A Tragic Blessing

I'm not really sure how I feel about what I'm about to write on...

In my many years of teaching children, I've seen a lot of different things -- good and bad. I've seen very loving families, very distant families, very dysfunctional families, and families wrought with heartache and families gushing with good fortune. Life tends to hit each of us differently for different reasons, and I do think for whatever reason, we grow from the lessons that are plopped in our laps--be it growth in a positive or negative direction in life.

Several years ago I taught a little boy who was extremely overweight, poor poor self esteem, lacking tremendously in academic smarts (primarily due to his low self esteem), yet an extremely good baseball player. His younger sister wasn't far off from him, although seemed to fit into the 'norm' of the school a bit better than he did.

The home life of this little boy was rather disturbing from my perspective. The school was quite familiar with the chaos that resided behind their closed doors. The mother tended the children with their schoolwork primarily--aiding in homework and conferences and after school activities. The father's main focus seemed to be in picking the children up from school and yelling out belligerent comments out the car window about how the school provided lousy education for his child and how our demands to educate his son (never gave the daughter much thought) were misguided because said son was going to be a pro baseball player and that's all there was to it--who needs education when there's pro baseball?

I hit a milestone with the boy that year. It had been two years since the children has first learned cursive writing, but the child refused to write in anything but print. Now truthfully, print or cursive, work is work. Typically in grade school though, penmanship is something that is worked on and therefore was part of my regular curriculum. I never saw this child write in cursive until mid year. I actually didn't think he knew how given how resistant he was toward it. Sadly, he wrote in print because his mother couldn't write in cursive. The child's print was horrendous and yet his cursive was immaculate! By mid year, I did have him writing beautiful cursive and feeling ~great~ about it. But like so many things in life, balance is always there. The good of his cursive brought about balancing bad-- misfortune at home.

In addition to attending conferences and maintaining the house and making the children's lunches and so on and so forth, the mother of this boy was also expected to make sure the children's grades were passing. Both children struggled tremendously, and this often led the mother to do the children's work for them. Unfortunately, not only could the mother not write in cursive, but she herself had trouble obtaining passing grades for her son and daughter. When the children didn't perform well, to the point of it affecting baseball plans ie having to stay after school to redo assignments, tutoring, etc., the father would become irate.

The irate head of the house, soaked and saturated with intoxication, would hollar at the school, belittle the teachers, yell at his children, beat his wife (after all she deserved it for not making the children's grades better, right?[intense sarcasm]),...he even keyed the principal's car.

As an educator, you do what you can to protect and help the children you teach that are in situations such as this. And quite often there is little you can do beyond listening to the children when they come to you and providing a shoulder for them to lean on. It's truly disheartening.

News came to me today about this family. Some years have passed, and I've not kept up with their details. The father passed away last week. Liver and Kidney failure. He drank like a sieve, so it really didn't surprise me. But news such as this does leave me wondering with a sense of sadness. What does the family feel? While this man was such a tyrant, he was still a father...a husband. Do the children and the mother feel a sense of relief? Do they mourn with deep sorrow? Does the wife wake up each morning now and think she's free from the mental and physical abuse she's been enduring? Does she wake up looking at the empty side of the bed where her husband used to sleep and weep for him? Do the children feel a sense of burden off their shoulders--no longer do they need to feel the need to protect their mother or worry that they will be hit or that their father will come home drunk yet again? Do they feel sad sitting at the dinner table with one less place setting? I wonder.