During the last week of my 18-year career, someone at my place of work calls me a motherfucker. This person is prone to yelling and throwing chairs if things don’t go his way. And approaching people without instigation and giving them the middle finger.
He’s four years old.
The morning of the day Darnay (not his real name) calls me an expletive motherfucker, I’m relying on the upcoming summer break for inspiration. The pandemic is almost behind us. Maybe these children will see a public beach for the first time. I read a story about being safe in the water to my 15 students. These kids are here because Montgomery County, Maryland, offers public preschool to low-income and unhoused families. Everyone qualifies for a free lunch. I’ve had a rotating roster of assistants all year. My current assistant sits on a chair behind Darnay rubbing his back. She’s hoping what I’m hoping. That he won’t stand up and do jumping jacks in the center of the circle. That he won’t grab the book from my hands or poke another child in the ribs.
I turn the pages, one eye on the book. I sit on the edge of the rocker. I’m ready to pounce, to redirect Darnay from throwing the toy car in the air.
I’m in the final chapter of my career. Because my husband worked in the foreign service, our family lived—and I taught—in other countries. Now, at 58 years old and living in Maryland, I’ve decided I can teach again, if only part-time. I can do four hours a day, I told myself. I had one more year before we would move again, and then I’d be done. I told myself, I can do one more year.
~~~~~
I almost didn't make it past the first day. Three special needs children who are placed in my room throw everything they touch. Every moment of the day I wait for another projectile to whiz across the room, my body ready to intercept a sharp object before it hits a child’s head. Large plastic trucks hurl through the air. Open canisters of toy bears sail across the room along with magnetic letters, train tracks, beads flying in every direction and rolling across the floor. Hard-cover books land inches from three and four-year-old faces. I’m ready at all times to leap across the floor to prevent someone from getting hurt. I don’t always succeed. One kid pours a carton of milk over another kid’s lunch, then gets on top of the table and jumps up and down. They hit each other. They hit me. The nonverbal child latches onto the handles of the lunch cart and runs with it around the tables while my assistant and I race after him. Chairs are thrown and not by me, even though I want to throw one through the window and run.
It’s a circus-in-the-round and I don’t know where to turn. My assistant leaves the room in tears on the second day. By Thanksgiving, she leaves and never comes back. My response is to feel angry at the system, but there’s no one to blame unless I want to blame the universe. Any child who doesn’t have an Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, is put wherever there’s space. For those with special needs, it can take months of observations by school psychologists, counselors, and social workers—if the parent agrees—before the child is placed in a classroom with fewer children and more one-on-one attention. Sometimes the children are never moved and the teacher must figure it out on her own.
I’m a general ed teacher not a special ed teacher, and I didn’t know how to deal with these children’s needs all at once. One girl, a child who has a scratch mark etched into her cheek by one of her peers, arrives at school sobbing every day that fall because she’s afraid to enter the room. I know how she feels.
My days begin and end with my own whimpers. There are too many needs. I cannot do this. How am I supposed to address these needs?
I believe I have the answer inside me but I forget, or looking for it seems like too much work, or I ignore it because I’m afraid. Some nights I’m awake for hours before my brain shuts off. Around the second week of school, I understand this isn’t sustainable. I can’t go on like this. The key to unlocking the mess is to pay attention to them, I tell myself. My mantra becomes Pay attention. Pay attention. I hold on to those words like a baby blanket. You need to find a way to reach them.
I lie awake in the early morning with the sheets pulled up to my chin and tell myself I’ve heard those words before, and I know where. Not just once, but multiple times. Those were my words, directed at my son’s teachers years ago. “You need to figure it out,” I remember demanding of them. “It’s your job to reach him.” And I remember my boy’s face, wondering what to do when the teacher handed out the paper, lost, well before the day he was diagnosed with ADHD.
Shit, I tell myself, my blanket curled around me, It’s my job to reach them.
But still, I sit in my car in the school parking lot at the end of a day in September and text my husband, “I can’t go back in there.”
He texts back, “You don’t have to. You can quit. We’ll manage.”
I stare out the window. I let that idea slide into my body for a sec. I can walk away. I’d never ended a contract before, and I know, even as I enjoy the ease of that thought, that I can’t. I don’t want to do that to myself, or to those kids. This is their first classroom. What would that teach them, if their teacher gave up? I’ve made a commitment and I’m not going to end my career with me walking out. I buckle up and focus on what I know I have to do. I have to accept the classroom I’ve been given. I have to accept these children. I’m resolute in my decision—I’ll finish this school year no matter what happens.
Each morning I head down the hallway towards the school entrance to collect them, an ache in my belly. I see their little faces peeking through the narrow window, the urgency of their waving pulling me forward. I open the door to a cannonball of energy and flailing limbs and moving parts and little arms clutching my waist. Maybe it’s their smiles that start to give me courage.
Mostly we play. Centers of blocks, playdough, paint, dress-up allow them choices. I turn on quiet music and sometimes calm descends like floating bubbles as the children move inside their interior worlds of play. I’m squishing pink playdough between my fingers one afternoon when a piercing sound bursts through the air. The boy who’s on steroids due to an autoimmune disorder kicks the classroom door and yells, “I want to go to the doctor!” the heel of his foot slamming into the wooden doorframe. The medicine he’s on causes aggression and weight gain. He’s too large for his age.
I leave the playdough table and take his hand and say, “OK,” and he follows me to the dress-up area and I find the doctor’s costume. I slip the white jacket on him and he stretches the head mirror with the black elastic band around his forehead. “Hello, doctor,” I say, and he throws his head back and explodes with laughter, his eyes hidden in the fleshy creases of his laugh.
I sit on the rug and lean against the wall and tell him I need a shot. He pokes around in the jumble of clothes and finds the plastic needle. He holds my arm in his pudgy fingers and says, “Don’t be scared,” and for a few minutes, under his care, I’m not.
~~~~~
The boy who ran around the room with the lunch cart is transferred out of the classroom mid- year making room for Darnay to fill the vacant slot. I gather my survival strategies—stickers, firmness, positive reinforcements. Will I walk out alive? Will my students? Every day it’s Darnay versus me. His look says, “I can splash water at the sink and you can’t stop me. I can throw my apple core on the floor and give the quiet kid the finger. I’m in charge now, not you, Mrs. Landor.”
The four-year-old starts running the shit-show.
I forget to redirect and I grab a red marker out of his hand because he’s scribbling all over the tabletop with his eyes fixed on me. When I tell him to wipe up the mess with wet paper towels, he does. One point for me. I give him back his marker.
Most of Darnay’s drawings look the same—jabs and sharp angles slashed with a grip so tough red marks are left on the surface of the table like he’s bleeding out. If he doesn’t get the red-handled scissors, the red paper, the red marker, the red paint, the red tissue paper, the red crayon, it’s all over.
I feel guilty about grabbing the marker instead of responding calmly. If I don’t ignore his behavior, he’ll win. I’ll end up like the patient in the Operation game—immovable, flat on my back, all my body parts blinking red. But when he’s destroying the tabletop, hurting another child, disrupting the stories and songs—then what? I can’t ignore everything. When he wraps his hands around another child’s neck, the child’s hands dangling by his side, his eyes roving the room looking for help, I knock over chairs to get to him. Later, I wonder why the child didn’t react, but I get that it’s not easy to stand up to a bully.
Darnay is chomping on a chicken nugget during lunch, sitting at a table with the other kids, when he says, “I love you Mrs. Landor! I love you and I love my mom.”
“I love you, too,” I say. “I love you all!” I say to the children. A chorus of “I love you!” spills across the room from the other children.
But I’m wary of Darnay’s love. A poorly chosen word, an exasperated sigh from me could create a flash flood. We’ll all be drowning in his anger if I make the wrong move. If Darnay doesn’t get to be at the front of the line holding my hand when we walk to the gym or music or art or the library or recess or the bus, he'll plop down in the hallway and refuse to budge, run away and hide, or tell me he hates me. So I let him walk in the front and hold my hand even though 14 other kids behind me want to walk in the front and hold my hand, too. While I hold a puppet in my lap and lead my students in singing the ABC song, Darnay wanders around the room looking for a toy to pick up, or rummages in the playdough area. I try to redirect him—“Come sing with us!”—but if I try too hard, if I push it, he'll start tipping over all the chairs. Ignore, I tell myself. I turn to the students in front of me, their eager faces waiting for my next move. I glance at the clock. Stop it. It’s too early to hope the day is almost over.
I’m on my knees building blocks with him, when he covers his eyes with his hands and tells me he stole the red train. I know right away what train he’s talking about. It’s the one he wrestles from other kids’ hands if they get to it first. “Oh,” I say. I’m silent, working it out. I try this: “Well, the good thing is that you can make a good choice and bring it back.” He adds another block to our tower.
That night at home I struggle to decide whether I should text his mom and let her know about the train, or not. When I texted her one afternoon to let her know that he ran from the classroom and hid in the school, she didn’t reply.
In the morning, I text her and tell her he took the red train home with him. She writes back, “Ok.”
Later that morning as Darnay and I hold hands at the front of the line and walk toward the classroom, I look at him and say, “Did you make a good choice and bring back the train?”
“Yeah. It’s in my backpack. My mom yelled at me,” he says, as if to blame me. I’m sorry about that. But I don’t have the answer about how to teach a kid not to steal.
The vice principal comes to my room to show me a list of students on homeless status, to let me know that Darnay’s family is on the list. He’d arrived that morning and said, “I went to the hotel again last night,” like he’s on a vacation. Does he know he doesn’t have a home?
His shoes are on the wrong feet and his laces tied all funky, and I bend down and say, “Who tied these shoes?” and he tells me his eleven-year-old brother did. That his mom wasn’t there. And later he cries because he’s hungry. I ask him if he’s had breakfast and he says no because his brother wouldn’t get the cereal down. I give him some crackers and he gobbles them up. Lunch is an hour away.
I’m in contact with his mom on Remind, an app admin encourages teachers to use to communicate with parents. Sometimes I send her pictures, like one of Darnay holding out a bunch of yellow dandelions, his toothy smile tucked in among the stems. This time I send her a text. “Darnay was crying this morning because he was hungry. He said he didn’t have breakfast.” I don’t want to shame her, but she needs to know. She doesn’t reply, but in future days he arrives at school with a bag of McDonald’s tater tots, or icing around the corners of his mouth from a doughnut.
I ask my sister, a former teacher, if she has any ideas about how to handle Darnay. She says, “Make him the helper!”
“But what about the other kids? Shouldn’t they get to be the helper, too?”
“Not every child has the same needs,” she says.
When I ask Darnay if he can be my helper he turns to me, alert. I need help flipping the pages of the story, passing out the lunch, propping open the door, and passing out the paper. All day long I need his help. This kid was born to help. His help begins to help me recognize that what he’s wanted all along is to feel needed and to be seen. He’s never not at my side. He’s my little helper and we will survive another day.
But my instincts aren’t always to call in for help. I’m angry when he messes with another kid’s puzzle, when he knocks down a tower a girl worked hard at building, or pushes a boy out of the way so he can be first in line. Those are the times I start thinking about how unfair it is to the other children. I’ll let someone else be the helper and Darnay starts to cry and runs from the circle and says he hates me and knocks over all the chairs. I wonder, as I attempt to stifle my rage, Whose anger am I really dealing with here?
I have a friend who used to teach preschool who told me once that when he saw a child who was upset he’d say, “It looks like you need a hug. Do you want a hug?” I practice those words, even if I’m angry and I don’t want to say them. Sometimes it feels like I’m acting a role when I force myself to say them anyway, but they soften me. And when Darnay accepts a hug and wraps his arms around my waist and buries his wet face against me and I squeeze, I know then that I’m not acting. I know then we’re both on the same team.
~~~~~
Near the end of the school year, after reading the students the story about a day at the beach, I demonstrate how to draw a picture of a seaside adventure: waves, sun, stick figures swimming. I don’t know if any of them have ever been to the beach. It’s hard to know what to believe when I ask them questions. Sometimes they say things I know aren’t true, like, “I went to Disneyland yesterday!” Not because they are lying, but because they are dreaming.
I give them paper and markers and they get to drawing. As I approach Darnay’s table he says, “I drew a ghost.” I tilt my head to look at the image floating sideways on the cusp of red waves. “It’s my dad. He’s a ghost cuz he died.”
I kneel by his chair. I know about his dad. Darnay had sat on my lap as I read him a story about a family and we turned the pages together. He’d looked up at my face, our cheeks nearly touching, and said, “My dad’s dead.” It’s the moment I realized why giving him stickers never works. This kid has already lost so much more than what he can ever earn back by getting stickers. He knows this. I thought about his mom, raising four kids alone. Working two jobs. Nothing like the pictures in the storybook. And now as I crouch near him, I sense an opening where there wasn’t one before.
“How did your dad die?” I ask.
“He ate a banana peel,” he says.
“Hmm,” I say, nodding. “What do you remember about him?”
“He had a hat and he wore gold shoes,” he says.
“I bet your dad loved you.”
“Yep.”
I put my hand on his chest. I don’t know what to say, but words tumble out of my mouth anyway. “That’s what you can keep inside of you. You’ll always have that. You’ll always know that your dad loved you.” He nods, hunches over his drawing.
Later, I describe Darnay to another teacher, telling her he loves the color red. “And no wonder,” I say. “Red is anger.”
“Yeah,” she says, “and it’s also love.”
~~~~~
We have two scooters in the outside play area, and during recess Darnay is the first to dash to one of them. A girl runs to the other scooter. This sets off a high-pitched wail from a new student, Ivan, a boy with autism. As he cries, I try to hug him, which he sometimes likes, and I tell him that Darnay got the scooter first. But he doesn’t accept this, and he begins to shake because he’s crying so hard. He kicks off his shoes.
He slumps on a wall as I tie his shoes. The girl with the other scooter jumps off it and props it against the wall for him. It’s the same as the other scooter, but he doesn’t want this one. He wants the one Darnay is riding. He flings his head back. His wails ricochet off the courtyard walls.
Darnay is no longer riding the scooter but dragging it across the lawn, looking over at Ivan and taunting him. He lugs it to the wooden gazebo and climbs the steps with it, then comes back down, clunking it behind him. Ivan spots him at a distance and rushes to him, lunging onto the handlebars and begins to yank. The tug-of-war intensifies, their bodies close, their faces a gnarled mask of angry eyes and tears, battle cries roaring behind exposed teeth.
“You’re not riding the scooter,” I say to Darnay as I walk over to them. I place my hands over his fists gripping the bars. Ivan is wailing in my ear, snot running from his nose. “If you’re not riding it, you can’t have it,” I tell Darnay.
But his fists are made of iron, gripping the metal bars, and I’m now in a power struggle with a four-year-old. I manage to release his fists which are now flailing at me. I wrap my arms around his body as Ivan runs off with his prize.
“I had it first,” he screams as I try to hug him, to help him calm down. I say, “Darnay, breathe.”
He kicks his feet at me and lets loose, “I hate you, you motherfucker!” He wiggles out of my arms and runs across the lawn where he halts in front of the second scooter, freestanding. And I think to myself, as I’ve done over the past two decades, Did I do the right thing? I don’t know if I solved anything or made it worse. But then I think of the handles with their rough exposed ends of stripped metal, and I feel relief. Maybe I just prevented an eye from being gouged out.
And as the children play in the sunshine I think about how alike we are, Darnay and I. Like Darnay losing his father, I worry about losing my son as he struggles with his mental health, and I struggle with my own anger at his refusing to take his meds. Like Darnay, I think about all that is out of my control. How every morning as I head out the door to my students, I suck in my breath, as if holding my breath will hold together my heart.
I watch Darnay zip around the path of the enclosed play area, glance at the time on my phone, then holler to the kids, “Time to line up!” A chaotic jumble of motion, arms struggling through jacket sleeves and backpack loops, misplaced water bottles, crying, throwing pebbles all somehow settles into a line of children behind me.
Darnay shoves himself to the front even though he’s the last to arrive, and we walk down the hallway holding hands toward the rectangular windows where we spot the yellow bus, and as we push through the doors he looks up at me and says, “Goodbye Mom.”
I smile. “What?” I say. “Mom?” I know what he’s doing. He’s saying he’s sorry. He’s saying I love you. Then he says it again, looking up at me before stepping onto the bus.
“Goodbye Mom.”
I head back inside to clean the room, to prepare for tomorrow, a skip in my step, another day behind me, so near the end.
I’m in countdown mode. I’ve been tally-marking the remaining days with a red marker on the whiteboard because the kids need to know what’s coming. I also need to see the end-day. We chant the tally-marks together.
We sing one more song, standing in a circle holding hands. The children clutch their artwork in their fists and walk with me to the bus. I’m hugging them and saying goodbye to my last group of students. It’s all over. I step onto the bus, secure their straps while they chant sing-songy goodbyes. I stop at Darnay’s seat and look down at him. Our eyes meet. Don’t cry. I force myself to smile. “Have a good summer!” I say.
“I’m not going to see you again?” he asks from his seat, looking up. He looks so small. His feet don’t even touch the floor.
“You’ll have a new teacher! You’ll make new friends,” I say to him. Don’t cry. His lips part. He turns his head to look out the window. I walk to the front of the bus and down the steps, my mind swirling with the realization that this is it.
I want so many things for this kid. Mostly, I want him to lean into love, like I keep trying to do. I stand outside on the sidewalk and wave as the bus pulls away from the curb. Then I open the doors of the school, clean out my classroom, and head towards home.