Displaced Dreamer

Sitting in the large field, alone, in the warm spring sun she watched the bees flitter from clover to clover.  Her new school is awful. At least in San Mateo she had friends to play with. Here all the kids wore expensive jeans, displayed fancy hair dos, and generally acted as though she didn't exist, in fact as if she were invisible. She wasn't used to this kind of snobbery. 

She continued to watch the bees work hard.  The yellow stripes on their bodies seemed even brighter than usual.  She felt privileged to be able to watch Max and Mabel, for those were their names today, pollinate flowers.  For a moment she turned her head up to the sky and noticed the lovely blue color and the large marsh-mellowy clouds.  They looked soft, puffy and inviting.  Would that she could escape this place that felt like a prison and jump freely among the clouds.  Just then the bell rang.  Reluctantly, she stood up and headed for the classroom.  "Good Bye Max and Mabel.  Maybe I'll see you again tomorrow,"  she whispered.

Herded back into class single file, most of the children were fidgety and giggly, but she stayed silent and observed the march to the classrooms with the hard desks.  The teacher of her class had a kind face.  She approached the teacher, eager to have a conversation with someone, she asked "what do you think it would be like to die?"  The teacher was taken aback, and appeared to be at a loss as how to respond to the question.  Instead, the teacher offered, "take your seat and we will talk about this later." This would be the first lie the girl would remember encountering.  Though the teacher had said they'd talk about it later,  she sent a note home letting her parents know that the girl would be given a battery of tests to find out what is wrong with her.  The girl's curiosity got her into trouble, and this wouldn't be the first time. 

The girl, sitting in what felt like a closet with a bright bulb behind the man opposite her, began offering descriptions of what different smatterings of ink appeared to be in her mind.  She was honest and said what she saw, "that one looks like a dragon fly.  That one looks like a flower. That's a girl riding a bike.  That's a dead cat on the side of the road." And it went on like that for 20 or so minutes.  After the testing was complete the man recommended that she go to family therapy, with the whole family.  He said her answers were not that of a typical 7 year old child and there was cause for concern because her grades were so low.   No one bothered to tell the man that this was the 3rd school she'd been to that year, and that of course her grades were low because each school she went to had a different curriculum and were at different points.  Not that it would matter, she should be brilliant enough to figure it out, in her mind anyway.

Family therapy was AWFUL!  She went and the doctor saw her, then her mom, then her dad, and then the three of them together.  The room was large with a lot of distractions, Tupperware shape balls, chalk boards, books, blocks, and puzzles.  She wasn't paying attention when the family were altogether.  In fact she became startled when her mom took her arm and led her out of the office.  She didn't hear her dad call the man a quack and that he had no right to interject his opinions of how he raise his daughter.  Her dad made it clear that the family would not take any part of this treatment, but she missed it, not that she cared too much, she wasn't sure why they were there in the first place, and never would understand, really.

When she returned to school the following day she was told that she would no longer be going to lunch with the rest of the children.  She'd spend the hour before lunch and through lunch with the school psychologist.  She didn't find this fair at all, but she wasn't really given a choice.

The girl was sad.  One night at the dinner table she began crying... perhaps it was for attention, perhaps she just felt invisible again, maybe it was the overflow of her heart unable to be contained any longer... but she couldn't stop.  Her parents were dumbfounded and asked why she was crying.  Obviously, she didn't know why she was crying, but her lack of answer felt wrong... so she made something up, "They called me a big fat chicken at school!"  Her dad stifled a chuckle, her mom appeared horrified and her sisters continued to stare at her.  Finally, her dad came up with an answer, "do you think you are a big fat chicken?"

"N-n-n-o-o-o," she stammered.
"Well, there you have it, they lied to you."

The statement from her dad, though designed to make her feel better, only made her cry more because she just lied.  Her dad, not understanding what was going on, put his arm around her and told her that she was not a big fat chicken to him.  She began to calm down, and did feel a little better somehow.

The little girl's body was too small to contain her very big feelings.  At the age of 7 she did not understand what her emotions meant but they would overflow from her in the form of tears, laughter, anger, and frustration.  She learned how to tell stories that explained them and soon, she would begin to believe the stories she fashioned.