Sometimes, a picture can bring up a wide-range of emotions:  joy, sadness, nostalgia, and everything else.  Earlier this summer, I sent my aunts on a search for the picture above.  It had been on my mind for some time.  I consider it one of the definitive photos of my childhood; one that has always stood out.  First, Grandma Buttrick had it framed in one of the back bedrooms of her house for many years.  I always enjoyed coming across it during visits.  For that reason alone, the picture remains a favorite.

While I was too young to remember having the picture taken at my Aunt Tara’s wedding to Uncle Bill in July of 1984, I grew up hearing all about it.  I can’t tell you how many times I heard the story of how I, at three years old, took the instruction to smile at everyone as a flower girl walking down the aisle much too literally.  I stopped at every pew.  At the end of the ceremony, I cried and ran after my mom as she left the church in the processional as a bridesmaid.  I didn’t understand that I just needed to follow my older cousins.  My only memory from that day is a hazy notion of playing at the beach on the animal-shaped play equipment at the Tawas City park during the reception.

In the picture, I see myself as a little girl full of personality and character.  There is no doubt that I was a ham like my mom, an extrovert.  When I look at this picture, I see “before.”  Before self-doubt, before losing self-confidence, before I realized that my body is, and always has been, all wrong; in other words, before kindergarten.  Prior to kindergarten, no one – not my parents, grandparents, cousins, other adults, other children, or preschool classmates – made me feel inferior in any way.  No one asked me to be something that I wasn’t, no one called me fat or ugly.  I could be myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved school.  I would not be a teacher today if that wasn’t the case.  I loved learning, I had some great teachers, and most of my classmates were great.  Yet, I dreaded gym and recess all throughout elementary school.  In gym, always picked last for any game, I just wanted to be good enough.  During recess, other students started picking up on just how different my body is and was.  When you hear that you are fat and ugly on a daily basis at that young of age, you start to believe it.  It becomes a part of you.

Oddly, things improved a bit during junior high.  I cared about my grades, others didn’t.  Suddenly, I didn’t care so much about peer pressure.  I began to see it for what it was, even though I would have given anything to be what was then considered “normal.”  Keep in mind that this included the era of grunge, emo, and heroin chic.  Any “normal” adolescent felt inadequate when faced with the popular culture of the time. While I finally did come into my own in high school and college, this picture makes me wonder what I missed all those years in-between.  What if I hadn’t had to work so hard for self-confidence?  What if I could have kept that early childhood enthusiasm and creativity?  What if I hadn’t turned inward in the face of constant bullying in elementary school?  What could I have accomplished?  What if?  That is what this picture represents:  possibility. Unadultered possibility.