Ode to Mom - Kindergarten Cuban Styleposted by Women's Media Nation Guest Post by Esther Fernandez-Walker Three months after arriving from Cuba my mother and I navigated the streets of our Miami neighborhood with ease. But on this particular day my usual enthusiasm and curiosity were missing. Our nonstop chatter was replaced by an eerie silence. It was September 1968 and I was headed to school to register for kindergarten. We walked to the school hand in hand, but as we entered the office my mother loosened her grip. And I held on for dear life. We spoke no English, but the woman at the school office spoke Spanish, and she promptly told us that both kindergarten classes were full. My mother didn't bat an eye. She thanked the woman, told her we'd be back the following year, and we left. I skipped all the way home. What if school is full next year? And the year after that? Would my mother just smile, thank the woman behind the counter, and take me home? Year after year? I pictured myself as old as my mother, 22 at the time, watching television all day long. Life was grand. The following week my mother burst the bubble when she decided that I needed to learn how to read and write. We had no children's books in Spanish, nor the money to buy any, so I learned to read what we had at home, the daily newspaper, Diario Las Americas, and my favorite, a tattered romance novel my mother smuggled out of Cuba. Families that were allowed to leave Cuba in those days were permitted to take nothing but the clothes on their backs. No money, jewelry, photographs. In a best case scenario anyone caught trying to sneak something out of the country would have the item confiscated. Worst case, the entire family could be detained, and the arduous process of applying for a visa to the US would begin again. My mother risked a lot for the escape she found on those pages, and I treasured them like the family jewels they were. We spent many afternoons poring over the newspaper, but not even my beloved comics held a candle to the intrigue I found on the pages of that novel, or the electricity I felt when my mother read passages out loud, her voice filled with emotion. When I learned to write, my first attempt at a story was a romantic thriller about a seven year-old boy and his five year-old neighbor, a girl who wasn't allowed to go to school because she was too beautiful to be seen by the naked eye. The boy had to wear special glasses to see her, but he died when the glasses flew off during a storm and her beauty zapped him of life. By the following September I could read anything, and was writing a story a day. When my mother took me back to school, at the ripe old age of six, I was declared too old for kindergarten and placed in first grade. In spite of the best efforts of Lucy, Bonanza and Mission Impossible, I still spoke little English, and spent the first three weeks of school sobbing hysterically throughout the day. One day after school the teacher pulled my mother aside and told her, in the best broken Spanish she could muster, that she thought I was a little slow, that I should be in a remedial class, and that she had arranged to have me tested by the school psychologist. My mother's reaction was swift, and disturbing to a six year-old that had never heard her raise her voice. I don't think the teacher understood half of what my mother said that afternoon, but I'm convinced she understood the context, because the words estupida and come mierda (shit eater) were sprinkled in the diatribe. My mother lost the battle, and the next day I was sent to the office to take an IQ test. The test was mostly visual, a series of match this picture with that one, this shape with these, and the woman who administered it was bilingual. Thank God for that. After that day I calmed down. Maybe the results, which I never saw, inspired my teacher to look at me differently, and so I behaved differently. I'd like to think that I scored off the charts and she realized she was in the presence of true genius. More likely, I stopped crying long enough to figure out that there were other Spanish speaking kids in the class, kids I could communicate with while learning this new language filled with silent letter combinations that had no rhyme or reason, and very few tricks to help you remember. Kids who had gone to kindergarten the year before, and who had already lived through my terror. By the end of first grade I was fluent in English, and by the time my sister started kindergarten two years later, she was too, because I spoke to her in English at home. On my sister's first day of school I went with my mother to drop her off before going to my own classroom. This was my first peek at kindergarten, and what I saw shocked me. There was a play kitchen, complete with a refrigerator stocked with plastic food. There was a massive doll house, buckets filled with dress-up clothes, and a giant alphabet rug where the teacher urged all the kids to join her for story time. There were no individual desks with heavy tops that had to be lifted to provide storage for math books and history books and rulers. Instead they had tables big enough for four and six kids, and cubbies with each child's name on the front and a small pillow inside for nap time. Nap time! I stood frozen in the middle of the room. I had been robbed. I couldn't look at my mother. Or my sister. I was livid. While five year-olds around the country were having tea parties, I was reading about Pablo's unrequited love for Maribel. While they were sitting on the rug, being read to, I was reading the classifieds to my mother while she made lunch. It took me years to get over not going to kindergarten. When my other sister started school four years later, I was still harboring a little resentment. Eventually, I let it go, and I think, I even forgave my mother. But then, sometime during my twenties, Robert Fulghum, who no doubt went to kindergarten, wrote a seminal bestseller, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and the old wounds gushed as the salt was poured over them. I couldn't go anywhere without seeing posters extolling the virtues of a kindergarten education. As much as I tried to ignore what I had missed, the damn missive followed me wherever I went. One afternoon, in a doctor's waiting room, the poster kept staring at me, until I was forced to read it. Here are the gems that stood out for me:
Share everything. This reminds me of the first time my mother took the romance novel from my hands and told me it was her turn to practice her reading, by herself. I was upset, but when she gave it back, it was easier to let her borrow it the next time. Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Pablo had a seed, and he planted it, and Maribel took care of it, and I learned that a seed well planted results in a beautiful thing you treasure and look after with love.
Flush I don't know where Mr. Fulghum lived, or with whom, before he went to kindergarten, but at my house, we learned to flush at the same time we were potty trained.
Don't hit people. All the Vietnam soldiers whose names I read in the obituary section of the newspaper taught me this one.
Play fair. One day, while my mother was changing the sheets on the only bed in our apartment, I read to her that Yale was admitting women. I didn't know what a Yale was, but my mother stopped what she was doing, read the article herself, and said, "It's about time." My mother's education topped off at 16, because the aunt and uncle that raised her after her mother died refused to let her go to nursing school; nice girls didn't pursue higher education, they said. Their son became a doctor.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. Pa made Little Joe and Hoss apologize whenever they hurt each other. And look how happy the Cartwrights were, and how big and beautiful the Ponderosa was. My mother and I didn't understand a word they were saying, but true love, and Michael Landon, needed no translation.
Clean up your own mess. Every Saturday morning I woke up to Tom Jones coming out of our record player. It wasn't really him, but my mother acted as if he was there while she swooned, and swished the toilet bowl with me, her helper, always close by with my own bucket and brush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. We snacked on Wonder bread, olive oil and salt, and although I've upgraded the bread, few things in life taste better when shared with those we love. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we. Trees die too, my mother explained as we admired the Christmas tree our neighbors had given us. But not our tree, she added, because, luckily, our tree was made of silver strands of foil with big blue balls already attached. Our tree would live forever.
Wash your hands before you eat. Seriously, Mr. Fulghum, you got all the way to kindergarten before someone taught you this one?
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. My mother no longer takes my hand when we go out; I now take hers, but only because she taught me how so many years ago. As I finished reading, I realized that Mr. Fulghum, with all his high fallutin' kindergarten education, forgot something: Say thank you when you've been well taken care of. Thanks, Mom. |
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