It was the morning of Emille Mabelli’s first day of preschool, and she was dreading it.
“School is the worst thing that can ever happen to you,” Emille could recall her 3rd grade sister saying, not long before.
“School is the pits,” her 8th grade brother had said that morning. “Ditch. That’s what I do, anyway.”
As Emille walked into the building, she felt as if a snake was squeezing her stomach so hard she could barely breathe. Fear was taking over, and her eyebrows furrowed.
“Please don’t make me go!” she had begged her mother as they walked into the building.
As expected, her mother said no. Her strong grip on her mother’s hand only eased when a nice looking woman walked in with a lollipop.
“Hello, there, Emille,” she said, “I will be your teacher. First we will take a small quiz to see how much of the alphabet you know.”
“Okay,” Emille responded in a small voice as her mother left the room.
Then she sat down at a desk for the very first time, and tried to write down the letters of the alphabet from A to Z.
At the end of the day, Emille came home crying.
“Mommy, I failed the quiz!” the poor girl cried out.
“You haven’t learned the letters yet,” her mom reassured. “Eventually, though, eventually,”
Nearly three had passed since then, and by that time, Emille knew her letters by heart.
“Mom, remember before I knew my letters? When I failed my first quiz?” Emille asked her mom, flashing back to her preschool years.
“Yes I do, Emille,” she responded, “You just didn’t have enough faith in yourself. As Martin Luther King said, ‘FAITH IS THE FIRST STEP EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T SEE THE WHOLE STAIRCASE’.”
