Broken Bonds

SUNDAY, MAY 8, 2011

On Mother's Day it seems appropriate to think about all the relationships we value and the evidence of our commitment. No human relationship is closer than mother and child. I loved my Mother, and in turn, loved my children. More than that, having been served and serving as host for a future life, mothers are connected in strange and wonderful biological and spiritual ways with their children. Children literally grow up in and with their mothers. Teenage years aside, that bond tends to last, and lucky moms, neither Tiger nor Bear, evolve a relationship that transcends generations as their offspring establish their own adult values, careers, talents, interests and families. Motherhood is about moving dependent infants to independent adults to interdependent functioning members of society who remain emotionally close to those humans responsible for their very existence. What a bond that is!

(Fathers are critical in this process as well, but, frankly, conception aside, children can be born and raised without one. No one who ever lived arrived on the planet without a mother as the initial host of their arrival.)

As an educator I worked with many children who for a variety of reasons did not have a good, healthy relationship with their mothers. Death, prison, emotional dysfunction, immaturity, etc., all contributed to problems I observed in children who somehow always felt inadequate, unloved, abandoned or lost because of their maternal bond. I continue to have contact with adults who experienced this dysfunctional bond and many of them recreated the same sort of relationship with their own kids. Some spend their entire lives attempting to resolve issues that arose from this initial, most critical of relationships. So sad. I am so lucky.

While I count my blessings regarding my relationship with my Mother and my relationship with my children, my heart is pulled another way for all those who have experienced a broken bond. Ties with others form our humanity. Loss of the connection, or living in an unhealthy connection, whether by death, abandonment, abuse or betrayal is excruciating. We all feel it, we all experience it. It breaks our hearts, it wounds our souls, it triggers anger, resentment, jealousy, rage and a sense of hollow loss.

I feel that way now about my profession. I am deeply wounded, I am hurt, I am angry. I feel simultaneously rejected and abused. Why is that?

Yes, I signed years and years worth of contracts with school systems and did my best to fulfill my side of the bargain. But that legally binding document is not why I did what I did. It was something larger. It was a bond, not a contract.

For those who enter this profession there is an unspoken bond that has been broken. And that breaks my heart.

This is the bond I understood when I decided to become a teacher and an educator: I consciously agreed to accept the fact that I would not make a ton of money. I consciously agreed to accept the fact that I would only work 9 or 10 out of the 12 months each year. I consciously agreed that during those months I worked I would treat each child as though he or she was my own. I would care for them and care about them. I would grade papers, I would talk to their parents, I would vest myself in their activities, I would work to remain at the top of my professional form, I would hurt when they hurt, I would feel failure when they failed, I would cry when they skinned their knees or loss the big game or broke up with their first true love. I would take ever so seriously my charge to teach them the essential learnings I was hired to teach them to the very best of my potential. And, I agreed if they were not learning, I would try other ways. I would adopt them, nurture them, and move them along the path to independent, highly functional adults as best I could. I would make them better, smarter, more learned than they were when they came to me.

In return for that, I understood that our community and our society would respect me for these efforts, would know that I was in it for their kids. They would pay me what they could and offer me benefits they were able, but I would be valued and cared for in ways beyond a babysitter or nanny. My calling was beyond babysitting. I was a teacher. I would take any child they sent me, not by lottery or audition, but any child. In turn, the collective "they" which included my community and my state and my country, would value my service, my commitment, my hard work, my emotionally draining efforts, and my sacrifice for a generation yet to assume the reins.

In short, I would give up wealth for something more than public service. Teaching is public service plus deep caring and commitment. Not just for the children easy to love and ready to learn, but for all the children sent my way, including the poor, the disabled, the abandoned, the angry, the hurt, and the not so bright. I would teach them all and exhaust myself doing so in exchange for the role of servant leader in my community.

That bond, the unspoken calling of teaching, has been broken. And the pain, the anger, the rejection, and the loss that comes with that broken bond is rippling across our land.

It is broken by the current efforts to reform education, and I continually seek to find a metaphor that will drive home the nature of these efforts and the terrible damage that is wrought on teachers and schools by these efforts. Here then, on Mother's Day, is another effort to explain this pain and damage.

If children today are not performing the way we wish they would perform, let us insert private sector initiatives into the mother-child relationship. Let us offer mothers who best prepare their kids for school some sort of bonus, some sort of incentive pay. Let us find ways to collect data on children and compare mothers, label mothers, discuss whether mothers have provided adequate yearly progress. Let's make mothering a competitive endeavor instead of a cooperative effort. Let's put tax dollars in alternative mothering scenarios where children are removed from their biological parents if the mothers fail to perform. If we find that some mothers are not doing as well with their kids as the standards we set, then let's take the children away from their mothers. Let's fire the mothers and assign their kids to someone else. Let's publish rankings of the mothers in our community. Let's standardize the data collection for mothers in our community so that on one day each year via a pencil and paper bubble sheet we collect data to summarize all the efforts of the mothers that year based on how their children respond to the test. Let's break up all the mothers' organizations that exist to help and support and improve the lives of mothers because these groups resist the above efforts. Let's argue that if we don't improve mothering we are a nation at risk. So much so, that mothers will be fired for not meeting the standards. Let's abolish the mother-child bond and replace it with a private sector contract that holds mothers accountable.

Ludicrous? If you are a mother and heard such a proposal, how would you respond? What if our cultural icons, billionaires, and our duly elected political leaders continued to argue that the above strategies would save our kids and improve our mothers? How would you fight that, knowing that breaking the bond, even putting the bond at risk, changes forever what mothering has been and should be. I suspect you would have sleepless nights, knots in your stomach, fear when you greet your children each day, and a sense of loss and competition when you meet with other parents. I guess fewer women would aspire to be mothers, and we in fact would turn to people who never really were mothers to be our alternative mothers when real mothers failed to meet the standards we set.

The above is what we are doing to teachers and schools. It is so sad. It is so dangerous. It will trigger ramifications across generations and will take an enormous amount of energy, commitment and caring to heal. Victims of broken bonds suffer for a long time.

On Mother's Day, celebrate the bonds you have that are working, that are healthy, that gave you life and meaning and purpose.

And fight the destruction of the bond between community and schools. The relationship between children and teachers and mothers are sacred bonds that should not be subject to performance based judgment and competition.

Happy Mother's Day!

I can't wait to say, Happy Teacher's Day!

POSTED BY EILEEN GOOD AT 8:04 AM


3 COMMENTS:



Anonymous said...

What insight. Thank-you.

MAY 15, 2011 9:47 AM



Eileen Good said...

Thank you! If no one ever read or responded to all this, I'd figure no point in posting. So, thanks and keep the comments coming.

MAY 15, 2011 3:50 PM



Mrs. G. said...

Well said. Teaching is very much like mothering, but the profiteers just don't understand that.