“There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”
I hated, hated, hated that story when I heard it in the first grade (I was about 6 or so).
It starts out innocent enough, how she just swallowed a fly, but it gets progressively worse.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider {snip}
She swallwed the spider to catch the fly {snip}
Perhaps she’ll die
Here is where it starts to get really weird. Instead of doing the logical thing and waiting for the fly to pass out of her she swallows a spider. So now not only does this old woman have a fly but also a spider. There’s obviously something wrong with her logic if she thought that was a good idea.
There was an old lady who swallowed bird, cat, dog, goat, cow
The old lady swallowed each of those animals in order to, in her messed up mind, catch the previous in a never ending cycle. She either has a form of Pica, which causes people to eat things they really shouldn’t, or a severe form of dementia.
There was an old lady who swallowed a horse-
She died, of course.
Here’s where I was creeped out the most. “She died, of course.” Throughout the entire story there’s an old woman who is obviously mental ill and unhinged, but no one cared in the least. It was around '92 when I was in the first grade so at the time it would not have been out of the question for an “old person” to survive both the Depression and WWII, someone whose stories needed to be heard, someone who had grit and strength, not someone who you leave alone in the room for her to eat animals and kill herself.
Of course
What kind of society do we live in when someone, anyone, not just someone who should be respected like the old woman, sits there and eats strange animals until she dies and we just respond with “of course”? Like it was natural. As if they said, “and the sun rose, of course.” Yes, death is natural and unavoidable, but one shouldn’t sit there and just wait for it to come.
So when I was in the first grade they read me a story about an old, mentally ill woman who swallowed animals. No one cared for her, no one mourned her. She either didn’t have family or the family she did have was so neglectful they may as well have been non-existent. Her death was met with a blase “of course” showing that society did not care about you at all.
How is this a kid’s story?
And yes, I was a difficult child.
