An Easter Memory, Unconsciousness... And A "What The Heck Is Wrong With Me" Moment

My family is known for many things back in my homeward, including inappropriate stories in Sacrament meeting talks, inappropriate costumes at Halloween parties, and inappropriate jokes in road show performances. But this time of year, it is our faint hearts rather than our big mouths that come to mind.


My family has a tendency to faint at the sight of blood, or mention of blood, or vague, semi-veiled reference to blood. In fact, I may or may not have lost consciousness three times just typing that sentence. With six wussy kids, my parents got pretty good at steering us away from anything that might result in mass loss of consciousness, but there wasn't much they could do to when Easter Sunday rolled around. With lessons about bleeding from every pore and paintings of the Crucifixion, there were Haws kids dropping all over the building. They just ran from classroom to classroom, chasing the calls of, "We lost another one!"
We all suffered from the same wimpy affliction, but I seemed to be the child who suffered the most in public.


In kindergarten, I famously fainted at the story table while listening to "Sleeping Beauty." She pricked her finger and fell unconscious for 100 years, and I dropped like a child-sized sack of potatoes and fell unconscious for three minutes.

In junior high, I attended the play "Dracula" that was being performed at the high school and predictably passed out. It would have been more predicable, however, if I had waited until Dracula actually came on stage and bit someone. Or if, you know, the play had even actually started at the time.

By high school, I was much better at anticipating my "spells" and therefore was able to leave many a health and biology lesson in time to pass out in the privacy of the girls bathroom. So when a girl in my English class decided to end a dramatic reading by staging a fake suicide complete with blood packet, I made it out of the classroom in time to reach the bathroom...only to find it closed for cleaning. I tried to make it down the stairs to another bathroom, and instead passed out mid-flight and went down the rest of the stairs on my chin. When I came to, I was only feet away from the site of my Dracula, incident. Now that I think about it, they probably should have commemorated that achievement with a plaque or something.

After my mission (the fainting stories from that 18-month adventure deserve their own post) , most of my episodes were triggered by my sister's habit of calling me to discuss birthing her most recent child. Luckily the phone connection was so bad she usually didn't hear the "thud" on the other end of the line and, by the time I was able to pick up the phone again, she had usually moved on to lactation issues. Those I could handle.

When I started teaching, I purposefully avoided discussing anything in classes that would clue the student's into my most exploitable weakness. But I came close to full disclosure of my Achilles heal when I was reading an article to my 8th graders that involved a graphic snakebite. Thankfully I was able to get a volunteer to read the rest of the article while I used the guise of looking for something in my bottom desk drawer as an excuse to put my head between my knees.

So how weird, ironic, and/or masochistic is it that I chose to teach my kidlets sentence parts by creating a very graphic sentence dissection unit wherein sentences are sliced open, their sentence juice spraying across the room as their sentence guts are spread across sentence skeletons.

Which once again brings me back to the question, "What the heck is wrong with me?"

REALLY.

I want to know.