L.O.V.E.

My sister, Anna, surprised me in the very best way last week when she brought me my grandmother’s wooden creche with all the figures, including the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the three wise men, the guardian angels, and all the sheep, cattle, and camels. Now anyone who knows me knows I’m not in any way “church-y,” so it might seem strange that I’d be touched by this surprise. I don’t attend church nowadays, but I did go to the First Congregational Church in South Haven for years with my grandma. It was during one of these Sunday visits after church each holiday season when my grandma would get out the creche and all the accessories to set up the manger scene. My grandma believed in God, and she loved Jesus. I believed in my Grandma, so I accepted God and Jesus, too. Together we’d spread the straw in the bottom of the wooden creche my grandfather had made, line up the wise men, and lay baby Jesus in the manger. My sister’s unexpected gift of the creche took me back to that time. A time and place in which I felt safe.

Since those childhood days of safe Sundays with Grandma, I’ve been trying desperately to recapture that feeling, trying to find where I belong. Maybe everyone feels like that, lost and alone. Perhaps I’m not “special” in always feeling a bit like an outsider. An outsider in my own family and with my peers. I know this sounds cliche, but one day while I was distracted by merely trying to survive and find a job to pay my own way in this world, this elusive sense of safety and belonging found me. My work as a teacher is where I’ve recaptured that reassuring sense of safety and acceptance. From the very beginning, my first principal took care of me, changing my tire when I discovered I had a flat after our interview. During my first year of teaching, I remember the family who showed they cared, inviting me over for a home-cooked lunch. When I volunteered to be the middle school ski advisor, it was the kids who took me under their wing, coaching me on how to slowly grasp the tow rope to take me back up the Bunny Hill. Students have been my greatest supporters, writing me poems and shouting my name across bleachers at football games, across the mall parking lot, and in the hallways each morning as they pass by my doorway.

Five years ago this fall, I returned to teaching after suffering a stroke and cerebral hemmorhage. A feeling so strong pulled me back to the safety, the familiarity of the classroom. I started this blog as a way to remember and capture in writing all the reasons I had to return to teaching. At the time, I couldn’t explain it fully to my family and friends who begged me to reconsider and worried I would not be able to “keep up” or withstand the demands of the job. I couldn’t really even explain my stubborn insistence that I return to teaching to myself. I just knew I would be forever broken if I did not.

Well, having written and reread my reflections over the past three years, I think I may have identified the underlying reason I had to return. The reason is simple…love. I returned to this teaching life, so I could give and receive love. I needed this love. And I needed to give that love to those young faces in my classroom, looking up at me, their eyes full of of hope and, sometimes, hurt.

Love brought me back to teaching and it is love that keeps me there now.