Aileen

Opening Scene

My Awakening

“It’s either them or me,” he said. “If you won’t do it for me, at least do it for yourself.” 

The ultimatum hammered in my head, as I lay there, crouched on the cold, hard tiles of the bathroom floor, the grit pressing into my knees. 

I wept silently so my teenage sons wouldn’t hear me. As I finally got into the shower, the hot water mixing with my tears, I stood there paralyzed, broken. “I wish I had COVID,” I whispered desperately - a death sentence back in 2020. Awakened, as if by God himself, I recoiled to the severity of those words. I didn’t dare repeat them, fearing my wish would come true.

“No, no, no! I don’t mean it. I take it back.” Shame and shock washed over me, forcing me into a complete and absolute surrender. “Please help me, God!”

Months earlier, I was reading a heartfelt email from a 4th grade colleague announcing her retirement. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to retire after seeing the shitstorm of the lockdown ahead of us.) I had left the classroom six years prior to become a literacy coach. Now, with this position opened up, the mental ping pong games began. Should I or shouldn’t I? They were phasing out literacy coaches in my district and I really loved teaching 4th grade. Besides, the teachers didn’t need me as a coach; they needed me in the trenches, alongside them. Decision made! Little did I know what I had signed up for as I prepared to teach virtually- the systemic reference to war was not far from the truth.

My makeshift school was squeezed into the heart of our home, immediately visible upon entering. We live in a great room layout: the living room, kitchen, and dining area separated only by a partial wall. The dining table, right in the center, became my full-time classroom and my office. A flimsy Wayfair room divider (which my cat Garfield eventually tore up) served as my background, and I armed myself with a whiteboard, an Expo marker, a contraption to hold my phone as a second Zoom camera, and, of course, my school laptop.

“Good morning class!” I’d say with all the enthusiasm I could muster. “Please turn on your cameras so I can see those smiling faces.” There were always two students with their cameras turned off: Alex, whose name my sons knew by heart, and Gabriel, who would show up 10 minutes late, in bed and in his pajamas. 

Each day, I sat in that chair, putting on a show - singing, dancing, displaying my meticulously created Google slide lessons and doing anything and everything to keep those kids engaged. The screen became a magnifying glass where parents could judge my every move. I’d close out the Zoom session at the end of the school day and immediately call families or answer emails. After that, I’d plan reading and writing lessons that I’d share with my fourth-grade team. 

My husband and sons would make dinner and eat while I worked relentlessly at the table.  They would finish and clean up, yet I continued to work.

“It’s 9:00, Mom,” Nicholas said one night. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“I’m almost done,” I replied, barely looking up.

My husband walked over to me and angrily announced, “This has got to stop! It’s either them or me.”

That’s when I looked up.

Assignment #1 Story Statement

This memoir contains a series of classroom vignettes in which the author sees her wounded child parts reflected in her students. Through their behaviors, she discovers her own family dynamics at play and begins to rewrite her childhood.

Assignment #2 The Antagonistic Force

The antagonistic force that catapults the protagonist (myself) into a spiritual journey during the 2020 pandemic is her husband. Seeing the dinner table become her office until 9:00 pm most nights, drives him to present her with an ultimatum: “It’s either them or me. And if you won’t do it for me, do it for yourself.” Her husband always felt last on the totem pole after their sons were born, just like her dad used to feel with respect to her mom.  Ironically, it is through the classroom, the very source of conflict in her marriage and family life, that becomes the protagonist’s resource for learning and insight. There, she begins to see her own family dynamics playing out among her students and with each relationship, she is able to see unhealed parts of her relationship with her mother who died just months before her wedding.  Her struggle becomes to unbecome the various roles she thought she had to play as a result of her mother’s childhood wounds. 

Assignment #3 Breakout Titles

• Through Their Eyes: A Teacher’s Journey of Self-Love, Healing and Compassion Within the Classroom

• Reflective Mirrors: How My Students Taught Me to Rewrite My Family Story

• The Journey Back to Me: How I Healed My Inner Child Through My Students

Assignment #4 Two Comparables

1. Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind: Thoughts on Teacherhood by Phillip Done

Although Done writes over the course of one school year, it is divided into months which contain multiple teaching experiences over time (being a 20-year teacher veteran), as well as memories of his own childhood, all skillfully interweaved, told with humor, warmth and heart. 

2. Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year by Esmé Raji Codell 

Codell writes in a diary fashion with grit and spunk, told over the course of one school year, with a more explicit heroine’s journey structure as she faces challenging students and administration.

My writing style combines Done’s humor and warmth with Codell’s heroine’s journey. My time span is 5 years, going in and out of past and present, with a focus on specific students who represent the childhood roles I am learning to let go of.

Assignment #5 Hook Line/Log line

With her marriage and family life on the line, the 2020 lockdown sends a teacher on a spiritual journey, giving her the ability to see her own childhood wounds reflected in her students and the choice to rewrite her childhood roles. 

Assignment #6: Inner conflict your protagonist will have. 

Inner turmoil over conditioned beliefs and values plagues the protagonist, shattering her sense of identity. She prioritizes school over family, driven by an unconscious need to succeed, be seen and validated. Teaching virtually during the 2020 pandemic becomes a magnifying glass of all her wounds and insecurities. She must be there for the students and her grade level colleagues. Her determination to shoulder it all as a martyr and savior sends her into a downward spiral, taking her husband and sons down with her, breaking her until her husband gives her a verbal slap back to reality. On her hands and knees, she hands it all over to God and finally asks for help. 

The secondary conflict involves her awakening to her unhealed inner child, which is perhaps the very reason why she chooses to go back to the classroom after a 6 year hiatus as a literacy coach. Her ingrained lack of self-worth and martyr mentality leads her to believe her colleagues don’t need her as a coach; instead she feels she must be “in the trenches” with them. Through a deep dive into Family Constellations, a key part of her spiritual journey, she learns how generational trauma has shaped her. Family secrets and stories surface, clarifying why she reacts to her students in certain ways.  She has brought her family dynamics into the classroom and her students have done the same. She begins to see the world as an external display of her internal map: suppressed feelings, people-pleasing tendencies, and forgotten remnants of her relationship with her mother, who died when the protagonist was 29.

Assignment #7: Sketch out your setting in detail. 

Beginning Chapter Setting

The house of the protagonist features an open room where a partial wall subtly delineates a line between kitchen, dining room, and living room, symbolic of the blurred, emotional boundaries she maintains between her roles as teacher, mother and wife. 

The story opens in 2020, when the pandemic forced schools to teach virtually. The kitchen table becomes her classroom and office, at the center of the house, at the center of her soul. Her childhood wounds spread like the virus itself into the rest of her home, her husband, her sons, her sense of self.

She creates a makeshift classroom with a room divider from Wayfair, a whiteboard, an Expo marker, a contraption to hold her phone for Zoom sessions, and her district computer held up by the stand she purchased in 2019 after the car accident left her with chronic neck pain. Her computer screen puts her on the spotlight to parents, magnifying her imperfections and vulnerability. She sees an ocean of faces with some cameras turned off, glitchy connection, no connection, too much connection.

The setting in the rest of the book alternates between a 2nd and 4th grade classroom back at school, her childhood home, and the hospital bed where her mom died of colon cancer.