My heart gets broken at least once a year, but it’s not what you think. I’ve been with my husband since my first year as a teacher, five years in all: My love life isn’t the source of my pain. It’s watching young women struggle through a callous world that often makes me feel at once furious, helpless, and duty-bound to do what I can, no matter how painful it is for me, no matter what I’m struggling with in my own life.
My first teaching job was at an all-Black middle school in North Minneapolis. I did my student teaching in East Harlem, so I thought I had the tools I needed. What I didn’t have was the kind of administrative organization and support I needed to establish a functional relationship with some very mistrustful students. When we had a discussion about the fact that I was white and they were black, my eighth graders squirmed uncomfortably. Finally, one of them told me to stop saying “white,” and I understood that for many of them, white people were not to be trusted. So how could they love me? They wanted to. It was hard for them. It was hard for me.
Sixth-grader Ashley* had outbursts in class about once a week. She would start swearing loudly and making explicit sexual comments, grinding the entire class to a halt. Her special-ed paraprofessional filled me in: Ashley had watched her father murder her three-year-old sister when she was little. He was serving a life sentence. It turns out, so was she.
We took the entire school to camp for a weekend to do some community-building. It was a disaster. A cabin window got broken, kids threw rocks during the campfire, and since it was dark, the teachers couldn’t tell where they were coming from. There were no consequences. The principal didn’t send anyone home. The kids knew they could get away with it, and so they did. Like I said: disaster. I texted my boyfriend and told him so. When I went to the bathroom, Shayna opened my phone, saw the text, and told her entire class that I had said they were disasters. For a whole week, none of them would look me in the eye and I didn’t know why. It all finally came out, along with the fact that Shayna lived with her aunties because her mother left her and moved to Texas. Shayna thought she was a disaster, and that’s why her mother didn’t want her. So then why would I want her? How could she trust me?
Sasha cried because she wasn’t allowed to sleep over at Nautica’s house. “What’s the big deal?” I thought. The big deal was that she didn’t want to go home because her mother’s new boyfriend had started hitting her mother, and her mother wouldn’t kick him out. Ciara came over, crying too, and told Sasha that her mother used to have a boyfriend like that too. It will get better. Ciara missed a lot of school, but when she was there she was brilliant. The whole class got quiet whenever she would speak.
I left that school partway through the year because the teachers got no support from administrators in dealing with disruptive students, and I didn’t have the skills yet to manage it on my own. I was throwing up from stress every morning before I left for work. I told the kids I had to leave for personal reasons, and they begged to know if I was pregnant. Destiny, who had rolled her eyes at almost every word I had said that year, helped me pack up my desk and hugged me. I went back a few weeks later for their talent show, but I was late and missed the seventh grade performance, so they crowded around and sang for me in my old classroom. I failed those children. That school failed those children. This country has failed those children. And yet in precious, tremulous voices, they sang.
My next job was at a more racially diverse middle school in a suburb of St. Paul: my seventh grade class was a pretty even mix of Black, White, and Hmong kids. Ella was the class clown, the youngest in a family of four older brothers. Sometimes I’d have to ignore her for the first ten minutes of class while she “planked” on her desk. She got so mad at me the day when I let other kids tell her to be quiet because I thought she was being silly when she was actually trying to be serious for once. In the hall she fumed, “You never let ANYONE interrupt anyone else in class.”
The curriculum included Beowulf, so I tried to make a thousand-year-old Viking poem appealing to city kids by reading it like a horror story, sneaking up behind them and grabbing them so they would scream and laugh. I had to watch it, though, because when Stephanie would let loose her deep, booming laugh, Hillary would start laughing too, and it would take me five minutes to stop laughing myself and get the class back on track. I was wound so tightly then, and they showed me that five minutes of laughter is worth ten minutes of grammar, every time.
The last day I spent with them was at Wild Mountain for the end-of-the-year party. We spent most of it on the water slides. Stephanie and Hillary dragged me to the inner-tube slide. We tried to hold hands all the way down without breaking the chain, but Stephanie’s tube flipped over in the rapids and her feet went up over her head. That laugh. I’ll never forget that laugh.
That was a long-term sub position, and the only real full-time teaching job I could get after that was in a mostly white, fairly affluent farm-town-turned-suburb. Not what I envisioned when I enrolled in the Urban Education program at Teachers College. (Teaching in my district has little to do with closing the achievement gap.) I turned to Mary, my cooperating teacher from grad school in New York City, for wisdom. (She was basically Yoda in the body of a 29-year-old hipster.) “Go for it,” Mary advised. “You can open their minds to new perspectives.” (The post-it dispenser that sits on my desk reads “W.W.M.D.” for “What would Mary do?” It was a good-bye gift from our shared ninth graders in Harlem.)
Amber was in my class as a freshman that first year at the farm-town-turned-suburb school, and she barely said two words. Her mom came to conferences and begged me for advice: Amber was hanging out with the wrong crowd, they were calling the house in the middle of the night, she didn’t know what to do. Amber hadn’t been in class because Mom had threatened to make her go to a different school and Amber had opened the car door and jumped out of the moving car. When she came back the next week, I didn’t push. I just asked her to stay after class for a minute, waited until everyone left, then asked her if she was being safe. “Yes,” she said automatically, barely repressing an eye roll. I looked her in the eye: “Are you being safe?” “No.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Your mom is just worried about you, Amber. I’m here if you need to talk to another adult.” “OK.” And that was it for the rest of the year.
Fast forward to fall of her sophomore year, and she started coming in to see me after school even though I didn’t have her in class anymore. Sometimes she wanted to talk, other times she just sat quietly listening to music and doing her homework while I graded papers. Then one day, she dropped a bomb. “I’m so tired. I barely slept at all last night.”
“How come?” I asked, glancing up from my desk.
“I tried to kill myself.”
Oh god. Oh god. “Tell me what happened.” She said she heard voices telling her to take a bunch of pills. She didn’t want to wake her mom up because she had to work in the morning. Somehow she managed to text a friend who told her to make herself throw up, and she did. I got her mom there as fast as I could. Amber didn’t want to tell her. She said her mom had overheard her crying earlier that week and didn’t even ask her what was wrong. “If you don’t tell her, I have to, Amber.” Her mom got there, and I felt something prompting me to say, “Mom, I think she needs a hug.” Oh, the way that girl melted into her mama’s arms. I got a text from Amber that night saying she was in the emergency room waiting while they found her a bed, smiley face emoji. I didn’t hear from her again for weeks while she was in recovery. Deep breath. Thank god.
When she came back, she came out. The first time she heard the voices was at Bible camp. It was right after chapel, where the sermon was about how being gay is a sin. Her grandma told her the voices were demons. Oh, honey, how I wish I had been there. They were demons, all right. The demons of a world that tells you being a “good girl” can only look one way.
It’s been three years since the car incident. Amber's a senior now. She and her transgender boyfriend Al stopped by this spring, and she introduced me as “the one I told you about, Al—the one who saved my life.” Al had bruises from getting jumped while he was on his was to class in Dinkytown. They called him a faggot. The police said there wasn’t much they could do, since they didn’t have any security footage of it happening.
I hope someday Amber can see that she saved her own life. I could never be that brave.
To all the girls I’ve loved before, I want to tell you that you are treasure. No. I want you to know that you are treasure without me having to tell you. On a good day, I know I am treasure. I hope that’s what you see in me, glinting behind the film of my own frailty and shortcomings.
Sometimes I think about quitting teaching and getting a nice, boring desk job. The kind where you can have adult conversations by the water cooler, take longer than 25 minutes to eat your lunch, and not feel bone-tired and brain-fried by the end of the day. Being a teacher is grueling. It is so easy to feel inadequate, despite what my Master’s degree, countless hours of professional development, and the Minnesota Department of Education say. But the truth is, I don’t stay just for what I can teach them. I also stay for what they teach me. About human resilience, and about what I take for granted. I bring them anguish from literature, history, and the news, and they come back to me with hope that things will be better when they are in charge.
The last week of school, Hannah told me I was in her dream the night before. “You were going to remove my spleen. I was nervous, but my mom reminded me that you had already removed my gallbladder and everything went fine. You told me to find a clean set of clothes to change into and swim to that island to wait for you while you finished filling your bucket up with clams.”
I’m not a mother. I want to be a mother. I am so terrified to be a mother. I feel like such a fraud that you dream about me this way, but I’ll slice you open and show you that your insides are beautiful if that’s what you need from me. You can cut out whatever doesn’t serve you. I’ll stitch you back up if you ask me to, or your mother can do it while my mother stitches me. We’ll use our surgeon’s hands to shuck these clams and braid each other’s hair. You can help, Hannah. You have your mother’s hands.
*Students’ names have been changed.