The Tricycle Stunt that Shaped Me

Like most other human beings I do not remember great swaths of my formative years.  I don’t remember being born, or tasting food for the first time... I don’t remember the first time I fell and got hurt, nor do I remember having any childhood pictures taken.  It’s actually quite a weird feeling looking at pictures of myself as a child and not remembering the circumstances under which they were taken. There I am with my mom, me less than two feet tall, looking all pudgy and cute... but I can’t identify with that moment of my own life.  In instances of personal reflection and philosophical questioning of the existential variety one could start to wonder whether such photos are really of oneself.  Could it be someone else?  Some other cute, little girl in a cute, little, light-blue tulle dress with white ruffled socks?  But no...  That’s me, alright…  'Cause what other mom would put a ponytail directly on top of a small child's head? Only an immigrant.

While I don’t actually remember this incident, my mom told me a story that I think contains a lot of insight into who I am.  Apparently, when I was about three years old, I decided I was going to ride my tricycle Evil Kenivel-style down the front stoop.  There were six steps, all made of cement.  My mom tells me, “Tu hai fato una facia come una Tigre arrabiata, e poi hai finto di giri il motore il tuo triciclo come se fosse un motorcycle. Prima potuto gridare “No!”, hai volato.”  Translation: “You made a face like an angry tiger, pretended to rev the engine on your tricycle like it was a motorcycle and, before I could yell, ‘No!’ you flew.”  In the way that good fortune falls with most small children who impulsively do incredibly dangerous things, this adventure began with me tumbling down the stairs in what had to have been the most gut-wrenching two seconds of my mom’s life, and ended with me landing at the bottom, the tricycle miraculously underneath me, as though I had actually ridden down the stairs successfully.  My elbows, knees and forehead were scraped and bruised but my bones and internal organs remained entirely intact somehow. After a moment of utter shock, my voice rang out, “Ta da!” in what could only have been the cutest little girl voice you can imagine.  My mom scolded me and told me never to do that again.  I could not process this, of course.  My newbie brain dismissed any admonishing with the overriding fact that I had succeeded in my mission.  Death, defied.

Psychologists who study happiness have discovered that a “mastery experience” can have a profound impact on self-confidence, which in turn has a huge impact on happiness.  I guess having had my “mastery experience” at 3 ½ years old set me up for a long period of not knowing what the negative consequences of my actions could be.  Saddled with a raging case of over-confidence, I grew up thinking that I could do pretty much anything.  Dumb luck leaves you more dumb than lucky, but it worked out for me for a good long time.

The first memory that I have of my own accord is that of my first day of kindergarten.  My mom dropped me off and I went about following directions; tracing the ABC's, coloring inside the lines, and unrolling my nap rug...  But after nap-time we took our first test and, unbeknownst to me, I was at a disadvantage!  I had learned all the names of the colors in Italian from a book I was given by an aunt who did not want us to forget our Italian heritage.  I discovered in a moment of panic that I only knew the word for “yellow” in Italian.  I felt like a failure and started to cry.  Hard.  Mrs. Krushing called my mom, who’s English was still not so great at the time, but she obviously got the gist since she showed up a little while later and took me home.  I immediately took all of children’s books that were in Italian and put them in our trash can under the sink, ensuring that a similar failure would never happen again.  I told my mom to speak to me exclusively in English and called Italian a stupid language (ironically, I said this all in Italian, of course, or my mom would not have understood me).  No matter how hard I tried that evening, I could not get my mom to say Mrs. Krushing’s name, or any English word for that matter, without the obligatory “a” at the end.  Misses-a Krushing-a completely understood the whole situation, though, as I found out the next day.  During nap time, she gave me the test again and I got all the colors’ names correct, in English.  Things went just fine in Kindergarten after that.

One thing about using tumbling down the stairs as a mastery experience, though. Probably, not a good idea... Send your kids to tennis camp or a robotics competiton, instead.