Childhood Stories that Define a Person

Sometimes there's a story from a person's childhood that sums up that individual's personality. I believe people are born with certain genetic traits that determine how their minds work, how they think, and that influences everything they do in life. And the things they say and do as children are very revealing, and will tell you all about them, if you only listen.

My daughter's story happened when she was very little, about three. She was in our breakfast nook, reaching as high as she could for the light switch on the wall. I was walking through, noticed it, and said, "Here, honey, let me do that" and I switched on the light. She gave me the dirtiest look I've ever seen from a kid, stretched up and turned off the light, then turned it on again. And went back to whatever she was doing on the floor.

My mother's happened at about the same age. She always had straight hair, that just wouldn't curl. Her sister had naturally curly hair, the kind that you could wrap around your finger and it would fall into perfect sausage curls, like Shirley Temple's. So Grandma would wrap Marion's hair in rags every night, and Mom hated it. One day Grandma walked into the kitchen to start breakfast, and found a pile of hair on the floor. Beside it was the scissors she kept in a bowl on top of the ice box. After she calmed down, she learned my mother had left her bed, climbed up on the cold stove to reach the scissors, then sat on the floor and cut off all her hair. And went back to bed. My mother never had long hair again, and all her childhood photos show her with a bob long before it was fashionable.

My husband's occurred his first day of kindergarten. His Mom, thinking it might be hard for her first-born child to be away from home, went to the school to meet him as he came out so he would have the comfort of her presence. He walked up to her and said, "What are you doing here?"

One day when my son was about two we learned he had what my daughter calls "a strategic mind." We taught our children there were things they could touch and play with, and things they couldn't. Among the verbotten things were the objects in the oak china closet in the breakfast nook. One day I was doing something in another room and he asked me to come to him. As adults often do, I told him, "In a minute." A few moments later he asked again, and I gave him the same answer. We went through this routine a couple more times. Then silence. Then I heard the doors to the china closet open. I ran to him, and he was just sitting there, opening and closing the doors, knowing it would bring me running.

I wonder what mine was.