This is topic that has been on my mind for a while now….and it started with a message I recieved several years back from a former student.
The story starts in the early 2000’s, back when DARE was a thing in schools. If DARE was before your time, the gist of it was that one week a year called Red Ribbon Week, the local police departments would come into the schools and give the DARE presentation about how to “Just Say No’ to drugs. All the kids would make a committment to “Just Say No’, and they would learn about what drugs looked like, and what happens to your body when you take drugs, and they would go on to show the mug shots of people who were incarcerated for using drugs. The thing was, growing up in a small town on the border, this was nothing new or shocking for many, if not most of the students. Most of them either knew someone, or lived with someone who was an addict. Drug and alcohol addiction was nothing new. In fact, in the upper grade levels, DARE was almost a joke.
It started the first year I taught fourth grade, leading my class back down the hall after the big DARE assembly. Slumped shoulders, glum faces, and sad hearts. These kiddos had just heard their local law enforcement officers tell them that their friends and family members were the bad guys, in not so many words. The message was very stereotypical of the day: If you do drugs, you are the bad guy, and drinking is the gateway drug to other drugs, so if you drink, you will become the bad guy and If you know someone who does drugs, you need to report them. My heart was breaking for these kids, but I felt their pain. I had family members who used drugs, and were alcoholics. My Gran made it common knowledge that she was a recovering alcoholic.
The conversation in my classroom started with an assurance that sometimes good people make poor choices. I used my own family as an example, and told them thet even my Crackhead Uncle John was still a good person who made bad choices. Everyone knew my Crackhead Uncle John who stood on the street corner by the only grocery store in town, dirty and high, flying his sign asking for handouts to get his next high. They just didn’t know he was the teacher’s uncle.
I used Crackhead Uncle John as the example of how we are not responsible for the choices our loved ones make, our loved ones don’t define us as people, and most importantly, life was about choices and we DON’T OWN the choices other people make. Growing up in a small border town, it is inevitable that at one time or another each of my students would be faced with the choice: someone, at some point would offer or even encourage them to try something. My words to them were to know that each choice we make leads us to the next choice, and I used ‘The Path Not Taken’ by Robert Frost to illustrate the point: Just becasue everyone else does it, doesn’t mean they needed to as well, and:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This became an annual conversation with each class of kiddos I had. It became woven into the course of the year and not just relegated to one week. I hoped with all my heart that my kiddos would be saved from poor choices, and that when the day came when they had to make their choice, they would remember those conversations, and make a good choice for themselves. Over the years, I know there were many hits. There were also a few misses. I pray daily for the former stduent who left rehab, and was thought to be headed in the right direction, only to up and dissappear. I pray for the kids that hang in the gulch waiting for the next opportunity.
But I digress….The message.
The message I recieved several years ago was from a student who at the time she was in my class would have been considered ‘at risk’. I won’t go into the details, but when she graduated from high school, went on to community college, and eventually left the state with her fiance, a kid she met who was serving on the military base in the neighboring community, I was so happy for her. Beyond happy. I liked her engagement photos when she posted them, and sent a wedding gift when she posted her registry information on Facebook. I watched her baby bump grow, and have seen the milestones her child has made in the first years of life. From the Facebook perspective, I was so grateful she had escaped Bisbee and was making a life for herself and her family that she could be proud of.
Except she wasnt.
Her message read:
‘Hi, I don’t know where I went wrong. But I did. I don’t know what to do. You always said to make good choices, and when the time came to make the choice, I made the right one. But XXXX (spouse) didn’t. I can’t take this anymore. Sometimes I just want to die, but I can’t cause XXXXXX (child) needs me. I don’t know WTF to do. XXXX is always drinking, and at first it wasn’t that bad. But I just can’t take it anymore.’
Over the next few days, after messages, phone calls, and trying to connect her with resources to support her (and ensuring she had no plans to make good on the death wish), the gist of the story was this: After XXXX left the military, he started drinking, and over the course of the year it went from social to habitual. His career had not taken off as he assumed it would, finances were not great, and the underlying childhood abuse and trauma and lack of coping skills resulted in alcoholism and toxic relationship dynamics. He drank every day. Some days he was fine, and things felt pretty ‘normal’. He would come home, they would eat dinner and he would pass out on the couch. Other days he was not fine and he would berate and belittle her, put her down, and make her feel as though she deserved the hell he was dishing out. He was jealous and often unreasonable. She said in his drunkenness he would sometimes go on for hours, and when she thought he had settled down, he would start right back up again where she left off. The issue was, even though he was only verbally abusive once in a while, she lived her life on eggshells knowing it could be anytime, over anything, and she never knew when or what to expect. She lived in such a heightened state of anxiety never knowing when happy drunk would turn to mean drunk. She assured me it was never physical, but abuse is abuse, and the emotionall and psychological abuse was just as harmful.
It has been a few years, and it took her a while, but she eventually found a way out of the situation with the help of a relative. But her words and her story haunt me because this is such a typical story of dysfunction hidden behind a fascade. As a teacher, back in the day, I thought I was empowering my students when we talked about making healthy choices, but when we can’t make choices for the people in our lives, and those choices impact us…well, that wasn’t in my lesson plans. But again, we DON’T OWN the choices other people make, but they often impact us as much as the choices we do make.
As I look back and reflect on the situation as a whole there is an element of generational abuse and trauma, she was after all, at 9 years old, considered at risk for a reason. Back then, we didn’t have the ACES test to gauge trauma and its impact on her life, but knowing what I know now, she was at least a 7 on the aces scale. While I thought she had broken the cycle, somehow, despite making all the ‘right’ choices, she still found herself in a generatinal cycle of addiction, abuse and trauma. The same cycle she worked to avoid, was the cycle she had to work even harder to escape, in order to prevent the cycle from happening…again… with her child.
I don’t have any answers today. I wish I did. What I do have is the ability to promote awareness, to encourage people to recognize toxic behavior, and reduce the dose of the toxic behavior on their children, and prevent it from becoming a generational cycle.
I would also like to thank XXXXXX for letting me use her story and thank her for trusting me. People who have lived with abuse often have difficulty opening up and trusting others, and XXXXXX is one of the strongest people I know! Keep telling that story lovely girl, shine your light, and be the beacon of hope for others!
