So you are a teacher, want to become a teacher, or are trying to figure out why you ever decided to become a teacher in the first place.  I started this blog after a long journey of trying to figure out who I was as a teacher and how I could make my life more bearable. 

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a teacher. In fact, when I was an English major at the College of the Holy Cross, teaching was the only field I knew I did not want to enter.  I had aspirations of working in New York City for a public relations firm. I envisioned myself constantly at the beck and call of my clients and skilled in the field of communication – putting out little fires here and there.  I had romanticized this notion of people needing my input with big decisions.  That sounded to me like an exciting life that other people would envy. For some reason, I felt that the meaning of success would mean that other people would want to be just like me.  However, one night when I was in my early twenties, everything changed.

I was living at home with my parents and working an entry-level position at a PR firm in Boston.  It wasn’t NYC and it was not glamorous, (the company worked exclusively in the field of semiconductors at the time) but it was a start.  Each day when I took the train to the Green Line and then walked to the little office on Newbury St., I felt I was on my way to becoming someone who other people wanted to be like.  One night after a long and frustrating day at work, I had a conversation with my mom about the direction I wanted my life to take.  The conversation did not seem very significant at the time, so I only recall a few details.  She expressed to me that she knew I wanted to be a mother one day and she was concerned that this “big city life” I was chasing may not be very practical. She asked me if I had ever considered going into teaching.  I snapped at her that I hated when people asked me that question which was a manifestation of my generalized anxiety disorder-but more on that later.  Needless to say, my mom knew me and could tell that I was chasing someone else’s dream.  But I thought the dream of someone whose parents spent an exorbitant amount on tuition to give their daughter the best chance at a successful life had to look a certain way.  She made me feel like it was okay to follow my instincts and be the person I knew I truly was inside. I still felt conflicted but I knew with her guidance, I would find my path in life.  A week later, she died of a brain aneurysm.

I could go on and on about how that taught me that life is short and we need to enjoy every moment.  I’d like to say that losing my mom set me on the path of living my best life but it didn’t.  I was just really sad for a really long time. However, I was able to get a teaching job, marry my best friend, and was ready to start a family.  I was finally on my way to happiness, but my life was interrupted again.  I struggled to get pregnant.  I felt like I was a failure at the one thing a woman is supposed to be able to do naturally.  This made me question myself and my beliefs.  I became obsessed with controlling my blood tests and planning my cycles.  I spent every waking minute trying to get my body to cooperate and feeling angry and disappointed when it wouldn’t. I learned a lot about myself as a result of my fertility struggles.  I learned to let go of the control issues. I became aware of the fact some people can actually sleep at night even if a picture on the wall is slightly tilted to one side.  I was on my way to gaining self-awareness but it was a steep learning curve.  After years of fertility treatments, I was finally blessed with two beautiful children born two years apart just like my brother and me.  I hoped my son and daughter would have the same relationship I had with my brother.  And just when it seemed like I was adjusting to life as a motherless mother, I was tested by God once again. 

On February 16, 2011, I lost my brother.  The only way I can describe what that did to me is that it took everything I ever believed in and sucked it out of me like a vacuum.  I felt a pain so horrific that I did not think I could go on to live another day.  I didn’t know how to survive in the grief world and it is only because of my husband and my children that I am even able to tell this story.  If you’ve experienced that kind of loss, then you know what I am talking about.  If you haven’t, I hope you never have to.  I have endless stories I could tell you about my mom and my brother but this is not where I will share those memories.  I’m sharing this information with you let you know that when you feel like you’ve had the worst day of your life, it probably isn’t as bad as you think it is and even if it is, it will get better. 

Losing my mom and my brother forced me to forge a new identity.  The idyllic family I grew up with was gone and I was no longer that girl.  My dad and I were forced to navigate this new world together and as you might imagine, we chose drastically different paths.   But through it all, one obvious thing kept me going: Love.  Although it is true, it is not a neat and orderly story wrapped up in a bow.  It’s messy and angry and full of things I could have done differently but didn’t.  And now here I am ready to share what I’ve learned.  When everything turned upside down on me, I held on to the only part of my identity that I could still recognize and that was of being a leader.  My definition of a leader has changed over the course of my journey. The qualities I thought were my weaknesses: empathy, sensitivity, compassion, I learned, were actually my strengths.  The order, control, and rigidness I sought comfort in no longer served me.  That is not to say that that I don’t think those things have a place in education-because I think they do.  I just want to be the person who approaches leadership with a different perspective to balance it out.

I have spent years studying educational leadership, social and emotional learning, and emotional intelligence.  It has been a challenging journey, but a very rewarding one. I was inspired by Pam Grout’s book The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (and Therefore the World) and have been incorporating mindfulness into my classroom ever since.  I don’t know about you, but the one thing that has become clear to me over my educational career is the level of hypocrisy that exists in education. I have attended countless meetings where I am fed the message: “Be engaging, let kids collaborate, and make sure they feel that they belong!”  However, these meetings are held in a room with one or two moderators repeating the same information in the same manner to a room of predominately white people who are feeling overwhelmed, under-appreciated and constantly misunderstood.  That is what over twenty years of teaching, over ten years as a high school English Language Arts department chairperson and a doctorate has taught me about teaching.  However, there is hope.  And that is why I started this blog.  Just as I reinvented my identity after surviving profound loss, so too have I reinvented myself as a teacher.  And I am willing to share the lessons I learned the hard way with you so you don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.