That would depend a lot on the age we’re thinking of here.
In my preschool years, I think “crabby” would probably be the top word. I don’t know quite why, but I went through a stage of being quite the opposite of cheerful.
(At this point, my parents could never have envisioned me owning a site that has “cheerful” in the tagline. Ha.)
In fact, the problem was significant enough that my mom cut out pictures of happy faces from the Sears catalog, glued them on one side of a 3×5 card, wrote Bible verses about a cheerful heart on the other side, and had me memorize them.
We called them my “happy heart” verses.
I don’t know if it was the verses that did the trick or not, but at some point, I stopped being so crabby and started being more cheerful.
Other words they might use to describe me:
- sensitive (this could be both a compliment and a criticism. Sensitivity has downsides and upsides)
- a bit of a pansy, as my dad would say (meaning, not that tough.)
- easy-going
- cheerful (after the crabby stage!)
- dependable
- obedient
And I don’t know quite what the word for this might be, but I was the kind of kid who makes themselves a little bit invisible. I figured out from a pretty young age that if you just do what you’re supposed to do, you avoid getting negative attention.
Not doing what you’re supposed to do = difficulty. And I don’t like difficulty.
So, to some degree, I think I just sort of hummed along in the background, quietly doing what I was supposed to do most of the time.
I think most of the childhood descriptors still apply to me as adult, although I’d like to think that I have become less of a pansy as I’ve matured!
I don’t know if I have this right without actually asking my parents, but like you (again) I think the answer would definitely depend on the age. When I was young, I was quite cheery and outgoing. I have a clear memory of being six years old and hearing my mother on the phone with her mother describing me as her” prima donna.” So, dramatic, too, I guess. 🙂 As I got older–and we moved more–I got quieter and more reserved. But I was always the easy-going one within my family. My older brother and sister did NOT get along–thankfully, they got over that as adults–so I was the peacemaker and buffer for them. Sometimes literally. I remember having to take the middle seat in the back of the car so they wouldn’t be sitting next to each other.
Crabby is unfortunate and not at all what I would have expected! Seems like it was handled well.
Even now, I live pretty thoroughly in my own head and don’t really latch on to people’s perceptions of me (sometimes too late, sometimes to my detriment).
If I would assess myself: Book-smart; quick to assume; stubborn; stern; critical of others; prone to complacency, idleness and procrastination; good at making mistakes and then self-castigation; not a fan of change. These are not really pleasant to dwell on but all marks of someone who lives inside her head a lot.
It would be interesting to see my parents’ spin. Can they put a “best construction” on that? *Is* there a best construction?!
And Mom says she thinks I’m thinking of myself after I turned 20! Ha. She remembers all four of us as being fun to have around. So that’s reassuring.
From around 9 or so and up, I was most often described as happy. But my parents jokes that they had to beat it into me, so… 😂 Apparently all of the strong will stuff that I get from my oldest is all stuff I dished out as a child.
My mother always called me the “peacemaker” as I was the middle child between my two sisters, who did not get along well. (I personally don’t think that description applies to me as an adult. :-)) I know I was the quiet one (still am mostly), in my head, and, like you, I knew that following the rules made life easier for me. My younger sister never understood that. I was stubborn, wanting to do things only “my way”, but not rebellious. I was pretty cheerful and always ready for any activity with friends or family that, to me, sounded like fun.
Yep. Peacemaker is definitely a word that has been used to describe me!
Rebellious. There is a picture of me with my parents when I was about two. I am dressed in one of those angelic looking white fancy dresses and wearing white lacy ankle socks and shiny black shoes, with one parent holding each hand. But if you look closely, you see that they have my grasped by the wrists and that my hands are curled into tight little fists and my arms are rigid—I am trying to escape. My parents were 15 and 18 at the time of my birth (the marriage age was early in their country) and I have no idea how they managed to raise an obnoxious from birth kid, although they did live downstairs from my grandparents so that helped. My father worked but my mom was in high school—and my father used to have to sign her report cards!