Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 November 2010 16:01:06
I stuck my leg out. And I'm still thinking about it. It was the last day before the summer holidays. Coming out of primary school everyone was excited and somewhat disbelieving - could those long-dreamt-of school holidays finally be here? Strangely, instead of rushing away from school, people tended to mill about - walking down the road slowly and then meandering back a little. I suppose this was a pleasure to be shared and its reality was more credible in company. In the middle of that I remember lingering on a street by the school when a kid from the year below came past. I knew him, but not well, but well enough to make a friendly joke. And so in a jokey way I stuck my leg out as if to trip him up. But my timing was off, or he didn't notice, or something, and he fell over. And started crying. Oh boy. I felt crap and, as I still tend to do when I sense that I have done something wrong, I ran away. I tend to conclude from that that the fear of being chastised was already burned into me. Except now I've learnt from my daughter that it ain't necessarily like that. She has the same desperate aversion to being chastised and will hide the evidence and run away rather than risk being told off. And while I can't say she's never been told off severely, I'd strongly argue that she hasn't had any experiences that justify the extent of her aversion to being told off. And since this behaviour of hers so identically copies my own, I have to conclude that I wasn't taught to fear chastisement - I was just born like that. Yet again my kids show me that my understanding of the world is just plain wrong. So anyway, I tripped the guy up, he fell down and cried, and I panicked. But it was the summer holidays, so I didn't have to see him again for 6 or 7 weeks. Then, when I did, at the start of the next term, his whole leg was in a cast. I can sit here now and rationally explain to myself that there is no way that his small trip, courtesy of my stupid attempt at humour, could have resulted in him still wearing a cast 7 weeks later. I can explain that til I'm blue in the face and I know I still won't listen. It was my fault, I broke his leg, and thirty years later I still feel crap about it.