My Daughter

I have one child.  ONE child.
She was my entire focus from the day she was born...and, admittedly, still is.
She's 39 now.  The same age I was when my own mother died.  As independent as I thought I was, and as independent as she is now, I was not prepared to lose my mother.   Not then.  Not ever.
A few days after Mom's funeral, I went alone to the remote cemetery where Mom was laid to rest.  In a moment of raw grief that I am glad no one witnessed, I wept uncontrollably because, just six feet below me, rested my mother.  Just one more touch, God.  Please...just one more moment with my mother.  Never to happen.
As awful as it was to be forced to give up my mother, I pray to God that nothing takes my daughter or my grandchildren away while I still live.  It sounds so corny to say, but that reality would be the end of me.  I could never recover from it. 

I was never a huggy kind of person, and my child isn't a huggy kind of person.  Coincidence?  Probably not.  I wasn't brought up that way.  My family hugged and kissed upon arrivals and departures but not on a regular basis in between.  We didn't need that kind of validation.  I knew my parents loved me.  There was never a doubt.  Everything they did, for the most part, was to provide for us kids, giving us the very best of what they could afford.  We weren't spoiled.  There was simply a reason and rhythm to the way things were.  We were just tight-knit because family was the only stable thing in life.  I think (hope?) that it is the same with my daughter and me.  Since her birth, every single thing I did/do was/is for her benefit, and I can only hope that she's figured that out.

Yesterday, I was late to a meeting at church because she called just as I was walking out the door.  She rarely calls, although we do communicate daily on the internet, and I knew the meeting at church could start with or without me.  I wanted to stay and talk to her.  I love hearing her stories and seeing her pictures.  Eventually, I had to cut the conversation short. but I really didn't want to.  My kid is raising teenagers and finally "payin' for her raisin' " as my mother would have said.  And I am an interested bystander.

My daughter keeps me young.  (Well...not young, but younger.)  I know the ol' saw about not being able to teach old dogs new tricks, but it's not true.  Every single day, I learn how to be a better parent from watching her and listening to her.  I made awful mistakes in raising her, but it never was because I didn't care or was authoritarian.  We joke that I spoiled her, but actually, I didn't really.  What I did was compensate for what she didn't have by way of my bad marriage and our divorce.  Watching her, and following her lead, I am more informed.  I am a better parent to her now, in her adult life, than I probably was in her youth.  Who knows?

I would love to know what things she has learned from me.  Part of me begs for validation before I die because, even though I talk a good story, I really think death is the end.  Too late to get that last little bit of satisfaction from those who reflect on my life after I'm gone.  Flowers die, eventually.  Words never do.

Protecting Kids

If you are reading this, I am guessing that you are older than 12-years-old, which means that you were 12 once.  What do you remember about it?  Did you do dumb stuff?  Did you think you were invincible because you were still under your parents' protection but were beginning to feel the urge to express your independence?  Did you totally understand why you did anything you did?  Assuming you came from a "normal" non-abusive family, would you expect the childish decisions you made back then to follow you for the rest of your years?  No?  Why?  Because you were a CHILD.  Because you were immature.  Because your brain was still growing, and you were unable to comprehend the long-term consequences of your youthful decisions.

Statutory rape laws in this country address this very thing.  According to law, a person below a certain age, no matter how emotionally mature, is not capable of giving consent to having sex with an adult.  And the names of victims of statutory rape are not revealed so that what happened to them doesn't taint their future.  (That's the theory, anyway.)

Several weeks ago, a 7th grader at a Noblesville, IN, school shot up a classroom, injuring the teacher and critically injuring another student.  Although his name and face are known to the locals in Noblesville, to this day, the rest of us have no clue who the perpetrator was.  The media can't/won't report it.  Why?  Because he was a child making an adult decision.  Should his decision affect the rest of his life?  It will, whether it should or not...but no one needs to help that along.

Someone near and dear to my life was "outed" on Facebook a few days ago for something that happened three years ago...when she was 12.  The person who spilled the beans was someone who should have cared and should have known--a close adult.  When the CHILD asked the person to cease and desist, she was given a virtual middle finger...told that the poster had "freedom of speech" and would just make sure that the child would no longer see what the adult posted.  So how are we supposed to teach our kids to respect authority when authority doesn't give a big rip?  Pretty sad, really.

I have lost every vestige of respect that I had for the poster  At this point, the child is acting more mature than the adult.  Not my circus; not my monkeys...but, if I were asked to choose sides, I would vote in favor of the kid.  We aren't talking about a school shooter here.  We are talking about a child who put herself at risk in an effort to get the hell out of a bad situation, part of which had to do with the adult in question.

I'm being deliberately vague here because I have no desire to spill beans that aren't mine to spill.  Those involved will recognize themselves, although I am 100% certain that the adult will not admit to any wrongdoing....yet virtually thumbing one's nose at a child who asks that private information not be shared publicly is just wrong.

I have no clue how things will shake out in this relationship in the future, but I don't foresee anything good--which is a shame because I really do think the adult worked very hard to make things work in the face of nasty circumstances.  She was hurt by the outcome.  I get that.  What I don't get is why she can't just admit her hurt, accept responsibility for the way she feels, and make a clean slate for the future.  The child is expected to do that.  Why not the adult?

I won't be writing about this again.  I'm just still appalled at all that I've seen and heard in the last few days.  May cooler heads prevail!



   

Why I Became a Teacher

If someone were to ask me why I became a teacher, I would have to confess that it happened by attrition.  It wasn't a calling.  I wasn't drawn to the profession more than any other endeavor except that I was guided in that direction, in a way, by my parents.  It was a "known".  My parents were teachers, as was my grandmother, at one time.

We do our children a disservice by expecting them to be able to commit to a life's work by age 18 when they graduate from high school.  Unless one has a particular passion, asking him/her to take a track to the future at that age is just ridiculous.  What does one know about life and/or self at that age?  The human brain doesn't stop growing until age 25, and the last part to mature is the part that helps make decisions.  What could go wrong?  A lot!

In my family, it was a "given" that I would go to college.  By the end of high school, I was adrift on a sea of confusion.  I was in love with a fellow from Wisconsin.  Had been since the summer before 8th grade.  I looked into Wisconsin colleges thinking I might get a little closer to him by going there...but...my mother told me we couldn't afford out-of-state tuition (something I knew nothing about), so that notion got quickly squelched.  I didn't do any college visitations.  I applied to ONE college, Illinois State University--my parents' old Alma Mater--and was accepted.  So much for where I would go.  Now, what to study while there?

At its founding, ISU was ISNU--Illinois State Normal University.  (The town that grew up around it was named Normal, IL.)  A "normal" university was a teacher-training institution, although it had grown way past simply that by the time I was ready to attend.  (1965)  What to study?  What to be??

Honestly, I didn't have any passions.  My only real goal in life was to be a devoted wife and loving mother.  To create a nurturing family home.  But, true to the times, it was also obvious that I needed a career with which to take care of myself in the absence of a husband to take care of me.  (This is a reflection of my parents' generation.  I was literally raised with the notion that a woman should have a career to fall back on should something happen to her bread-winner husband.)  I remember a conversation that my mother and I had where she told me that Secretary, Nurse, or Teacher were respectable professions for a woman.  I believed her.

I didn't want to be somebody's secretary, although I figured I'd be good at it.  Nurse?  Does that mean I would have to give shots to patients?  No, that won't do.  What's left?  BINGO!  I decided to be a teacher, not because I thought I would want to but because it was comfortable and respectable.  At the very least, I figured maybe I could do it just a bit better than my own teachers had.  I wanted to make content interesting and relatable to contemporary students.  But what to teach?

I had been a four-year A-student in French in high school.  I considered being a French interpreter at the UN.  Yeah...how often does that happen?  My first semester in college at ISU, I took the lowest level French class that was available to me--French Novels--and spent the entire semester with upper-classmen who had studied in France and were much more fluent than I.  My nights were focused in French vocabulary dictionaries.  I was lost.  I felt somewhat betrayed by the highs I felt by being the best of the French students in high school, only to discover that throwing me in with the real world showed how totally deficient I was.

My whole passion in my senior year of high school was music and theater.  Loved it.  Was good at it.
Before I entered college, I gave up the notion of studying music because I understood that it would then become work, not fun.  I could read music but understood that music students had to be proficient in one instrument or another.  I could play piano, sort of.  My understanding of scales and chords and keys was extremely rudimentary.  I quickly gave up studying music as a thing.

Entered college as a theater major, with English as a minor.  (I was also good in English in high school, although I had no real verve for it.  I mean, EVERYBODY speaks English, yes?  Where is the passion in that?)  In one class during my college freshman year, a theater instructor asked which of us didn't have any scholarships.  I raised my hand, as did others.  It seems that there were talent grants available for theater students that weren't being used.  I got one just by nature of being in that class.  Didn't have to do a thing to have it.  It gave me a tuition break.  I liked that part, and so did my parents.

As it happened, however, I became disenchanted with theater.  I was only interested in the acting part.  Couldn't have cared less about the technical parts, although the technical parts were those about which I had no clue.  What I didn't know then, but soon came to know, was that MOST high schools in Illinois didn't have a drama department or even a real stage, unless located in the Chicago/suburban area.  Some time in my sophomore year, I switched majors.  English became my major and theater/speech became my minor.  I had a good head start on that.  (What I also didn't comprehend then was that English is a four-year requirement in schools.  I did myself a career favor in flipping my course of study.  I lost my talent grant but gained employability.)

The rest is history.  With many starts and stops, I was able to support my daughter and myself through some rough years via my career.  I don't begin to pretend that it was easy.

In retrospect over many long years, I have come to understand that I would have been a kick-ass counselor/psychologist.  For reasons beyond my own comprehension, I did better dealing with the challenged students than I did with the ones who were the most like me.  If I had my life to do over again, I'm not sure what I would do differently, but I DO know that I did what I did because that's what I thought I was supposed to do.  Baby Boomers are confused like that.

Carry on!