On grocery stores and tom boys

My creativity was reprimanded from me the same day my Mom lost me in Wal-mart because I started building a castle out of ice cream tubs in the middle of the frozen grocery aisle. They told me that I could never have a castle of ice cream, it would melt. My Mother reinforced this lesson by making me pay for all the thawed ice creams she had to pay for, which was nearly three hundred bucks. 

What can I say, I'm a woman of ambition. 

For the next six years, I was laughed at in front of my entire extended family every time someone brought that story up, which was quite frequently. Every time i built a fort, every time I played with Legos, every time I created something remotely close to a castle, I was reminded of my stupid idea to build a frozen delicious house in the middle of a grocery store.

 So I stopped building.

Things just like this happened all the time to me when I was a kid, and every time an authority figure would laugh almost directly at me, and assume I was too young, or too stupid, to think they were laughing at what I did. I wasn't. I understood that my mother talked about me wearing sneakers to church with her friends, she would laugh and say she never taught me to be such a tom boy. They would all laugh, and make fun at the little girl who only played with boys, and wore sneakers to church. One even suggested I might grow up to be a lesbian.

 I sat three feet away, coloring butterflies in a notebook.

My point here is that adults assume that they have something that children don't have, some sort of leverage over them. And while in a lot of cases, this is true, adults should never assume they are smarter than a child. I knew that my ice cream castle would melt, I just wanted to how long it would be before my mother would realize I was missing; enough time for me to build three hundred dollars worth of ice cream castle. As for the shoes, I was told to wear my best to church, for Jesus. My favorite shoes where my sneakers, They were muddy from the puddles I stepped in, scuffed from climbing all my favorite trees. It made sense for me to wear the shoes that I loved best, for Jesus to love them too.

But my mother pressured me into too high heels, and makeup and believing in solid houses, and spending more time and money on the cosmetics aisle than you did with your children. 

So I learned to smile, walk, and talk, just like mother. 

But I am still building my ice cream castle, because I am not my mother.