Last year I wrote about the most influential teacher in my life and how it was a pretty dysfunctional experience and the closest I’ve ever come to spending time in a cult.
This year for Teacher Appreciation Week, I’d like to offer a slightly more positive reflection on someone even more influential on who I am today: my mom.
In job interviews – at least job interviews for teachers – they always start off asking you to talk a little bit about yourself. And I always talk about how there is a legacy of teaching in my family… Great Aunt Francis and her discipline paddle… Aunt Betty and Cousin Anne, both career elementary school teachers in the Richmond suburbs. I also mention my late mother, who was an elementary school teacher and a high school librarian up until she died of cancer in 2005. (I chose my words carefully when I said this would be only slightly more positive.)
I’ve never done a lot of reflecting on her as a teacher: I was in high school when she passed, and the amount of time I was able to watch her teach and hold court in a conventional classroom setting is pretty minimal. However, I do think that my experience knowing her has made me what I am today as an educator.
In a lot of ways this isn’t the most obvious conclusion. My wife, Jackie, never got to meet my mom, and any time I’ve tried to describe what she was like, Jackie has always appeared puzzled at exactly where I came from. A few years ago I found a recording of Mom speaking at a church function, and Jackie had some questions. Where’s my southern Virginia accent? Also, why am I never found in church? I answered with shrugs.
Anyone reflecting on Mom would start with her faith. She grew up Baptist, and her faith was a defining feature of her personality. She enjoyed the enrichment of the congregation – she was the type of person who would find a church to visit while on vacation. Aside from her faith, she was driven by many passions. Yes, she enjoyed reading, being a librarian after all, but she wasn’t a nerd or pretentious about it, preferring mostly genre stuff (I remember her reading The Cat Who detective series, Bridges of Madison County, stuff like that).
She had a similarly earthy relationship with music, nothing fancy, just enjoying it. She played piano at our church and sang with a voice that was pretty and without affectation. I started playing guitar in seventh grade, but I never really chatted with her about singing or her relationship with performing, something I regret. I also regret never talking with her about gardening, another one of her passions that originated from her childhood growing up on a dairy farm in Appomattox County. We lived forty minutes away on a farm in Cumberland. She loved staying in touch with friends and family, and she would usually make a phone call or two in the evening. She had very nice handwriting, and intermittently kept a journal. She would stay up late reading or talking on the phone, and overall was the type of person who could be perfectly functional on very little sleep.
Her career in education started in the 80s, with stints as a third-grade teacher in Cumberland and Appomattox County. She stopped teaching in 1988 to stay home with her beautiful angelic first-born, Thomas.
She was my teacher from kindergarten to second grade. She taught me how to read, and I remember working through books for a few hours and then having time to play with my brother the rest of the day. Mom homeschooled us more for practical reasons, not for the regressive book-burning beliefs the practice may be bringing to your mind. Her general tolerance is what made her so popular: she was an accepting person, and her deep faith didn’t extend to some church-lady sort of narrowmindedness. For example, I remember her pulling my brother and I away from a Cub-Braves divisional playoff series in the early 2000s. She made us come upstairs, where she read us the first chapter of a series that was becoming popular called Harry Potter. My brother and I were skeptical and angry at being torn away from the game. By the end of the first chapter, we were hooked.
When I started public school as a third grader in Prince Edward County, my mom got back to work, substitute-teaching at the school. Two memories come to mind. First, the day she subbed for my third grade class. It was also my eighth birthday. It speaks to her personality that I remember this as a good day.
The other memory is very brief but very deeply implanted. It was the end of the day and I walked into the classroom in which she was subbing. The students were doing their end-of-the-day routine, hitting together blackboard erasers, packing their bookbags, the usual. There was Mom, sitting in a chair near the center of the classroom, singing to a small group of students around her. I don’t remember the song, but I remember the calming effect it had on the whole room, the warm vibes.
She took a job at Appomattox County High School as the librarian in 1998. My brother and I made the forty-five minute commute every day with her, and we would finish our grammar school education there.
Driving to and from school gave us plenty of time to talk. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about what we would discuss, but I do know that mom was not one for complaining. She also emphasized treating everyone with kindness, especially the people who keep the school running behind the scenes. She made relationships with everyone, and her easy-going nature could charm anyone. Even cops. She was pulled over for speeding so many times (a skill I have inherited), and she always, always got off with just a warning (a skill I have not inherited). At school she was in great standing with the grouchy building engineer, Mario, so much so that he once brought my mom a bottle of Jim Beam when she was suffering from laryngitis. Her student library-assistant one year was a goth kid who worked at a video rental store named Seth(?), and I remember mom being so pleasant and eventually evening winning him over, moody goth video-store clerk Seth. She loved a good story, and she genuinely loved learning about students’ lives and supported them in their journey to become a decent person.
All this positivity contributed to Mom’s legacy, which is ultimately defined by what she had to endure for the last five years of her life. When I was in seventh grade, in the fall of 2000, Mom was having trouble sleeping. She spent most nights sleeping in the recliner in the living room. A mass was found on her lung, which upon surgery was found to the advanced stages of cancer.
She had the choice to enter into perfunctory chemo treatment at our local hospital or participate in a research drug trial at Duke. It would mean weekly trips to Raleigh-Durham to be part of the double-blind experiment, which at worst would provide the exact same treatment she would get in Farmville. In spite of these risks, she chose to participate in it, and she beat the cancer to remission in a year. She went back to teaching soon after, also making time to speak at churches in the area about her experience and the role faith played in her life.
She was the librarian in 2002 when I started high school as a freshman. I remember being in the computer lab that year and she was teaching us about something, I don’t remember what exactly…probably how to use this new thing called the internet. She was in the middle of her lesson when one of the most annoying students in my grade, Jacob, tried to “well, actually” her about the topic. I don’t remember the exact exchange, but I do remember the outcome: she put Jacob in his place, to the delight of the class.
She never tried to micro-manage me at school. She didn’t need to, as my teachers were happy to give her daily update her about my progress or problems – it was rare that I was first to tell her about an issue that occurred in a class during the day. It’s hard to convey to NOVA people what it’s like growing up in such a small community. All of my teachers knew Mom growing up. John Pettyjohn in history, Chris and Scott Conkright in science, Marie Morgan in math – they had all gone to school together and now worked at the high school from which they graduated. My brother and I were known as Janet’s boys.
As high school progressed, it was surreal seeing my mom develop close relationships with my peers. Although my graduating class totaled fewer than 150 students, there were so many of them I didn’t know at all. I remember one classmate specifically…she was another one that was goth or goth-adjacent, a pretty definitive stance to take in a rural school. This student struggled with mental health issues throughout high school, and Mom developed such a close rapport with her that this student would visit our house when Mom was on Hospice care. We would awkwardly acknowledge one another with a nod and leave it at that.
This was in the summer of 2005, when the cancer returned. I remember Mom playing piano at church and forgetting the chords to a song she had played for years without issue. The cancer was in her brain now. After a month of palliative care at home, she died on October 23, 2005. There was a general grief within the school community, and I could sense everyone keeping an eye on me, my friends trying to awkwardly strike an emotional balance in a situation they had never had to deal with before.
Because she brought so much positivity to people’s lives, there was a lot of mourning, a lot of people coming up to me at the gas station or at Wal-Mart in the weeks and months after she died. After they identified me as “Janet’s boy,” they’d tell me about what she meant to them. (Mario the building engineer quit smoking because of her.) It could feel overwhelming. At the time I felt unworthy of receiving this information, and I was uncomfortable with the sad attitude from my teachers the rest of my senior year, reminders of the whole thing.
I have never written about this – ever. When my brother applied for med school in 2010, I helped him revise his personal statement, and he rightfully brought up in his essay how formative Mom’s death was in his life. As I offered comments on grammar and punctuation, I reflected with pride that I had never trotted out this fact from my life to win over sympathy from an audience that didn’t know me. What a weird attitude to have about this event.
When I started teaching, I was hesitant to talk about this to students. Over the years, I have realized it’s not something that necessarily deserves to be hidden. I don’t make it a point to tell my classes about it, but I also don’t shy away from it anymore.
For example, one morning a few years ago I sat in a circle with my PEER class. It was the usual way we started the day, and the ice-breaker topic was “What has made you the way you are?” I realized it was October 23, and I shared a bit with my students about Mom’s life and what she meant to me. Something about the way the students became so incredibly focused as I spoke made me choke up slightly. By the time I was done, we were all tearing up. It didn’t help that this happened to be a week of intense stress in students’ lives due to end-of-quarter exams. It became known the rest of the school year as “the day we all cried.”
But what I’d like to emphasize is that enduring lightness that Mom carried in her spirit. One thing I told my students that day was how I try to live my life as a testament to her genuine, life-affirming positivity. This is a topic we had talked about that very year as a class, the concept of toxic positivity, feeling the obligation to always see the positive, to never complain. Mom was not like that — there was no falseness to her personality. She could get upset and frustrated just like all of us. But she would rarely let those storm clouds of lowness push her around for very long.
And that’s what I try to emulate in my own life. I think about it every day: she was 50 when she died. When I become frustrated by an unfair situation, I think about her. She never smoked a cigarette in her life, and yet she got lung cancer. She was never able to see her sons graduate high school. She spent her last five years fighting a losing battle with a terminal illness. Nothing is fair.
And in spite of that, Mom was always smiling, singing, and, when possible, doing this at work, sharing that positivity with others, her coworkers and especially the students, accepting others for who they were and trying to genuinely care for them as best she could. I don’t always do the best at imitating her, but I always know that it is my obligation to keep trying.
Because being alive and having the opportunity to offer that sort of kindness to others is an all-encompassing gift. It is by far the most important thing I have ever been taught by anyone.
