Cry Baby

Posted on July 5, 2003 in Book of Days Childhood PTSD

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a time you cried.

My problem set upon me suddenly in the Second Grade. Where other boys punched faces and pulled hair when you called them a name, I cried. I was identified as a kid with a problem that needed fixing. So Sister Annette teased me to harden me up.

I suppose this was like developing a resistance to being pricked by a pointed stick by repeating ramming it in the same spot. Eventually you stop feeling it because the stick forms a hole large enough for it to fit in. The body stoppers the wound by growing skin around the cavity. You grow up with an unsightly depression. This is how men grow to manhood.

Sister Annette took us for a walk one day. We went through the Catholic Cenetery which is just off Arrowhead in San Bernardino. Back then, it was all fallen tombstones, yellow conquest grass, condoms, and beer cans.

A girl named Denise said “I heard that if you step on graves it’s bad luck.” I didn’t believe that. I made a mental note and kept going with the rest.

When we got back to class, Sister Annette asked us to report about what we had seen so the slow learners who’d been left behind could hear what we’d learned. I raised my hand. She called on me. I said “Denise said that it was bad luck to walk on the graves.” Before I could add “I don’t believe that” she said “Oh, Joe, you don’t believe that.” She led the class in a chorus of “Joe is superstitious. Joe is superstitious.” (She never could remember to tack the L on my name.) When I cried, she taunted me for that.

You were only allowed to cry for serious things, like breaking a bone or having your arm ripped at by a dog as happened to a boy who leaped the fence after a ball. Never for humiliation. When I broke my arm or scraped my knees or cut myself, I never cried. “Cry baby” is what they called me anyways because I couldn’t take teasing. Eventually, I had to leave the school. For some strange reason, I wasn’t learning any more.

I had Sister Annette for two of my four years at Holy Rosary, second and third grade. At the beginning of 4th grade, my mother wondered who my teacher would be. “If it’s Sister Annette again,” I said, “I’m going to take out a gun and shoot her.”

“Oh, Joel, that’s a terrible thing to say” and she slapped me for it. It was. I didn’t really mean it literally: after all, I’d only been murdered metaphorically, hundreds upon hundreds of times.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: So it has come to this.