SEPT 2024 - Creating a world

As a child, I didn’t have any friends. I was variously labeled—too sensitive, too serious, too intense, a goody goody—so I developed ways to play by myself. I liked being outdoors: roller skating, riding my bike, walking to a large park less than a mile from my house. Sometimes, the kids on my block played games and let me play with them because they needed people. During bad weather I created play from my imagination.

When I was nine years old I spent months playing what I called, “school.” I constructed an imagined world—classroom, teacher, principal, parents—using various kinds of paper I took from my real classroom. As the teacher, I wrote short bios for the ten children in my class, took attendance, created tests, wrote behavior reports that were sent to parents on the same yellow paper my teacher used. I imagined parent/teacher conferences, and sent notes to and from the principal arising from various classroom experiences. I marked files: parents, students, principal and kept them in separate folders that I stored on my desk.

The material that described each child began with the usual information—name, birthdate, sex, family members—but as I added new information, such as absenteeism, behavior, grades, etc., the file on every child grew thick, especially as I included teacher, parental, and principal responses. I made up achievement reports including the strengths and weaknesses of each child, and how they progressed during the year.

I was so fully engrossed in my imaginative play that hours would go by, so absorbed I didn’t hear my sister and her friends playing or when I was called to do chores. Occasionally my mother would storm into the room and ask if I was deaf. It was always startling to be interrupted, as if I were dreaming and suddenly a noise stopped the dream. 

I found books in the library about innovative teaching methods and read them with great interest, using what I learned to create new kinds of teaching, where children had a say in what they learned and how they were taught. The contrast between the school I created and the school I attended made me wonder why school had to be what it was: often boring, sometimes painful, rarely interesting. I hated when teachers belittled classmates, made fun of someone who didn’t know the answer, or chastised me for asking too many questions or raising my hand so much. 

In the school I created, the notes that got sent home were not about students being “bad.” Instead, as the teacher, I focused on how well a student was doing. This was a marked contrast to the real notes my real teacher sent home about me. Since the notes required a parental comment and signature, I responded with my father’s impossible to read handwriting saying I’d do better, then signed his name, accurately copied from his real signature on a letter I found in a waste paper basket.

As the months passed, I spent a lot of time writing about the lives of the children in my class both in and out of school. I created worlds of families with the child as the focus. I enjoyed figuring out relationships and how they affected the child. 

One day, when I came home from a piano lesson, much to my shock and horror, I discovered my 3-year-old sister tearing up the last of the papers of my school creation. My desk and the floor around it were covered with scraps of paper of every size and color. Each piece of paper and folder was torn in bits. I stared at the devastation, at what my sister had done, unable to take in what I was seeing. 

When I yelled her name, she ran out of the room. I followed, ready to kill her, but she took refuge behind our mother. When I told her what my sister had done, she said, “It’s just paper. You can make it again.”

No. I couldn’t. 

It was as if something inside me died. At home, I’d sit at my desk, now empty, mourning the loss of what I’d worked so hard and intently to create.

A few months later, when I was in a stationery store with my mother and sister, I saw a notebook—not one that was big and difficult to hide. No. The one I saw would fit into a large pocket. I bought it but kept it hidden, not able to write in it. One day, when I was feeling lonely, I remembered the notebook and took it out of the pocket. I started writing stories that I never showed to anyone. More often, I wrote stories in my head. No one could find these. No one could destroy them. 

Has anyone destroyed what you created?

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SEPT 2024 MONTHLY STORIES