Addition and Subtraction

I figure I was about four years old.

It was before any schooling for me, and since I did some kindergarten and then, of course, real school, which would have been the age of five. Three would have been too young.

I was staying, with whichever of my siblings were here on this earth with me, with my Aunt Mava and Uncle Jim and cousins Donna and Debra, who were a matched set of comparators to my brother and me: the same age, opposite sex, and competitive in all things. Where were my parents? Probably at the hospital for the birth of my younger sister.

Mava had prepared for us some busy work. Simple addition problems. I remember green-bar paper and long rows of properly formed sums in the long addition format, i.e.

I can’t tell you if math or addition were new to me, but I can remember sitting on a stool, long yellow pencil in hand, steadily doing the math and getting the answers right. Gold star for me. Turning this in, I was given another sheet that looked like this:

I went ahead and added those up as well and turned the sheet in. To which Mava noticed my obvious additions and explained the concept of subtraction to me.

“Oh!”

I went back and re-did the worksheet using this new subtraction concept and got the answers right.

This is a story about defensiveness. Did Donna or Debra tease me about not knowing subtraction because that meant they were superior? I don’t recall. But they could be like that.¹ How did I feel when Mava reviewed and informed me of the incorrect answers? It wasn’t dramatic - no tears, no red face. Mava saw what I didn’t know, taught me in a positive way, and off I went. This memory popped up to me yesterday while working with my protective ego. It was hardly the worst moment of my life but here it is, some 50 years later.

I wasn’t stupid. I was ignorant. When given the concept, I was able to accomplish the task. And yet this defense of myself, be it dramatic or inconsequential in the moment, was already in place in my psyche. There’s a distinction between justifying myself with “it’s not my fault; I didn’t know” and it simply not being my fault; I didn’t know.

The point is I had to justify myself even then. For we were praised for being clever, fast, tall, well-behaved. In mastering the concept of subtraction in about a minute, I survived and moved on in the world. Remember: It wasn’t my fault; I didn’t know. That was a valid response from me to the world, a Schrödinger's gat-out-of-jail-free card that is both genuine and misguided depending on when you observe it.

1. Donna once had me sing, in that same house, some couple of years later, Yankee Doodle but instructed me to “start each word with the letter ‘F’”. When I got to stuck a feather, Mava immediately and forcefully called Donna’s name, not mine. I had no idea what had happened.