Content Warning: Although not central to the story, this post contains references and links to offensive, racist practices, such as blackface. (Also: If you’re eager to tell me how the racist thing “isn’t racist” move along now; bye!) There’s also some childhood trauma.
It’s the 5th of December, so Happy Saint Nicholas if you’re celebrating today or tomorrow.
I figured now would be a good time to re-tell the story I once posted to my Twitter account, before deciding to delete all my posts there. If I remember correctly, when I told the story originally I said that I was five years old when it happened, but in hindsight I reckon I may have been four (I know, minor detail, but still…). Also, without the character restrictions of Twitter, I can elaborate on the story a bit more than I did when I told it there.
It was the late 1970s and times were different. That’s no defense of anything that happened, but it is necessary to mention. There is a lot of knowledge and terminology nowadays that didn’t exist or wasn’t commonly noted in the seventies. It helps to know that my birth had not been smooth sailing and at age two I’d spent time in hospital with meningitis. So when I displayed clear issues with my motor skills and balance those were attributed to the aforementioned life events and I was prescribed healing gymnastics. But since I wasn’t physically smaller than other children my age and even seemed ahead in terms of speech and language, my mother scoffed at the hospital doctor who literally used the r-word to describe me (because apparently I “responded differently”) and lovingly nicknamed me Blondie for how I disheveled my fair hair into a painfully tangled mess every night in my sleep.
By the time I first entered school at the age of four I was that busy, clumsy, chaotic, full-of beans, smarty-pants child that people of all ages would quickly be annoyed with and label “too busy” and ✨too much✨1, all of which would be chalked up to bad behaviour and/or bad upbringing and responded to with bullying and punishment. That was all people knew and it is with that perspective one should read the following story.
It was days (or maybe weeks) before Saint Nicholas eve and this particular day in our class of four- and five-year-olds was dedicated to crafting Saint Nicholases and Black Petes. Each child was provided with sheets of coloured paper with shapes (head, hair, hat, eyes, mouth, etc) drawn on for us to cut out using our pricker and felt and then stick onto each other to create the faces of Saint Nicholas and Black Pete.
My motor skills by then would have been good enough to be able to do that neatly, but I appreciate that I was likely excruciatingly slow at it in itself, not to mention I was so easily distracted that at least half the time I would have been chattering away and not crafting. So I get that it is likely I pushed my teacher’s buttons that day. By the time I’d proudly completed cutting (well, pricking) out those shapes, everyone else in class was pretty much done glueing their faces together. The teacher – a woman I adored more than anyone else in my life at that point – had reached a breaking point… and lost it.
For all my pride in my (partial) achievement, she snatched the round black circle that was supposed to be Pete’s from under my hands, held it up to the class while using her other hand to point at me, and sneered “Look, everyone, this is how far Jojo got! HA! HA! HA!” If you’ve ever spent time in the company of a group of young children, you can guess what happened next: My classmates followed our beloved teacher’s example of performatively pointing and laughing at me. “HAAA! HAAA! HAAA!” Seconds before I’d felt proud, accomplished even, but now I felt crushed.2
I wish I could say it ended there, but it didn’t. In fact, she took the humiliation a step further.
She could have ended her cruel reprimand at the point where the peformative ha-ha-ha’ing fizzled out. Instead, she went another round by starting a chant. Objectively speaking, it was a ‘good’ chant: short and memorable. She took a Dutch noun derived from a pejoritive adjective to call someone – me – slow and started chanting it3. It didn’t take long for the entire class to follow suit and so for what felt like an eternity I was pointed at and ridiculed once more.
I did not stop loving my teacher that day. I loved her deeply, and continued to do so after this. Because I was a child. I also did NOT become a better person from it, because I was a child and there was no lesson I could take from it at the age that I was that could have made me a ‘better’ child.
There was just humiliation that made me feel unloved and unwanted and had me believe that I was a bad person who deserved to be treated like 💩 so I generally accepted people treating me like 💩 and would continue to do so for years to come. And I continued to live up to the negative expectations people held of me, because there was no incentive nor any guidance to do or be better; in fact for some time in my childhood I behaved worse and I did that deliberately because of how other people – adults, especially – treated me.
There was another occasion either that same school year or the one after, where the same teacher who had humiliated me would attempt something similarly awful to another pupil who she tried to ridicule for untidy embroidery, but since I was that annoying kid I butted in to say the girl’s work wasn’t untidy, she’d just done something different in her own way4 and somehow that diffused the situation for the girl to not get the collective humiliation from the rest of the class that I’d once suffered. I guess being obnoxious wasn’t (and isn’t) always bad, eh?
I don’t remember how long the teacher remained at this school, but it doesn’t matter because the nickname I got from her derogatory chant would stick for the rest of my school days in the village (and to some extent after); I moved on to the elementary school in the same building and run by the same people, with a teacher I adored even more, but nearly every single day would be called that nickname by the other kids in school. My upbringing and school days in the village weren’t without nice experiences, but the entire memory of that period is overshadowed by the bullying I was subjected to using that nickname.
The school closed a few years later. I got to enroll in a different school where no one knew my bad nickname. It was an unexpected fresh start and it was by no means without issues, but overall it was probably the right thing to happen.
Times were different, but now that I’m an adult I do look back at what happened and am apalled that any Responsible Adult™ could have done what this teacher did, even in the context of times being different. As much as I recognise that I was certainly not the easiest child, I was still a child.
My experiences did not ruin Saint Nicholas for me, because I was a child and I loved the excitement of it and the sweets, treats and gifts. But my memories are tainted, so I also don’t miss it. Just like I don’t miss that school, and I don’t miss the village5.
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More about that in this previous post:
Did I cry? Of course not! I’m generation X, by the age of four most of us would already heard “STOP CRYING OR I’LL GIVE YOU A GOOD REASON TO CRY!” often enough to know not to cry—or show much/any emotion, for that matter.
Having worked as a translator, of course my brain found a good English equivalent that would make for a great chant, and I used that in the Twitter thread and thought of using it again here, but decided against it because too many people on the internet are awful and might take to it and use it against people.
There’s no way I could have thought that up all by myself or parroted it from anyone I knew, so it was probably the influence of the books I read. Please don’t ban books.
There are two exceptions: There is one person from that village that I love to know how they’re doing (and most of all hope their living a fabulous life, because they’d deserve it), but I don’t remember their full name so can’t look them up. And of several American families that lived in the village while stationed at the nearby US airbase, there’s one in particular that I’d love to know they’re doing great today.