I'll paint pretty next sunday

When I was in the second grade I had the meanest teachers ever invented by mean teachers. She hated me so deeply and with so much passion that the other kids in my glass had nightmares that she killed me. When their parents started to call my mom it was the last straw and she pulled me out, but it was too late. School was officially ruined for me.
One time the mean second grade teacher yelled at me because I colored outside the lines of our math assignment. It wasn't that I had scribbled or colored the square marked 5 meant for red, yellow. No, it was because behind the picture of the large butterfly we were meant to color was a large openness of white, and I, having finished my butterfly earlier than the other children decided that I would color in a large field of wild flowers with a blue sky and bright yellow sun, because of course in my mind butterflies do not fly though large openness of white, they fly through large fields of beautiful wild flowers.
We the mean second grade teacher had reached my desk she stop and quickly swiped the paper out from under my hands leaving a small paper cut on my pinky.....I can remember how it sort of burned.
She then proceeded to ask the class to look up at her when their heads all turned up to meet hers she  used my field of wild flowers as an example of what "unfocused children" do with their time.
I cried.
She threw my paper in the garbage and told me that I had done it wrong and there for have failed.  If her goal in that moment was to teach me to follow directions completely as they are given then she very much succeeded. However if in that moment her goal was to teach me to draw on my own time she failed. I never colored outside the lines again. not once.
Even as I grew up and I started to paint it was never a freeing relaxing thing for me to do. I would stress, tense up and finally cry that it was not good enough. Until one day when I stopped trying all together.
I've always wanted to be a "real" painter. I've always wanted to somehow paint the images in my head but I find myself always settling for painting the furniture instead.

Comments

[Granny Glo]

oh honey, don't let her win...free yourself from the constraints the old heifer placed on you and paint, paint, paint!! Sometimes having an excellent memory binds us to things better forgotten and she needs to be forgotten (actually she should have been sent to the worst prison imaginable for child abuse and never released) She was a miserable person and had no business teaching (?) or even being around children.....

Let her go and paint free... you can do it!!!
Love you,
GG

[abigail]

I remember her...She gave me nightmares. I didn't remember that day though, I probably blocked it, I blocked most of that year. She was old and depressed, but that was still no escuse for how she treated us kids.