Good Girls Get Flowers

If you were a person who knew me in the everyday, general sort of happenings of things--my students and colleagues, you understand--it wouldn't be a stretch to say that you would be surprised if you saw me become so spontaneously made happy by way of full-blown feminine, emotional hysterics by a random occurrence that you would say to yourself, "Well, now, I didn't know she had that in her!" Such a day and such an occurrence were this Friday past.

To make gross light of a situation that has by no means been close to goodness, it is enough to say that the teaching position in which I landed myself this school year has been unpleasant. The last few weeks, especially, as I claw tooth and nail to extricate myself from this place, have been rather a fright much more than once over. It hasn't been good for me. As a result, I have felt that my "teaching-game" has suffered because being in this place has made me feel that everything has been diminished by this employment. And yet.

Just at the beginning of my 4th period class, as my students were paper-ball fighting, begging to go to the bathroom, and updating one another on who broke up and made up while they were away at their elective classes, one of the office secretaries delivered me an arrangement of yellow roses with the slightest orange trim and little purple wildflower looking things with a beautifully tied orange ribbon with yellow polka dots. Lord Krishna, you would have thought I had been wholly unaware of the existence of a thing in nature called "flower" so outside the bounds of the teaching personality I have donned did I step when I was handed that loveliest of tangible tokens of appreciation and endearment. As those who don't know me well at all in my place of employment were quite surprised to see, I immediately burst into tears from the joy that simple gesture wrought in me. I was rendered absolutely feckless to really teach with the composure I am usually able to cloak myself in, no matter what atrocity has been rained down on me on any given day, for the next two class periods. That first class, being the ones who actually witnessed the spectacle I made of myself and my mad dash to the ladies room to get-it-together, were so stunned upon my return that they were entirely silent, actually conducting their research on famous authors like they were supposed to have done with not a single prompting from me to do so! Not quite able to keep a pesky tear from streaming down every five minutes or so, I busied myself with filling the white board with all the bibliographic directives they would need for their papers due in two weeks' time. I could feel them, I tell you, watching me to see if I would explode with emotion or feeling one more time so that they could believe that it had truly happened. That it hadn't, actually, been a dream they'd dreamed brought on by the agony they suffered from not having had the opportunity to piss from 7:30 am, when they left their lovely and not-so-lovely homes, until now at 11:00, when it was time for their scheduled, supervised bathroom break. (Scheduled and supervised, you see, because of the unfortunate incident of two male students and one female producing an amateur pornographic video during an unscheduled, unsupervised bathroom visit. Lost everyone the privilege of pissing when one freely needs to piss. Shame, isn't it?)

I didn't care about the tears, they could look all their fill--it was the hyperventilating that I did feel the need to control before paramedics had to be called in. (And fuck that. It would have been ABSOLUTELY horrible--have you ever seen the SNL skits "Appalachian E.R.?" Right. Nothing further to say about that.) All I felt was the most sincere surprise, the utterest of utter shock, and perhaps, a tad bit of validation that I was still, through the haze of evil I've had to wade my way through day-in, in this school-house, doing something right, or at the very least, meaningful for one woman's child. My bouquet was from a mother whose daughter I have taken under my particular wing this year, even though, often, the care I try to take with her seems to fall on deaf ears. This child--one I call one of "my children" raises my blood pressure on a regular basis concerning her choice of boyfriend alone. That aside, I love this child. I hadn't known that her mother knew that I loved her. And further, how could her mother have possibly known that I needed--really needed--that small token which was like a ruby encrusted tiara for being teacher of the year to me. I was full.

There are twenty days more, all things falling in line as they should, of work in this place with these children of mine--angels and devils all mixed in together--in this rural town. I shudder to think in whose hands I will be leaving them after I am gone. But, "it is what it is." (What the principal of this school-house consistently says in lieu of dealing with inequity, injustice, racism, verbal abuse, harassment, and the like from a certain segment of the population of both parents and colleagues of mine in this rural community.) It has been hard to see what good I might have done in this place, constantly confronted with the ill I do, apparently, as deemed by certain parties.

My roses are blooming, they are gloriously fragrant, and when they are gone, their memory will help the next four weeks go by with substantially less anxiety.

Plus!..."I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job..."

I am an English Teacher. I am good. I get flowers delivered which say so. Equivocally.