody designated or created to protect her.  jody did not have any siblings yet either.  None of the others came about because of preschool.  The only others connected to preschool are penny and brooke, penny in particular.  And neither carry anger.

We've always associated this incident with the Auroras.  In fact, Aurora13 came out to protect the children in a separate incident that occurred two years later.  Aurora13 has been around since infancy and has a history of dealing with unbearable situations and protecting the children.  And we believe that Aurora17 came about because of this nursery-school incident.  It makes sense--Aurora 13 coming about in infancy and Aurora17 coming about four years later, with Aurora17 ironically ending up being four years older than Aurora13.

So to the best of our knowledge, Aurora13 hid the happy child, whoever this was, and Aurora17 absorbed the anger.  But who was the hurt child?  Who was upset a little while ago when we started thinking about all of this again?  Aurora13 says that it isn't her.  The likeliest are penny and brooke, but neither is saying anything.
_____

When we talked about this with our T last session,  we mentioned feelings of shame.  We said that we felt ashamed not because of what the teacher did;  she hadn't been unkind, and she was simply doing her job.  We felt ashamed because we believed that we should have known better.  We should have know where the correct room was, who our usual teacher was, and which other children we were usually grouped with.  Preschool is all about routine, and we should have known. 

Even at age four, we knew that we could only count on ourselves, and we'd let ourselves down.  So we were angry at ourselves for "failing," angry at the teachers for not sending us to the correct room when we had lined up after recess, and angry at our parents for sending us to nursery school in the first place.  And we were probably angry at our grandmother, who no doubt had advised our parents to enroll us (and had probably paid for it, Laura says). Because that's the kind of busybody that our grandmother was.