I need me

Today, I am in my classroom and I am thinking about children and adults alike, who don't know how to love themselves.  They get into relationships that aren't healthy where they are used to make others feel good, but they themselves come out suicidal.  They hurt themselves, they cut themselves, they torture themselves because they have no self esteem and no self worth.  Their relationships with people mean more to them than they do themselves.  I liken this person to the person for which everyone has value accept them.  I pray for their strength.  I am acutely aware that, at the end of the day, I am the only person I have left.  I need me.  I need me to be whole and healthy and well.  I can't let you destroy me because I may be all I have left.  When you get through destroying me, you still have you.  You can repent, get yourself together and live another whole life after you destroy me, but not I.  I have to survive.  I will survive. I ...................survived.

Love again

It is that time of the year.  I am back at work facing another bunch of students and we have just prayed.  Paint has been on the walls and I am wearing my teacher clothes.  For some, this is just a job in the midst of a lot of jobs they have had.  It is a paycheck.  For me, there is so much more.  I feel like I am their mother.  I spend five hours a day making sure they are safe and that they are educated.  Their parents trust me to love their children like they love their children or better.  I have never been able to be selfish enough to refuse to love someone.  I have loved many who now don't love me back.  When I think back on it.  I didn't lose anything by loving.  When you truly love someone, you don't lose, you gain.  Well, it's time to go love again.

Won by a landslide

Sitting here at the end of my summer session, I am a teacher, I have had some time to reflect on my mother.  I have written before that she was not the best mother.  My mother had internal struggles that led to her mothering skills being a tad bit compromised.  Where I work, there are some strange examples of mothers all of which were affected by something in their lives that made them bad mothers.  As a matter of fact, some were horrible mothers.  That is when I had a Eureka moment.  I have always compared my mother to good mothers.  When I did, she did not even compare.  She was a bad mother.  When I compared her to bad mothers, she won by a landslide.  If you are comparing apples to apples, a bad apple is really bad.  An apple doesn't stand a chance being compared to oranges.  My mother should have never been compared to women who weren't abused, weren't abandoned and weren't neglected.  My mother often said that she was a poor "throwed away" child.  If you compare her to Claire Huxtable, she was a miserable failure.  When I compared her to the woman who was sexually abused who then molested her children, abandoned her children and suffocated them in hot ovens, my mother won, like I said, by a landslide.  Now, I know what the old folks always told me.  She did the best she could.  She wasn't an apple, she was an orange and if compared to oranges, she did pretty darn good.