Baby, You’re Going Places: Why I’ve come a long way since first grade
First grade was a rough time for me. Like, considerably more difficult than it should be for any small child. As you can see in the above picture, I had a questionable wardrobe (I’m fairly certain those jeans are acid-washed), some overwhelmingly frizzy hair, and apparently no teeth. (I thought for sure I had teeth in first grade… Huh… Well, the camera doesn’t lie.) The only thing I had going for me was my prim and proper seating style.
In addition to the issues you see in the photo, I was struggling with things one cannot capture on film. I had an overwhelming speech impedament that turned my ‘R’s and ‘L’s into ‘W’s, and quite the lisp. I would introduce myself to people as Haywee. For example, when I first met my best friend of 16 years, I told her my name was Haywee. After telling me her name was Erica, I proceeded to call her Ewica. She yelled at me and constantly reminded me that her name was not Ewica, it was Erica. All of this happened while I stood there with a red mustache from my cherry Mr. Misty from Dairy Queen. I eventually just stopped calling her by her name.
So not only did I have this embarrassing difficulty with speaking, but I would be removed from class a few days a week to work with a speech therapist on it. It was positively humiliating. They didn’t trust me to keep track of time on my own, but instead decided it was necessary for the speech therapist to come into my classroom and say it was time for me to leave for a bit. If, in my first grade days, I would have known what the term ‘walk of shame’ meant, I would have compared leaving for my speech lessons to said post-coital walk. The other tiny children would stare at me as I made my way past their desks, the shiny unicorns on their Lisa Frank notebooks and trapper keepers laughing at my pathetic situation. While the other children would practice keeping time on the giant clock with a face and playing mancala and chutes and ladders, I was forced to sit in a small room and read sentences about Juan, Maria, Jose, and their trip to the taco stand. (Looking back I realize that my speech lessons were slightly racist. At the time, I was just pissed that in addition to not being able to speak like a normal person, the names were damn hard to pronounce. Thanks a lot, suburban public schools. Bastards.)
These lessons went on for all of first grade. Being the overly neurotic child that I was (read: still am), I worked extra hard to perfect my speech. Thought a great deal of this was because I wanted to avoid the first grade walk of shame, it was mostly because I hated missing snack/milk time. (I always got orange juice instead of milk because I lied and said I was allergic to milk. (At the time I thought this was a lie. Turns out milk and I actually don’t get along well.) Even as a first-grader I was a straight-shooting badass.) So basically, what it sums up to, is that even though I really hated being made fun of for having a speech problem that caused people to simply smile and nod because they had no idea what I said, I had no problem being a little fatty, cause damn it, I loved me some cookies and orange juice.
Edit: The only thing worse about first grade than speech lessons was the fact that my mother still dressed me in onesies because I was so small. I would go to the bathroom at school and not be able to re-button myself into them, and would frequently have to ask my teacher to come into the bathroom and help me. Thanks, mom.
