I did an interesting exercise with my students yesterday. We had just finished reading a short essay by Amy Tan--a memoir piece recounting a childhood experience about feeling different, out of place. As the daughter of immigrant parents from China, Tan writes often of her childhood experiences growing up and feeling different from her peers. I asked my students to think a little about a time in which they too felt different, and to write about it. One student claimed she couldn't think of a single time in her childhood or adolescence when she had felt different from her peers. I tried to coax some memories out of her (Braces? Funny hair? Parents picked her clothes?), but she stayed steadfast in her claim that she had never once felt different. At first I thought she was lucky, really, to be so thick-skinned and sure of herself that she had never seen herself as an outsider--not even once. But then later, as I thought about it more, I realized that feeling different can be a blessing, really. It can make us stronger, and give us a better sense of who we are, and where we came from.
We talked for a while about some of their experiences, and I shared some of mine, too. I also realized, as I was talking about my own experiences, that I seemed to have quite a few--a sizable collection of them, actually--some funny and some that make me wince, even today.
One of the anecdotes I pulled out for my students was about the time my dad decided to try his hand at making his own sandwich bread. My school lunches were strange enough as it was--no Twinkies, no white bread, no Oreo cookies, ever. My mom would pack carrot sticks, plain wheat crackers, or, horror of horrors, her specialty: cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, a carryover from her college days in England. But when my father decided to make his own whole wheat sandwich bread, things took a turn for the worse. In the cafeteria I would hunch over my lunch bag so no one would see me unpack my sandwich and catch sight of the thick hunks of grainy bread--slabs, really--the contents in-between spilling out the sides. The bread was thick yet crumbly, so that the first bite into the sandwich usually resulted in the rest of it disintegrating onto the table below. Sometimes he would get the measurements wrong and the bread would end up doughy, crumbly on the outside, but chewy and gelatinous on the inside. I was the kid with the weird lunches, and I longed for my friends' character lunch boxes with the Wonder Bread bologna sandwiches, bright orange peanut butter crackers, and the golden spongy Twinkies ready to be unveiled from their crinkly plastic wrappings.
But, as an adult and a parent now, I have thought more than once about how grateful I am that my parents worked hard to send me to school with good, nutritious lunches, instead of caving in to my pleas for junk food. I remember my father kneading his bread dough, and mixing a little bit of this and that, punching the dough down with his hands, bread made by him, not in some anonymous factory somewhere. I realize that my quirky lunches were a testimony of what they believed best for me, and of their love, pure and simple.
I can't sit here and say that I hope my kids will have a large selection of their own embarrassing anecdotes to share with their kids some day, or that my heart doesn't break a little each time my son tells me a story from school that makes it clear that others do find him different, and often. And when T.'s friend at the pool commented about the way she speaks, that really bothered me--tremendously. Being different isn't fun all of the time, and sometimes not ever when you are young, but as Amy Tan's own mother told her, "the only shame is to have shame" about who you are. I hope that when our kids do feel different, because we try to instill in them our own values and traditions, and our own sense of the world, that they will someday realize that this was a gift of love from us to them, straight from the heart.