Choices

Making choices is pretty easy when it comes to choosing between watching ‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘Peter Pan’ again. I am 6 and what I cannot understand is how is it possible for people to be sure they have made the best choice in any other type of matter. It seems important to me and I decide it’s something I need to learn. Adults around me seem to know how to do it, they claim to have made the best choices all the time. I don’t understand anything. I take it really seriously, I focus but I just can’t wrap my head around it. I worry I will never get to be one of those grown-ups who knows that she makes the best choices. I feel confused.

I’m in 3rd and discover my preschool teacher does not understand anything. I thought all teachers were good. They’re not. I can’t trust adults anymore and that is complicated. She is asking us to draw a picture of an activity we do with our families but I’m having a hard time finding something. I always have a hard time getting started. I am scatterbrained, they tell me. And I am slow. 

A friend complains. He claims there is nothing all his family does together. This brings me back to the class because neither does mine. I was about to draw something I did with some people in my family. I keep listening as the teacher scolds him because "how is it possible that there is nothing you all do together" she says, and "there has to be something", she says. No, it doesn’t. 

I am shocked to realize teachers can be dumb enough to think all families are the same and it makes me uncomfortable to discover that my family is not the way preschool teachers think families should be. 

Something silently breaks inside of me and leaves me engulfed in an annoying sensation, like honey seeping through the cracks of a glass. I no longer care about lying and I hand in a crappy drawing. I suddenly feel confident I have just made the best choice.