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I write a lot about being free of my teaching career and how much more joy I have in my life now because I’m no longer there. This is true, but it does not mean that I didn’t once enjoy my career. In fact I actually knew in my core from a young age that it was what I always wanted to do (aside from the rock star thing, that is).
I have a very vivid memory of being in early elementary school and knowing in my 7 or 8 year old mind that I wanted to be a teacher and I mom. I also remember very clearly that I knew these two things would go very well with each other because of summers and holidays off. From that moment on, when I would be asked the famous question of what you want to be when you grow up, it naturally just became “a teacher” that flew out of my mouth.
I had in my young creative mind already set up the path that would be my future…go to school, meet my future husband, become a teacher, get married, have kids, buy a house, take kids to work with me. I had made the plan. Then I got the wonderful fortune of living it.
Precisely in that order and not without miracles and learning adventures I got to live the exact life I set out for all those years ago. The life that my teenage self would get made fun of by my peers for dreaming. The life with the sceptics that thought it doesn’t always work out the way you plan, but then showing them that it does. Just not always the way you think.
I met my husband, Chris, the summer after I graduated college for the third and final time. (The first were encounters he does not clearly remember, and the second was a nice but weird date that led to a brief pen pal relationship for a few months.) From that time on we have talked every day, even while he was stationed here in VA and I was still living in MA. After a year of long distance, during which I was unable to find teaching work other than substituting in my unionized state, I moved south at 23. I hadn’t visualized moving so far from my large loving family when I was creating my story, that was just part of the adventure.
Within a month I was hired as a fourth grade teacher in a large district, very different from my experience back home. I was excited, eager, and engaged. I spent that first year in stress. Learning a new job, living away from home, cohabitating and learning what it was like to live with Chris, and planning a wedding. I was both happy and overwhelmed. I gained over 30 pounds and developed IBS. The nutritionist I was assigned to by my Dr. told me, “even good stress is stress”. The next year I was assigned to third grade with my new name and armed ready to have a terrific year. I did, for the two months that I had that class. Then I was asked to go back to fourth grade due to an overage and found myself with a whole new group of very different students. Overwhelmed again while Chris was put on shift work by the Navy, I attempted to find outlets like volleyball and Friday nights with teacher friends at Chi Chi’s.
That winter we found out we were pregnant and to my great relief, I saw a light at the end of the school year. It was always my plan to stay at home with our kids, so I was very excited that my “mom years” were on the way. To make life more exciting, we were able to move back north near our families. I couldn’t have been more excited to get out of Virginia at that time.
That is why after eight magical years living close to family and friends while living my dream job as “mommy” to two amazing children and waitressing/tutoring in the evenings, it was very strange to feel an inner guidance to go back to Virginia. However, life back in 2008 had us in survival mode and I was ready to thrive. So after a lot of conversations and a string of odd occurrences, we voted as a family to move back here.
This journey was full of heartache and hope. It was and is still difficult to think of the family that we left (but visit often) and the memories that could have been. But I am convinced the best path forward for our little family of four was the hard decision to leave.
The trip here was not easy. It involved Chris breaking his tibia and tearing his ACL/MCL right before the move. It involved me not being able to register our son for school until we were here in person, and it meant not getting put on the hire list until I was physically available even though I offered to move ahead of the family. It took selling my husband's truck to pay for a moving company. It took my biggest personal moment of weakness when I had to put both parents down as unemployed when I finally showed up five days before school started to register Andy.
Every risk was worth every payoff though. Not 10 minutes after chatting up the school secretary, I was being interviewed by 5 people on maybe 2 hours of car sleep. Within an hour I was hired as the new third grade teacher (a position that had just become available that day). Three hours after that I was meeting my students at my first of twelve open house/back to school nights in the school that my kids were districted for! The furniture hadn’t even arrived yet.
It took a year for Chris to heal and Abbie to start school with me and Andy the following fall. Chris suddenly got to learn what stay at home parenting was like, while I experienced full time working mom life. A lesson that taught us a lot about role reversal and ultimately brought us closer together.
Two years after the move we bought our dream house. I spent 5 years in third grade having a great time with my students, learning, growing, and changing in all the ways you do in your thirties. All while my kids commuted back and forth with me every day and we got to spend summers together recuperating and visiting family.
I then got to experience the world of first and second grade for the next seven years. I learned and grew right along with those students while I worked hard to adapt to the changing educational system and still make school somewhere my students wanted to be. All this while my own children went off to different schools without me.
That building became a home away from home. I made friends, helped families, built strong relationships, and learned what it feels like when all of your dreams come true. Then I learned what it felt like when you forgot to create the next part of your dream. A journey and a story for another day.
I’m not sad I no longer want to teach children in a classroom setting. I am grateful I got to live that part of my dream life and I was able to do so much good in those classrooms. Those kids will always be part of me and considered family, just as much as my friends and co-workers will be. That life served its purpose and it was amazing, magical, and full of great learning for all of us. It is exciting to now be able to continue to teach, just in new, less obvious ways. This life we live is full of mini lives, and though I’m grateful for each one, I am much more cognizant of the fact that there are many more to enjoy and be amazed by.