Introduction
I’ve been a teacher for more than half my life. I’ve been a teacher for longer than I’ve been a wife and mother. I fell into teaching, really, after dropping out of an arts degree. But when I fell, I fell hard. I loved teaching from the very first day I stepped foot in a classroom and couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else. I landed in a career that ignited a passion, and as a young teacher, I felt blessed to be working alongside equally passionate teachers.
Teaching has brought me endless joy. But it has also brought its share of heartache. This is the reality of working with young people. I have stood in the glow of their achievements, and I’ve stood in the shadows of their despair. I have felt the intoxication of life overflowing and the agony of lives lost. I have been present at some of the most intimate moments of my students’ lives, holding one young man as he collapsed into my arms the moment his father quietly passed away.
Teaching is a vocation of privilege. It is a window through which teachers witness other people’s lives. Most are filled with love and opportunity, hope and optimism. But for too many, there is loneliness, sorrow, or violence. And these are the ones who need our time the most. Teaching is deeply emotional work. It is becoming even more so as schools seek to respond to a plethora of social crises—family and domestic violence, substance abuse, aggressive and antisocial behaviour, suicide rates, and the rising number of mental health issues affecting young people. Teaching is also deeply intense work. Teachers make hundreds of educational decisions a day, which can lead to decision fatigue—the brain is so exhausted and overloaded that it looks for shortcuts or stops working altogether. My own experience has caused me to question how sustainable such intense work can be.
As I tried to keep up not only with the emotional demands of the job but also with the rapid changes to the profession, my work as a teacher became overwhelming. I found it difficult to separate my life as a wife and the mother of my own teenagers from the work I did with young people every day. The boundaries of my professional and personal life collided, so I could no longer see where one ended and the other began. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognise the dangers of this until I spiralled into emotional collapse, by which time the damage had largely been done. I was reticent to acknowledge my illness for fear that in doing so, I might put at risk a career I loved and had dedicated half a lifetime to.
Almost half of all Australian adults meet the criteria for mental illness at some time in their lives.2 This was my time. Although painful, in many ways, it has been the best teacher of all. This is not a story I wanted to write, but as it bled onto the pages of my journal, I realised it is a story that can be told a thousand times over. I pondered what was the better question: ‘What happened?’ or ‘Why did it happen?’ In writing it, I tried to pinpoint the events that led to my emotional collapse, hoping that I might offer my experience as a cautionary tale for others. I also hoped not only to find peace but that my story might contribute in a meaningful way to the important conversation of mental health.
I have tried to provide an insight into the day-to-day life of a teacher. Too often, teaching is reduced to headlines as the profession lobbies for better conditions. By and large, the public are well informed about what the challenges of teaching are—large class sizes, behavioural issues, an overcrowded curriculum, the need to support at-risk students, the occasional hostile advocacy from parents—to name a few. But to simply name these, even when they are supported by research, dilutes the impact of what this means for teachers as they navigate school life on a face-to-face basis.
The anecdotes in this book span a thirty-year teaching career, and I’ve done my best to tell the story authentically, knowing that memory is subject to the ebbs and flows of time. I offer it to anyone who has felt the crippling effects of mental illness. I offer it to all those who have a teacher in their lives. You will know that just like me, they cry too.
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‘Who is she?’ they’ll ask when they find an empty afternoon and time enough to pick up a book.
‘Has she climbed a mountain?’
‘Run a marathon?’
‘Survived a war?’
She’ll whisper a secret into a noisy world, a secret that reminds them truth doesn’t always roar. They’ll remember their own mountains, their own marathons, the battles from which they’ve emerged, survivors. They’ll cry just a little bit. They’ll smile knowingly and nod. They’ll read about a woman they’ve met a thousand times over—somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister, somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s teacher, somebody’s friend.
‘Ah,’ they’ll say. ‘She is just like me.’
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Teachers Cry Too now available from Amba Press.
