"I'm Rubber and your Glue, what you say bounces off of me and sticks to you..."

Wow, now we are going back to grade school... that old ryme was chanted so many times on the playground that I can still recall it later in life. But do you know what? We used to say this all the time but we never really put into use. Let me say this, even though those words don't hurt physically, they do hurt, and being rubber is a great defense to bounce those words back to the rude party. But they still stick and work themselves into our pysche. What I have come to realize is that we allow them to stick. We allow them to hurt, we allow them to melt our self esteem and cause us grief.

I remember when I was in grade school, we had this girl in our class, we were all poor but she was poorer than most. And in the second or third grade we had an outbreak of lice... yep still makes my head itch. Well the teachers all checked us and this girl with her long blonde hair apparently had lice along with a few others in our class. Well most parents took their child home and did the lice shampoo and such and it was all good. Well not her family, they could not afford the special shampoo but her dad had some sheep shears and so he cut all her hair off. The next day she came to schoolwsith her head shaved; now this was before shaven headed women were the "in" thing... And she was made fun of. The other kids teased her, called her Kojack (he was famous back then) and made horrible fun of her. I moved away later in my early junior high days so I lost track of the kids in my class. After my senior year of high school I came back to the area and was reading the paper and saw this familiar looking person in a story about a beauty competition. It was "lice girl", yep it was her!! And man, she was a looker! Beautiful blonde hair, beautiful smile and I sat there and thought, "how can this be?" While reading her list of accomplishments I saw that she graduated from another school in the area than where we attended together. I saw that she graduated at the top of her class, that she was involved in Stuco, Drama, Sports and just about everything else. I started wondering how this "lice girl" was transformed into a smart, attractive, talented beauty queen?

I remember her saying one time, "I am rubber, you are glue, what you say bounces off of me and sticks to you..." I think she actually took that to heart... I wish we all would.