Not all abuse is physical. Some is the result of psychological warfare. For 42 years, I seemed to be receiving coded messages that something was wrong. They came from seemingly likable billboard ads, pop songs and TV comedy skits. The queasiness, t...
Despite the psychological hall of mirrors my 4th grade year was, trusting the school came naturally to me; my mother taught in the same school system in a nearby community, and she was an active member of the teacher's union. So this classroom setting was by no means unconnected to my home life.
In truth, my Mom would have been furious had she known this woman was emotionally abusing her precious son, and she would have demanded Miss Briggs' firing. But there was another piece of evidence that I misread that pointed incorrectly to my family being tied into the teacher's behavior.
About two days before school started at the end of the summer of '67, my mom said she had some teacher business to take care of that would require her to stop in at my elementary school, and she asked, would I like to go with her.
My elementary did not feed into the secondary school where Mom taught, so I thought it odd that her business would take her there, and when we got to the school, Mom walked into the gym and started talking with my school's principal. The three of us stood in the middle of the gym as maintenance workers in spots were finishing the preparations. Mom and our principal, a man I recall very fondly for his firm but fair omnipresence, talked about this and that regarding area education matters. I remember no focus; it seemed like they were passing time.
Then, the principal turned toward a corner of the gym and said, "There's Miss Briggs, your new teacher, Scott. Let's go over and I'll introduce you to her."
We did, with a purposefulness that the preceding talk had lacked.
With Mom and the principal flanking the nine-year-old me, I was introduced to a young, nice-looking and outgoing blue jean-clad bespectacled woman with impeccable blond hair pulled back, who had just wheeled a supply cart down the hall from her new classroom. She bent down, boisterously smiled, extended her hand toward mine, and said with a confident and cheerful ease that matched the mood of all there: "Well, hello, Scott! It's nice to meet you."
This portended a fine upcoming school year. I don't know if I am retro-projecting on this, but I recall feeling uplifted that a pretty, blonde teacher has met me before any other of her students, and she likes me – let's get this year underway!
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And so, with the fly welcomed into the spider's parlor, my 4th grade year began. I don't know how quickly I discovered that the introduction in the gym was the ultimate example of things not always being what they seem, but the harassment by Miss Briggs probably was immediate.
As follow up incursions against me established that her behavior was a ritual, I quickly connected it to my having been brought, evidently deliberately, to the school at summer's end.
When something is happening to you which you cannot explain – like some Candid Camera gag that goes on and on, without Alan Funt ever popping out – you pounce on any possible way to make the situation make sense.
My hypothesis then: This was therapy for my being shy, a term I had heard used once or twice describing me incidentally. Miss Briggs being a brand-new teacher in our school system, her bizarre behavior being aimed solely at me, and it dovetailing on me being escorted to a close-up meet-and-greet – all this supported the theory.
The most elaborate extent to which I fashioned this idea was that the teacher had been brought into the school -- into the whole community for that matter -- just for me. To believe this, one would have to think of my 25 or so classmates as having just an incidental purpose in this classroom, a view which would reflect the self-oriented perspective of a three-year-old. Yet, given what was happening week in and week out, such an idea gains efficacy.
I believe that in this way, Miss Briggs' callous actions reversed my maturation (about age 9 is when a child sheds the last remnants of the self-centrist perspective it is natural for them to hold in their early years).
More generally, the teacher's ritual toward me challenged my faith in logic and warped my reality, opening the way for Magical Thinking.
The sense of walking in a minefield all day for nine months launched my OCD; that was the opinion of my psychologist, who also speculated that the teacher's behavior toward me may have hampered my relating to women -- in any realm, not just the romantic.
That stands to reason, particularly when one looks at a regrettable fluke of the calendar -- 1968 happened to be a leap year and who else would be the person to teach me about the first Sadie Hawkins Day of which I was old enough to be cognizant.
When Miss Briggs summarized the significance of the upcoming Feb. 29 as the day, "the girls chase the boys" the room erupted into laughter partly driven by shock over such a contradiction to our core training.
I'm sure icky sensations were widespread among boys at that moment, but for me -- good grief, there's even a day set aside all about my anguish in this room. I wonder if I called in sick on the 29th.
Gender issues and the firing up of OCD were bad enough, but the cruelest consequence of the teacher's abuse was the placing of an unnatural wedge between myself and my family, who would never, ever have subjected me to any denigration or fear. The prime explanation I had to grab on to lest I sink – that my Mom, the principal and Miss Briggs had all agreed to her behavior as a technique that was for my own good – forced me to sacrifice my feelings of acceptance in my very own home. And that home was our family's loving lifeboat after our father was gone.
And what I perceived as Miss Briggs' "technique" made me ashamed to have shyness, and certain that I was shy to an unhealthy extent. Nothing verified this except a chain of unproven suppositions.
The word "shy" -- not just the concept, but the sound of the word itself -- played the central role in a short story I wrote in the late 1980s and included in a booklet of prose and poetry distributed regionally.
For all conscious purposes, I wrote the story about a woman's memories of her teenage battle against society's homophobia. It's a cause I care deeply about, and the fictional character is a person to whom I feel close. But my subliminal processes also were at work as the word "shy" popped up several times in a powerful passage, even though the heroine is not at all shy and shyness is not an issue in the story.
Her hearing the contemporary lyrics from the Pointer Sisters' hit, "He's So Shy" on the radio plays a big role in that prose. Though nothing from my 4th grade horrors is in any way connected to the character, her 16-year-old self is described as obsessing on the way the song's title lyrics crescendo on "shy!"
I included in that writing no more from the Pointer Sisters' song than those title words, but my 4th grade situation comes directly to mind with:
"He's so shy. That sweet little boy who caught my eye."
I wrote the story more than two decades before 2010, but it would appear that subliminally, the struggles of another person besides its central character were a stowaway in my prose.
And it was during that momentous 2010 Saturday morning, as I was discovering that the 4th grade abuse was the source of intractable problem after problem, that this assembly line of old obsessions rolling by included a revisit to a short story little known to the area's reading public, but crucial to me. Over those minutes of life-altering realizations, I – while still horizontal -- now understood the reason why I made "shy" so important in someone else's story.
It seems that coded media references to the horrors of the 4th grade had been sent, not just received by me.
