Permanent Marker

by Aimee Ross

  Man, why hadn’t I thought of all that a few minutes ago?

  “Aimee?” a male voice said behind me.

  Oh no. More disapproval?

  A younger teacher approached, smiling.

  “I hope your students realize how lucky they are to have such a creative and passionate teacher as you,” he said, before shaking my hand and leaving the room.

  I was incredulous.

  Two evaluations, each at different ends of the spectrum, both in the span of less than five minutes. I wondered if he’d heard her and just wanted to make me feel better. I wondered if he meant what he had said. And I knew which of the two should influence me, no matter the motive, but criticism tends to leave more of a mark, doesn’t it?

  And that’s why I broke out in tears packing up the rest of my things.

  Three days later and back in Ohio, when my phone rang and the caller ID said California, I winced. Maybe I shouldn’t answer, I thought.

  “Is this Aimee?” a female voice asked.

  Uh oh. Was this call going to echo the biting words from just days before, or was I just paranoid?

  “Yes?”

  “I’m calling to let you know that you have been chosen as one of thirty-nine teacher-winners from across the country to receive the Disney National Teaching Award this year. Congratulations!”

  Oh. My. God. OhmyGod. OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod.

  Me! An award-winning teacher after only twelve years! Me! Out of more than 10,000 applications!

  Something I’d dreamed of since college had come true!

  But here’s the best part:

  The person who had nominated me for the Disney Award was a former high school history teacher who had not only won the award twelve years before but was also Jewish and currently making his career in Holocaust education at the national level. He had observed me teaching—both students and other educators—on several occasions. If he thought enough of my abilities for this recognition, and my application had actually won, then maybe I did have a right to teach about the Holocaust.

  This atrocity had left its mark on me, a permanent one, and I had to teach about it. Even if I were from a small, rural town in Ohio. And even if I weren’t Jewish.

  Frizzy-haired, frown lady unfortunately had left a mark on me, too.

  But I would rebound.

  With a vengeance.

  December 2010

  From my living room on that late, gray afternoon, I noticed a police car parked on the street outside the apartment. Weird, I thought. It hadn’t been there a few minutes ago.

  Almost immediately, I heard a knock at the front door. It was a state highway patrolman.

  What had happened? Why was he here?

  My heart fluttered, rising, and lodged itself at the back of my throat. I inhaled deeply to catch my breath and opened the door.

  “Ms. Young?”

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering if I could come in and speak to you for a few moments.”

  “Of course.”

  As I opened the door to welcome him inside, I suddenly remembered that I had never returned their call after the accident.

  “Please, Officer, sit down.”

  The highway patrolman perched along the edge of my beige leather couch and leaned forward, elbows on knees, a clipboard in his hands. He was tall, and he looked uncomfortably out of place in my small living room. He cleared his throat then, dark eyebrows resting under his hat like two fuzzy caterpillars.

  “I’m from the Ashland Highway Patrol Post, Ms. Young, and I’m here to talk to you about the accident you were involved in, back in July.”

  So that was it. The accident. It had been over four months.

  “I never gave a statement. Is that what you need?”

  “No, that’s not why I’m here actually…but if you’d like to give your statement in writing, we can do that,” he offered.

  Hmmm. Why was he here if it wasn’t for my version of the accident? I was confused.

  “I’m here because toxicology reports came back for the other driver involved, and— ”

  Oh no.

  I already knew what he was going to tell me.

  He flipped a few papers back on the clipboard so he could read from one, and I wanted to plug my ears. I didn’t want to hear this, I just wanted the whole thing to be over.

  “—the other driver tested positive for marijuana…and…”

  I knew it. I knew it.

  Wait. He said “and.” There was more?

  “…uh…”

  His dark brows furrowed, and he looked at the paper as if it were a puzzle.

  “Benzo…”

  He wasn’t sure how to pronounce it.

  “Um…Benzodiazepine,” he said.

  I wanted to see the word. I leaned forward, and he turned the clipboard around to show me.

  “I’ve never heard of that before.”

  “Neither have I, actually,” the officer replied.

  Unbelievable. That and marijuana. I wondered how the combination of those drugs might affect someone.

  “Since the other driver was under the influence, I have to inform you that you are now officially the victim of a crime,” the officer said, “and you are entitled to certain rights as such.”

  Victim of a Crime: a new title to add to my otherwise prestigious collection. It would fit nicely up against Supermom, award-winning teacher, Ricky Martin fangirl, local “Holocaust lady,” and heart attack survivor, wouldn’t it?

  He handed me a pamphlet about being a victim of a crime. How could a pamphlet possibly help? I wanted to ask. Why would knowing I was the victim of a crime and that I had certain rights matter now? It wouldn’t. Nothing could change or fix or soothe what had happened nor what I now knew for a fact: why it had happened.

  “I’ve heard so many rumors about him,” I said.

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Do you know how fast he was going that night? I’ve never seen any reports.”

  He flipped through a few more pages of paperwork and finally gave up.

  “I don’t see it here anywhere, and I wasn’t the officer who wrote the report. I wasn’t there that night,” the trooper explained.

  “It’s okay; I understand.”

  “You can always call the post and speak to the officer who was on call that night,” he said. “He could tell you.”

  “Thank you. There was a voicemail on my phone after the accident from him, but I never returned the call. I forgot.”

  “You can give a statement now if you’d like,” he offered.

  The patrolman handed me the clipboard with a blank accident report on top to fill out.

  “I was going about 55 mph south on Route 60 toward Loudonville, and out of my peripheral vision saw lights, and then it seemed there was an instantaneous crash, impact on my left-side door. I noticed immediately my front tooth and then there was a man talking to me outside my car. I couldn’t respond,” I wrote.

  I handed the clipboard back to him, so he could read it.

  “What injuries did you receive?” he asked.

  As I told him, he recorded a list, raising his dark eyebrows in surprise.

  “Well, you look like you’re recovering nicely,” he said. “You’re a teacher, right?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “Have you returned to work yet?” he asked.

  “No, I’m going to wait until the new semester starts in January. I’m taking a little extra time off to make sure I’m ready.”

  “That’s a good idea. And I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but I hope it can bring you some peace,�
� he said.

  With that he stood up, tipped his hat in respect, and said, “Have a good night, ma’am.”

  I closed the door behind him.

  Wow.

  How could knowing bring me peace?

  I thought back to my hospital bed in the Trauma Clinic and the unfinished threat I made. I better not find out the driver of that car was drunk or high…

  Or what, Aimee? What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it?

  Nothing. There was nothing I could do.

  The other driver had broken the law. He was under the influence, just as I had suspected. I had the word of authorities, and they had toxicology reports. Concrete facts.

  Things I couldn’t change. Things that don’t go away or bring peace, no matter how much I longed for them to. They just become a part of the experience, a part of me, forming another scar.

  And what was one more?

  Spring 2011

  As my physical recovery from the accident improved, I found myself questioning what had happened to my life more and more, specifically the end of my marriage, which I had never really grieved. It felt as if everything had happened so quickly between the heart attack and car accident, with little time to process splitting from my husband and leaving my home.

  Now that I had time to think about it, I wondered if I’d actually come out on the other side of a mid-life crisis. I was in my early forties, married to my high school sweetheart, and miserable in every aspect of my life (except being a mom). Did other people feel this way? I hoped I wasn’t an anomaly. I hoped having a mid-life crisis was a real thing.

  So I researched.

  First, I looked up the actual definition for mid-life crisis. Google said it was “an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence that can occur in early middle age.” Yikes, that sounded a little like me, but I needed more proof to determine my case.

  During my next round of investigation, I found statistics somewhere out there in Internet land that said only two percent of marriages are between high school sweethearts, and if they wait until at least age twenty-five to get married, seventy-eight percent of them will have a ten-year success rate. We were engaged at eighteen, married by twenty-two, and still together eighteen years later. I was astounded. We had actually beaten the odds, even as teenagers who hadn’t even figured ourselves out yet.

  At least I know I hadn’t.

  After more research, one study by The Guardian, based on 50,000 adults from Australia, Britain, and Germany, claimed that mid-life crises were real and that life satisfaction declined from early adulthood to its lowest point between the ages of forty to forty-two (before rising again to age seventy). Mid-life is considered stressful, and though it is also associated with parenthood, children had no effect on a mid-life crisis or its cause. And as if that weren’t enough evidence, I also read on the Huffington Post that women were more likely to go through a mid-life crisis earlier than men—between the ages of thirty-five to forty-four.

  Whoa. It all fit me perfectly. I was forty-one and had three children when it happened, and judging from the statistics, I wasn’t the only woman to ever feel the way I had.

  All of the research certainly provided a baseline against which to decide my plight, and I was almost convinced. Then I found the writing. My writing. The writing of some previous version of the Aimee who would later find herself sitting in front of a computer Googling mid-life crisis.

  That’s when I knew for certain.

  Tucked into a folder of miscellaneous writings from the fall of 2008, just months before I turned forty, and only a year and a half before I left my marriage, I found a scrap of paper with this written on it:

  Life is a continuum of chance and choices, decisions deliberate and random, and as shifts occur, we simply live, moment to moment and day to day. Where will time take me? Do I have to be the socially correct, morally acceptable wife and mother and teacher and role model or can I just be imperfect, sad, questioning, normal, and human Aimee? I don’t understand. I don’t know who to be. And I don’t know how to figure it out. Who will guide me?

  Those thoughts, bigger than my head could hold and spelled out in ink by my own hand, were the ultimate confirmation.

  Self-diagnosis: mid-life crisis. It made so much sense. Evidently, I had lost myself.

  And yet I’d made it through. So maybe it was time to consider forgiving myself. I certainly could use all the help that forgiven Aimee could provide right now.

  • • •

  Once upon a time, I was a pretty good teacher.

  It was all I’d ever wanted to be.

  (Well, I mean, besides Cinderella, but I understood pretty early in life that might be a bit hard to pull off.)

  I had wanted only two things from life—to be a teacher and to find love—and not only had I failed at marriage, but my job recently had lost its luster, too. My ho-hum life bored me, and in the years leading up to the accident, I wondered if there was something more out there for me.

  I never imagined being anything other than a teacher, though. I never had a Plan B. For me, it was teaching or nothing.

  In fact, I probably wasn’t even in kindergarten before I had my first classroom. My dad hung a black piece of slate as a chalkboard in our basement toy room so I could play “school,” and I gathered stuffed animals and Barbies around it for lessons. I even filled the pages torn from Dad’s old gradebooks with their made-up-student names. I wanted to be just like him.

  Finishing college, I vowed to become that one teacher—the favorite—that every student loves. The fantastically creative, inspiring, and entertaining Best Teacher Ever.

  And I did.

  I won awards. I was granted fellowships to study and write. I joined networks, shared exemplary teaching and resources, and traveled to conferences in cities all over the country. I was even a contributing author to Today I Made a Difference: A Collection of Inspirational Stories from America’s Top Educators (Adams Media, 2009).

  Contributing author! A high school English teacher’s dream!

  But after almost two decades in a profession in which extrinsic rewards were rare, my head and arrogance swelled as my accomplishments accumulated. Soon, I believed that only I could do what I did. That other teachers should learn from me. That the field of education needed me.

  And among all the accolades and trips, even as I found independence and confidence, I lost sight of what I loved most about teaching: my personal relationship with it. With my classroom. With my students.

  It had lost its magic, so I stopped giving it my all. I stopped putting in the creativity and passion that I had in the past. All because I thought I deserved more.

  Huh, interesting. Kind of like my marriage.

  Maybe there was no such thing as happily ever after. Or maybe it was just a mid-life crisis. Either way, I had been putting on a front, sloughing away days that no longer glistened the way they used to. Days that felt like they belonged to jobs others complained about.

  And I certainly didn’t believe any longer in the hallowed, English-teacher inspiration I’d once hung above the chalkboard at the back of my classroom. “You are the author of your own life story,” promised the skinny strip of green bubble letters outlined in neon pink. What teacher-catalog bullshit. Eventually I would become a character in my own life, unsure of who was writing the story.

  But even so, and much to my surprise, when I returned to school on January 18, 2011, against the better judgment of doctors and attorneys, I discovered that my classroom was just what I needed.

  I needed its therapy. I needed its community.

  Instead of spending long days alone, thinking about what had happened to my life, I was back in my comfort zone surrounded by teenagers, once again fueled by their energy. Students didn’t ask me about what had happened, b
ecause most of them knew, but they listened if I wanted to talk. And sometimes, their unfiltered and honest words or questions gave me just enough of a poke to shake me out of the anger and guilt I was holding on to.

  They treated me gingerly, as if I could break at any moment, and some even seemed to be in awe of me. I talked with a lisp from the flipper still filling in for my knocked-out front tooth. I also walked with a limp and had visible scars on my arm and foot.

  Regardless, I sat in a chair at the front of the room and relished in being alive and back in my classroom. I wrote alongside my students, expressing my feelings and fears and trauma, and I welcomed sharing the literature of Great Britain that I knew so well. Considering how to read it, how to analyze it. How to see life and the human experience reflected in its pages.

  Soon, it was obvious that I hadn’t given teaching enough credit the last few years, and I started to regain sight of why it had once been my passion. I fell in love with it again.

  I needed my students now even more than they needed me.

  • • •

  Feeling back at home in my classroom, I filed papers and put books away, lost in the chatter of teenage girls, until I heard the choppy propellers of a helicopter.

  Oh no. Life Flight.

  It was just before prom, and local law enforcement officials were sponsoring a mock crash for our students. They had set up the wreck in the student parking lot where everyone would gather to watch the follow-up scene as if it had happened in real time.

  But I refused to attend. I just couldn’t do it, no matter the cause.