Footnotes to My Dialogue Journal with My Teacher, Third Grade, Spiral Notebook
1. Spiral notebook plastered with animal stickers. Bunny wearing a beret, balancing a palette. Kitten cuddling a giant candy heart. Dog standing upright in a yellow slicker. 2. In the first entry, I wrote about my baby sister who died right after she was born, which is what my mother had always told me.
- a. Years later, my mother explained she’d actually had an abortion, a decision I don’t judge—but why tell me I had a sister at all? Why turn an unborn baby into a sister who lived and died? It’s a lot to put on a child.
- b. My first opportunity to share anything about my life with an adult, and that’s what I chose. I was grappling with it.
3. My “faverett” food was “spgetti”; my “fav ice cream flaver…chokelet chip.” My brother was a “softmore” in college. When I was born, I weighed six pounds and three “ownsis.” 4. Despite the misspellings, the only thing that embarrasses me is when my teacher thought
I was transferring to a local Catholic school the next year, and I wrote, “I DID NOT SAY I WAS GOING NEXT YEAR! I SAID INSTEAD OF MIDDLE SCHOOL!”
- a. My teacher wrote, “Well, excuse me! I guess I made a mistake! You can go to St. Mary’s anytime you want!”
- b. I wrote, “That’s A-OK and I’m sorry.”
- c. I wrote, “I wish I could go to the public middle school. My mom won’t let me.” 5. I do understand what prompted that outburst. I didn’t want the life my mother kept telling me was coming. I didn’t want to transfer to a Catholic school and leave my friends. I didn’t end up attending that school; I don’t remember why. But the threat was always there—do what Mom said or she’d send me to St. Mary’s.
6. As an adult, authenticity is so important to me. I want to be myself at all times. Reading this journal prompts a thought—to be myself, I have to know myself. I wonder when I first knew myself. Sometime after this journal, I’d guess.
7. Here’s a list of things I wrote my teacher:
- a. Tired knock knock jokes I passed off as my own.
- b. Invented song lyrics.
- c. A request for my teacher to list reasons why she would and would not enjoy being a book instead of a person.
8. Maybe I was being myself, and I just can’t recognize it because that kid is so different from who I am now. But I have an uneasy feeling that the whole journal was one big outburst, one big attention grab. Like I was desperate to be noticed and seen for who I really was, even if I didn’t know who I really was.
9. Scattered throughout are these personal confessions that come out of nowhere. a. My sister’s “death.”
- b. My father’s laryngectomy (“larenjectome”) and strokes.
- c. The fact that my brother and I didn’t get along.
- d. My mother’s expectations.
10. I was trying to write the truth—but I was too young to understand much of what I felt, so my attempts included a lot of acting and acting out. It would take years to learn how to confess what scared me without lashing out. How to express my emotions without feeling some strange pressure to entertain. How to identify all the warning signs in my house.
