How Self-Love Woke the Mama Bear: Opening a Gift After Nineteen Years

By Melanie J. Police

When you devote your life to raising two children and teaching hundreds of students, you dish out a lot of love. You give unselfishly. It feels good, albeit stressful, but you wouldn’t trade it for the world. There isn’t anything you wouldn’t do for these children, these adolescents, these young adults. Their joy is your joy.

And after 19 years, you feel happy. Why wouldn’t you? You are making a difference in the lives of so many.

Then one day you realize that while you have been busy shaping the lives of so many, you’ve only been dreaming of the life you really want. It’s not until that day, when something unexpected happens, when you find you've been living an amazing story all along, when you find self-love, that you really wake up and start living.

A collection of short stories, journal entries, tributes to teachers, poems, and blog posts; the lessons on these pages come from children, students, and teachers I’ve had the opportunity to know, teach, learn from, and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329382459

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How Self-Love Woke the Mama Bear: Opening a Gift After Nineteen Years

How Self-Love Woke The Mama Bear:

Opening a Gift After Nineteen Years

by Melanie J. Police

Copyright © 2015 by Melanie Krause

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

How Self-Love Woke the Mama Bear: Opening a Gift After Nineteen Years/ Melanie Police.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-329-14425-5

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers. Please contact Melanie

Krause

Tel: [phone] or email: [e-mail]

~With love to my family and friends~

A teacher and mother. A wanna-be writer. Working with students who struggle on many levels. Co-parenting two children, one with a chronic illness, as a single mom.  My natural instinct is to fight for those I love. Finally, I have learned to love myself enough to go after what I’ve always wanted.

A collection of short stories, journal entries, tributes, poems, and blog posts, the lessons on these pages come from children, students, and teachers I have had the opportunity to know, to teach, to learn from, and to love.

To My Children, Marisa Jayne and Ian Kristopher,

In just 15 short years, you’ve encouraged me, inspired me, and given me so many tales to tell. You’ve unknowingly gained from my experiences as a teacher, and you’ve forever changed the way I teach.

You’ve waited anxiously for the day my dream of being an author would come true. Thank you for your patience, your encouragement, your faith, and your confidence in me. 

My love for you and my hopes for your future cannot be measured.  I hope you are forever inspired to do whatever it is your heart is calling you to do.

To All My Baby Goats,

A long time ago, one of my Language Arts teachers criticized me for using the word kids when I was referring to children.  "Kids are baby goats," she scrawled across the top of my paper in red felt-tip pen.

Consequently, I’ve always had issues with that word.  More than students, you are my baby goats, my kids.

I wish when I started teaching I had written all your names down. I wish I kept a list.  There are so, so many names…You have given me so much in nineteen years.  Years and years of special gifts.

One thing you’ve taught me along the way: raising kids is different from raising your own children.

You teach them. You discipline them. You raise them. You love them. And then they leave. Or you leave. And you don’t get to see the ending.

Little did I know that each student I met along the way, every one of you who challenged me, loved me, or hated me….

You would be leading me to a new beginning.

The Beginning

~ 1996

Like most teachers, I began teaching at the age of 22. A brand new wife, in a brand new town, in a brand new job that 4 years of higher education really didn’t prepare me for.  Walking into a high school with young men who thought I was the new girl in town was uncomfortable. Luckily, I left the high school after first period. 

I spent the remainder of the morning as a home instructor for five children with significant medical challenges. As a young woman with dreams of a family, this was the first time I felt genuine love for children I’d never see into adulthood. To this day, I wonder if their own parents even saw them into adulthood.  With medical problems so severe they required in-home nurses, I try to imagine them at the age of 30 and wonder where their lives took them.

After my morning with my little ones, I’d head back to the elementary to eat lunch alone. It wasn’t that I was disliked and had no friends, I just had a schedule that was different from everyone else.  So, I ate alone in a lounge in the basement. I only turned on one of the three overhead fluorescent lights. And as I sat in a dimly-lit storage-room-turned-lounge and ate in silence, it was then that I began to retreat to a cave with only enough room for a Mama Bear and her great big heart.

Mama Bears Don’t Wear Heels

~ 1997

My second year of teaching found me at a neighboring school district in a more traditional role. I was the Primary Grades Resource Room teacher.  While I was grateful for the experience my first job provided, I longed to be in the position I had always dreamed of…

The pretty classroom teacher with the pretty classroom. The brightly decorated bulletin boards. The morning circle time. The little line of children who obediently and quietly followed me down the hall.  The lunches in the teachers’ lounge. The life-long friends I would make as we raised our children together and went for Saturday morning pedicures.

In my little classroom, I was living the dream - the best a first year teacher possibly can.  I was the pretty teacher who wore shoes on the first day that had my feet bleeding before lunch.  I had the single-income, pretty classroom with mailboxes made out of old shoe boxes and contact paper.  I had bright bulletin boards - although I learned that hanging bulletin board paper is not as easy as it looks...especially when you are just over 5 feet tall.

I sang each morning during circle time, in a key that has not yet been discovered. I always prayed my principal would not enter my room during this time.  But my little students did not fear my voice. We sang our hearts out on that little remnant of beige carpet.

I did seem to have the discipline down - a little line of ducklings waddled behind me as we went to music, gym, and lunch.

But then this Mama Bear retreated, once again, to her cave to eat her lunch. This is when I wrote never-ending IEPs and worked on 36 weeks of lesson plans. 

I ate in the lounge less than half a dozen times and awkwardly attended one staff party the entire year.

I didn’t have my first pedicure until I was 38 years old. And I went alone.

And then on the last day of school, we held hands in a cleared out classroom, and we sang Elton John’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight? We danced in a circle, and we all got a little teary eyed. 

I did not return the following year. 

Where You Think You Want to Be

~ 1998-2014

Like many young married couples who move away after the wedding, we realized we were making the two-hour drive home more weekends than we were staying in our overpriced Columbus apartment.  Within a month of our decision, we both landed jobs near our hometown, and we purchased our first house.

Once again, I found myself in a unique teaching position: A brand-new middle school multi-handicapped unit that literally came with a room, a teacher’s desk, 9 students, and 3 aides.

I felt underqualified. I did not even have a Multihandicapped degree, but my first concern was just rounding up enough desks for my students to sit in.

My teaching career would repeat like this, over and over and over for many years. It was a cycle of new students, new subjects, new classrooms, new buildings, and new districts. 

I was always seeking change. It was not for lack of commitment. Wherever I was and wherever I taught, I taught with all my heart. I gave everything I have.  I had overwhelming love for my students, even the toughest ones. 

Especially the toughest ones.

I eventually had two little ones of my own and experienced the unconditional love parents speak about.  However different that love was for my own daughter and son, it was still very much the same as the love I had for my students. It was a mix of fierce protection and gentle survival-training that only a Mama Bear can give her young. 

In 19 years of teaching and 15 years of parenting,  I’ve had some challenges, faced many personal obstacles, and needed to make some big changes. 

I’ve learned that when your heart is no longer in it, when you feel like you are in a pattern of hibernation and rude awakenings, it is time to move on.

It