“I DIDN’T SEE MYSELF DOING IT” - Liane Graham, Group 1

When I was six years old I uttered the most ridiculous phrase I can remember saying: “I didn’t see myself doing it”. At six this made perfect sense to me. What I was trying to say was that I had no recollection of the event for which I was being punished, but as I sat in Rabbi Moskowitz’s office on the fifth floor of my elementary school, I couldn’t think of anything else to say to redeem myself. They told me I had stuck paper towels in the drain of a sink in the girl’s bathroom while leaving the tap running. They told me the bathroom was flooded so severely that thousands of dollars worth of water damage had trickled down into the floors below, and that I was to blame, but to this day I can’t remember this happening. I wondered how they knew it was me, even though I didn’t know it was me. As I always did when sent to the principal’s office for disciplinary reasons, which was more often than I care to admit, I cried like a baby. It didn’t help that, with my tiny size and penchant for playing pretend, pretty much the entire school thought I was a baby anyway. I felt like a baby. I was mortified. Had I really done something so senseless? It couldn’t have been on purpose. I had no desire to cause a flood. Why would I stick paper towels in a running sink instead of the trash, where they belonged? I tried to explain this. I tried to tell Rabbi Moskowitz, and then my parents, that I honestly did not remember this happening. “I didn’t see myself doing it,” I said, but they laughed, and insisted I admit having done it. They told me my tears were a sign of my guilt, as though crying couldn’t have possibly been a manifestation of my wretched fear. My puny child’s brain went over the events, trying to pick this memory out from between the memories of lunch (a tuna sandwich with ridged potato chips wedged in between the tuna and the bread, and chocolate milk) and afternoon class (learning to use a calculator and story time). The memory was nowhere to be found. I felt broken. How could I not remember something from my own experience? It seemed so impossible. At six I was sure that I could recall every single thing that happened to me, and even though I kept mum on most of my actions from day-to-day, resulting in my parents calling me a “secret agent”, I at least would be able to be honest with myself. Was I wrong? Did I flood the bathroom? Or were they wrong, the teachers, the Rabbi, my parents? Was I being accused, as I often felt I was, of doing something that I had really not done?
These questions remain unanswered. In the almost seventeen years since that fateful day in the first grade when I allegedly stuck paper towels in a sink full of running water in the girl’s bathroom, the memory of having done so has never resurfaced. Eventually I accepted my guilt. I seemed pointless not to.