Dirty Little Secret

Like the Roman Numerals? I’m going to see how many I can remember before I have to Google them. Also, even though I’m on the third installment of how I (eventually) became Mrs. Hot Guy, this is only the second time I’ve done it on a Tuesday. If you’d like to join in, write a post on your own blog and leave a comment so I can link to it. Or you can just confess in the comments.

Episode 1

Episode 2

I decided to tell the whole saga to A, the older, happily married custodian at the school where I taught first grade. After my fifteen minute long diatribe, during which A. could have being doing better things like leaving for the day, he was kind enough to smile. And then he said, “Do you mean to tell me that an attractive, educated woman such as yourself can’t do better than a freak and a child?”

Hmm. That certainly put things in perspective. And after he told me that six or seven more times, as Freakboy  acted like a boyfriend one day and a pal the next and 21 year old showed himself to have both the personality and IQ of a Labrador, I finally realized he was right. Freakboy and I became STRICTLY friends and I only talked to 21 year old on the phone when he called me. As summer school ended, A. made me promise that I would use my time off wisely.

Hehe. Thus began the season of dreadful dates. There was D., cute and intelligent, his only flaw being his obsession with his ex-wife. I realized it was getting to me when spending the night watching Law and Order seemed preferable to going out on a second date. Then there was Mark, who did not ask me one question all evening and then complained that I didn’t talk enough. There was also Joe, so sweet and thoughtful it was like going on a date with my best friend. My best girl friend. From fourth grade.

I gave up when football season started, spending my weekends watching games with my friend Mimi, flirting with her boyfriend’s friends (who were all married or alcoholics) in a desultory way. I did some volunteer work and some tutoring after school. I began going dancing a lot (which, by the by, is not really a good way to meet straight men). I was content.

And that’s when my friend T. decided we should harness the power of the internet to improve our dating lives.

“You know how some kids act out a lot after a parent is killed?” said a good friend, former colleague and still practicing teacher to me last night on the phone.

“Mmmmhmmm,” I said, images of kids flashing through my head. I’d had a fair number of students with at least one dead parent – and most of those deaths had not been caused by diseases, either. Kids – at least the kids I’d taught – tended to become wild after such a thing, or incredibly quiet and hard-shelled. My friend continued to tell me about her extremely disturbed student, who had transferred in from the inner city district where we both used to teach.

As she continued with the girl’s story, I began to feel somewhat ill. With guilt.

When I hear about kids from my old district, and especially when I (very rarely) hear about kids that I taught, I instantly feel like a soldier that has gone AWOL. The euphoria over having escaped is mixed in with massive amounts of guilt.

The last year that I taught – while I was pregnant with Lovebug – I had a seriously crazy parent who may have wanted to beat the crap out of me. Or something else. The threats were unclear. Not that it was my first threat, but he was the only one who continually hung around the school and tried to get into my classroom. The school I taught at for the first three years of my career was in a neighborhood where nobody I knew would even drive into. I had a few scarily violent (and yes, that is possible when you’re dealing with mentally ill 7 year olds) over the years, too.

My supervisors tended to be idiots – people too dumb or cynical (or both) to get jobs anywhere else. I had one in particular who couldn’t pronounce words like “specific” and “individual”. And another – the one who really drove me out of teaching – later fired for embezzling funds. The pay was laughable – I never made more that $34,000 a year from teaching in that district. And all the promised perks were being slowly eroded.

And then there were my students. Students with dead parents. Students who had been (or, unfortunately were still being) abused. Students repeatedly hospitalized with sickle cell problems. Students who couldn’t get a good night’s sleep because of gunfire. Students born in prisons. Students with various untreated mental problems. Students who didn’t know what the sky was called. Students who didn’t know any English. Students who were autistic but got very little support.

So yeah, it felt like fighting in a losing war. A noble cause, to be sure. And there were some victories, for this or that student. But for every victory there was a failure. Or two.

I’m not saying what I did even comes close to what soldiers do every day. But I sure relate.

Sometimes I tell myself that I put in my time and it’s okay to never go back to teaching in an urban district. Actually, I don’t want to go back to teaching at all. Not that I really know what I’d like to do instead, of course.

But then I hear a story about my old district and the guilt washes over me.

Anybody got any advice?