Two summers ago I was falling apart ... the beginning of a deconstruction process that would take me through many twists and turns, beat me down, chew me up, and spit me out transformed at the end.  

Two summers ago I called off my wedding because the debilitating anxiety was screaming at me to do something for once ... to slam on the brakes and stop barreling toward a future that seemed a mistake at best. 

Two summers ago as I was recovering from the end of my "fairy tale" and the utter sense of failure and shame I felt, I found out I was pregnant, and the anxiety came back tenfold and crippled me. 

Two summers ago after I began to build anticipation for the new life growing inside me, I miscarried and learned how much it can hurt to lose something you never really had.  

I felt empty, flat, hopeless ... trampled upon by a deadly combination of circumstances and my own poor choices.  A week later, as I embarked on what would become the most challenging year of my teaching career, I met the children who would ultimately save me from myself. 

I had always believed that happiness was a choice, but this time was different.  Though I was determined to pull myself out of despair and was doing everything I could to find my way back,  it was beyond my control.   No amount of exercise or positive thinking or healthy eating or therapy seemed to light my way, and I found myself spiraling.  The only thing keeping me going was the six hours a day that I could forget about everything else and focus on the 20 little second graders in my care.

And they demanded my full attention.   Two students with ADD, two with ADHD, one crippled by perfectionism, one suffering from depression, one compulsive liar, five extremely gifted students, and five struggling students ... all topped off with chronic lice, impetigo, ringworm, and scabies.  It felt like a three-ring circus on most days.  David cried every time we had to do work ... which was pretty much all day, every day.  Aaron flat-out refused to do work unless he was sure that he could do it perfectly.  Steven hung upside down on his chair,  thoroughly enjoyed egging David on, and reveled in the ensuing explosion.  Erik didn't even seem to know he was at school half the time, and Javier pretty much wasn't mentally or emotionally present at all.  April traded "I'm not inviting you to my birthday party" for "I'm going to stab you with a knife."  Marcos and Gwen went through an identity crisis because they could never catch up to Kaylan who was reading at a ninth grade level.  Everyone was needy, and I felt like I had less to give than I had ever had in my life.  But, that's when the kids unknowingly stepped in and gave back in the form of lessons.

I am convinced now that God sent them to me so I could learn the important lessons of failure.  We were broken, dysfunctional.  As we limped along through the year, we learned patience, tolerance, compassion, and the ability of love and understanding to pave the way for progress.  We celebrated small victories.  The first time David expressed his frustrations in words instead of tears and tantrums, only we understood how monumental those three words "I feel frustrated!" were.  When Aaron decided to sit on the carpet and give himself a breather from a difficult game in the computer lab and then returned to complete it a few minutes later, I couldn't help but tear up while sharing his accomplishment in the staff room.  When Mariah came back to school and was found to be lice-free, we cheered because we were so happy to have her back.  After sitting for a week at every recess staring at a card his dad had made him in prison, Javier got excited at the prospect of writing back to him ... the first time he had expressed anything but sadness all year.

But the sense that I was failing them was a heavy weight upon my shoulders ... a burden I could never manage to put down when I went home.  There were many nights when the guilt became so overwhelming that I sobbed.  The day I finally went to my principal and declared my bag of tricks empty, the unexpected happened.  The weight lifted.  Just the admission that I wasn't perfect, that I didn't know everything,  that I wasn't in complete control was enough to change everything.  It was three words that did it.  "I need help."  Those words were my salvation.  In my twelve years of teaching, I had never uttered those words.  Once I did, I was free to embrace failure, pick up the pieces, and put them together in a new way.  I was forever  changed.

I chose to keep my dysfunctional Room 10 family for their third grade year, and many thought I was crazy.  Perhaps there is some truth to that, but I had faith.  We understood each other; we had built a community.  The three months of summer before third grade magically brought a measure of maturity, and a couple of my biggest personalities left us.  Boy, did we have a year ... by far, one of the best of my teaching career.  We learned to focus on being better at, not better than, and we decided that perfect is boring.  We actually started to believe in the value of mistakes, and we used those mistakes as springboards to scale the highest heights.

During the last week of school, many of the students cried because I think they understood that what we had built was rare and special.  It had been a perfect storm of converging issues, challenges, and personalities, and we had not only survived, we had conquered.  I will always hold dear the Class of 2009 because, although they don't know it, they are the kids who saved my life and taught me lessons that will last a lifetime.

This is a repost from last summer for this month's Featured Grownups alternative topic. 

This is an entry I wrote a few months ago.   I feel like it kind of fits the bill here, so yes, I'm recycling.  Hey ... I'm being green! 

• The weather is normally mild all year, except for a few excruciatingly hot weeks in summer.
• From where I live, I could be in the mountains, at the beach, or in the desert in about 30 minutes.
• We have all manner of authentic ethnic cuisine.
• I love the diversity of the population here.
• There is no shortage of things to do and see, not that we ever do or see any of them. 
  

• People here are Grouchy ... yes, with a capital G.
• The traffic is horrendous enough to turn even the calmest, kindest individual into a raving lunatic.  I know we're infamous for our freeway shootings, but if you drove our freeways, you would want to shoot someone too.
• Everything is EXPENSIVE!  Case in point, we live in a modest but hugely expensive home, a home we could get for a song almost anywhere else in the nation.
• Smog.
• Earthquakes.
• Lack of seasons.
  
• The only communication our neighbors seem interested in has to do with working out the details of building a fence between our two properties so we don't have to see each other.
• The road to happiness here cuts directly through the plastic surgeon's office.  More silicone than you can shake a stick at and a mentality to match.