On the Birth of an Educator

I got the call.

I was nearly eight.

“That’s good, nice job. I can tell you’ve been practicing,” drove me to do more, to be more.

Her dark hair and green eyes greeted me every day.

She said, “Those flowers are beautiful. Yellow is my favorite color. You should be proud of your hard work,” as I glued colorful tissue paper to large sheets of construction paper.

Then there was a fieldtrip. Her dark fluffy hair was on the bus and she was murmuring something about being gone for a while. She was going to be a mom soon and needed to be home with the baby and husband. We will have someone new when we get back from Plymouth.

“Can’t you get a babysitter?” I asked, icicles gathering in my chest.

She talked about how paying a stranger to take care of her baby so she could take care of “other stranger’s babies” didn’t make sense.

The full weight of those words hung on me the whole ride after she’d patted my head and tears rolled down my cheeks.

First of all, I was not a baby.

Second, how could she call me a stranger’s baby? I know she didn’t “really” know my mother, but she met her at parent’s night and my mother crocheted a doily for the craft fair. Surely my mother wasn’t a “STRANGER” like the ones we were told to avoid.

But we rode to Plymouth without our teacher. We saw a gray rock and a murky ocean. And a lighthouse with its light out.

It was a dark ride home when I decided. I was going to teach strangers’ babies. Stranger’s children. I could be a light for kids like me.

When “yellow is my favorite color lady” left there was a yearning, a hunger, a want of nourishment. The replacement wouldn’t be the same. She wouldn’t know how far I’d come. How I stumbled over “str” words and “wr” words, and things like chipmunk, pyramids, and ambulance, but how I kept reading anyways.

I practiced reading Stringbean’s Trip to the Shining Sea. I warped flashcards practicing tongue twisters, and I compulsively swallowed my saliva so as to eliminate my lisp.

My mother worried about my intelligence. She said my lisp might make others think less of me. That it might make me seem dumb even if I’m not. And she added, “sometimes what you say isn’t as important as how you say it.”

And later when I told my mother about what happened at school, she stared at me as I cried. Her eyes wobbled in their sockets, and I wondered if that happened to other parents’ eyes.

Then I knew mother must be a stranger. When she held my chin in her hand and wiped my face as she said…

“but she was just your teacher.”

Originally published at @daynabrowndolan on Medium