The Bad Teacher

Trigger Warning: Multiple sensitive themes including physical violence, sexual violence, abuse, mental health, suicide.

I raised my hand for the entire class and our teacher, Miss Dixon, would not call on me. She had once called on my raised hand early in the beginning of the year.

I said, “Miss Dixon, should you be doing that?”

Her face turned red and I knew that she was angry with me.

In our second-grade math class she started to tell me, “Two plus two does not equal four,” and I was troubled by this revelation.

Up till then I had been good at addition and subtraction.

A boy in my class once said, “She’s just tricking you,” but I could not understand it.

One time I was running in the parking lot (where recess was held before the school built a playground and annex for the new upper school) and she reached out and shoved me. I fell hard onto the black top and there were chunks of gravel scattered about the parking lot, and I skinned my knee, gashed it open on a rock and began to bleed profusely.

In truth, I had needed stitches, but the school nurse could not fathom what had happened—only that I had fallen and scraped my knee—and she cleaned it and slapped a bandaid on it and sent me on my merry way.

The wound did not heal. For years after that it would burst open if I knelt too hard on it. I still have the double scar on my knee to this day. The scar is red and wide with a purple outline.

I was so angry because I could feel her hands connecting with my back and I knew that I had been pushed. I was also angry because falling like that meant I was some stupid little kid who had no concept of balance and no control over myself. Like I was awkward and clumsy instead of pushed.

There was a time when I took meetings with my classmates on the new playground at a picnic table. Unfortunately, our teacher was sitting at the picnic table next to the one I was sitting at and could hear everything I said. But I had no control over that. I had to speak the truth to my classmates. I told them what she was doing to them was wrong. That they had to tell their parents.

But everyone seemed completely incapable of sharing this dire news with their parents. I credit the fact of this with the fact that we were children who lived in the moment, pure and simple. When we were gone from school we did not think about school. When we were away from our horrible classroom and the bad teacher, we forgot all about it and tried to live in the moment instead.

Besides, I learned early on that I did not have the vocabulary to articulate what was happening to me in her classroom and on the playground and when we would walk around the church and school building, hidden by large holly bushes.

It was the class joke that I was the “caboose” of our single file line because I was always called last for everything, including the composition of our single file lines.

“Get in a single file line!” Dixon would call out and then she would read names from her clipboard and each child stood in a single file line against the cinder block wall in the hallway.

As I was the caboose of the line and no one could see me since I was behind all of them, she would hit me hard with hardcover books—her teachers planner textbook. Or she would hit me with her hands. Her hands I could endure—they were not as hard as the books. But when she hit me with those hard cover books, I never saw it coming. I never expected her hits to the back of my head because I was just living in the moment.

A psychiatrist once told me it would take a forensic psychiatrist to plumb the depths of a mind like that. People do not think like that, usually. His hot take offered me little comfort.

When she hit me with those books, I would stand still and cry. Sometimes she knocked the breath out of me. And the line would stop and the other kids would be afraid to look back at me and she would say, “keep moving!”

But sometimes I just stood still and cried because it hurt so bad. And it made me so sad. She hated me and then I knew it. If I had forgotten that she hated me, now I remembered clearly.

My mother documented in her journals from this year of my life that I often complained of neck pain.

By the time I was twelve my neck had severely herniated disks. My parents befriended a chiropractor from our church/temple. Ozie Mark offered to help me and to make my pain go away which required frequent visits to correct the subluxations and to properly align my spine.

One time when I was fourteen, I woke up at two in the morning in such pain that I could not move my neck, and my mother rushed me downtown to Ozie’s apartment where he adjusted my neck and thus brought me some relief.

When I was in my twenties, I told Ozie Mark about what happened to me when I was seven. He believed me. He offered to go with me to the school and church and to be my witness. He also had my first x-rays of my very misaligned, messed up neck and back. But mostly the pain was in my neck. He once asked me if I had been in a car accident. I had not. The herniated disks in my neck really had no explanation other than the truth.

In 2016, Ozie Mark shot himself in the head on Fathers Day which also happened to be the summer solstice.

I could not go to the funeral.

By that time, he was married to a beautiful woman named Patti and they had seven children together that were homeschooled.

I could not go to his funeral because I did not believe it. I could not believe it.

Ozie Mark saved my life and had over the years reduced my pain so much and straightened out and fixed my neck so that by 2016 I could freely move it without pain and never had to have any surgery for it.

All the equipment in his practice was given away. All the x-rays were thrown out.

I don’t even believe he killed himself.

They said he was depressed. He was of the natural school of thought that does not believe in big pharma cures to solve anything. So maybe he was depressed.

But I do not think he killed himself.

He would not do that. He would not leave his beautiful family and all his beautiful children and his beautiful wife and partner. He had a thriving chiropractic practice and helped so many people and had so many friends. He was truly gifted. He was a natural healer. He was like the father I never had. He actually cared about me and was someone who would go to a questionable school and church and stand by my side in solidarity.

My father accused me of paranoia and had me committed to a psych ward when I told him about what happened to me.

In 2011, I contacted the school and church, the current principal and the current pastor and told them that a woman who was still teaching the second grade at their private Christian school had abused me in 1992 when I was seven years old.

I sent them an email saying that.

They wrote back and it was clearly from a lawyer and they said, “you have no proof.”

It freaked me out. They did not know what my proof was. I had proof all right.

I had my school photo from that year, and it looked like I had been crying or was jaded beyond all recognition. I had a picture of the bad teacher with her arm around my waist on the last day of school and my hand is behind her—not touching her at all—curled upwards in a small wave. But really my hand not touching her like I am afraid to touch her and like I had to make the truth known somehow. It was my last stand for justice. It was all I could do.

On the last day of second grade our class was playing on the playground. We had been told all year to stay away from the poison ivy. On that day, the teacher did not bother to say this again. I convinced some of my classmates to rub poison ivy on their arms and faces but no one did it as thoroughly as me. I said they were magic leaves and would give us special powers. The bad teacher looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said nothing.

That day my face turned red and by the next morning my eyes were swollen shut. For several weeks I looked like a monster. I do not know why I did what I did, but it had something to do with the fact that the bad teacher had lied to us all year and I needed to find out for myself what poison ivy was.

I remember being in math class and I could not do the math problems anymore, so I laid my head down on the desk that smelled of disinfectant and pencil shavings.

Peanut butter and jelly was my favorite thing to have for lunch. I requested that my mother make it every day. On the last day of second grade it was the last time I ever ate the stuff. I took one bite and then threw it in the trash can and said goodbye to the perfect combination forever.

It rained an extraordinary amount that year and we were stuck inside often instead of being able to go out and play on the new playground. The rain was really my tears.

On the way home from school, I would watch raindrops racing down the window and I would cry. My mother never knew what was wrong with me. She chalked it up to the fact that we had moved into a new house and my baby sister had just been born. I was “adjusting” to a new way of life. My mother had no idea the kind of turmoil, torment, or grief I was experiencing.

I liked art class because the art teacher was nice and she never told me that I had not drawn an orange cat. I won a blue ribbon at the art fair for “My Orange Cat” that year. I had an orange tabby cat named Picky-Picky at home. We had named him after the cat in Ramona even though our cat (an outdoor cat) was not picky at all.

He had showed up at our house one day and then never left and I believed he was an angel sent to protect and watch over me. When he crawled under our deck to be alone and to die of old age, I was truly alone.

I had always felt utterly alone in the world of exasperated adults and mean or forgetful kids. I had a few friends but I always felt like I was on my own.

My mother was overwhelmed with having three little kids (even though we were well behaved). She had once been an ambitious graphic designer who worked in big cities and having kids and being a stay-at-home mom in the 90s when that was not considered a respectable job, weighed heavily on her.

My father was a commercial airline pilot who was away much of the time on trips. At first he was a domestic first-officer and then he became an international captain. But when I was seven, my father was trying to balance his flying career with his family. He was always away—flying on trips. We were the ones who stayed home in the suburbs.

Sometimes he would pick me up from school although it was rare of him to do so. Then we would drive with the top down in his white and black Mazda Miata. I would feel the sun on my face and the breeze in my hair. And everything was okay for that moment. He used to read books to me at night. The Princess and the Goblin was my favorite.

My mother never read to us. She never played with us. We were kids and adults didn’t play with kids. Kids were supposed to entertain themselves. I had a vivid imagination and would play by myself or with my sisters for hours, trying to leave my mother alone so she could do whatever she so desperately wanted to do.

My mother often forget to pick us up from school on time. We would sit on our hard Igloo cooler lunchboxes and wait and wait and wait. Finally, me and my sister Hannah had to return to the classroom with Miss Dixon because my mother had not come to collect us on time. These were pre-cellphone days, and she did not call to say she would be late or that she was on her way. My mother viewed my teacher as a paid babysitter who worked for her. I remember standing up after every car had come through the carpool pick up line, hoping every car would be my mother, losing hope, and gathering my backpack and the lunchbox and following Miss Dixon back to the classroom.

She did not mess with me or my sister when we were alone with her. It was like she craved an audience that would look down at their penmanship, with eyes averted from whatever obscene thing was happening when she pulled out the metal drawer to her big beige metal desk and called each student up one by one.

Whatever she said to my classmates was bad because they each started crying and walked back to their seat in tears. I was a leader back then and I would say something encouraging to them out loud, told them she was wrong, don’t listen to her, she’s trying to hurt you.

Whatever she said to me never made me cry because I knew that was what she wanted. So, I would close my ears to her words and not listen, block it out. But she succeeded in making me cry countless times anyway. Like when she hit me with books or the time she pushed me down a flight of stairs after school let out. Before that happened, I had gone up to her and whispered in her ear, you won’t get away with this.

Then as I was about to step down from the landing onto the first step I went flying forward with such force that it stunned me and I instantly tucked my head in and rolled down a flight of stairs, cushioned by my leather backpack that I had just put a sweater into. I landed flat on the floor and my head hit the ground. My breath was knocked out of me and all the kids who were in the stairwell stopped and stared, silently.

A voice in my head said, “get up!”

I stood up and ran out of the school. My head hurt to touch for weeks afterwards but I never told my parents. I knew then that she wanted to kill me, not just make me cry.

A guy walked up to my dad and said, “my kid saw something.”

My dad got excited and walked away but he did not ask any questions. This was the early 90s, a few years before TWA Flight 800 exploded or whatever really happened. There was a plane crash and all 230 people on board, died. It was an international tragedy.

But I was wrong. She had gotten away with it. I never told my parents what happened because I had no way to express the sentiment of it all. I suffered in silence. And I knew that I could not tell them. If they knew the truth it would ruin their lives. It would destroy the perfect suburban life that they had so carefully cultivated and shaped for us all. I couldn’t do that to them, so I kept quiet. And I kept quiet because I had no vocabulary for what had happened. I was trapped in my mind and body with no way out, utterly alone.

I went to the school and church to tell them about the bad teacher and they said, “you have no proof,” and I ran away from it and tried to live my life.

I had a son who was born with leukemia (bad blood?) the following year and he died. In my profound grief and curiosity, I went back to find out what had been done about the bad teacher.

I found out she had been moved to the first grade. She taught the first grade for seven more years and retired from teaching five years ago. But she is still involved with the church.

I did not know I was supposed to file a police report. I was too fragile and broken back then to fight them. But now I know.

All my pain!

Then I think, what if it never happened? What if I just imagined it? What if my memories are useless? What if my memories are false?

And the source of such a thought strikes me as the cruel, cheap effort of some nameless, faceless entity looking to control the narrative in my own mind.