Why being different is a good thing, Part 1
I’ve never been very much like my friends. And I mean never because I was different at only 4 years old! I love it. Some people call it weird; I call it different. So this article is about each year of my life, and what I did that was different from what other kids did.
When I was 1 year old, I was very intense, or so Mom says. She says when I was drinking milk out of a bottle, I used to concentrate on it very hard. And she has this picture of me as a baby sitting on the sidewalk and looking very hard at a stick, like I’m studying it. Mom says I’ve always been this way and probably always will.
At 2, I was all into bears. I don’t know why, I just was. I had pretty much all of the toddler problems: Toilet training, trying to be mature and giving up diapers. But that didn’t stop me from adding a little bit of my own stuff to my life. I had these little toy animals, and my favorites were (needless to say) the bears. I had two. One had a light spot on top of his back, and so I called him the Light Bear. The other one was the Dark Bear. The Light Bear was my favorite, and I played with him all the time.
Another thing about being 2 that I remember is the basement in our old house in Wisconsin. It was a huge basement, with carpet and everything, and in it was a water heater that made “ticking” noises. I was sort of scared of it at the time. So that’s why I started this thing I called “Ticking.” What you had to do was run around the basement saying, “Tick, tick, tick, tick ...” over and over. And then when you’d go by the water heater, you had to say it louder. And do you know what? It actually worked. I wasn’t quite as scared of it after that.
When I was 3, I was all into fish. And so I memorized the names of all of the fins, including dorsal fin, anal fin and pectoral fin. Then, after hearing the names of all of Santa’s reindeer out of a Christmas children’s book, I made up an imaginary character called “Blitzen the Fast Fish.” I used to pretend to be him and run around the dining room table, seeing how fast I could be as “Blitzen.”
It seems like every year I have a big “thing” I’m into. When I was 4, that “thing” was rabbits and bunnies. I wrote my first song at 4, and it went like this: “Bunnies go outside the house, bunnies and bunnies are we! Bunnies go outside the house, bunnies and bunnies are we!”
Another thing I did when I was 4 was that I made up a super hero named “Bummingwheel.” My brother, Fox, was only 2 at the time, so he talked a lot of gibberish. I remember him talking in toddler language to himself, and one of the words he accidentally said was “Bummingwheel.” I liked the sound of the word, so I made it into a super hero. Back then, pretty much everything we invented we would pretend to be, so Fox made up a hero to go with Bummingwheel — “Bummingwheel Chair.”
When I was 5, I remember I was in a preschool called “Happy Hands.” I actually kind of liked it, but I remember these two boys who were constantly making trouble. And there were two extremely nice teachers named Miss Joyce and Miss Jan. One day, they had a dress-up closet at Happy Hands, and I went over to it and put on a green dress. They asked who I was being and probably expected me to say that I was a princess or something. Instead, I said, “I’m being Mrs. Pasteur, and I’m helping my husband develop a rabies vaccine.” That was definitely not what they were expecting me to say.
That’s it for now. In my next article, I will continue where I left off and describe what I did while I was 6. I enjoy being different. It wouldn’t be fun if I were just like the other girls. I’m home-schooled, so the only chance I get to see what girls act like in big groups is at Spirit Camp, and let me just say that I’m glad I’m different. They can do what they want to, and I’ll do what I want to, and that’s what makes it all fun.
Fern Webber, 12, is a home-schooled student from Princeton. You can contact Webber in care of this newspaper at P.O. Box 340, Princeton, IL 61356.
