Kindergarten

My kindergarten teacher's name was Mrs. Fukumitzu. She was mean. Most people have fond memories of kindergarden. Holding hands in line, finger painting, singing abc's and I have a few too. Only a few though. Because I also have memories of Mrs. Fukumitzu screaming at us that if we didn't quiet down, she was going to turn herself into a wicked witch and boil us in her witch pot. Now call me dumb if you want to, but at five years old, I believed her. In fact I really did think she was a witch. The woman should not have ever gone into any career involving children because she obviously hated children. We were all too scared to even ask her if we could use the bathroom because she would roll her eyes and I had heard from my brother, who scared me with stories of The Exorcist movie, about how eye rolling is one of "the signs". I once got in trouble for jumping up onto a sink to hide from one of my little friends after lunch. When Mrs. Fukumitzu came into the bathroom and caught me, my punishment was to climb onto the wooden chest we kept our dress up clothes in over and over again because according to her,"Since [I] was so good at jumping and climbing, let's see [me] do it until [I got] tired of it and maybe then [I] would stop being such a bad girl whose parents are probably ashamed of." I'm not joking. That's what she said. Of course at first it was fun but then I got tired. After what seemed like an eternity I was so tired and I began to cry and beg Mrs. Fukumitzu if I could sit in my seat with promises to be good for the rest of my life. NO. She made me keep climbing up and down on that wooden chest until I said I felt like throwing up, which was not a lie because as I had mentioned, this happened right after lunch. This was not my only incident but you get the point. I used to always fake a stomach ache, hoping I would have temperature so the school would be forced to call my mom and I could go home. We lived on a military base and my dad was at sea for most of that year so I had no one to yell at Mrs. Fukumitzu for being so mean to me. My mom was always shy around my teachers.

But it wasn't just me. People in my extended family always seem to think that we were all raised spoiled but it's not true, we were raised in extreme strictness and that's putting it mildly. So I was a pretty good kid. And I wasn't the only one who feared that woman. Remember how I just told you we were all too scared to ask if we could use the bathroom? I overheard the teacher, who's class was next door to ours and shared our bathroom, comment one day that it seemed like an awful lot of children from our class got sent home for peeing in their pants. Yup.

Which brings me to one reason why I've been gone this week. I have a little volunteer thing going on at a local elementary school. I read books in the school library to kindergardners for about 20 minutes and then hang around to help them check out books for another 20. They are as squirmy as I imagine I was and there's a lot of giggling and poking and pinching and teasing and talking out going on. But at no point do I feel like scaring the bejeezuz out of any of them by threatening to turn into a witch and boiling them all in a pot. Of course I only spend about 45 minutes with them but thier teachers for the most part seem sane and thankful to me since my being there gives them a break. I get a lot of hugs and smiles and chubby fingered hand holding which, to me, is the key to all hapiness. I also get to be addressed as "Miss Angel" which for some reason makes me blush. And since everyone who knows about it has been asking me: yes, I do the voices when I read and no I'm not embarrassed to admit it. I would've made an awesome kindergarten teacher. Way better than Mrs. Fukumitzu.