Parents Just Don’t Understand

You agree to meet the parents on a Friday, as teachers are supposed to prioritize two-way family communication, and autumn is the best time to build those relationships. But at 4:05, when they appear in your classroom in desert camo and tactical boots, wide stance, arms crossed, no bother with hello, just complaints about traffic leaving base, they are in every way opposite of your sweet, shrimpy fifth-graders, so entirely incongruous, that your legs quake. 

Their email mentioned concerns about academic progress, so that’s what you do. Welcome them. Usher them toward a place to sit. Open a manila folder of their son’s work samples, share areas of strength and concepts to keep practicing. That takes ten minutes. Afterward, something’s off. Seventeen years teaching school. You can sense when bad is close to happening. It’s the way they are sitting. Too much focusing on you. You try to pivot toward goodbye, but Dad wants to talk about post-pandemic life. He’s smiling, but you can’t shake the sense of sharks circling.

You smile back reflexively. You had waited tables in college. Stupid habits are hardest to break.

“So much suffering,” Dad says. He stops smiling. You stop smiling too. Dad wants to talk about a church friend whose twenty-something child is saving for gender reassignment surgery, and is depressed and living “in filth.” He quotes a statistic on transgender suicide, then strong-arms it into opposition to the school district’s new policy. “Why support something that makes kids kill themselves?” While you’re flailing with that, he dances in deeper, covering topics such as the importance of ending critical race theory and which novels to ban. Mom says nothing, just nods.

It comes too fast. You choke. But why though? After seventeen years in the classroom, why do you still lack the ability to think on your feet, debate, retort, speak articulately through panic? How can you be at ease with children but not adults?

Is it even a lack of ability? Or just the way elementary teachers are expected to be? Angels of the public sector. In old-timey stories, the teacher always had a bottle of booze in her desk drawer, but IRL you don’t even put the wine in the grocery cart first. You have to get all your produce and boxed stuff, then double-back and hide a bottle under the clementines. Angels don’t imbibe.

Or perhaps you were always this way? Born shy. Or the pandemic did it? Perhaps the unprecedented number of hours humanity spends with computer screens has made us reality-resistant. Recently in conversations, you’ve had to remind yourself not only can you see them, they can also see you. Now you’re smiling again, you dummy.

You stop listening to ponder whether you are merely a bag of rote information, paid to fart facts at children, a middle-aged know-nothing feigning wisdom. This is the version of yourself which just then feels most true. The anxiety has you swirling. You slump in your seat. You pick a cuticle. Your face must have gone red, there’s a heat to it.

As the boy’s father opines about gender-neutral restrooms, Mom strolls the classroom. What’s she looking for? Who knows. Nothing in her expression reminds you of the expressions seventeen years of parents have worn. This mom expresses ice. She has a cell phone in her chest pocket with the camera lens pointed out. At first you wonder, and then you feel sure the meeting is being recorded. This is the family—it comes back to you now—the fourth-grade teacher grabbed your arm about at the staff meeting. Litigious had been the word she’d used. You’d forgotten, figuring nobody sues an angel. But people do sue angels. And try to get them fired.

Then the mom returns to her plastic chair and the pair of them tag-team you a while. 

Dad allows Mom to interject, but every time you open your mouth they rush into more words and you just shut it again. You have stayed late at school often enough to know you are not entirely alone. Elmer, the shiny-headed, classic-rock-humming custodian, rolls in every afternoon at 4:30. His interruption will be enough to pause their drivel. You make a plan to ask Elmer about his wife, if she’s feeling better or if he took her in. Once he gets to talking you can look at the clock, gasp, make up something about obligations. This is the polite way to get out.

Then there’s a contemplative moment afterward in which you have been let go from your teaching position, had your certification revoked, been foreclosed on. You’re in a rest area somewhere in America, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. 

But 4:30 comes and goes, then 4:40, 4:45, 4:50. On a Friday evening, every elementary school in America is a wasteland of construction paper scraps and uncapped glue sticks. But Elmer’s cart cannot be heard in your hall. You gaze morosely at your doorway, wearing a frozen smile. 

So Elmer must have taken his wife in. The district must have called a sub. The sub must have started in Primary. So you aren’t entirely alone with these parents. Somewhere out there, someone is dust-mopping under a Kindergarten desk. Might as well be dust-mopping the moon.

And what happened to Christopher Columbus. Did COVID-19 kill him too? After the pandemic, we have Indigenous People’s Day. 

You sit there, enduring the verbal barrage, wondering if what you are experiencing is a microcosm of a larger national strategy. What awful deals were made among the awfulest of Congress? Did the military itself deploy them, a mini-contingent of two, Operation Teacher-Takedown, with instructions to separate you from your job? You take a mental journey to the land of Worst Case Scenario. You imagine kicking back your chair. It’s a roller chair, so it just rolls. You imagine screaming invectives, waving your hands above your head. You imagine chasing them out the door. The look on their faces! The fear! This is the best part of the fantasy.

Then there’s a contemplative moment afterward in which you have been let go from your teaching position, had your certification revoked, been foreclosed on. You’re in a rest area somewhere in America, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. 

You don’t know this is what would happen. Maybe they’d just reassign you to a new classroom. But the nothing-left-to-lose brand of freedom is alluring. And it’s your fantasy, so whatever. 

Finally, finally, they have kids to feed, so they stand to go. You stand. You walk them to the front door so you know they are out of the building, and you open the door for them in the vestibule and stand there, smiling and saying goodbye. You desperately want to go home, peel off your nylons, shower, cry in bed. But you can’t risk appearing in the parking lot before they’ve driven off, so you return to your desk and type a shaky email to your principal, as she always knows what to do. You are beginning to cry already. You can’t help it. 

Your email says, I need to talk to you about a parent conversation I just had.

It’s well past five. You don’t want to seem alarming. So you type a cheery addition, Monday = no worries. You cap it with a sideways smiley and close the laptop.

Then you rage-sob the whole drive home.

Your phone rings after dinner, it’s your principal. You had a feeling she’d call before Monday.

You blubber the whole story in an ugly rush. Your principal coos, sympathetic. You hear her say she’s taking this in the other room. Squee-click, a door closes. “I should have warned you about this family,” your principal says. “I’m so, so sorry. I meant to in August, but I forgot.”

There is only one thing all the moms in your class have in common, and that is you. You become a homebody. You don’t even grocery shop anymore. 

You like your principal. You wonder if she’s a bit drunk. Her voice sounds very emphatic. “That’s okay,” you say. You mean it. As a waitress, when you had gotten behind/overwhelmed, all you needed was to say In the weeds, and help would come from fellow waitstaff, the hostess, busser, manager, anyone and everyone, without hesitation. You’d loved the teamwork. 

As a teacher, you have been “in the weeds” every day for seventeen years, and you have never once dared to ask for help, because it’s the system. Every teacher, every administrator, support staff, even the custodians, all of them are in the weeds every day. And how selfish to ask for help when everyone around you is also drowning. 

But is there a union? Yes. Once on the workroom counter you came across a copy of a letter a coworker had written to the district rep, complaining about workload versus planning time. So you know the teacher’s union is more than just a line differentiating your gross pay from your take-home. It does exist. Theoretically, it helps. Have you tried contacting them? No you haven’t.

So you talk for a while. You don’t mind that your principal forgot. She has a lot to remember. Even more than you. Your principal’s voice is a hug. She says it’s not only your right but actually your responsibility to inform a person when what they’re saying is making you uncomfortable. Reschedule difficult meetings for when others can be present. You have the right to walk away. 

Your tears dry. She makes you promise to call back if you want to talk more, so you agree and afterward you feel better. It’s the cleaned-out, cried-out feeling. Also, now you are smart enough to never again agree to a Friday meeting when (to quote your wonderful principal) Everyone knows Fridays are for relaxing.

•

Then it’s October, and all of the fifth-grade classes at your school have an economics event approaching. They’ll be citizens participating in a model city. Every student has been assigned a business or civic group. There is a festive air as students move from their own classrooms into other classrooms in order to meet with their groups. On this day, they’re creating ads for the newspaper. As an example, you make up an off-the-cuff ad which candidate Marnie (really a student assigned the role of mayoral candidate) might write with her city hall group. 

Marnie! Marnie! She’ll be great! A friend of working families. The best mayor for our city.

Your instructions plus example takes less than two minutes, after which the students get started.

But the next morning, just before the bell, another fifth grade teacher appears. She has an email on her phone from one of her student’s moms. It’s accusing you of instructing the fifth graders to support the current re-election campaign of US Senator Patty Murray.

Murray, Marnie. You eyeroll and explain the mix-up to your coworker. Uh-huh, she says.

The mom’s email goes on. If this district continues to indoctrinate youth, I will take action. I do not give consent for (your first and last name) to instruct my child again. I’m aware of other parent complaints against (your first and last name) and I do not understand why (your first and last name) is permitted to continue teaching.

So you become quakey/infuriated all over again, worse even than the first time, because being misquoted sucks, but also because the other teacher is unsympathetic, focusing on the logistics of the student switching groups, then droning on about the volunteering this mom has done in her own class, how this comes as a surprise, not seeming to notice it’s 9:00, time for students.

So October sucks. Is it normal for teachers to experience dread when overhearing kids talk about upcoming birthday parties? This year for you it is. Imagining bevies of moms gabbing in doorways, whispering in the front walks, volume dropping to share the worst of the worst. In your mind they clump and bow like players before the game. Their hands are filled with car keys, cell phones, Starbucks cups. There is only one thing all the moms in your class have in common, and that is you. You become a homebody. You don’t even grocery shop anymore. 

Then there’s the fifth-grade trip to The Washington State History Museum, which of course the Patty Murray mom signs up to chaperone. For the most part, your student group and her group do not cross paths, except in the C.A. Weyerhaeuser Natural Resources Wing, where she is possibly shooting you dagger eyes, but you can’t tell under the bright/dark halogen lighting. At least your military parents aren’t chaperoning.

•

So you stew through November, the holiday break and January, venting whenever possible to your friendlier coworkers, but for the most part telling nobody. You have no real friends. You’ve never had friends. Who has friends? You live in the post-pandemic friendship pandemic. Friends do not exist in your world. 

You keep thinking back to your teacher certification program, when one of the soon-to-be elementary teachers, a man, swatted a slow-to-move child on the butt and the UW expelled him.

I’ve been a dad for a decade, your classmate had said the last time you saw him. You’ll never forget. You’d run into him at the Subway by campus. He’d been dining in, by himself, looking morose. It’s a habit from when my own kids move slow.

You’d believed him, of course. All your classmates had. But then you’d blabbed about it to someone later at a bar. She’d sighed, ehh, and twisted her glass, so even before she spoke you knew she wasn’t going to agree. Why defend him? Are you sure he’s not a predator? Be grateful to the UW administration for preventing abuse.

And nothing works to say to that. Not, He seemed like a nice guy. Nor, He had kids of his own. Because yes, why defend someone who’s more or less a stranger? And ever since, you’ve tread lightly, thinking maybe that’s what we’ve come to in this country, (maybe that’s what we had already come to seventeen years ago.) Guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.

So you feel pretty low, ruminating on all this. 

But also not. As your forties are apparently going to be synonymous with the pandemic and post-pandemic era, there’s no parceling out if it’s biological or cultural, but in the past few weeks and months have you feeling IDGAF! 

As in, I Don’t Give An F! 

What led you to this grim dictum? The planet is in death throes. People are living in cars. You keep stumbling upon the phrase “another world war” in the media. Your teaching career has become a game of telephone, where you say something to a person, who tells it to another person, who tells it to another. And it is just hilarious, boy it’s hilarious, to hear what comes out the other side.

Your fingers act before your brain, clicking over to your social media community page. There it is. 

During your own childhood, kids represented hope, not property. I believe the children are our future, Whitney Houston sang in 1986. Teach them well and let them lead the way. 

Today parents just don’t understand.

But of course you still, in some ways, do give an F. Behind the wheel, regarding the academic and social-emotional growth of your students, when it comes to personal hygiene. About all that you definitely do give an F. 

But a lot of times you really don’t. You finally, finally, no longer give an F.

Case in point, despite blubbering to the principal in September, you’re over it now. This manifests in your daily read-alouds. This year, every single title you select has been a “frequently challenged” banned book. You are yelling “Come and Take it” via A Wrinkle in Time. 

The number of parents opting kids out of your read-alouds has reached a high of three. Three represents one-eighth of your twenty-four. There they are in the hallway, not reading their parent-supplied biographies of Abraham Lincoln. Your previous high had been zero. Luckily you don’t give an F.

•

Then it’s February, Black History Month. Your unit culminates in an activity where each student selects the name of an historical figure to research. Each student organizes five “character clues” from general to specific. They take turns presenting while classmates guess the historical figure. This is one of your annual activities. It’s fun.

The next week the scored papers go home. You’re in the shower when your phone rings.

The principal’s voicemail is chilling: Check your email. Call me when you’re ready.

The email includes a screenshot your principal was just sent. It’s a social media post, showing the boy with the military parents. He’s holding his character clue sheet.

1.   I am a strong, brave girl.
2.   I am a p

It cuts off there. He’s got the paper at an angle. But you remember it. I am a pioneer of school integration. You’d praised his use of pioneer. A pioneer is exactly what Ruby Bridges was.

Mom’s words are a white-hot blaze across the top. MY! SON! IS! NOT! A! GIRL! 

Your fingers act before your brain, clicking over to your social media community page. There it is. You gobble down half-digested comments, jabbing at each Read More, scanning for your name. What a dinosaur you are for believing the communication happened at birthday parties, not digitally. Still, you are thinking as bad as this is, as embarrassing and infuriating, at least if your name isn’t posted, if there is no personally identifying information, who gives an F. Why give an F? Maybe you can find a way to not give an F.

Then your principal calls, because it’s been a few minutes and you haven’t called back. 

Are you okay? she asks. 

You don’t answer, because what kind of question is that? You wonder whether you ought to make an effort to be polite, given how nice she’s been, given she’s your boss. Then you see it.