The Early Years

Every person develops an identity, a sense of self that pervades our thinking on either a conscious or sub-conscious level. Identity formation happens so gradually that it’s often nearly impossible to define precisely when and where we developed our identity. My identity though was and has been intimately linked to sports. It was on the soccer and football fields of my youth that I began to discover a part of my identity. Like most relatively healthy people, a portion of identity making took place around something I was good at. Eventually, as it does for most who identify themselves as “athletic”, this identity was fractured when I realized how many people identified themselves as “athletes” who were bigger, stronger, and faster. However, in kindergarten I didn’t have any sense of identity, no relationship to the buildings, the teachers, or the other students, nothing to tell me who I was or might be.

The kindergarten classroom was the nearest one to you after you exited the bus. A long semi-circle of dull grey pavement lead along the front of the school, mirrored by a small slice of medianal grass, browned by the scorching summer heat. I walked to school that year, deposited in the classroom, which felt, similar in height to a five year old as the cathedrals of Europe do to an adult. The ceilings felt vaulted, the rows of chairs and tables, cavernous, and the height of the windows, left light filtering through in a way that is reminiscent of those same cathedrals, places of holiness and silence.

Our class was run efficiently and quieter than many of the kindergarten classrooms that I’ve been in since. Mrs. Marks had this habit of speaking extremely close to the children in her classroom when she wanted you to do something. She had sharp features, close cropped blond hair, and blue eyes. At five, I was scared of her and the intensity of expectation implied by her face’s proximity to my own. Towards the back of the classroom was a semi-circular table, with room for an instructional aide or Mrs. Marks to attend to our tasks, which were generally structured around cutting out shapes or tracing letters. Much of this time was given over to properly holding scissors, a task which eluded me. 

Much of adult life whether we’d like to acknowledge it or not is given over to an acceptance of our limitations, our failures, our shortcomings. When you hold a child for the first time, you are filled with wonder, with the awesomeness of their fragility and I understand now, with the width and depth of their possibilities. When I first held scissors, thinly, inexpertly, when I first tried to cut in a straight line and wound up with a ragged edge, the possibility that I would be many things was disclosed. Whether I possess inferior fine motor skills because of a series of ear infections suffered as a child, or whether it was genetically inherent, it’s still true that I can’t cut in a straight line with scissors, nor can I paint or draw with anything but crudity. Back then, I sat at the back of the classroom, in that thin light trickling through the window, blue construction paper in front of me and the shape of a circle inscribed into the paper’s center. As I cut, with my right hand, I tried to shift the paper clockwise with my left hand, keeping the dull edge of the blade carefully on the black line, who’s shifting form remained impossible to define by the boundary of that dull blade. Sometimes, Mrs. Marks would stand next to me, the thick smell of coffee over my shoulder, my fingers growing sweaty at the effort, my mind experienced a kind leadenness as the shape refused to conform or emerge from the paper. In short, I was a failure. 

Recently, we received a small gift of Legos for the girl. The box said age’s seven to twelve and contained a fanciful picture of a pink winged fairy flying over a small kitchen set, ready to alight and begin making some complex French dish. Alas, the toys do not arrive fully formed but in boxes with elaborate instructions that are vaguely reminiscent of Ikea. The girl’s arms are flapping wildly as she looks at the instructions. 

“This is hard,” I say.

“You can do it, dad,” she says.

“These pieces are very small.”

“They’re not too small.” 

The first few steps are easy, but the Legos are so much smaller than they were when I was a child, difficult to assemble, nearly impossible to squeeze together for my fingers, which are still not nimble. We sat on the carpet for forty five minutes, towards the end, while trying to put a final piece into place, I broke off a chunk of one of the small towers that were part of the large central oven, leaving a scattering of pieces all over the floor. 

“I can’t do it,” I said, placing the rest of the Legos on the table and telling her to wait for her mother.

“I’m not good at things like this,” I tell her, and turn to the sink and begin washing hummus from a small yellow plate. 

The playground was no better. I had not yet constructed an identity around my ability to kick or throw a ball with the facility of an older child. Rather, I walked around in a daze, excluded from groups of kids who had navigated pre-K classrooms or who were full of boisterous energy, ready to wrestle and to ask other people to be their friends. And so I walked around on those heat blasted days, over the red dust beneath the trees, watching the swings sway back and forth after someone had left them, chains dangling. I watched as children jumped on the multi-colored jungle gym, and I watched as some kids stood far out in the field, trying to play soccer. It was in these first weeks and months that my mother swears Drew threw rocks at me, but it’s a memory that I cannot conjure. Having children of my own now, it is easy to imagine young boys hurling rocks at one another. There is a temptation to play the victim when recounting one’s own life, to make a list of wrongs, which seems to put the blame for any inadequacies elsewhere. I tell you that I could not cut with scissors, nor that I knew how to socialize. I was strange. 

But I was also eager to please, and still am, which means that I desperately wanted to bend the scissors and the paper to my will. 

The girl and I are negotiating the cleanup happening in the kitchen. She’s been wild of late, biting and pinching the rest of the family, throwing tantrums and telling one or the other of us that we’re the worst parents in the world. Behind locked doors, she slams her first into the door frame while I silently slam into the edges of my mind. “I can’t take this anymore,” I say, because I often can’t. Today though has gone relatively well. I’ve given her small structures, boundaries and rules about what she can and cannot play. These structures are triggering her two years of schooling in Montessori, which is based around describing work as play and giving each child space to create or work on an item. She likes these structures, and I think of our friends who have said that the people at their day care make better parents than they do. It is 2015, and I have stayed at home part-time with both of my children, reading them books, giving them baths, changing endless diapers, snuggling them when they fall downstairs, and yet, perhaps the people at school are better at giving my child the structures that she wants and desires. Certainly, I love her more, but when has love ever been enough? If love was enough then, in an intellectual short cut around free will, there would be no evil, for God’s love would be sufficient. But nothing is sufficient. Nothing is ever sufficient. 

After the first few ragged months in class I start taking a short walk to a trailer out at the edge of school. Behind the scenes there is some sort of war being waged between Mrs. Marks and my mother about whether I need to repeat kindergarten. I could not cut with scissors, struggled to trace the letters of the alphabet and was socially awkward. In fact, in retrospect, I can see many of the signs pointed to the fact that I was not ready for the next year in school. My mother, who knew me as an agreeable little chap who wanted to snuggle, disagreed. When I think of my mother, from the perspective of a child, it is hard not to think of a swan, extending its wing, and pulling her young close to keep them sheltered. She was gentle and kind and giving. And in this case, it’s hard to know, thirty years later, whether she was right.