"Today, I am a Mirror" Creative Writing "Here's Lookin' at you, kid"

I’m really great at my job. I’m not being boastful, cuz it’s true. There aren’t a whole lot of people who would, number one, do what I do, and number two, have a high level of success. I teach students with special needs. Not just Learning Disabled, Resource Room/Content Mastery kids. I teach students who are Mentally Retarded, Emotionally Disturbed, Autistic, Visually, and Physically Impaired. These are all labels, diagnoses. I teach humans who have to overcome some of the greatest challenges in order to have a full, independent life.

More times than I can count people say “It takes a special person to do that”, and “I could never do that”. And I always tell them “I am no angel, and I couldn’t do your job, either.” See, people think that if you do this sort of work, you must be more special than anyone else, that there’s a “special place in heaven” for you because of your profession. Truth is, we are only human, just like everyone else.

We’re lazy, back-biting, addicts, manipulators, liars, just like everyone else on the planet. There is no special place in heaven for us. The special place is here, now. We are special because THEY are special. They aren’t lucky to have us, we are lucky to have them. Yes, most of us do everything we can to teach them, help them. But they end up teaching us, and helping us more than we do them.

My favorite writer, Kahlil Gibran, in ‘The Prophet’, tells us about work. Work is a gift, not a “curse and a labour of misfortune”. It’s a gift. “And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.” It’s easy to work with love in my job; I see God in every student who’s crossed my path. So, I have a hard time understanding when teachers don’t go above and beyond every moment of the day.

Last year I worked with someone whose whole existence seems to be a “curse and a labour of misfortune”. She was never satisfied, always in some sort of trouble personally, and put little to no effort into her work as a teacher. We shared many of the same students, and I could not figure out why in the world she didn’t give a damn! Instead of teaching them, working with them, setting the highest of expectations, and helping them reach them, she did scrap-booking on her computer, letting the teacher’s aide do very little with them. Not only did she “sit on her ass and not teach”, she had no respect for them as human beings, rarely interacting with them.

Not one to feel self-righteous on a regular basis, I was filled with a feeling of superiority. I was going above and beyond, I was doing everything I could to encourage these kids to be more independent, communicate more, apply what the state wanted them to know to their everyday functioning, while she did nothing! So, I began making comments in the class. When the students wanted to color, I told them they could color in Mrs. Alexander’s class. When they showed progress, I told them to “never let anyone tell you that you can’t do it”. She was there, she heard it, she knew I was talking to her.

Many mornings I told myself “Today, I am a Mirror. She will look at me and see where she is falling short”. “If she doesn’t see God in these children, she sure as hell won’t find him at her church!” “WWJD? He’d get up off his ass and do everything he could to help these kids learn!” Yep, that’s what I said, that’s what I believed, and that’s how I felt. The “Christian could stand to learn a few things from this Unitarian Universalist she wants to lead to the Lord.”

All that time, I thought I was a mirror for her. Turns out, she was a mirror for me. I still think I was right in what I said and thought about her, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have something to teach me, too. She’s known to be spiteful, vindictive, manipulating; all sorts of things that aren’t in line with her professed Christianity. Still doesn’t mean God doesn’t use her for what we call “His will”.

She lied about me, manipulated me, tried to take me down and end my career as a teacher. Instead, she was my mirror. I discovered that I’m stronger than I ever knew I could be, and that I actually did have the strength to give up a crutch in life that no longer held me up, but was holding me down. All that time I was focusing on her, and the changes that I thought she should make, instead of looking at the beam in my own eye.

No, not the beam, it was an entire tree. So, while I was licking my wounds, I looked at myself in the mirror. There were things I saw there that I didn’t like, changes I wanted to make. She changed my life for the better, which was not her intention at all. Limb by limb I’m takin’ that tree out of my eye. I’m lookin’ at myself again, loving myself, and becoming the person I wanna be. Who and what anyone is is not my concern. It’s not my job to change others, it’s my job to change me.

She was my mirror. She forced me to look deep inside and see where I’d strayed from my path. So, I say to myself “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.” “I’m lookin’ at me, and I like what I see. It’s up to you to make those dreams come true.”