Peanut Butter and Honey Fairy Squares
Thinking about school lunches makes me remember all the things about those early years of school that I wish I could forget sometimes. The smell of my kindergarden room carpet, sandbox, and rice-bin, paint, plastic, wood. That weird smell of lenolieum, glue, and something else kind of sour, that I could never quite find the name for, like stale milk mixed with some form of putrid lime from another planet. The first boy I fell in love with in kindergarden wore a suit on the first day of school, and ended up hating me, and running away from me every time I ran after him on the playground. The boy who punched me in the stomach. My "friends" who would also run away from me on the playground ( I wasn't very popular) and dis-invite me from their birthday parties, then invite me again when they felt like I deserved it again. I spent a lot of time alone, counting the tires that circled our playground, once I realized how mean kids could be. Counting the tires helped me figure out other things inside my head, that I couldn't talk about to anybody else. I often wondered to myself what we were doing inside this cage? What kind of animals were we? Monkeys? We did have monkey bars? We were treated like animals.... Well, we were children, but of course! And one of the most veriosious types of animals out there... real human children.
There are good memories too, very few...but they're there. The good memories are mainly all the things I imagined up inside my head. Usually completely oposite of what was actually going on in my direct reality. I learned to be an expert imaginer, to get through my day. To survive.
My lunches for school were packed by my Mom, usually peanut butter and honey sandwiches, those were my favorite snacks in the whole world. If Icould have, I would probably have aten them three times a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of my favorite songs that I learned was about sandwiches, and I used to sing it all the time it went like this "sandwiches are beautiful, sandwiches are fine, I like sandwiches I eat them all the time. I eat them for my breakfast and I eat them for my lunch. If I had a thousand sandwiches I'd eat them all at once." I'de always picture haveing thousands of sandwiches in my mouth at once, and it frightend me to see my mouth open as wide as the whole world to fit all those sandwiches inside me! This reminds me of another song I used to sing, and it was one of the first times that I became really afraid of reality because I realized I hadn't a clue what it was to be alive...the song goes like this "row row row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream"...I remember singing that in the car, and then feeling this pang of fear, wondering, "if life is a dream, then when do I wake up, and what will I wake up to, who is going to wake me up, and when I got back to sleep, will I wake up back here?!" I did not like the row your boat song. Almost all of the songs I heard as a kid made me feel uneasy, like you know : Pocket full of posy...all fall down, and Rock a bye baby on the tree tops. Both those songs would make me feel really sad, and I didn't know why. My favorite ones were the sandwiches song, and a song called "the cat came back" about a cat that comes back over and over again, the very next day...even though his master tries to get rid of him time and time again...the cat just won't leave. It always made me laugh.
Sometimes I didn't feel like eating my lunches, and they would go rotten in the bottom of my napsack, staining the edges of my books and duatangs with the moist soggy smell of mold and neglect. I couldn't stand the word duatang when I was little, but I loved saying the word binder, and I couldn't wait until I could use a binder and not a duatang, because the older kids used binders, and I wanted to grow up faster so that people would take me more seriously. My Mom would get angry with me when I would let my lunches go bad at the bottom of my bag, and as I got older she stopped making me lunches, and I would go hungry. I didn't like eating, most of the time because I was nervous and tense all the time, and it made terrible painful cramps in my stomach. The nervousness started when we were learning how to write, which is the same time yelling and fights started happening at home with my Mom and my step Father, her boyfriend.
I remember my teacher telling us to hold the pencil in our right hand, then telling us to hold it in our left, and then asking us what hand feels the most comfortable. For me neither hands felt any more or less comfortable than the other...and I told the teacher that both hands were the same. I wanted to write with my left and going from the right page to the left...but when I saw that most of the other kids were using their right hands, and the teacher said that this was most common, I did the same. Thats when the tension in my neck and back, and stomach started. It felt uncomfortable, but I wanted to fit in. Now I have re-taught myself how to use my left hand in writing, and it feels more comfortable, so I use both now, like I wanted to in the beginning.
I knew that my Mother loved me very much when she would ask me "DO you want me to make you a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and cutt it into fiary squares?" ( The way her eyes widened and the way she said Fairy Squares was pretty much the most magical thing in the world for me to ever hear!) Fairy Squares by the way are just the sandwich cut into triangled pieces. I never knew exaclty why she called them fairy squares, I just figured that it was probably because they were smaller pieces, the right size for a fairy to eat, if they wanted to try some of my sandwich, it wouldn't be too big for them to bite into. I'de picture them buzzing around my sandwhich like flies waiting for me to look away for one second, from my food, to steal it from me, but I was always too quick for them, and ate up my sandwich as fast as I could. My Mom would usually make this for me to cheer me up if I was feeling sad. It always worked wonders on me without fail. IN an instant my whole being would become lit up, and I would nod my head vigorously showing my wide eyed approval.
Like most kids, I liked to imagine more than I liked doing anything else. One of the major reasons why I loved peanut butter and honey sandwiches so much was because I could always imagine myself as a little baby bear cub when I ate my sandwich, and the reason why I enjoyed doing this was because my favorite character on our bed-time-story-tape called "Nanny Bird" was the Bear, and he just Looooved Peanut Butter and Honey Sandwiches -- he would make the most delicious sounds in the story while eating, and I tried to the best of my ability to imitate him. In my mind at that moment of.... bite and chew... I became a little tiny bear cub, no longer human, and the Bear from the Story became my Pretend Father.
My Dad left my Mother and us when I was two years old, I met him when I was five.
SO I pretended that I was not a little girl without a father, and I hadn't yet fully realized why other little girls had fathers but I for some reason did not -- slowly I began to believe that there was something wrong with me, and it was all my fault that father didn't want us.
Now I think I almost know the answers to many of the questions that puzzled me at that time, but every so often, when I eat a peanut butter and honey sandwhich I can still imagine myself as a bear cub, and it makes me smile.
