Ghost from the Past

I teach teenagers, which up until this year had not been a problem for me.

When I was a child, I was abused by my dad’s friend who was a young adult. He was an unclean slender druggie with greasy, stringy dirty blond hair, an acne-scarred face, and a scraggly beard.  He is the man I had nightmares about for decades.

Although he is now an old man and with any luck, dead, I swear he walked into my classroom in the body of a one of my students.  He is a druggie in trouble with the law who looks like my former perpetrator – complete with acne scars and scraggly beard. He is a student who requires more time than all the other students because he doesn’t know how to behave. He does all he can to disrupt class and to do absolutely nothing.

I knew when he walked into the room that this would be hard for me, but I couldn’t go to the counselors and say, “This kid gives me flashbacks; can you move him?”

So I did what I always do when I have a hard kid; I prayed because I know Heavenly Father knows what this kid needs. I tried to help him feel like he was part of the class, yet every time I looked at him, I felt revulsion. I knew it was not his fault that I felt this way, so I prayed harder to be able to see the good in him. Every day he came to class and every day I dreaded seeing him come to class. My anxiety was off the charts. Yet, he was making progress. He began participating (at times) in productive ways.  

But I still wanted to quit my job so that I wouldn’t have to see him and be reminded of the horrors of the past. Instead, I kept praying.

One day he didn’t come to class. When I recorded attendance after school, he was no longer on my roll. I put my head on the desk and cried because I was so happy. I offered up a prayer of thanks because God knew that although I did what I could as a teacher, parts of me could not handle this child.

I found out later that one of his partners in crime was in the same class, so they had to move him. He was furious and didn’t want to be moved, so at least he could not tell how badly he affected me. I am glad for that because I would never want to make a child feel poorly about themselves - even a child with problems, or I should say, especially a child with problems.