I will not begin this story of me telling you about my traumatic birth, nor my relatively unexciting childhood as the oldest of three children growing up in a fairly unusual family. I will not tell you about being poor or eating only whole wheat bread and never having had a Twinkie until I was fifteen years old. I won’t tell you about these things because it makes me sound old, deprived and relatively depressing. Instead, I will try to paint an accurate picture of my life for you, the reader.
I was born. It was traumatic. It was the end of the 70’s and my parents were too young and too stupid to know that having me would change the course of their lives individually and together. My mother describes the look I gave the camera in the first hospital picture taken of me as “baby with an attitude.” This is probably a good way to sum up my childhood, for I had an attitude from the beginning. I think this is because I was alive and I wanted to world to wake up and realize it.
As a child growing up in the city of and the suburbs around Chicago I was pretty “free wheeling.” As in, I was a loose cannon with a quick temper and an even sassier mouth. “I didn’t ask to be born!” was one of my favorite sayings to scream at my parents as I slammed my bedroom door. “Dear ex-mother” was also the way I enjoyed starting hate letters I sent via paper airplane down the stairs. I was writing though…wasn’t I?
How in the world did I get from all that to this place? I think I got here because of my determination NOT to. My mom was an English major and would have been a high school English teacher if she hadn’t had me and my dad hadn’t had the brilliant idea to homeschool us kids. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I actually admired my mom, what she did for us, how well-educated she was and how she contributed to who I am today. No, in fact, I didn’t want to be anything like Mom, so I decided not to embrace my obvious love (reading and writing) and go for something completely different.
As far as teaching goes, I didn’t really like teachers. “Teachers” were the people who told me that something was wrong with me because I didn’t go to school. They told me I would be an unsocialzed lump and turn out with horns growing out of my head. Or worse, NO FRIENDS. Teachers were truly my enemy. I never wanted to be that.
So, I wound up in North Carolina wondering how I got here and I started going to UNCC in 1998 for History and Anthropology. NOT TEACHING! “What are you going to do with those majors?” everyone asked. I really didn’t know. Nor did I care. Honestly, I did not care. I was following my passion at the time and that’s all that mattered to me.
Several years later after trauma, depression, homelessness, my parent’s violent divorce and a marriage of my own I finished what I began. And then…nothing. I didn’t do a damn thing with it. I was lost.
So yeah, I embraced my love of dogs, something my dad had denied me, and began training and rehabilitating dogs full time under the instruction of a very talented woman who saw my gifts like my own mother had seen them. I was good at the teaching part. Yes, I was good at the dog part too, but I was really good at finding ways to teach the same information to so many different people. I had classes with children, teens, the elderly, old, cold and stony men, women who cried and told me the stories of their broken relationships—People!
I then came up with this fantastic idea to go back to school, get my English degree, bring up my GPA and become what? An English teacher! In the fall of 2006 I went back to school and completely immersed myself in the English curriculum. I was there for two glorious semesters reading, writing and discovering how I should have studied English the first time I was in college. However, I think it was good for me to have gone this route. I have so much more experience in the world to draw on. I have been through some very difficult times in my life and can relate to students who have trauma, bad family situations and feel overwhelmed.
I was very successful in school the second time around. I let go of the shame of my bad GPA from the first time and realized that it was really a result of my life, not my abilities. I made the chancellor’s list both semesters I was back in college and I really felt good about myself. I felt like I would get hired by some high school and I would be successful teaching a subject I loved and felt confident about.
I think my first day in the classroom was the closest I’ve ever been to true panic. I felt so lost and alone even at the age of 28. I was so glad I had not started teaching at 22 or 23…they would have eaten me alive. My students had problems I could not imagine and family situations I could not comprehend. I taught seriously at-risk students who had previously failed English 1. They were blank-faced, disrespectful, disenfranchised, and scared. They didn’t seem to like me, school or what I had to teach. Some of them barely spoke enough English to be in a regular classroom and I was overwhelmed by the task ahead of me. I cried every day. I sobbed on weekend. I told my husband I couldn’t do it—I couldn’t face another day. But every day I got up, got myself together and went to school to face all of them and their problems and tell them I cared enough to fight for them.
I had no support at my first school. I was literally hung out to dry and people whispered behind my back about my impending failure. “Maybe you’ll get a real class with real students—someday” they’d say. It was the most depressing thing I’d ever heard. Someone said that because my students had failed, they weren’t REAL.