The Wrong Room

by Charity

I need to write about two important memories that we talked about in our T session this week.  One memory is of an incident that happened when we were four and a half, in our second year of pre-school.

I don't have the sense of being personally tied to this incident.  When I look at it in our communal memory bank, I don't feel the emotions of the person who was there.  I know that being emotionally distanced from it now isn't conclusive proof that it isn't my memory.  I can only go by our knowledge of how our system works, and by my own convictions.

Our parents had sent us to nursery school because they thought it was an appropriate preparation for kindergarten, but also because our mother had decided to go back to college and finish her degree. We didn't want to go to nursery school in the first place, but it never would have occurred to us to speak up, since we had no reason to believe that anyone would listen or care.

We didn't like being around strangers and didn't feel safe in the outside world. And as our mother recounted numerous times during the years that followed, we didn't talk to anyone at the school for the first six months that we were there.  And when we finally did speak, the teachers commented on what a deep voice we had.  It never occurred to any of them, or to our mother, that there was a valid reason why we didn't speak.

But back to the incident.  One day during our second year there, we were on the playground during recess.  The teachers called everyone to go inside.  We lined up.  And the next memory we have is being in the classroom seeing fingerpainting supplies on the table.  We sat down and started fingerpainting enthusiastically alongside the other children.  Then one of the teachers came up to us and said to us, "You're in the wrong room."

She didn't say it in a mean way; she was simply being factual and trying to get us to go where we belonged.  But we were mortified.  It was our second year there, and we knew enough about the school and the routine to know where we should have been.  We followed the teacher to the correct place, but we never forgot what happened.

More later.  This is upsetting somebody.  :-(