The first time I remember really being embarrassed was in second grade when Mrs. C admonished me in front of a completely quiet class to finish the silent reading assignment. The whole class looked up from their books to stare at me. Over fifty years ago and I still can feel the rush of heat to my face, the panic at being the center of very unwanted attention. Mrs. C walked towards my desk, her shoulder length brown hair falling forward into her thin face.
I said I had already finished.
She shook her head in disbelief and said, “there is no way you could have finished that already.”
But I had. It turns out reading fast is my superpower, but no one knew it then.
I heard giggles and whispers around me and dropped my head to my book and started flipping pages, pretending to read, my heart beating so loud and fast I could feel it in my ears. Pound, pound, pound. My face stayed red, this time in anger at the unfairness of it all. I had done the assignment and then quietly waited for everyone else to finish.
Amazing, how easily someone can make you feel ashamed when you have done nothing wrong.
It is many years later. I’m standing outside of a dance studio with the other mothers, staring through the glass at our tiny barely-out-of-toddlerhood girls in their little pink tights and black leotards. It is just a step above herding cats, but the girls are enthusiastic in the way they fling their bodies around trying to do the steps the teacher is showing them. She directs them to march in a circle. Then to gather together in the center of the room and crouch down, folded up into child’s position, head down, pretending to be asleep. Then she gives the command to get back up.
One child does not get up.
My daughter.
My heart starts to race for her. Get up I think, seeing everyone else up and jumping around.
She stays down. Face to the ground.
Every other girl has moved on to the arms in the air move the teacher called for. Then they spin around, again following the teacher’s instruction.
Get up I think again.
She stays down.
Finally, the teacher taps my curled-up daughter on the shoulder, and she looks up and around and I can see it, that same shameful feeling. What did I do wrong? How am I the only one being singled out? Why is everyone staring at me and giggling?
She jumps up, face red.
It feels like I’m back in Mrs. C’s class, only this time it is worse. Far, far worse when it is someone you love feeling shame.
My daughter makes it through the class with a steadily blank face. Even from that young of an age she had decided not to let people see her cry.
In the car she tells me she doesn’t think dance is for her.
I nod. “Worth a try, not for everyone,” I say. “Thank you for giving a shot.”
Not a chance I’d make her go back there. Turns out she’s more of a martial arts gal anyway.
It would not be long after that we discover that she is hearing impaired. That she had been reading lips and making use of other cues to understand what people want of her. That she had no chance of hearing the teacher’s instructions in a loud, echoey dance studio, full of music and clomping girls and many voices and her head down.
Just like no one knew I could read fast, no one knew my daughter was hearing impaired. Understandable mistakes, resulting in understandable embarrassment.
Mrs. C and the dance teacher were just humans doing human things. I can give them a break. But there is a huge space in my heart for the singled out, the unfairly accused, the tender introvert who just wanted to read, the stoic faced little girl who so remarkably navigated a confusing world that it took four years to realize she needed hearing aids.
Postscript: That little girl is currently twenty-one years old, about to graduate college with two majors and a minor, and is kicking ass at Krav Maga (an Israeli martial art).
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