If you have a kindergarten teacher in your life, give them a hug. They need it. Because they’ve now spent weeks in a classroom with 20 or so little personalities and little anxieties. And probably big insults. Because no one knows how to cut a person to the quick like a little kid. I’m talking about the kind of insults that you think about before you fall asleep at night, the kind that stay with you for years and years.
Of course, the kids don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but that’s also kind of the worst part. My kids have felled me like a dead tree with their off-the-cuff remarks so many times that it’s a wonder I can still leave the house. And I just have four of them. I can’t even imagine what it would be like with five times that amount. The closest I can come to it is my aunt’s home daycare, a lovely place where I recently popped in and a cherubic young girl there asked me if I was pregnant. She was happy for me, I could see it. What is there to say?
You see, there is nothing a person can say in response to a small child’s accidental insult. They don’t mean anything malicious by it, and you don’t want to hurt their feelings. So what was I supposed to say this summer, when I was chasing my friend’s little boy around the backyard in a fun game of tag until he screamed, “Help! An ugly zombie is chasing me!” I was not, in fact, wearing a mask.
Or that time a friend was buying a copy of my book and she showed it to her little boy. “Look, Jen wrote this book!” she told him. He walked over with his soccer ball under his arm, sweaty from playing and ready to pass judgment. He held up my book, looked at the author photo on the back, and said, “Is this really you?” I told him yes. “Wow… you’ve REALLY changed.” He said this two years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven him.
I should be accustomed to the targeted, honest, and totally devastating insults from toddlers and preschoolers by now. My own kids certainly came up with some zingers. “Can you take that ponytail out? Because I can’t tell if you’re mad at me or if that’s just your face,” my youngest said when I was, indeed, very mad at him over his messy room. His comment did not help matters.
“Mommy, I bet you don’t get cold in winter because you are like a polar bear,” another son sweetly said, happy as a clam for me, when we were out on a winter walk together.
Once, when one of my kids was a toddler, I was carrying him inside while he slept in his booster seat. He bolted awake and yelled, “Don’t touch me! The holes in your nose! They’re! Too! Big!” He meant my nostrils. So specific. He is a man now, kind and thoughtful, and yet here I am still looking in the mirror with my head tilted back, wondering how to make my nostrils look smaller.
The problem is, of course, that these insults are not insults. They are simply honest observations from small children who mean you no harm and can’t help noticing that you, like me, have a “comfy, squishy stomach.” Which is exactly why their version of observational humor really hits us adults where it hurts. When my toddler niece told me as we were packing up to go to the beach, “Aunt Jen, I think you’re more of a one-piece bathing suit girl, right?” I meekly changed out of the (very modest) two-piece I was about to wear. Because she was right. I’m a one-piecer all the way.
Despite their cut-glass wit, despite their assessing eyes and life-altering one-liners, kids are the most fun. Sure, a young kid might tell their teacher unprompted that their roots are showing, for example, but they’re also generally the most interesting people in any room. All will be well, the energy in the classroom will be positive and fun and good, and then all of the sudden one of the students will say, “Are you already a grandma? You look old like my grandma,” with the sweetest smile. They’ll cut you to the quick and calmly saunter back over to the water table like they didn’t just end you. They’re like sweet versions of Princess Margaret.
I would love to tell you that there is a way to safeguard against these cherubic character assassins, but I don’t think there is one.
I wonder all the time how teachers do it. How they move past it.
Because I can’t seem to. I’m still thinking about my year as a nanny in Switzerland when the French-speaking toddler in my care casually asked, “Etes-vous un imbécile?” Being called an imbecile hurts so much more in French, I’ll tell you.
The only thing to do is laugh it off. Remember they don’t mean anything by it. Like when my niece told me I reminded her of Ursula the Sea-Witch from The Little Mermaid (the original), she really loves Ursula. And she really loves me.
It’s not her fault that she’s sort of right.
Bless all those kindergarten teachers who are out there suffering the slings and arrows of our terribly honest children. Let’s thank them and compliment them all the time because boy oh boy do we ever need them.
Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she is not traveling as often as possible she’s trying to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once but she’s open to requests.
