The first 'who am I' defining moment that I remember occurred in grade four, when Sandy Padano took a swing at my head with her Sunshine Family mom doll in the junior girl’s washroom. Sandy – whose dad was Spanish and had a complexion as dark as mine - screamed “spot-face, spot-face, you’re a dirty brownie, you’re a dirty brownie” until the gym teacher dragged her away and stashed her in the first aid room for a time out.
I knew what I looked like – sort of what you get in a cup of cocoa mixed with cream – half of my mom’s colouring, with a sprinkling of freckles, and half of my dad’s, with lots of curly hair thrown in.
Sandy knew she was in trouble, but it was me who barricaded herself in the girl's bathroom. I cried so hard I was at the gasping, damp-faced stage where I didn't care what happened next. No one had ever called me names before, but I knew it was wrong. I had no idea why, to Sandy, I was somehow less than what I had been the day before. That made my stomach hurt.
They’d had to interrupt the janitor’s smoke break so he could unscrew the hinges from the bathroom stall door. I remember he smelled of stale beer and all-purpose cleaner. My homeroom teacher finally coaxed me from my perch crouched on the toilet seat. The principal had whispered that Sandy ‘had issues’, but at nine, what the hell did that mean to me? For the rest of the afternoon, I was a mini-celebrity because my class got a spare while the teacher dealt with the parental aftermath with Sandy's harried mother. For a couple of days afterwards, though, the side-eye looks and grimaces from my classmates re-opened the word-wounds. After some brief commiseration, my parents told me to stop sulking and grow a thicker skin.
My brothers sometimes looked at me like I was from somewhere else. They were younger, and being boys, just didn't understand what it meant to be me. At the start of grade five, I got better at pretending to be oblivious to the hurts flung by folks I downgraded to unimportant or stupid. I convinced myself that I liked being ‘different’, and saved my tears for the darkness of my bedroom. On a more positive note, Sandy’s spittle-fuelled tirade fueled my determination to be the best at everything I could – school work, crafts, sports. What that got me was more names like ‘browner’ and ‘keener’.
"No one promised you a rose garden," my mother said one day as I was wallowing in my latest drama.
I’ve always been skittish about how other people saw me, what they thought of me, how I sounded when I spoke. I wanted to be the 'good girl', the 'smart girl' who could be counted on to help out an adult. Hence my transformation was to focus on what my teachers thought, rather than care about my classmates. But that came at a cost, because it was hard to keep track of which face I was wearing on a particular day.
I didn’t keep many friends for long, because I enjoyed winning too much, and I hadn't learned that letting someone else come out on top was a positive thing to do for maintaining relationships. I became what my dad called a ‘shapeshifting pleaser’, except when I deployed competitiveness and a smart mouth as a force field. Let’s just say I haven’t always been well defended. Which is a roundabout story about how the ‘me’ – Kenora Tedesco – began to be shaped by events I couldn’t control.
In grade six, I had stopped believing in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. My younger brothers still bought the hype our parents dished out, but I refused to look under my pillow for cash when I lost a tooth, or write to Santa asking for stuff that I'd find on the top shelf of my parents' walk-in closet. I had no interest in a Lite-Bright or a can of Silly String, although if I could have wheedled an old book of magic spells, a short-wave radio setup or a $500 gift card for books out of mom and dad, I might have written out the best begging letter ever, on toilet paper.
Without me asking, though, my parents gifted me a Magic 8 Ball when I was ten. All I wanted to know was if Jimmy Tudhope, the star hockey player in grade seven liked me. The answer was, ‘Outlook hazy’, which in retrospect made sense, because he was in a different orbit than me. I should have been more curious and asked what would happen to me at 20, 30 and onwards. Why? Because the older I got, the more I took refuge in working harder at being the best I could be, even after that became a catchy recruiting slogan.
Did my life turn out peachy-keen better? Better than Sandy’s. A couple years ago, I discovered via a Facebook post from one of her cousins, that she’d spent half her life making clay pots and needlepoint lampshades in a secure facility up north. And Jimmy Tudhope had a brief career with an American minor league hockey team before flaming out in a sex-and-drugs scandal.
Some days, not having to adult, keep a budget and make any decisions seemed like not such a bad deal. The thing is, after I turned 40, and I began to be whip-sawed by events I could never have imagined, I realized that I had another chance to discover who I really was.
