Thanks so much for reading my childhood memories, there is only one more to go but I wanted to share them with you because many of these helped make me the person that I am today. Miss Harris for example changed my life unequivocally and although the journey at the time was soul destroying, she taught me some of the most important lessons of all.  I managed to stay steadfastly ME regardless of how she judged me or what she thought was best.

My dementia journey continues and last week it included losing peripheral vision for two days which was frankly terrifying and unnerving.  Just when you think you have adjusted to your new 'normal' up pops another issue that needs to be dealt with.  We are off to see the eye clinic at Wellington Hospital today so hopefully they will be able to shed light on what is happening.  Stay safe out there.  

When I was seven years old, I moved into a new class and our teacher was a lady called Miss Harris.  You had the same teacher for every subject so who your teachers were was incredibly important because you were stuck with them for an entire year which felt like a lifetime when I was seven.

Miss Harris was like a round hole and I was a hexagonal peg, we just did not fit.  I like to think that Miss Harris had the very best intentions but some of her methods were questionable. She was the first adult I met who clearly did not like me as a person and it felt very personal. 

She would call on me in class when she knew that I had no idea what the answer was.  She criticized my drawings to such an extent that I stopped drawing altogether.  I felt that everything that I thought was OK about me up until that point was in fact not OK at all.

Not long into the school year she recognized that I was not keeping up with the rest of the class academically.  She decided that I must have something wrong with me and so she decided to find out exactly what that was so that I could be put right again.

She gave me a note to take home to my parents.  After that I was taken to a bunch of different people – someone looked at my eyes, another man asked me lots of questions and got me to play some games with him, I was also sent to another doctor to test my ears and was given a thorough physical.

Finally came what can only be described as a defining moment in my life and like all defining moments you don’t know you’re having one of these until you are on the other side. 

I was asked to go into the teachers’ lounge which was this magical room that we all knew existed but to cross the threshold of the doorway and enter was a bit like finding yourself in Narnia.  I walked into a room full of adults, some of whom were teachers from the school, some were the people who had tested me and some were total strangers. 

I was told to take off all my clothes except for my knickers and stand in the middle of the room.  I remember being mortified at this request because the teachers’ lounge jutted out slightly from the rest of the building.  Because of that you could see into the teachers’ lounge from one window of the library. I was terribly concerned that another school friend would see me in my underwear and tell others.

I would love to be able to tell you what was discussed in that room but I can’t remember a thing.  Except knowing in the very depths of myself that what was occurring was just wrong.

My other thought was how can my Mum be OK with this? She was also in the room and when we discussed what happened years later, she told me that she felt powerless to speak up and say anything in a room full of ‘experts’. I beg to differ with this opinion, I believe she was the only person in the room with the power to say "no thanks, my daughter is not doing this today or if she is - she can have her clothes on".  Times were different however and I completely understand the feeling of powerlessness, its what I felt in that moment as well.  

The person who had the best handle on things appeared to be the optometrist who remarked that I saw and perceived things differently but he did not know the root cause.

All the above confirmed once and for all that I was “different.”  None of my friends had been sent to see doctors or had to stand in only their knickers in the staff room.  I now had undeniable proof that I was not "normal" and that leads to feeling isolated.

I still remember the day that Miss Harris told the class she would be teaching us for the next year as well.  I just sat at my desk with a fuzzy brain and very heavy heart.  Another whole year of being “wrong”. 

I cried all the way home.