Failure is not something I’m used to. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, like I’m just good at everything. Anyone who has ever seen me play sports knows that’s not true. The truth is, I know myself pretty well; I’m an intrapersonal type – “self smart,” we would call it in my classroom. I know I’m not good at a great many things, but in knowing my own limits, my weaknesses, I also know my own strengths. I’ve always set realistic goals for myself, and I’ve always accomplished those goals.
Except for one.
As a teacher, I knew I had the power to make an impact on young lives, and it was an amazing feeling. I just never dreamed I would be in the position I am now, where my personal success or failure will impact the entire world. It terrifies me. My life is worth more than it ever was before, and I have a duty to fulfill, an obligation to the human race.
I can’t fail again.
Friday, April 6, 2012
7 days before Infernal Friday
“Okay, boys and girls, we’re on page four now, the article called ‘America Overseas.’” Gretchen Elliott folded her copy of the weekly Time for Kids magazine, creasing along the edge, so that she was only looking at page four. She watched some of her students mimic her actions at their desks and waited until they were all on the right page. “Now, this is a pretty short title, isn’t it? It doesn’t give us a lot of information. But what else do you see on this page that could help you predict what the article is about? What inferences can we make?”
The children looked down at their articles, their eyes scanning the page. Some knew exactly what to look for, while others had learned merely to stare at their magazine, to look busy, when really they had not a clue what they were supposed to be doing. These, she noticed, suppressing a smile, would furtively look up every few seconds, their eyes shifting over to their neighbors to see what the other kids were looking at.
It didn’t take long for the first hand to shoot up into the air, followed by a few others. Gretchen offered the early birds an appreciative smile, but waited another minute while she gave the rest of the class a chance to look and think. Then she called on a girl whom she knew had taken the task seriously. “Faith?”
“I think it’s about the war,” was Faith’s matter-of-fact answer.
“And why do you think so?” Gretchen prompted.
“Well… there’s a picture of a soldier.”
“Yes, there is. How many of you made the same prediction as Faith based on that picture?” Most of the class raised their hands. “Does anyone have anything else to add? Let’s see if we can be more specific. What about the war?”
Most of the hands went down. She gave them another few moments to scan the page again before calling on a boy named Chance. “Maybe it’s about the soldiers and their families and stuff?” was Chance’s answer. It was not the one she had been looking for, since the article was about the parts of the world in which the U.S. troops were fighting.
“What makes you think that?” she asked neutrally.
“’Cause there’s a little boy with the soldier in the picture; maybe it’s his kid,” Chance explained.
The soldier was black, the little boy Korean, but no matter, Gretchen decided. Families were so mixed, so untraditional these days, his assumption that they were father and son wasn’t completely out of left field. “It could be,” she said. “Where could we look to find out who the people in the picture are?”
“Um… that sentence below the picture?”
“Absolutely! Do you remember what we call that, the words below a picture?”
Chance screwed up his face in thought; he couldn’t remember, but many of the other students did, since they reviewed it every Friday in their weekly Time for Kids. “The caption,” Maddie supplied.
“Bingo,” said Gretchen. “Who can read this caption for us? Kenzie?” She called on a girl who was on the verge of spacing out, bringing her back to the lesson. Kenzie startled, but quickly found her place and began to read.
“Private Aaron Mar… Marshall, pictured above, bends down to greet Lee Yong… Sung?” She stumbled over the foreign name, blinking at the page for a moment, then shook her head and continued on, “… a South Korean boy. Marshall is one of many American soldiers who are sta… stat… stationed in…”
“Seoul,” Gretchen supplied, knowing her third-graders would never get the correct pronunciation of that one.
“Seoul, the capital of South Korea, where Yong Sung lives. South Korea is an alley-”
“Ally,” Gretchen corrected.
“-ally of the United States. An ally is a country that helps another country.”
“Thank you, Kenzie. So Chance, was your prediction correct? Is the boy in the picture the soldier’s son?”
Put on the spot, Chance looked unsure. “Um… no?”
“How do you know? What did we learn from the caption Kenzie read?”
His eyes dropped back to his magazine. “He’s just some kid who lives in South Korea.”
“Right. Good example of how our inferences can change as we get more information. Thanks, Chance. Now, before we start to read the article, does anyone else have a guess about what it will be about? We’re pretty sure it’s about the war, but what else?”
It was nearing the end of the day on a Friday afternoon – Good Friday, actually, and the last day before a week-long spring break. Almost a third of the class was absent from school for “religious reasons” (reasons which, Gretchen was sure, included an early start to the beach for many families), and the two thirds who were physically present were starting to check out mentally. Gretchen didn’t blame them, and when no one wanted to answer, she didn’t push. She called on a volunteer to start reading the article and walked around the room to observe the students as they followed along.
She had been teaching for eight years now, though it was only her first at this school. Still, the last nine months had been enough to cement her opinion that third grade was absolutely the best grade to teach. The kids came to her with distinct personalities and a delightful sense of humor and were old enough to work independently on increasingly complex skills. Yet they were still so young that they looked up to her with respect and adulation, even when she made mistakes, and they did, as Cosby would phrase it, “say the darndest things.” She had been blessed with a great group of kids this year, and even now, when she could scarcely wait for her week off, she adored her class.
Gretchen had wanted to teach for as long as she could remember, going back to the days when she had played school with her younger sister; she had always been the teacher, her sister, the student. Real school was something that had come easy to her, as someone who could be described as “book smart,” and because she was also shy, she had always found it easier to interact with children than adults. Therefore, it seemed only natural that Gretchen follow in her mother’s footsteps to become an elementary school teacher, which she had. She’d done it the quick and easy way, taken the direct path: high school to college, college to classroom. She’d gone away to school, to a four-year university known for producing excellent teachers, and graduated with her bachelor’s degree in exactly four years. To her relief and excitement, she’d landed her dream job three weeks before graduation, teaching fourth grade in the same district where she had student taught.
“Want me to stop here, Mrs. Elliott, or should I keep going?” The voice of one of her third-graders, who had likely been a newborn during Gretchen’s first year of teaching, snapped her back to the present, and she realized his monotonous reading had lulled her into a daydream. It had been happening all too often lately, whenever she was not standing at the front of the room, directly instructing the students. Gretchen Elliott needed a break like she’d never needed it before. Her emotions, the recent events of her personal life, were starting to interfere. She could keep it together when she was in front of her class, too busy to stop and think about what had been troubling her, but in moments like these, she found her mind wandering, the thoughts that kept her awake at night creeping in.
“Go ahead and call on a new reader, Jeidyn,” she said, glancing down at her magazine to check where he had left off.
At twenty-two, Gretchen Millworth had found herself right where she’d wanted to be in life: graduated, teaching school, living on her own. By twenty-five, she was searching for more. Her career, up to that point, had played out exactly as she had hoped, but her personal life was at a standstill. For three years, she had used her job as an excuse, a crutch to fall back on when people asked her about her nonexistent love life, the reason she hadn’t been dating. She was too busy, she would claim; she didn’t have time for a boyfriend. And anyway, she was happy being single.
It had been partially true, but of course, not totally. The truth was, even though she’d been happy with her life, she wasn’t completely satisfied. She was halfway through her twenties, with no immediate prospects of finding “the one,” and that had made her nervous. She had always wanted a family, even more than she had wanted to be a teacher, but with no man in her life, she had started to worry that her most important goal in life would never be fulfilled.
And then she had met Shawn Elliott. He was her age and from a similar background, having grown up in a Midwestern, middle-class family, the same as she. While she had been immersed in her career for three years, he had been finishing up medical school, with aspirations to be a military doctor. The U.S. Army had paid for his education, in exchange for two years of service, minimum, upon his graduation. Having watched her classmates from high school enlist and be deployed to Afghanistan following September 11, 2001, having consoled her college friends whose boyfriends served in Iraq during the War Against Terror, Gretchen had sworn never to fall in love with a soldier. The life of a military wife was not one she wanted for herself. But she’d soon learned that the reason it was called “falling” in love was that it happened suddenly, accidentally. She’d had no control over it.
She had fallen in love, and now here she was, Mrs. Shawn Elliott, teaching not in the Midwest, but in Atlanta, Georgia, after two years of tutoring military brats on bases across the nation and one as a first grade teacher in Maryland, where Shawn had taken a job as a researcher for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases after finishing his tour of duty. A year later, he’d been offered a better position at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. They’d married over the summer and moved to Georgia, where Gretchen had been lucky enough to land her current teaching position due to a last-minute opening in the district.
Gretchen loved the job, loved her school and her class, but was all too relieved to say goodbye to both when 3:30 came and she was allowed to leave. Unlike most of the teachers, who left empty-handed, insistent on enjoying a duty-free week away from school both in body and in mind, she took with her a tote crammed full with papers to grade, hoping the work would help take her mind off what had been bothering her at home. As much as she was looking forward to the time off, she feared it would be too much time to think and worry and feel sorry for herself.
At home in the modest, two-bedroom bungalow she and Shawn had purchased together, Gretchen sighed with relief as she changed out of her teaching clothes and into a pair of pajamas. She lived in pajamas around the house, especially now that she was pouring herself into her old clothes to go to work everyday. She refused to dress in maternity wear anymore, even though it was far more comfortable than the clothes which were now a size or two too small. If the kids had noticed this change, they hadn’t said anything, though she dreaded finding a way to tell them. She wished the school year were over now, but it was only the beginning of April. They still had another two months to go.
She had been twice that far along when she had told her third-graders what her friends and family had already known for a month: she was expecting a baby. Her third trimester was over, and she’d gained enough weight to be showing beyond the point of hiding it anymore. Not that she had wanted to. She’d been bursting with excitement since finding out; it was her first pregnancy and the culmination of her dream to one day have a family of her own. A nurturer by nature, Gretchen was the type of woman who had been born to be a mother.
She’d been a little nervous about the pregnancy, of course, but hadn’t anticipated any real problems. None of the women in her family had ever had trouble conceiving or carrying babies; they all had more than one healthy child. When Gretchen had realized she was pregnant at the start of the new year, after seven months of marriage in which she and Shawn had not really been trying to conceive, the two of them had joked that she must be blessed with the same fertility.
Now, looking sadly at the pooch of her belly in the dresser mirror, Gretchen wondered if she had jinxed herself.
The spotting had started two weeks ago, followed by heavier bleeding. Sick with panic, Gretchen had gone to her doctor, only to have her worst fear confirmed: she’d had a miscarriage. No one knew what had caused it to happen, and Gretchen couldn’t think of anything she had done wrong, yet of course she felt to blame.
Thankfully, Shawn didn’t blame her; he had been wonderful. Of course he was devastated; he had been looking forward to the birth of their first child as much as she had. But he kept assuring her that there would be more chances, more babies. She just wasn’t sure when she would feel up to trying again.
Gretchen filled the two hours between school letting out and the end of Shawn’s shift by preparing an indulgent dinner for the two of them to share. The only time she liked to cook was when she was bored or wanting to take her mind off something, though being a wife had brought out her domestic side. She timed it just about right, so that dinner was almost ready when Shawn walked in the door.
“Happy spring break,” he greeted her with a kiss. The loving gesture brought a genuine smile out of her, and she hugged her husband tightly, hoping this week would be a chance to heal for them both. She knew he’d been hurting too and, like her, working through the pain of losing their unborn child. He planned to use some of his vacation days next week, while she was off, so that they could be together. Grieve together, she thought. They could share the grief the way they’d shared so much else.
The phrase “opposites attract” didn’t apply to Shawn and Gretchen. They were soulmates, in that it truly seemed as if they shared the same soul; they were alike in so many ways. Both were shy, reserved; they took a long time to get to know people. At their wedding reception, Shawn’s best man had joked that he couldn’t imagine what their first date had been like, with only scraping forks and chirping crickets to form conversation. It was a good thing they had gone to a movie.
“It’s always the quiet ones,” their friends liked to tease them, but underneath their quiet exteriors, Gretchen and Shawn shared the same wicked sense of humor and a love of rock music. He was intelligent and bookish, like her, with a fair complexion, a thin, studious face, and wire-rimmed glasses. Everyone had always joked that if the two of them had children, they could already predict what they would be like: blue-eyed, brown-haired, left-handed, and incredibly near-sighted. Both Shawn and Gretchen were.
With sadness, Gretchen wondered about the child she had lost. Would it have turned out like they said? She watched her husband push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and wearily rub at his eyes and felt her sorrow shift to him. He had been working long hours lately at the CDC; the government feared the use of biochemical weapons by the enemy countries in the war, and Shawn was part of a team assigned to investigate, experiment, and develop antidotes. Gretchen was glad he’d been granted a few days off; he needed the vacation as much as she did.
“Go change your clothes,” she told him, loosening his tie and undoing the top button of his shirt. “Dinner will be ready by the time you’re done.”
He smiled, a tired but grateful smile. “What did I do to deserve a wife like you?”
His rhetoric, intended to be romantic, made her smile back, but once he had left the room, the smile faded from her lips. A wife like me, she thought. What kind of wife would she be if she could not give him the one thing the two of them had always wanted? The answer came in the form of a word she had always hated, a word she had always feared.
A failure.
