Back In the Classroom

A return to Lutheran education brough me normalcy, but not the healing I needed

Photo by MChe Lee on Unsplash

Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.

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The previous chapter

The Growing Loneliness

And now

Months before that first faculty meeting, I had wanted this. I wanted my own classroom again. I wanted to regularly meet with high school colleagues. I wanted the return of both routine in my day and regularity in my paycheck.

But this had all happened so fast.

One moment I was fearfully looking at our family finances, trying to decide how we were going to make it all work and terrified to return to the unpredictable world of substitute teaching. The next I was trying to figure out a regular schedule that would have me running from teaching at the high school in the morning to teaching a college class some afternoons, helping in a dual credit classroom at another high school other afternoons, and then rushing to make it to my graduate school classes once that was all finished. And somewhere in all of that, I still had to be a mom to two small children who depended on me for everything. My newborn was less than two months old and wasn’t sleeping through the night. My toddler was keeping us running. Oh, and my son was successfully breastfeeding, which I wanted to keep going for as long as I could.

Our child care situation was also new. With my previous babysitter moving because her husband had finally finished seminary, I had to find a new arrangement. Even with the increase in income, the Lutheran church daycare right by our house was still out of the question. I had appreciated having an in-home daycare situation for the past year and started looking online for available caretakers. We still had few connections in Fort Wayne, and even fewer who could help recommend women looking to babysit in their home. Our lack of community wasn’t just painfully lonely, it was also preventing us from finding the resources we desperately needed for our family to thrive.

I finally searched on Care.com to find a new babysitter in an in-home situation who could take both a toddler and an infant and still be affordable. It was a tall order, and I still wasn’t 100% comfortable with it once we found a woman who fit the bill. She was nice enough, she was a grandmother, so I knew she had experience with little ones, and she offered us a price we couldn’t refuse. Between my part-time pay at the high school and my TA pay at the college, we would be slightly better off than we had been for the past 12 months, even with the need to pay for an infant in addition to a toddler for daycare.¹

But I never felt like this could be a long-term solution to our childcare needs. I was willing to give it a try, but I nervously dropped off my infant and toddler for their first day, unsure I was making the right decision. For the first time in working motherhood, I was leaving my children with a complete stranger. I had no roundabout connections with person who would be watching my babies during most of their waking hours, five days a week. I knew that this change was necessary for our family for a lot of reasons, but I still felt more guilt than ever before as I drove away to the high school for my first day of meetings.

Then I prepared to meet my new colleagues.

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We Move to Fort Wayne

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From the beginning, it was clear God had opened a door and I walked right through it.

The faculty was bigger than at my previous two schools, but student enrollment was also twice as big as my previous two schools combined. Several of the women on the staff were working mothers with kids the same age as mine or a little bit older. When I expressed concern about finding a safe place where I could privately pump so I could continue breastfeeding, the chemistry teacher immediately offered me the science office/closet with a couch, giving me both comfort and privacy for the 15 to 20 minutes I would need each day to pump and eat lunch before driving the half-mile to the college campus where I would spend my afternoons.