Flipping through my journal, I ran across this entry, “Looking
Back to Find Myself”. I wrote these
words December 15, 2012 , a
day after the horrific shooting at an elementary school in Newtown ,
Connecticut
Looking Back to Find
Myself
June 2012
was a devastating month for me. Life as
I knew it, my plans for the immediate future, and a lifetime career and love
that I swore I would never do—teach—yet did well for 23 years, were all
decimated within 30 days. I had no clue
that the rug would be swept out from under my already clumsy, off-balanced feet
in such a quietly unobtrusive, yet stealthily calculated manner. To this day, I do not know the official cause
of this destruction to my life, but I do know that MS was a compliant
accomplice that abetted my dismissal from the school and life I loved. Twenty-three years of obsessive love and
devotion to my craft, honed and driven by a commitment to lifelong learning and
professional development, a master’s degree, and a fervent desire to make a
difference in the lives of young people—gone in a puff of smoke as we hauled
the last of my classroom away on the back of my brother’s old but sturdy farm
truck, a week after my 19th year wedding anniversary. Never was there even so much as a hint of
what was to come, even though it was known how hopeful I was of returning to
the classroom, my teaching career unceremoniously ended. The smiling faces I saw that day said
nothing, and let me prattle on cheerily about my plans and preps during the
interim of my sick leave. But by June 30, 2012 , a day that will live
in infamy in my life, I heard an indelible clank of the bars as the day dawned
on my loss. An expired contract,
unrenewed, expendable, non-tenured with a proven track record of success with
students—terminated… Just like that. The resonance of those words is still deafening.
How do I
recover from this? I don’t know; I still
am in recovery. Today is December 15th, a day after the most horrific event
a parent can ever imagine—sending your child to school never to come home, hug
or kiss again—and I am attempting, finally, to write about my life. After bouts of frequent crying and raging,
suppressing my feelings and sobbing in silence, playing online Scrabble and watching
TV all day, every day, I finally feel strong enough to try to find myself
again. Facebook is my steadfast friend
and outlet to the world. There have been
weeks at a time when I do not leave the house, don’t even know what day it is
really. I’ve missed out on so many
crisp, sunny, gloriously beautiful days of autumn, my favorite season. After making sure that Jalen, my youngest
son, gets off to the bus stop on time, my day is pretty much over in terms of
having a sense of purpose. But six
months of a life with no meaningful, self-fulfilling purpose is driving me
insane. I have got to find a way to
check back into life, find a renewed purpose and means to give of the one thing
that I think God put me in this world to do—be my creative vibrant,
know-it-all, teacher self. My goal for
2013 is to get my “BE” back, and in doing so, find myself again and straighten
my reeling life back on the tracks.
The verb “to
be”, such a nondescript, impassive infinitive, yet so powerful in defining
self, is a verb that I have lost in my life.
How do I define myself? For so
many years, I proudly said, “I am a teacher.”
What is my “I am” now? How can I
be a teacher when I have no students to teach?
It is like a tree falling in the forest, and no one is there to
listen—does it make a sound? Depending
on how you look at it, yes it does, but does it really matter? I have always strived to matter, not just be
decaying matter in the forest, whose only point in life is to provide
sustenance to vampire plants who need the symbiotic sucking of life from you in
order for their own survival. One of the
greatest components of teaching is the relationships that a teacher forms with
students. Each year, never the same, but
always rewarding, those relationships, each and every one of them, including
the ones that never worked out the way that was desired, was always special. (No
matter what you do, not every student is going to like you…) God is the great “I
am”; I know I need to look to Him more as I travel this journey, but my “I am”
is missing. I want to “be” a dynamic
force again, not a softly atrophied shell of my former self. I am very “squishy” as Jalen says when he
playfully pokes me in my arms, as having no means of safe mobility through the
house has rendered me soft and rather fragile in my physicality. It’s amazing how many things can’t be enjoyed
in a wheelchair unfriendly environment!
More to come on this frustration later in my story… Back to my obsession with “being”, African-American
dialect notches up the imagery of “I am” into “I be”, as in Stevie Wonder’s “We
be jamming” riffs pulsating the soul to dance in freedom. That power, that freedom, that side of my
self that causes me to revel in my being and be so content, my “BE”—that is
what I am desperate to find and redefine.
By looking back on my life, and trying to reconstruct what has been
desconstructed and cast aside, I will be able to emerge from my self-imposed
chrysalis still beautiful, energetic, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, engaging…
but different. And it will finally be
okay, because I will have a purpose in life to carry me to the end of my
journey in this life, and I will be…
No comments:
Post a Comment