Blogging Through The Years: Fourth Grade

I am blogging through all of my years in school–from Kindergarten through College.  If you want to participate, write a post of your own! Previously: Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade, Third Grade.

Fourth grade was a hugely dynamic year in my life.  Everything changed and I was mostly happy about that change.

• Very early in the school year, my mom started dating this guy named Randy.  My parents had been divorced for what to me at the time seemed to be at least 10-15 years, but I now realize was less than five.  My mom hadn’t dated much in that time.  Life after the divorce had been really difficult for her and by the time I was in fourth grade, things were finally starting to look up.  She’d met Randy through a friend of my sister’s.  As it turns out, my sister’s best friend’s sister’s best friend was Randy’s daughter.  My sister and Randy’s son had actually been in Kindergarten together.  They lived on the exact same street as us, but at the other end of our small town.  There were a lot of connections like that.  Looking back, I can’t believe how fast everything moved.  Randy’s two kids were almost the same ages as my brother and sister, and so everyone got along very well.  By Christmas they were engaged and by April they were married.  I liked Randy and I thought my two new siblings were about the coolest people ever.  My family had been through a lot and it was nice to see everyone so happy.

• My only apprehension in the midst of gaining a step-dad, of my single mother no longer being single, of being the youngest of five kids instead of the youngest of three, was that  I didn’t want to move.  I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood kids behind.  When you’re a kid, proximity is everything.  Even when you’re an adult.  Who you’re friends with is like 90% determined by who’s around you.  I knew that, and I didn’t want to waive goodbye to the old neighborhood.

• For motivations that are no longer clear to me and perhaps never were, I decided to run for school treasurer.  I campaigned, made posters, and gave a speech.  Somehow, I won.  At the time, I hadn’t yet adopted the I suck at math mantra unfortunately popular among girls and characteristic of English majors.  Actually, though, the fact that being the school treasurer would mean doing math didn’t occur to me until the very first candy sale when I had to count up the totals.  Then there was the time I had to do math in front of the entire student council (the cool kids!), including the fifth graders.  After the candy sale every Friday at lunch, I got to stay after and count up the money we’d made.  It was a cool job.

• My brother is 9 years older than me, so when I was in fourth grade, he was in his first year of community college.  My fourth grade class had a hamster and someone had to take the hamster every weekend.  I had no special affection for this hamster, whose name I think was Junior, but I liked the attention of being the one who brought the hamster home.  Because I walked home from school every day, my brother had to come to my class during the school day to pick up the hamster and take it to our house.  When he walked in, several kids said to me, “Is that your dad?”   We still laugh about that.

• Speaking of my brother, my fourth grade teacher was out for an extended period of time because of a neck injury.  We had this substitute who was just the worst guy.  That next summer, he applied to work for my brother’s student painting business.   It was weird to me that this guy had a life outside of the classroom and especially weird that he was applying to work for my brother when my brother was so much younger than him.  It seemed a kind of justice for making my friend Lacie cry once.

• I got one of those Adidas coats with the stripes down the arms.  It was royal blue and I loved it so much, because I thought it was so cool.  I remember a boy from class asking if it belonged to one of my siblings and I’d like to think I pulled up my hood and gave him one of those looks and said, “nope! It’s all mine.”

• It happened coincidentally that my dad’s second marriage ended so soon after my mom got remarried.  It changed forever my relationship with my dad.  He was never really single after my mom, and so going to his house for the weekend always meant spending it with my step-mom and step-brother too.  When my dad got his second divorce, it was the dawn of what we now call Dad and Ash time.  We developed a lot of our own traditions.  He’d pick me up on Friday afternoon, back to his office for a while, then grocery shopping, then Taco Bell.  Saturday we’d always have pizza.  Otherwise, we’d visit the used bookstore, the mall, watch TV, go see movies, roller blade.  Whatever I wanted, really.

• My school had some kind of creative writing workshop that only a few students could attend, so my teacher had to choose only three of us.  I was one of the chosen.  I thought there had been a mistake.  It was the first time I’d ever been recognized for writing. A surprise, because I wasn’t a great student.

• There was this girl in my class with this amazing long hair and I remember that she always had her bangs gelled back and I just thought that was so cool.  I started doing it myself, but I could never get my bangs as high.  I tried for years.

• I had this friend named Danielle.  She had braces and she always wore a fanny pack where she kept a tooth brush and toothpaste and floss.  Believe it or not, she was cool.  Danielle’s family lived in an apartment, her mother was illiterate, and her dad wanted to move them to another state after there was a shooting in their building.  I’d been raised hearing that my family was really struggling and this was my first little bit of perspective.

• Elyse and I had different teachers in fourth grade.  Her class was unique in the school, because it had a supply store the students got to work at.  It was actually this awesomely-designed stand in the classroom that the kids would squeeze into when it was their time to work the store.   I remember buying one of those pens with a bunch of different colors of ink where you would push down the color you wanted to use.  I had that thing for years.

• As I’ve said, I wasn’t a very good student at this point.  But, I was motivated by these charts we’d get each week with stickers when we completed everything.  My teacher also had an honor roll you got your name on if you did well that week.  Both of those were very motivating to me, but I was lazy.  Every week we got new vocab words and one assignment was just to look them up and copy down the definitions.  That was too much for me, so I’d just make up definitions and write them in the style of a dictionary entry.  My teacher must have thought I was ridiculous.

• I’ve suffered from migraines as long as I can remember.  They come on when I mess up: don’t eat enough, sleep enough, wear sunglasses, etc.  Once I have one, there’s nothing I can do but try to find a cold, dark place to fall asleep before I start throwing up.  I was having a lot of problems with them in fourth grade, but I had also realized that it was pretty easy for me to fake.  If I was feeling the slightest bit ill, I could just let my pale face fall.  I’d squint like it was hard to keep my eyes open to the light.  That was enough for my teacher to send me to the nurse’s office.  There they would take my temperature while I rested on one of the vinyl-covered beds.  I specifically remember the nurse a few times noting that I didn’t have a temperature, but I guess I was convincing enough that they would still call my mom to come get me.  For this, I will never forgive myself.  My mom was working double time just to keep things together and here I was pulling her away from work on a semi-regular basis when I wasn’t even sick.  My normal migraines combined with my faking was enough that my parents took me to the doctor to figure out what was wrong.  I was tested for everything.  I ended up with glasses (they were bifocals!) and these little orange pills I was supposed to take twice a day to prevent migraines.  I never wore the glasses, even though I’d wanted them so badly, and I stopped taking the pills pretty quickly too.

Related posts:

1. Blogging Through The Years: Fifth Grade
2. Blogging Through The Years: Third Grade
3. Blogging Through The Years: Sixth Grade
4. Blogging Through The Years: Second Grade
5. Blogging Through The Years: Seventh Grade