Children are cute, blahblahblah

I haven’t really been working lately–I mean at my job… my life is like 100% Work and I am sooooooo busy–but I had to go to school a couple days this week to do a project with the children. A wall-hanging which was inspired by another wall-hanging I saw in an Italian nursery school, to be auctioned off for hopefully not less than $10,000. Do I sound like an asshole yet?

Of course the amount has zero to do with the item being auctioned off and everything to do with how many serious high-rollers are in the class and how competitive/drunk they are. So I’m an asshole and also an idiot, because they would’ve paid the same amount for the usual auction project, the Popcorn Bowl with Fingerprints. Those Italian nursery schools were just so fricking inspiring.

It turns out that simple, rustic Italian art projects are actually really frustrating and hard. You feel like an asshole for using pipe cleaners, because the Italians would never use pipe cleaners. But you can’t remember what the Italians used (reeds? cashmere?), because they don’t allow you to take pictures of their art projects, or anything. They are serious about controlling their image. It’s creepy.

Anyway. There are many things about my job that I don’t and won’t miss–like Wasps, other nursery school teachers, and the fact that I have always found Early Childhood Education to be exceedingly boring (except in Italy; then it’s fucking riveting). And I would rather plunge a pair of scissors into my heart than cut more stuff out of construction paper. But I still find three-year-olds to be totally weird and brilliant.

I was sitting with this one kid I love–a pip with super-bright eyes and, unfortunately, one of those names that sounds like half of a pharmaceutical company–and she said, “Ms. Whip, I remember you.”

“I remember you too,” I said.

“I remember you, except your hair looks really different.”

“Last time it was like this?” I moved my bangs to the side.

“Yes.”

“I got a haircut,” I said, and I made scissor-fingers. I snipped-snipped across my forehead, and she cracked up. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in eight years of this, it’s that that joke kills with three-year-olds.

Then her face got really serious. “Could you do that again?”

“This?” I held up the scissor-fingers. She shook her head. She meant move my bangs to the side. She wanted my hair back to the old way.

I did it, and she looked relieved.

Yesterday morning a bunch of them were haunting me as I set up my rig, and one girl goes, “Ms. Whip, you ALWAYS make us weave, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I always make children weave.”

They have no sense of time. If you do something two days in a row it’s perpetual, and if you did something last week it was a long time ago.

Which reminds me of another time when I was ministering to a girl with a papercut. I went through the whole thing–getting her to stop crying, insisting that we wash it, insisting that we wash it with soap, washing it, drying it, Band-Aid–and when it was over, she looked up at me and said, with great nostalgia, “That’s exactly how my mother used to do it.”

So yeah. I will miss them chickens. And I will miss the version of myself that ALWAYS makes you weave, and does it exactly the way your mother used to do it.

Oh my God, did you just make that dirty? Because that was not dirty.

by Pistol Whip | 19 April 2007 | cute, boring | Comments