Home Free! - part III

"Tattle-Tale! Tattle-Tale! Hanging on a bull's tail..."

And so, when I was a small child, telling on the perpetrator was what comforted a dismayed spirit. Particularly because I was the child, that wanted to do the caring and admirable thing.

I did nothing to become this wanna-be-good, self-sacrificing individual. I did nothing for the care and grooming of it. Rather, it came upon me insidiously (something modern society will most certainly fail to understand), through a religious upbringing that made the worth of a righteous character so much greater than my competitive spirit.

And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether one is the aggressor or the aggressee, from a child perspective, it seemed to me that God wanted most of all, remorseful and truthful confessions from evildoers.

And if they were not willing to do that, I was. And of course, all my tattle-taling was wholly and holy truth. I’m prett-ty sure.

And so, was it not like a ‘blessing’ for me to bring evildoers, through my well-articulated, third-person confessionals-on-their-behalf, into a state of guilty pondering? Perhaps even remission? Seemed like the righteous thing for me to do.

And so, I’ve said quite enough about tattles. Or have I?

Have I told you that because I was ‘a good little girl’, my parents and teachers were the backers of my tattles and so, as a result, it was rather serious when I told a sneering school-mate that I if they didn’t back off, I would tell on them?

Well your know now, and right about now, you’re probably saying that ‘this is the longest rant about tattle-tales that I have ever heard in one lifetime’.

Sorry about that, but you really must realize, if you haven’t already, that this kind of telling is at the very heart and nature of the DNA of a tattle-tale. The need to tell and tell and tell again.

But to bring this to a summation, ‘tis true, tattle-taling worked well for me in primary school but eventually that kind of juvenile reaction had to be discarded. And so with adolescence and eventually adult maturity, I moved on.

NEXT POST: Therapy and my oh-so-lovely Therapist