Did you go to kindergarten?

Really? What was it like?

Because you see, I never went.

I have mentioned this fact once or twice in my blogging, but it came up today in therapy, and by discussing it with my therapist and especially judging by his extremely shocked reaction to the fact that I had not gone and why, it has really come into focus for me as a source of my problems.

First, the bare facts : I didn’t go to kindergarten or preschool. My first experience of school was Grade 1 in elementary school.

That is more than a little unusual, don’t you think?

In fact, judging from my therapist’s reaction, it’s not only unusual, it’s downright unheard of and on some levels, downright horrible, to be honest.

So how did this terrible thing happen?

Easy. They didn’t have enough seats for the number of applicants at the local kindergarten, so some of us just had to go. Locked outside the Garden of Children.

They tested us, and decided that because I was so precociously bright, I did not need kindergarten. So if someone had to be left out in the cold, clearly, one of them was to be me.

This would have been around 1977. As I recall, the kindergarten program was not run by the school board but by the local Catholic diocese, and therefore, I suppose, they had no legal obligation to take me in. They were not part of the education system. They were free to exclude if they felt like it.

And that’s what happened to me. I got excluded.

And my parents, being very busy and in general already quite used to mostly ignoring me, the unplanned and inconvenient child, did nothing to fight this. Apparently, they thought kindergarten was optional too, if they even gave it that much thought.

I suppose I could have kicked up a fuss, self-advocated, and demanded kindergarten for myself.

But in my defense, I was four years old. I barely knew what it was, let alone that I needed it. And back then, I still trusted that the people who were in charge of my life knew what they were doing and had my best interests at heart.

Later, I would learn that largely, they had no idea what they were doing, and that mostly what they wanted was for me to go away and stop being a problem. My best interests were not high on their priority list. I was on my own.

So what effect did this exclusion have on me?

For many years, I figured it had no effect. From what I gathered, kindergarten was just a bunch of kids playing with toys and listening to stories, and as a kid I was not all that into toys, so what could I have possibly missed by not going there?

Fool. What I missed was primary socialization. Despite the system deciding I did not need kindergarten because I was so bright, kindergarten is about far, far more than merely teaching kids certain things.

It’s about introducing kids into a nonthreatening, low pressure atmosphere where they can learn all their primary social skills without the need for academic performance. They learn to get along with one another, to make friends and to relate, to share and sing together and enjoy themselves.

Robert Fulghum was right. All you ever needed to know, you learned in kindergarten. And I didn’t go. I didn’t learn any of it.

So when I entered school in Grade 1, I was both extremely advanced academically, and severely retarded socially. All the other kids had been through kindergarten and I had not. They were way ahead of me.

And to be quite honest, I have never caught up.

Early today, before therapy, I was pondering the fact that I really was never a teenager. I think I went through puberty without actually going through adolescence. I never did any of the things which typify the teen years. I never rebelled, I never acted out, I was never sullen and bitter. I never tried to explore my burgeoning sexuality. I never even looked at my fellow students in a sexual way.

But after my therapy session, I realized that it’s no wonder I was never really a teenager. I was never really a child, either.

I was never like other children, especially in those early years. I never saw the point of getting into that sandbox and pushing your truck around and making vroom noises. I couldn’t see the point of playing on the monkey bars or playing tag. I liked books and TV, mostly, and later on, video games.

Looking back, I wonder how I ended up so damn intellectual so early. Is this inevitable for bright kids? Why was I looking for the point of everything?

And of course, you can’t say what the point of playing with trucks in a sandbox is, not in a way that would make sense to a child anyhow. There is no point. It’s play. Part of the definition of play is that it had no purpose other than itself.

What the hell was wrong with me, really? I don’t say that in a self-judging way, I just want to know why I was such a weird kid.

Well, not going to kindergarten probably had something to do with it, come to think of it.

My therapist was quite horrified that the system could so callously exclude me from what he considered to be a completely necessary step in any child’s development.

I wish I could say that I am surprised, but I have been treated thus my entire life. I can’t recall a time when I felt there was someone looking after me, someone protecting me, someone who took care of things so that I would okay.

Instead, I have been ignored, excluded, shoved aside, abused, neglected, punished for needing help, made to feel unwanted and unwelcome in my own family, and more or less completely deleted from people’s minds and made to feel guilty every time I reminded them I exist.

No wonder I’m fucked up beyond belief.

And that’s just the early childhood stuff.