Reclaiming Myself

 I was a school teacher for thirty-five years. I loved the work. I loved my kids. I was pretty good at it, I think. Sometimes, in some small ways, I made a difference.

I had no teaching credential. All of my own educational background was in science, engineering, mathematics, and computer programming. When I left a seventeen year long career in the oil and gas and mineral extraction industries, I was determined not to go back to that work. I had found it to be soul destroying. On a long shot, I applied for the computer instructor position at the Catholic elementary school that I had attended as a child, and because it was the middle of the year, and they were in a desperate situation, they hired me to begin on two-weeks notice after the Christmas holiday. I put together a program for 3rd through 8th grades from almost nothing, and taught there for a number of years. I learned to teach by teaching. I watched my kids. I listened to them, and if something didn’t work, I didn’t do it again. They taught me way more than I ever did teach them. In time, I moved into a 5th grade homeroom class, teaching math, and science, and religion of all things. Then, I moved away to Ohio, and in time, I came to teach middle school math and science. For about half of the time I taught, I was divorced, and that was my persona: the middle school teacher lady who lived alone with her cats. I kept to myself, and kept my life pretty seriously private. I devoted myself to my work and my kids, and people knew only what they could see of me; which wasn’t much.

That lack of a state issued teaching credential kept me tied to the Catholic school system, and because I needed the work, I danced to their tune. I almost always taught science, even when I might also be teaching some math classes or some social studies classes or even some religion classes. I taught science with a sincere passion and love for the subject, and I wanted my students to love it too. I wanted them to sense the connectedness of it all; to understand how they fit into all of it; how beautiful it all was. I taught the Big Bang and I taught Darwin’s evolution through natural selection and I taught climate change, even when doing that caused me to raise the eyebrows of the higher-ups and the church hierarchy. Through much of the last decade of my career I taught a health curriculum that included sex education. Although constrained by the limits of the Catholic church’s teachings, I did my level best to give my kids as much as I could of a healthy and positive education about their bodies and their sexuality, even in the face of resistance from some parents and the parish priest. That work ultimately led to my untimely retirement from the teaching profession when I simply could not accede to demands that I refrain from addressing topics like menstruation, wet dreams, intercourse, and childbirth in an 8th grade sex education class. There are limits beyond which truth will not bend.

Through it all, there was never any real reason to disclose my personal life to my students or my colleagues. What I did outside my classroom had no bearing on my teaching. I worked to teach with compassion, care and respect. I taught with integrity and with academic rigor. My goal was to find a way to help every student succeed. Whatever they brought to me, my job was to help them use all of their skills and talents to build their very best pathway forward.

And, then I retired. I left my life’s work behind, and I walked away one very early February morning, and I never looked back. There was no ceremony, and there were no goodbyes. It was sudden, and it was very, very final. I took a deep breath and stepped from one part of my life into the next. Now, three years later, I find my life is slower, quieter, deeper. I am also very glad to find that many of those former students remain connected to me through the miracle of social media. For all of its many very real flaws, it does provide some definite paths to those connections. I am so grateful.

Lately, though, I’ve been contemplating the fact that those young people still have little sense of who it is that they think they “know.” My Catholic School Teacher costume was just that...a disguise. It served to allow me to function in a world where I could work, earn a living, and make a valuable contribution in the lives of young people, but it required me to keep much of who I was hidden from view. The vast reality of who I really am would have made that teaching life untenable, but without the truth of it, these current friendships are flat and one dimensional. There are so many potentially interesting conversations that have no place from which to begin.

I have no reason to hide any longer, and really nothing of substance to lose. So, at the risk of alienating some, I want to step into the daylight and perhaps open the door to a deeper set of understandings with those who might choose that. Like everyone else, I am a person with many levels of complexity. There are many sides to “Ms. D.”

I am politically liberal and unashamedly progressive. I simply believe that all people ought to be able to live in safety with health, comfort, and dignity. I am anti-racist, although I still have much to learn about how to fully live out that aspiration in the world. I have been a feminist since my teens. I believe that no one ought to be treated as less because of their sex, sexuality, or gender identity. I think every person ought to be able to earn a decent living wage doing work that has dignity in a workplace that is safe and protected from abuse. I believe everyone should be able to obtain a full range of healthcare services, and that paying for those services should not result in economic hardship. People should have adequate housing, food, and drinking water. Our air, water, and food supply should all be safe. Education should be accessible and affordable to every person from the preschool to the very highest level for every single person. Your zip code or your family’s last name should not determine your ability to access educational opportunities. We must prioritize the protection of our planet’s environment. Failure to do so dooms our future; dooms the future of every living thing on the planet. There might me more, but that is the gist of it. Honestly, I don’t feel like most of that is so very radical. It seems like what decent people ought to think about things.

I am a masochist. I eroticize pain. I participate in a sexual-erotic relationship as the masochistic bottom partner with a sadistic top. He likes to inflict pain, and so we are well matched. The dance that we engage in together works to our mutual gratification. I get regularly spanked, flogged, caned, paddled, strapped, and whipped. It is a sexual practice that is likely not for everyone, but it takes me places that I cannot get to in any other way. I reach heights of humming, roaring ecstasy that are beyond my reach without this particular kind of power play. I don’t prescribe it for others, and I never impose it on others. I am careful about consent. However, in a world that assumes that people all engage in a particular sort of “normal” sexual relating, to not acknowledge and honor my own sexual expression is a kind of amputation that I will not tolerate any longer.

I also live within a polyamorous family. There are three of us. Tom and Teresa are legally married to each other. I am divorced; no longer married, but firmly committed and connected to the two of them. We love one another. Ours is a family, no different in most ways than any other. We own a home together, we manage our finances together, we eat together, cook together, handle the household chores together, support one another in times of health crises, work around one another’s schedules… just do the things that families do. We are not looking for other partners, so we are more closed than some poly families, and we are all straight, so we “love” one another in the ways that work best between the different ones of us, but we DO love one another.

So, yeah. I am not exactly that Catholic school teacher lady with her cats that I projected for all those years. I am a bit more alternative than it might have appeared to those who sat in my classrooms back in the day. I have no idea how that might land, but I am ready to live out here in the world. I am completely comfortable with who I have come to be. There is no need to ask for anyone’s approval. I am always happy for the friendship of those who offer it, and glad to offer it in return to those who might find it of some value, but I will not hide any longer. Let it be what it truly is.

Sue