childhood trauma: national poetry month edition

When I was seven or so, I used to write a lot of poetry. I thought it was far more sophisticated than writing in prose; anything that didn't have an aabb rhyming scheme, however, didn't count as poetry. After bunny rabbits, my new baby brother was my favourite topic and I'd write about how cute he was and things he did, so when he threw his porridge bowl off his high chair tray and laughed as it shattered, I wrote a poem about it. The poem included the lines "Mum said, "you are a naughty boy/ you treat it like a toy!"" (I was a poetic genius, no?)
When I showed it (written out in purple crayon and artfully illustrated) to my mum, somehow she restrained herself from going into raptures at my prodigious talent as a poet**. Instead, she was horrified that I'd publically and wrongfully exposed her as an evil, horrible parent. She might have got cross with my brother's behaviour, but she would never do something so damaging to a child's psyche as label them naughty!* She suggested I change the lines to ""that was a naughty thing to do!"/ said Mum as she picked glass out of her shoe". I'm not sure if I was meant to show the revised version to the teacher so she'd see that the original characterisation was unfair, but I just guiltily put it away out of sight without changing it.


*I only just noticed the irony as I was marvelling at the fact that I still remember the exact wording of the relevant lines, and those lines only.

**um, now I'm feeling guilty again. It's not like she never went into raptures of praise, she did, embarrassingly often, even.