Day Job

My day job for the past 12 years has been a high school teacher in the field of English and Literature. I have loved it and been exasperated by it for 12 years.  It seems to me, looking back, that I have untapped reserves inside me that help me deal with the myriad challenges, problems and strange situations that come with teaching teenagers.  I teach with my heart and not my head, which poses a number of issues for me in regards to emotional exhaustion.  But I wouldn't want to be any other kind of teacher.  Not ever.  In fact, at the moment, I am taking a break from teaching and only doing casual relief teaching for others who are away or ill.  I do not, under any circumstances, regard this current job situation as 'teaching'.  I read notes, hand out worksheets and monitor effort and behaviour.  This is not teaching - although many teachers believe this is all a teacher is required to do.  I leave at 3 o'clock and take home no stress, no marking, no research, no programming or planning, no phonecalls to parents, no emails to parents, no parent nights and no organising of camps or excursions.  I do not 'teach' as I have come to know it these past 12 years.  I drive to work, enjoy the energy and humour of the kids I am there relief-teaching with, see my friends and go home to be with my own teenagers.  And, right now, that's just where my own finite levels of energy should be directed.

I had my second breakdown a few weeks ago.  It seems to come around every 6 years.  After the last one I went from strength to strength and found myself shining through brightly and illuminated.  This time I lost some of that confidence but I am clawing my way back.  I believe that we often think that when our own children are teenagers, we can somehow or other ease off the intensity of the caring and have some 'me time' (that dreaded euphemism for female self-indulgence - not that I don't indulge in it myself from time-to-time, but I know it has its slippery slope); but it's not time to ease off.  Teenagers are so vulnerable and so fragile.  It doesn't mean we have to hover and demand from them their undying allegiance.  It doesn't mean we must interrogate them and make them fear the outside world.  But it does mean we have to be there; a soft place to land when they need it and a safe heart to come home to when they fall and have to pick themselves up again all by themselves.  We have to love them without smothering them.We have to watch them without seeming to. 

After I lost my virginity at 16, one gray Sunday in 1986, I went to my old primary school down the road and climbed up on the benches outside the classrooms and peered into to every one of them, one by one, wishing that I could go back there and find myself as a child.  I wanted to go back and stay there.  I found myself weeping for that lost girl and so wishing that I had not given her away so casually.  I had my heart broken that day in many ways - but I learned that I couldn't go back.  Not ever.  Take a step forward and then another and keep repeating til you get back home.  My mother was at home, working on her university degree - the familiar tap tap tap ding of the old Olivetti typewriter - when I walked in. The heater was on and it was softly raining outside, necessitating lights to be on in the middle of the afternoon. And I was glad to be there in that soft light, in my avocado room.  But my mother sense nothing.  She was absorbed in her work and, at the time I was grateful for that because it meant I could easily cover my face and slip into my bedroom unnoticed.  I wouldn't have wanted to explain my red eyes and broken heart to anyone, especially my mother. Yet I was glad she was there as there remained a sense of safety in her presence.  But I look back to that day and I hope that I would sense the change in my own girl and feel the draft come under the door that alerted me to her pain.  I hope I would...

As a teacher I know we are rarely there when the big things happen to our teenagers.  We try to be and we want to be, but their lives are secret much of the time and sometimes locked against us as though we are intruders.  We learn things about them after the event when they choose to let something slip.  We pick up a word here or an image there and wonder how they so quickly went from telling you everything and loving you so demonstrably and intensely, to the vacant person in the gangly body (now taller than you) who used to be your baby.