Original subtitles

Honestly, I never imagined my first day like this.

Miniature anarchy!

Ruled by the whims of spoiled children

who seemed to see me as some strange human nuisance.

I'm lying down drinking coffee.

I put makeup over my right eyelid:

an 'inaugural' souvenir I want to forget as soon as possible.

I accepted the assistant position because I wasn't supposed to be left alone.

These kids were competing to see who could be the rudest.

Ha! The "serene environment conducive to early development!"

The head teacher had vanished to 'take an important call' the moment she saw my face walk through the door.

Maybe she wanted to tell me without words what I'd gotten myself into.

The beginning was quite promising.

Twenty-three little faces, all sitting cross-legged, plotting my worst nightmare.

I started with a song about sharing but all they heard was 'destroying.'

While I was singing, the most terrible one accused the girl next to him of 'breathing his air.'

She, clearly a creature of equal determination,

responded by emptying all her glitter glue into his hair.

The chaos that followed was quite a spectacle.

From a simple fight it escalated to territorial warfare and nobody wanted to be left behind.

Everything that wasn't nailed to the floor served as a guided missile aimed at someone else's head.

The 'terrible one' tried to lift my desk chair to execute whoever crossed his path first

because by then everyone had completely lost it.

That was the last straw.

I tried to keep my composure but the calming techniques I'd learned were useless.

Trying to quell the rebellion, I didn't realize I'd started screaming like a deranged lunatic.

It was completely useless. I was completely useless.

Out of sheer nerves, I ended up hitting myself in the eye with a wooden block.

I couldn't believe they weren't even registering me.

The humiliating demonstration of my incompetence.

I sat on the floor, defeated, hand covering my thsrobbing eye while the screaming continued.

That's when something strange happened: one by one, the kids started to stop.

The morbid curiosity of seeing an adult sitting on the floor, probably crying.

The silence that followed was almost deafening.

"Are you crying?" asked a little voice.

It was the glitter girl, now with her hardened strands pointing in all directions like a tiny porcupine.

"No," I lied, though my voice came out broken and unconvincing.

"My mom says when grown-ups cry it's because things are really bad," another one added.

I wiped my face with my sleeve, smearing all my makeup.

They were watching me now with something like guilt, or maybe just fascination at my breakdown.

"Things are really bad," I finally admitted, too exhausted to fake professionalism.

"You're all acting like monsters and I have no idea what to do."

"My sister says I'm a monster," said the most terrible one, completely serious.

"We're all monsters," added another girl from the back, as if it were an irrefutable scientific fact.

I stared at them, these little dictators who minutes before had turned my first day into personal hell,

and something inside me surrendered completely.

"Okay," I said, still sitting on the floor.

"Then let's be monsters, but monsters who don't hurt each other. Deal?"

Another one said: "Can we roar?"

"You can roar."

"Can we make monster art?"

"All the monster art you want."

With my black eye and my makeup a disaster,

I reached a diplomatic agreement with the twenty-three tiny tyrants.

When the head teacher finally reappeared forty minutes later,

she found something unexpected: kids drawing monsters on newsprint,

some roaring softly while coloring,

and me, sitting at my desk,

with an improvised ice pack made from paper towels and cold water.

"Everything okay?" she asked with a smile that clearly said "I warned you."

I looked at my reflection in the window:

disheveled, my eye like mush, my blouse stained with glitter glue.

"Perfectly," I lied again, but this time with a genuine smile.

Because I'd learned something valuable on my first day:

sometimes, to survive kindergarten, you first have to hit rock bottom.

Literally.