Mother/ Teacher

by Meg Petersen

     I was so dissatisfied with the first draft of my teacher lore that I asked my response group for themes.  One of the main ones they identified was the theme of mothering, and the connection between teaching and mothering.  I hadn’t seen it when I wrote the draft, and I admit to being a little uncomfortable.  My discomfort has to do with teaching being seen as women’s work, with teachers being seen as nurturing, with the disrespect of teachers being tied to the profession being seen as a women’s profession. I don’t want to contribute to anything that demeans the intellectual nature of teaching.  But I’m going to stand by it. 

     When I relate teaching to mothering, I don’t mean that men can’t do it, or can’t do it as well, or that one has to have children in order to be an effective teacher.  I mean that there are some similarities and connections between the invisible work of mothering and of teaching that have nothing to do with gender roles or being a parent. 

     Both kinds of work do not lend themselves to self-glorification.  As Jeffrey Wilhelm wrote, “The meaning of our work is in the lives that it enables others to lead.”  Our children’s achievements are their own.  Our students’ achievements are their own.  And much of the work that sustains and makes possible those achievements is invisible, daily and repetitive.  I remember when my children were small and I used to line them up to be sure that diapers where changed and teeth were brushed.  Who can romanticize that? To say nothing of vomit. 

     Try as many movies do to glamorize teaching, much of it is inherently unglamorous.  Waiting to pee until the five-minute intervals between classes, bolting down 15-minute lunches, splitting up couples while chaperoning dances, wiping small noses or slipping on mittens, repeating directions for the third, fourth or fifth time, cleaning up random messes in a daily round that can seem endless.*  (Again, not to mention vomit.) And we do it every single day, through our bankruptcies, divorces, headaches, deaths in our family and heartbreaks. 

     Yet teaching, like motherhood, can humble you. On days like this, we know that the subject of our teaching is never the content, but the actual human beings before us and who they are becoming.  And there are moments of transcendence, moments where suddenly things you did not know you knew come out of your mouth and are true.  You speak them because someone needed to hear them. Teaching, like mothering, demands all that you are and all that you will ever be.  It demands that you put aside your ego and your prejudices and your anxieties and see the students in front of you. Of course we often fail to do that. But I can say for sure that both teaching and mothering have made me a much better person than I would otherwise be.

     So I am going to set aside my discomfort and honor both teaching and mothering.

 * Thanks to my writing group for the crowdsourced contributions to this post.