Grades, Self-Esteem, and Chasing My Brother Through the House with a Stainless Steel Pot

So the grades thing…well, that saga begins WAAAAAAAY back in the day probably around an April age of 7 or 8.  I had to be impressionably young but, at the same time, old enough for my younger brother Aaron to know how to talk…and logical enough to effectively rebut an insult :-).  Most of my time as a child was spent by myself in my room drawing, riding on Rawhide the bouncy spring-operated horse, listening to my nifty little faux-denim-covered record player and singing along with every Disney heroine recorded before 1982, making myself sick to my stomach on the Sit ‘n Spin, rocking to said Disney records in my rocking chair, or—after age 5 or so—reading whatever book I could find whether it made sense to me or not. 

Me daydreamily driving the old tractor

“You know it is time to turn the page when you hear the chimes ring…like this: rrrrrriiiiingggg!”

I learned to read AND to sing to those Disney records, and after seeing Sleeping Beauty on the big screen for the first time (AND after freaking out over Maleficent the evil witch lady who didn’t deal well with rejection), I even started writing the story out myself in whatever phonetic way word constructions made sense.  My Grandma actually kept a couple of these, and it must be admitted that—when I read them as an adult—the absence of proper grammar and sentence structure was annoying (yes, that’s how obsessive I am about such things :-).  Needless to say my hobbies were best accomplished during extensive alone time…which annoyed my little brother Aaron and then-only sibling.

Aaron was, for the most part, a perfect antithesis of his big sis April, Nerd-in-the-Making.  He spent his free time outside playing “Search and Destroy the Werewolf” or whatever with any weapon-like object he could find.  Sticks, rocks, bricks, bullwhip-like strips of old leather, baseball bats, those green ball things that fall off whatever tree they fall off of, clothesline wire, you name it: he knew how to transform it into Fictitious Big Game Hunter accessories.  If he wasn’t outside, he was inside plowing and/or disc-ing the carpet with his toy Farmall farm implements.  Sometimes we would play together, but being the mostly-indoor girl that I was (and still am to a large degree), I let him roam the moors alone.  Looking back, I think this fact irked him :-).

Aaron on safari

I know this because of the lashing out that eventually began.  As so many children—especially siblings—do, we were mean to each other both for attention and for retaliation/revenge.  He’d take a swipe at me, I’d swipe back…and vice versa.  I wouldn’t play with him, he wouldn’t leave me the crap alone so I could draw some fairy princess with her arms growing out of her ears (what IS it with kids perceiving human anatomy that way??  Yes, I hear with my arms, don’t you?).  While chatting with him recently, he reminded me that my big insult to him was that he couldn’t sing…to which he responded, “Oh yeah?  Well you’re fat!”   We both suddenly discovered just how deeply those remarks were then buried into the subconscious minds of both him and I.

Wow.  I was fat.  Revelatory.  Truth be told, I was an overweight kid and didn’t start shedding the extra pounds until age 16 or 17.  But I wasn’t AWARE that I was fat and therefore ugly (thank you, Twiggy…grrrr) until hitting high school and being around all my skinny, designer-jeans-wearing friends.  So to make up for the agony of being obviously unattractive, I boxed up such awarenesses and shoved them into the furthest, darkest recesses of my mind.  Of course now I had to find something good about myself…and fast.  Somebody told me once that I sang well, so that notion was latched onto like a lifeline.  By second grade it came to my attention that I might actually be good at school too (except math…when they took away the brightly-colored counting beads, I was lost LOL), and since my predilection for being alone and delving into books had already taken firm root, getting good grades became my meaning in life. 

Many years of self-realization and discovery happened between then and now, but the desperate need for alpha-numeric approval is still engrained inside me.  Having a high-ranking letter or number assigned to my essays, articles, and research papers makes me feel worthy and worthwhile.  It makes me feel like someday, somehow I just might matter…IF I can accumulate enough adulation and approval from other people who already “matter.”  When I started back to college in 2006 and got my first happy grades, I’m almost embarrassed to say how much they meant to me.  At last I had black-and-white proof that my life meant something…that I meant something…and all because of a silly sibling remark made 30 years ago.

As adults, Aaron and I have much more in common, are terrific friends, and are also a hell of alot nicer to each other :-).  But there was that one night during our teen years that he wouldn’t let me watch the movie I wanted, so I chased him round and round the house with a stainless steel cooking pot screaming at him like a crazed meth-excited banshee that I was going smack his hateful head…those were the days!