One Bad Kid

When I was about 6 or 7, I went to daycare. My mom and dad worked full-time. I would go to school in the morning and be picked up by the daycare van in the afternoon. My sister and I (the youngest one came later) would wait for our parents to come pick us up around 5. Unfortunately for everyone involved, most of the people working at the daycare center made minimum wage and had virtually no certification or training. We actually went to a nice little place, but that's just the way daycare centers are.

(They try to call them preschools now, but we ALL know...)

I was, let's just say precocious, as a child. I was sassy, too smart for my own good, and in trouble a lot. I got into fist-fights on a weekly basis.

There was a particular incidence at the daycare that I remember very clearly. Another kid and I were alone in the corner of one of the rooms, obviously not being watched very closely. We started to write down all of the bad words we knew. They weren't spelled very well. I remember spelling f*** without the "c". How I knew that word at 7 is beyond me. My parents cussed, but infrequently and never that word.

So the little boy, whose name was Joe-Lee (remember I grew up in GA, and everyone is related to, or knows, someone with a Lee added to the end) and I ended up with a pretty impressive list. It was all very funny and enlightening until one of the workers caught us. She asked us what we were doing. Uh...I don't have a list of cuss words under my fanny, No Ma'am! If we would show her the list, she promised, she'd never show it to anyone. We just had to stop doing it.

Well, of course if she promised...

She broke that promise. I don't know if my parents remember looking at it, but eventually all the adults in the center, including the owner had seen it.

This taught me a few things:
1. Not to trust adults. This not trusting adults/authority figures last through college until I was an adult.
2. Never leave a paper trail.
3. That I was a bad kid.

Now, I'm not sure if this was a defining incident for #3. There were a lot of things I did in my childhood that judging by the adults' reactions, made me think I was bad. I genuinely thought I was a horrible kid. Thinking that about myself made me even worse. But I was thinking about this in relation to my own kids. How do they view themselves? What labels have they given themselves? Have I given them any labels? I've tried to be conscious of this, but what little things have slipped through? Sass told me recently that I yell too much. This kind of shocked me, since it seems like James yells a lot more than I do. Maybe it's that I'm just with them a lot more often, so I have more of an opportunity. Either way, if my child thinks I yell at them too often, then I do.

So that's my goal this week: Less labeling, less yelling.