The First Nightmare I remember

Life, Milestone

Alphabet terror

When I was five years old, I started kindergarden. I was very shy and introverted. Self-conscious and yet eager to prove myself a good student. My mother had already branded me as the smart one. We were all branded. My oldest sister was the wild one. The next in line, April, was the artist and the pretty one. Next down the line was my oldest brother. He didn't have his own brand. He was my mother's favorite and we all knew it. Then came my best friend, the brother who was my protector, two years older than me, he watched over me as best he could.   I had picked up reading in an organic way. Nobody taught me to read but I could read when I was 4 years old. I was reading the newspaper one afternoon when my dad arrived home from work, saw me with the paper that was twice as big as me and laughed. "What are you doing? You can't read!" He smiled. He had the best laugh of anybody I ever met.   "Yes I can", I said.   The gauntlet had been thrown down.   He came and sat next to me and said, "Okay, go ahead."   And I read the newspaper article to him. He was quite impressed and I honestly don't know how I figured out how to read. Both my parents read a lot so it was natural to see one or both of them with a book at any given time.   The night before I started kindergarden, I was excited and eager. My mom had taken me shopping for school clothes and it was a big deal for me. A rite of passage. I would be in school just like my brothers and sisters.   I was a tomboy and didn't like dresses but I had gotten a kilt with a nice big shiny pin like real kilts and I loved that thing. I was feeling confident when I climbed into the bath that night. I felt so grown up. I saw there was a razor on the tub left there by my mom. I pretended to shave my legs and watched in shock as a long curved line of bright red spread its crimson halo into the bathwater. It stung but I wasn't worried about that. I thought I would get in trouble.   I finally had to call my mom for help. She reacted very strongly to the sight. I still have a scar and it's rather long but razor thin. See what I did there?   It was bedtime and my leg was still a large seeping wound so my mom hunted around and ended up fashioning an awkward looking and ill fitting dressing made of three parts to cover the entire thing. I wasn't as excited to start my school career after that.   In kindergarden, we were going to learn the alphabet. I could read but I struggled with memorizing the alphabet. My teacher told my mother I was having trouble and I felt like a huge failure. My school career wasn't starting off how I had planned at all. When my teacher discovered that I could read, she was not happy. She made the remark that that was probably the reason I was struggling to learn the alphabet and I felt that I had done a bad thing, perhaps ruined my whole school career by learning to read on my own the year before. I was devastated.   As self conscious and shy as I was with the big mountainous bandage on my leg, I became increasingly nervous and worried over the alphabet. I had my first nightmare.   I was lying in my bed and woke up. The room was in total darkness, black as black when I could make out dim orange shapes across the room from me. There were letters there. Strange letters that I didn't know the names of. I was terrified. One letter would move to the foot of my bed like a dim orange ghost in the black, threatening and huge. To my relief, it started receding back towards the wall while at the same time a different letter launched itself in my direction, mean, threatening and like a monster that might eat me because I didn't know the name of the letter. This went on for some time. I felt genuine terror throughout the nightmare that just seemed to last all night long.   I tried to describe it to my mother but her reaction was purely dismissive and impatient. "It was just a dream, forget about it." She advised.   But I never forgot that nightmare.