Repeater: A Reminiscence From Childhood

I started primary school a year earlier than other children. I think there are two experiences here which I still remember, which goes to show that they carry weight in my psyche. My instinct is to dismiss them as unimportant, which makes me think I'm employing a defensive mechanism to not delve much deeper into these experiences.

Since I started school a year early, I had to repeat my first year. Repeating my first year meant that I spent two years in the same class with the same teacher, rather than one year.

Perhaps the initial trauma was when all my friends changed but my teacher didn't. She must have been the only constant amidst a tsunami of change. I cannot really remember classmates, but my first teacher is imprinted in my memory more than any other. I can see how maybe I learned a lesson from that trauma: friends abandon you but Sister Dorothy does not. I might be projecting, I really don't have any memory of my emotional reaction to all my classmates changing. Perhaps having that comfort in my teacher's constancy is the reason why.

I suspect this to be the case, because what I do remember, very vividly, is the start of my third year at primary school. This year I progressed, being the same age as my peers. I remember going into the class I had spent the last two years in. Bear in mind two years were 40% of my life so far. Childhood arithmetic is crazy, y'all.

Anyway, I remember a deep, deep sense of anguish at being told that this was not my class. I remember crying. I remember screaming. I remember teachers comforting me, talking to me. Just like that, any vestige of constancy proved to be illusory. I remember feeling confused as to why Sister Dorothy didn't "want" me in her class any longer. Was I being punished? It seemed so arbitrary, so fundamental a change.

I guess the upside is that I discovered most of my classmates remained the same as the previous year (there were three or four classes and schoolchildren got shuffled from one year to the next). Maybe my experience of relying on a single person to take care of me most of the day is why I tend attach myself to a single person, be it a friend or a romantic partner. I really don't know but it certainly makes sense.

The other memory is related to the other children. I used to ride a van to school with other schoolchildren. At least one of them was in my class in my first year of school. I don't know how, but everyone learned I was repeating the year. For context, the label "repeater" is incredibly loaded in child-speak. Millennials are the new boomers, so kids may have updated this insult.

I also learned that I wasn't born in the year I thought I had been born in. For some reason that commonality was important. I guess when you're four years old you don't have many experiences on which to build common ground. The year you were born in is just one of the few things that connect you with others, and given the scarcity of facts about you, it might seem like a big deal to a four year-old.

I don't remember ever being insulted as a "repeater", probably because my classmates weren't there the previous year so they didn't know. But being a repeater is probably the first secret about myself that I've ever kept. And as I looked down upon the occasional "repeater" with naïve, hypocritical disdain, I'm sure I was expressing not a little self-loathing.

An instance I do remember is being made fun of in the van for not being born in the year I said I was born in. Memory is fuzzy, but I think the children were calling me a liar. Ah, well. If only I knew enough about the nuances of church school induction procedures back then, I could have defended myself a little more eloquently. All I could do back then was deny, deny, deny.

The school van and bus remained a seemingly-unlimited source of deep trauma to me, and I'm sure to many others. To this day, I feel anxious boarding a coach full of people I know. Christ.

I delved into these memories as an exercise to understand the basis of some of my unproductive behaviours today. Understand why I use withdrawal as a protective mechanism, as a means of controlling my environment. And also as a means of understanding why I change or hide parts of myself for others' approval.

I decided to publish these accounts for a multitude of reasons. First, I have processed these events now. People can call me a repeater all they want. Second, it feels scary to write about these deeply personal experiences. And that's as good a reason to do anything. The third reason is you, dear reader. If you have these experiences, it's okay to process them. Even writing them out for your own personal use feels cathartic. At least it did for me.

It's a good step in recognising and understanding behavioural patterns. Recognition, in turn is a step in the direction of responsibility.