The Things I Should Have Learned in Kindergarten

One of the lessons we learned in kindergarten was to share everything. I'm intentionally unlearning that.

Do you remember the book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? It was a bestseller in the late 80s and early 90s (yeah, I know…the 1900s). Admittedly, I never read it. That book was everywhere, though. You didn’t have to read it to understand something about its basic premise, namely that our lives and our society would be better if we followed the simple rules that we learned in kindergarten. I recently browsed through it and Robert Fulghum’s “Kindergarten Credo” is good wisdom to live by.

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life–learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup–they all die. So do well

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned–the biggest word of all–LOOK.

Over thirty years later, most of this makes sense. My gastrointestinal track disagrees with that part about warm cookies and cold milk. But mostly, I do think the world would be better if we’d adhere to these simple rules. Mostly.

I’ve written before about how a kindergarten classroom was where I learned to hide myself. As the only student in my half-day kindergarten class who knew how to read, my daily time in the reading corner was hijacked by my classmates, who demanded that I read their favorite books again and again. Perhaps the teachers did not notice what was happening. Or maybe they thought that I was doing a great job of mastering Fulghum’s first rule: “share everything.”

As an eldest daughter, an eldest grandchild, a StrongBlackWoman in recovery, I have overinternalized that rule. I have learned to share more of myself than I should have: saying yes when I should say no, suppressing my needs in order to elevate those of other people and institutions, staying silent because what other people had to say was more important, remaining constantly vigilant about how much space I’m taking up.

That last one remains a challenge for me. Just this week, I caught myself doing it in the pool, hugging the wall as I swam laps because I was paranoid about drifting into the ropeless lane beside me. Even when the person in the middle lane told me that I could take his lane because he was leaving, I stayed near the edge, not wanting to take up more space than was fair.

I am very conscious of space in the pool. In water aerobics classes, I am always monitoring the area around me to ensure that I am not encroaching upon other people’s space. And when other people encroach upon mine, I adjust. I shift position, sometimes moving to a different spot altogether. That is what eldest daughters, StrongBlackWomen, parentified children do. It’s what the responsible ones do: we constantly look around to make sure that everyone has what they need, sacrificing our own needs in the process. We share everything.

I shrink myself in physical and psychological ways all the time, trying not to take up too much space in the world. I am working to unlearn this habit. For the past few weeks in water aerobics, I have refused to yield to the people who do not know how to respect personal space: the woman who splashes wildly, the man who mindlessly wanders into other people’s spaces, the two women who consistently show up late and insist on squeezing in the most crowded areas. I have even refused to yield to the other self-shrinkers who crowded me because someone was crowding them. And this week, each time I caught myself swimming agains the wall, I said to myself, “take up space.” I moved from the pool’s margin to the center of the lane (how very Black feminist of me), and as a new swimmer stepped into the lane beside me, I decided to let him be the one who adjusts.

I still believe in sharing, but just not everything, and certainly not with everyone. I didn’t need kindergarten to teach me to share. Nor did I need it to teach me not to take things that aren’t mine. What I needed was to learn to rightly claim what was my own. I needed to learn to say no, to expect that my no be respected, and to do the same for others. I needed to learn not to shrink.

How have you tended to shrink yourself? What helps you to take up space? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

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