Meeting Sister Mary Whatever After Breakfast
Although I’ve always loved going to school, some of my first days did not go so well.
I barely remember my first day of kindergarten, but my mother filled in the details as I got older.
Mom told me that the morning had gone well, and I hadn’t shown any apprehension about going to school. She prepared her traditional breakfast of “coffee egg” and buttered toast. Coffee egg consisted of a beaten egg yolk mixed with sugar and milk and topped off with a small amount of coffee. Dad had taught us to dunk the buttery toast into the coffee egg which resulted in a swirl of oil floating near the rim of the cup.
The school was a mile and a half away from our house and they didn’t have a bus. So, Mom and I walked. She said I seemed happy, skipping part of the way.
Things took a different turn when I entered the classroom. Who was this person approaching me? She was very tall and covered in what looked like a costume: brown and white from head to toe, only her face and hands showing. Mom said it was Sister Mary something or other. As she approached, I tried to hide behind my mother. Sister reached around and touched my shoulder. My response was to upchuck the coffee egg and toast on her lily-white skirt.
Sister, once she wiped my breakfast off her habit, brought me to my desk.
“You’ll sit here. And see all the children have an animal next to their name. Patricia you will be a doe.”
This did not please me. I didn’t know what a doe was. Susie, the girl next to me was a bunny. I wanted to be a bunny. I began to cry and, Sister knowing what might result from my getting upset, quickly walked away, leaving my mother to console me.
For the rest of the school year, whenever Susie was absent, I took her bunny and left the hated doe on her desk.
Apparently, I got over the trauma of starting at a new school. That was until we moved right before starting junior high.
We moved to the suburbs from the city. In the city kids were still kids. Girls wore ponytails and were too young to wear makeup. In the suburbs the girls had their hair short and chic, wore lipstick and short skirts.
The snickering started as soon as I was introduced as the new girl. The bullying started just a few days later. “Look, it’s a horse. See her tail. She must have come from a farm.”
I was more developed than the suburb girls- probably from all those coffee eggs- and it gave the boys more ammunition. “She’s wearing an over the shoulder boulder holder. Look at those boulders.”
So, my first, “first days” weren’t so great. But things changed on my first day of college. I was twenty-seven years old and over the top excited to begin that new stage of life. It no longer mattered if I was a doe and those boulders that had been mocked had nursed four children.
