Miracles
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By Maria Rachel Hooley, 43; Oklahoma
I am the mother of a child neither I nor the world has ever seen. Many years ago, during her eleventh week of life, I wrote her out of my own life by choosing to have an abortion. Not many of those years have passed without thought of her, and, two children later, she remains my first child. Most of my life has been spent either pushing the memories away or trying to make my life add up to something worthy of those eleven weeks. Perhaps this is the reason God sent me into teaching high school kids. The principal would say I teach Language Arts, but I would hope I teach more than that. I would hope I teach love, tolerance, and respect. The latter, to me, are far more important than the former. Up until now, I would have said that I had been through high school once and learned what I was supposed to learn. I am a teacher, after all, not a student. Then I met Amy —a ninth-grader who despised me even more than she despised English, and if you know anything about high school kids, you can imagine how much animosity that adds up to. There'’s a reason the teachers that end up as victims in mystery books are English teachers. She hated the way I taught, the way I graded, and even the way I patiently refused to hate her back. She couldn’t understand that. She was used to people —especially teachers —hating her. She tried diligently to change my opinion of her. It started with talking when she should'n’t have. She copied published stories instead of writing her own. She whispered comments about me to other students. Time and again, I disciplined her and then acted as if she’d done nothing worthy of anger. Finally, she publicly accused me of altering her grades based on my dislike for her. The principal promptly assigned her two weeks of in-house suspension, which is really tough for the kids to take. Work is the only release from boredom, and the students hate to work all day. Two weeks of work seemed insufferable to Amy, and she begged me to change the punishment to something else. Anything else. We made a deal. For a month, she would lose half of her lunch time to stay in my room and work on the assignments I gave her. If her attitude resumed its prior course, she would go to in-house. At any time, I could send her to in-house. I didn’t know if she'’d be able to change because she resented me so much. Yet, day by day, I watched her become a quiet and respectful student, showing me a side of her I could'n’t have imagined. We began to explore mutual respect, and even as things settled into a pleasant routine, both of our lives were about to change. About a week after our confrontation, she found out she was pregnant. Hours later, the whole school knew. At times, I wondered if, in my hurry to end her behavior problems, I had failed her by not realizing the true cause of her frustration. How long had she feared being pregnant before that fear had been confirmed? Often I wished I could tell her something to ease her pain. I wished I could tell her that she was not alone and that I had been in her place once, and that I had chosen the “easier” and less humiliating choice. Weeks went by and I watched Amy back away from her peers, guarding herself against the cruelty of both students and teachers who never considered how much courage it must have taken for that fifteen year-old to let the world know she had made a mistake. How many of those girls who were laughing at her had been pregnant and taken the same route as I had? Was that what society truly thought better? Was she so much worse because she hadn’t made the second mistake? For the rest of the school year, we developed a quiet trust, and all that summer I worried about her, knowing how slim the chances were that she would return to school. A week into the first term she still hadn’t shown up. I was frantic. Then one day she appeared in my doorway and said, in her soft voice, "“Hello.”" I know my face must have glowed as I simply said, "“I am so glad to see you. I’'ve really missed you.”" Tears pricked my eyes and I blinked them away. She looked doubtful, incredulous, amazed. But it was true. I had missed her. All summer I thought about the parallels between my situation at fourteen and hers at fifteen. I also thought about the differences. Twice she had taught me the meaning of courage. The first time came when she approached me and asked for a gentler punishment than in-house. How much nerve had it taken to ask someone she truly thought hated her for a kindness she really didn’t expect to be given? Then secondly, when she made the choice to keep the baby— a choice I had not been brave enough to make. She had let everyone in the world see just how remarkable she was, but even so, some people mocked her. Others degraded her. Still, those who really know the price she had paid believed in her. Not long after she returned to school, she asked me to be her homebound teacher. Again, she asked me for kindness, and I felt blessed. She could’'ve chosen any other teacher, and yet she picked me, the one she believed so strongly to have hated her. I visited her three times a week, and we often joked about the year before when she almost failed my class. She said she was planning to go to college, and was thinking about becoming a Spanish/English teacher or maybe even a doctor. When she worked on her assignments, she sometimes called herself stupid and I corrected her. That is the only thing she ever said to me that I refused to hear. After all, she has one of the wisest hearts I’ve ever known, and if the heart is wise, how can the rest be any less? She wanted to go to college. I wanted that for her more than anything. After Amy had given birth, I visited her in the hospital and she asked me to hold her son, a miracle named Anthony. For a moment, I simply stared at her baby and ached over the choice I had made, a choice I knew I could never change. I picked him up and felt the warmth of his innocent beauty rush through me. I stared at his thick black hair and long eyelashes. I placed my finger in his palm and he gripped it tightly, just as his mother had held onto him even in his first months of life. And then he yawned. Amy and I both laughed, and, at that moment, I wished I could have told her how strong she truly was and how greatly I admired her for all she was and all she would become. I once believed my choice was a mistake, but Amy taught me that it’s only a mistake if I refuse to learn from it. And I have learned many times over the years. I had thought I had learned all I needed to know, but I realized that as teachers, we come to our students with bruises and cuts life has drawn upon our hearts. We expect God to heal us in a way that is similar to the way we have been wounded, but sometimes the only way to heal ourselves is to heal another person. Amy was the first child I had the chance to help and nurture during what, for a while, seemed such a dark time. Thankfully, she will not be the last. I used to wonder what name would'’ve suited the little girl I still miss. Now I know. Amy will never know just how much hope she gave the teacher she thought hated her. Some miracles just take longer than others.
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