Ugh, the scar.

It's a good thing that when I was a little kid in upstate New York, I had a nice, fun, blonde teenage babysitter who taught me how to go swimming to compare to the much meaner blonde mother who was oppressive and stabbed me with a needle. Because she was trying to dig a splinter out of my finger out of duty and not with much compassion, and, well, it just not a good experience, for me or my sister or the brown boy. 

Of course, sometimes the mind wants to figure out more about the negative lessons, but maybe we should just think more about the positive like swimming lessons and peanut butter and fluff sandwiches and playing games and the funny laugh the nice babysitter had. She had a very distinctive laugh. It was kind of like a sneeze.

I'm pretty sure the blonde mother had too much on her plate to care about anyone else's kids and really should not have been babysitting us, but unfortunately she was a mother in a patriarchal society, and babysitting was a way to make money.