Sometimes I think we spend our entire lives waiting for the next milestone.
I’ve been teaching for 18 years now, and I am waiting with bated breath for my twentieth. Because at that time, if I wish, I can take an early retirement and figure out who else I want to be when I grow up. Of course, by that time, three college tuitions will be around the corner, so I know I won’t actually do it. But the milestone is in knowing the option is there.
I was thinking about that milestone as I got ready for work on my forty-sixth birthday this year. Perhaps in an effort not to think about the next one beginning with a number 5, my mind wandered to where my teaching career began.
As the years go by, you lose the names and sometimes the faces, but that first year remains crystal clear. For me, I remember everything from my first three, which took place in the sleepy, rural town of Coventry, Connecticut.
I recorded my grade book by hand back then, and if blow the chalk dust off it, I can still attach a face and personality to every name on my nine language arts classes from 1998-2001. I was a kid in my mid-twenties, trying to figure out how to manage the restless behaviors of middle-schoolers riding the tidal waves of adolescence. I still remember Kyle Whitehead whipping his friends with the stalks of my withered snake plant, which he yanked from its roots when I wasn’t looking. I can hear Brett Giglio’s triumph at getting kicked out of class on the first day of school. I can see Kevin Sanderson scooping the beads from my beanbag chairs during Homework Club (my own special prison for those who resisted my assignments after hours) and firing them at nearby readers. And I can see Jeff Haley’s head popping up in my first-floor window after school, trying to ease me into cardiac arrest as I recuperated in the silence of my empty classroom.
I decided that surviving those first three years was a milestone in itself. It cushioned the blow for the next one…the dreaded 30.
At any given time in your twenties, 30 seems surreal. At 23, I remember sitting in the bleachers cheering on my then-boyfriend and editor of the newspaper for which I worked as a reporter (scandalous at the time, I’m sure), as he hobbled up and down the court with his teammates in the Over 30 League. (Kidding, John McKenna…you know you were awesome.) I thought, maybe there’s too much of an age difference. It’ll be light years before I’m 30.
I blinked, and 30 came pounding on my door. Then came 40. And as I rang in another birthday yesterday morning looking back on the Coventry years, it dawned on me that another milestone had crept up on me while I wasn’t looking.
I left my last batch of seventh-graders in 2001 as most of them were turning 13. That means the 360 or more goofy preteens who made me laugh until I cried all those eons ago—Kyle, Jeff, Kevin, and Brett included—have one by one nailed down that 30 milestone. They have fiances, husbands and wives, families, careers, and responsibilities. They are all old enough to sign up for the Over 30 League. They’re older than I was when I stood before them trying to teach them parts of speech and how to write a five-paragraph essay. In a handful of years, they’ll be eligible to run for president.
The reality of it all slapped me like a snake plant across the face.
Onward to the next milestone. After this one, 50 will be a piece of Estroven.