liezel graham

I have wanted to write a poem about kindness, but my words have refused to be shaped into something compact and poem-like. They wanted to tell a little story instead. They wanted to tell of one small moment, when I was about eleven years old. The memory slipped into my room the other day and stood at my desk whilst I was working. I tried my best to ignore it, because in all honesty it was a ridiculously small memory and one that I was almost certain nobody would be interested in.

Also, I would have to remember other things and right now my hands are so full of here-things, things with big mouths that whisper fear-things, but of course it would not leave, as other storytellers would know, and my memories, much like me, are particularly stubborn, so here I am late at night standing in my Standard 3 classroom in the tiny school that I attended for a few years. It is noisy. My classmates are shouting and throwing paper aeroplanes at each other. Our teacher, Mr Meyer, has stepped out of the room for a moment. This, of course, invited chaos and anarchy to commence.

Where am I? Let’s look. There I am in the 3rd row from the left, about three seats from the back. I am not throwing paper. I am not shouting. I am not even talking. My head is resting on my hands, I need the darkness of that warm space between my face and my desk; trying to escape the headache and nausea of a migraine. I was only nine years old when these headaches started. For the first few years I was unable to recognise the signs that one was building inside my head, and often I would be completely surprised at its sudden unwelcome presence. I was an anxious child. I was many other things as well. Things that made me unpopular amongst my peers. I was awkward. I read books far beyond the level of those that my peers were reading. I was awfully incompetent at any form of sport, or physical activity. This, apparently, was akin to a crime. I was much taller, much more developed, and stricken with acne that caused me severe embarrassment.

I was also that dreadful thing; the worst thing that could ever happen to any young girl, or woman—I was overweight. Some people softened the blow by calling me plump. Others went straight for my young jugular and simply called me, fat. It was the second name, that I wasn’t given at birth.

It didn’t take me long to realise that I was everything wrong, and nothing right. Fat was ugly. Acne was ugly. Being almost six foot tall at eleven years old, made me stick out like a sore, fat, ugly thumb and it is a curious thing about human mammals… they so often equate their idea of unlovely with being ‘stupid’ and less than.

These lies show themselves in time and I have since sent out many, many stories about how I fell in love with the body and soul and person that I am, but in this moment, in this memory, in this small story I was still looking at myself with the eyes of other angry, hurting people.

And so, with all the certainty of a child learning new things to tuck into her coat pocket, I knew I was all these things, the fat, the ugly, the stupid, because people told me so all the time. And just so you know, there really is no kind way in which to tell a child that they are ugly. There isn’t. And be careful with the word fat. Dear God, we have life and death living right here in our mouths. If only we knew the power. The words, ugly and fat, became a house in which I lived for most of my adult life. It was failure. I was a failure. As simple as that. I was a girl-child already failing at the most important thing in life—being graceful, and beautiful, and a delight to look at.

Fortunately, even though God refused to sort out my raging hormones, I was given a gift. I had my own secret world, made up of words and much like the magical wardrobe that C S Lewis conjured up in his stories, books were the secret door right at the back of my life, where I could quietly disappear through. If I am grateful for one thing, it is that I could eat words and never, ever tire of them.

But I have wandered a bit, so let’s go back, shall we? Most of my memories around migraines at school are fuzzy. I remember being given a vile orange liquid to drink and told to lie down in the sick bay, which was really a fancy term for a fold-up bed in a large walk-in closet, next to the music room—a particularly unpleasant place to try and sleep off a migraine. Piano lessons, and recorders, and primary school children hammering away at their musical futures, and a young head splitting into sharp shards of light are not the best of friends. It is all a bit fuzzy. The mind is kind to us sometimes, in forgetting the details.

But this tall day, with its singular moment that I shall now tell you about, has lived with me for almost thirty-seven years—that moment when Mr Meyer walked back into his classroom, witnessed the noise, saw me hunched over, my face ashen, and in his deep quiet voice, silenced the whole class with these words:

‘We have a sick child in the room with us. Please, be quiet now.’

Only that. But it was enough. For me.

Ask me about kindness, and I shall tell you that I met it then; really saw it face-to-face on that day, in those words. I wasn’t often singled out for any softness at school. I was teased so much, mocked, and bullied, not only by my peers, but by some teachers, as well. I knew one thing only, how to make myself invisible. There was safety in that. And if I were to be honest, and shouldn’t we all be as the tellers-of-the-stories-that-help-others-heal, then the unlearning of that invisibility is still a thing that I make eye contact with every, single day.

I am not sure why I had to tell you any of this, but as most of you know by now, I give my words work to do, and perhaps you need reminding that even the smallest act of kindness will live for a long time, certainly as long as it might take an awkward child to grow into a woman, who is still acutely awkward, but one who knows that there are words far more dangerous than ‘fat’.

And that kindness, dear God, kindness is a soft thing that will wrap itself around you, and you can never have enough.

Never.

And it is never too small.

And once you have been given a measure of kindness as small as a mourning dove’s soft and downy breast feather, you will hold it above your head like a sign; a standard.

It will be your language, your mouth.

Kindness.

If you will allow it to draw a single breath, it will root down and it will grow, and forever it shall be called, ‘In that one, soft moment, I was seen’.

I was seen.

© Liezel Graham 2021.