Memoir: "Shout out your sadness and pain. This can bring you back to normal."

Recently passing Harpeth High School after a spring hike, my friend said to me, "There's the school. What do you feel when you pass it?"

I responded that I still felt some bitterness about my last few years working there. Now after eight years of retirement, I want a way completely to let go of the bitterness and to help my old heart mend still further. My heart yearns to soften toward all that happened there.

This morning as I'm reading The Book of Joy, the Archbishop Tutu tells us "Shout out your sadness and pain. This can bring you back to normal."

Another friend discourages me from telling my stories--especially these three--because she would say that they are private and no one else's business but mine. She says that readers who don't know me at all will think, "Boy, she sure feels sorry for herself " Or else that I will appear "whiney and vindictive."

As people who know me know, I do not feel sorry for myself nor do I ask for pity. As a rule, I am not a complainer and certainly not vindictive. But I will tell my stories to you and to no one else. Please judge tenderly of me, Dear Reader. I believe that the telling of these stories will help to mend a broken part of myself and perhaps help others understand their own stories and heal themselves.

According to the The Book of Joy, we are to embrace all of our emotions because they no doubt play a necessary role in our lives. The Archbishop says, "It is the hard times, the painful times, the sadness and the grief that knit us more closely together."

My teaching career, which was so instrumental in my life as a whole, ended on several notes of sadness and grief.

First and last, it was by word-of-mouth that I discovered that I had lot my job. After nearly forty years of teaching, in 2009-2010, I had finally realized a dream of mine to retire and then to job-share, I had worked the first semester, and my job-share teacher/partner was working the second semester.

It was January or February 2010. Through the grapevine I heard that the then director of schools Tim Webb had let all part-time and job-share employees in the county go! Apparently, he gave no thought or care as to who these people were that he was letting go. He wasn't from our county and didn't know us. The then board of education seemed have some control over the director, and they too must have wanted part-timers and job-sharers gone.

Immediately, when I heard of job-share teachers losing their jobs, I went to the school and asked the then new principal about the "rumor" and why she had not informed me. She responded, "I thought that you would have received a letter." I never did receive a letter nor a phone call from the central office. Nothing.

Perhaps it was all in the name of saving money, with no consideration for experienced teachers because the very next year the county offered experienced teachers "bonuses" of thousands of dollars (depending on one's experience) to retire, and many really good educators who had lost faith in the way the county school system was being run took the money and left the profession. (New teachers are paid less salary than those of us who have experience. So a county full of new teachers is going to spend less on paying its teachers.) My guess is that after the 2010-2011 school year, Cheatham County was left with a dearth of  experienced teachers.

Thus ended my nearly 40- year  career as a teacher in Cheatham County. There were no farewells, no goodbyes. About nine months later, my daughter and a former student of mine and one of my co-workers from Cheatham County Central High School hosted a retirement party for me in a beautiful venue in Nashville. They put a lot of work and love into it, and it was a really fine get-together, filled with many former students and some faculty, but it was bittersweet for me. Harpeth High School, where I had spent the last 25 years of my career, never even acknowledged my leaving the profession.

Since then, I have heard that my story of loing my job unexpectedly was a universal story in Cheatham County for that year and the next. Many good teachers and administrators lost their positions as unwise decisions continued to be made by the then director (whom the county eventually had to "buy out" of his job) and his buddy, the next director, and the board of education.

Lives and jobs were tossed about with no thought or care of how these actions affected the individals involved nor how they affected the school system as a whole. (Later a group of administrators sued the school system for loss of their jobs for bogus "reasons," and the administrators won! Thus the county ended up paying out thousands of dollars to settle those law suits! In the long run, I don't believe the county "saved" very much money, and it lost a lot of valuable educators.)

Nevertheless, my own career was ended before I had made that choice myself. Knowing me, I would have continued to work part time until I was ready to fully retire from teaching. It would have been a way of slowly phasing out in stages and of adjusting to not being a teacher after nearly four decades.

But here are the good things about my losing my job--my first granddaughter was born in late March 2010, and my daughter had post-partum anxiety and was not sleeping at all. So I was rested and free and able to keep baby Tessa overnight from the time she was a couple weeks old! And I've been keeping her and her little sister on overnight visits for the past eight years!

When the big flood came in early May that same year and my home was partially flooded, I was rested and free and able somewhat to keep my sanity and help with the big clean up and reconstruction of my house.

Another good thing was that I could not have made the decision to retire on my own; teaching was too much a part of who I was--so it's a good thing that I was forced into retirement. Also I did not know that my last semester teaching was my last semester teaching. Thus I was not then sad and griefing the loss of my career.

There are a couple other things that occurred those last few years that I taught at Harpeth High School that I want to tell you about, Dear Reader--one had to do with a group of parents who wanted me gone (fired) from the school system and another had to do with a group of teachers who broke my heart.

Those are the other two stories that I want to share with you in the coming weeks.

to be continued . . . 

A Memoir: Feminism Is My Story

First used in 1841, the word feminism means "(1) the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes" or "(2) organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests," according to Merriam-Webster.

A dear friend asked me at lunch yesterday how I had become "such a feminist." Right away, I wondered once again how people could not believe in political and economic and social equality for both women and men. Later this same friend said that she has other friends who were teens in the 60s with much more moderate views on the subject.

It was then that I was reminded of one of my male students calling me a "feminazi," which means, of course, a radical feminist. His calling me that word upset me; I think that it was the "nazi" part and its association with Hitler. I've always been proud to be called a feminist, even when it was not meant as a compliment (or when its meaning was misunderstood, which it most often has been.) I do not think of myself as a radical feminist--just a plain ordinary feminist--but in a small southern town, where it seemed apparent to me that feminism had not yet arrived, if it ever would.

I also remember returning a call to a parent when my classes were studying Kate Chopin's book The Awakening. The mother of a young man in my class wanted to know why we were studying this book. "One of the themes of the book concerns the idea that men and women deserve equal treatment," I said. To which she responded, "I don't believe that men and women are equal." I was dumbfounded by her remark, and for once, left speechless. Perhaps she and I were talking about different things.

"Equal" does not mean the "same." Anyone knows that women and men are different. But from an early age, I resented males being treated better by virtue of their gender, which was happening in my family of origin and in my schooling and in my being a teacher in Cheatham County. 

Most of the time, male chauvinism in our schools was "somewhat" subtle. Early in my teaching career, all of my principals and vice-principals were males (as if only males were capable of leadership positions). My first principal was male, of course, and definitely a male chauvinist. I intuitively knew that I was treated differently (less respected) because I was a young female teacher--differently (and not in a good way) from how the young male teachers were treated. What we now call "white privilege" was then "male privilege."

(Sometimes this "less than" treatment of women appeared to me to connect to religion--especially to right-winged, fundamentlist religions that taught that women were to be subordinate to men.)   

Research shows that teachers (male and female) call on male students more often than female students and praise male students more often and just generally give them more attention. Male favoritism was obvious in our school system--for example, one of my male principals was overheard saying in reference to me when I was disciplining some students for cheating, "What she needs is a husband." And still later I overheard this same principal saying to a male teacher, "Wouldn't it be better/easier if all teachers were men." 

Perhaps I can trace the root of my becoming a feminist back to my childhood. It was the 1950s, and I had a male cousin nicknamed Butch, and he was about the same age as I. He  was definitely favored by my Grandmother Drawdy (my father's mother) and her only sibling and sister, my Great Aunt Pansy. I couldn't have put this preferential treatment that my male couisin received back then into words; it was just a feeeling of being made to feel inferior to him, as if he were better than I simply because he was a boy. (It also seemed to be common knowledge that my grandmother favored her sons.) 

Here's an except from the blog that I wrote about our Great Aunt Pansy and for which I interviewed my cousin Butch:

http://lauramallernee.blogspot.com/2015/01/memoir-my-great-aunt-pansy.html

"My cousin Butch would visit Pansy for a fun-filled week during the summers, and she would buy him spiffy back-to-school clothes from the downtown J. C. Penney's. With Aunt Pansy's attention, Butch almost felt as if  he had two loving grandmothers on his father's side of the family. Butch remembers, 'We (he and Aunt Pansie) always went to church on Sunday morning and then went to Clemson House in Clemson for a lunch of she-crab soup, roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy and real strawberry shortcake for dessert. We would joke around about how could they tell if it was a she-crab or a he-crab. We would laugh and talk; there was never a dull moment around Aunt Pansy.' Butch also recalls his family going to lots of Clemson football games with Pansy through the years."

In my memory, Aunt Pansy had never taken me or my family out to eat lunch or gone to a football game nor had she ever bought me school clothes or anything else. 

My cousin Butch had been born to my father's (Ken's) older brother CF, and as a child, I got the distinct impression that my father was somewhat jealous of CF and that part of that reason was that CF had received favorable treatment from Aunt Pansy and another part was that he had a son whereas my father did not. (My father had two daughters; I was the younger one.)

From that same blog, now I can discern that it wasn't only Butch that Pansy favored but also his father CF, my father's older brother--"Once [Grandmother Drawdy's] first born graduated high school, CF (Charles Fulton) went to live with and work for Aunt Pansy, delivering Western Union telegrams. Later she sent him to Clemson College, then procured him a summer job at Carolina Beach." 

So I can now see that it was as if I absorbed my father's envy of his older brother and transferred it to his brother's son Butch--but I can also perceive how CF's and Butch's being favored by Aunt Pansy and by Grandmother Drawdy most certainly set the stage for my becoming a feminist.  I was a little girl child, and like all children, I was trying to make sense of this world into which I had been born. It didn't seem fair or make sense to me that Butch got the lion's share of attention and affection. Simply because he was a boy.

Now this is over 60 years later that I write about this experience--that I put all of this into words--back then it was just vague, and not so vague, feelings. I have to wonder how all of this affected  Butch--he had to feel so special and so loved. I would like to go back in time and tell little Laura that she was special and oh so loved too!  

Thus the stage was set to fast forward to the 1960s and to today!