What I've loved about my job is the ever-expanding sense of kindness I feel and the joy at interacting with kids, person-to-person, mentoring them and feeling like an aunt or an older cousin. I've grown more from this job than any I've yet had.
But as much as I love it, keep growing from it, I also need something...different...in my life. More than me, my family needs something different. The itch for change has been scratched too softly and has grown to a larger-than-life rash. Healing will have to begin soon.
So I have decided not to return in the fall. It hurts to say goodbye and I lie to myself about not coming back for a beloved student's senior year, nor others' sophomore years. I do not allow myself a countdown because that would be to admit it will end and I've always been the kind of girl to ghost a gettogether, not the kind to say the proper series of polite goodnights.
When I travel to my hometown there is a social routine in The Goodbye in which people ask "how much longer are you guys in town for?" That's the phrasing. Verbatim.
I've always been thrown off kilter by it. It sounds like an attempt to get together one last time and I've always felt perplexed knowing I didn't have time for another meetup. But it isn't an attempt to make plans. It's a nicety to avoid the issue of a final goodbye.
I wish there were an equivalent at my job in which I were allowed to ever keep my place in this story of my school that I love so dearly. I never want to walk into it and know it's no longer my place; that someone else's classroom trinkets have taken the place of mine. Yet I also know the day will come and soon.
I'll enter a new school and it won't quite fit right. Too newly starched, the sleeves will feel stiff and as though the threads in the seams still need cutting from within. Because cutting the ties I have to this place where I have grown so much will take more than a few snips. I've woven myself in.
And yet it is time to try something new, something that makes space for loosening middle aged skin to not quite yet fully sag but to plan for it to happen. Something practical with a retirement plan and good dental perhaps. It may sound pedestrian but I have these brilliant offspring to plan for. Something that allows me to begin passing on a torch, helping other teachers receive some of the lessons my boss has passed along to me. A chance to add a cornerstone of kindness upon which future teachers grow their compassion and resilience for students.
Or perhaps the space I open into may not be a starched shirt at all, but more a bohemian wraparound all-in-one dress fabric that will fit to any size I wish. I write in that future. And write and write. I peek into the nightsky during my witching hours and do not mind the tick of the second hand at 4:14 AM. It is a secret time for writers and lovers. A secret stolen time when the young and the old cavort and tell tales. I open my laptop to a magical fabric of story, stretching as far and wide as I can imagine. If I expand into that future, I shall surely join the stars.
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