Heidi's Guide to Four Letter Words(4)

Spreading a few of the branches apart with my hands, I watch Brent walk back over to his yard, jog up the stairs of his front porch, and disappear inside his house.

One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to talk to that man without making a fool of myself. As soon as I figure out what in the world I’m going to do about getting a new job before my mother finds out and marches into the principal’s office with fifteen dozen of her famous brown butter sugar cookie bars to try to guilt him into giving me my job back, that’s going to be my top priority.





Chapter 2





“Did you try Southview Elementary?” my mother questions, as we stand out on the front lawn of our church after Sunday service.

The rest of the congregation is gathered in small groups all around us, chatting about life and the sermon we heard today, which coincidentally was about picking yourself back up when you’ve been knocked down.

“Yes,” I reply, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice.

“Bayview?”

“Yes.”

“Laketown?”

“Yes. And before you even ask, I checked every elementary school within a fifty-mile radius. There’s a hiring freeze in schools all over the state of Minnesota right now. No one is hiring new teachers, especially ones without tenure,” I remind her.

We’ve already had this discussion at least ten times in the last week since I was let go from my teaching position at Trinity Lutheran Elementary. My phone was ringing off the hook before I could even pull all of the hydrangea leaves out of my hair when I scurried back into my house after my disastrous interaction with Brent. As much as I would have liked to keep this news from her for as long as I could, not only was it impossible in this small town we live in where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but it was also hopeless. My mother is a retired kindergarten teacher from Trinity Lutheran. She still keeps in touch with every single teacher employed there and also has a standing lunch date every month with the vice principal, the secretary, and the guidance counselor. My father plays poker with the principal and my former boss of Trinity Lutheran. The same Trinity Lutheran whose lawn we are currently standing on, where we attend church every Sunday.

“Did you try St. Joseph Catholic School?”

“Oh, hey now, Margie!” My mother scoffs at my aunt, who turns around to join our conversation after saying hello to one of her neighbors. “We’re Lutheran. We don’t work in Catholic schools. Ever heard of the Reformation?”

“Fine. Then who gives a rat’s patootie what she does, Peggy? Let the poor girl take some time off and figure out what she wants to do with her life. There’s no rule that says she even has to be a teacher,” Aunt Margie states.

Right about now, I’d love to give my aunt a hug and tell her how much I love her, but going by how red my mother’s face is getting, I’m just going to stand here watching their conversation like I’m at a tennis match, with my head bouncing back and forth between them. My aunt and my mother are like two sides of the same coin and often get mistaken for twins. They’re both slim and stand around 5’4”, and both go to the same hair dresser like clockwork every six weeks to get rid of the grays and clean up the ends of their dark brown, chin-length bobs. The only difference between them is my Aunt Margie’s mouth. She tends to be a little more… colorful than my mother. She’s also always on my side, no matter what the subject matter may be.

“Heidi is a teacher. Heidi will always be a teacher. It’s in her blood. It’s what she was always meant to do,” Mom says passionately. “It’s bad enough she’s still single and hasn’t given me any grandbabies yet. When I was her age, I already had tenure and had been happily married to her father for seven years, God rest his soul.”

“Dad’s not dead,” I interject quietly.

“He will be if he doesn’t convince Lou to give you your job back.”

The three of us turn and look behind me where my dad is currently talking to his poker buddy and my former boss, Principal Lou Shephard.

My mom lets out a sigh of frustration when the two of them throw their heads back and laugh, clearly not having a heated discussion about my teaching position like she had hoped. I can’t help but feel a little happy that my dad isn’t on the same crusade my mother is to get me my job back. I keep that thought to myself as I turn back around, and my aunt and mother continue with their argument about my future employment.

From the moment I could talk, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted be a teacher just like my mother. She’d be standing right there beaming the whole time, and it wasn’t until later that I wondered if that was the real reason I gave the answer I always did. By then, I’d gotten my degree in elementary education, and after student teaching and getting my certifications, I immediately went to work at the same place where my mother had spent thirty years molding the minds of five-and-six-year-olds. I don’t even know when things changed, really. All I know is that within the last six months or so, every morning when I got up to get ready for work, I did it with dread. I dragged my feet and I grumbled and moaned through my morning routine, pasting on a fake smile as soon as I walked through the school doors. Don’t get me wrong; I love children. I adore them. I want to have my own children someday in the distant future. But being in charge of other people’s children for eight hours a day just didn’t excite me as much as I thought it would. Dealing with angry parents who yelled at you because they thought you weren’t doing enough, yelled at you because they thought you were doing too much, or just yelled at you because they had no one else to yell at when their son or daughter was struggling in school wasn’t what I signed up for. Neither were the politics or the gossip or the stress of not being allowed as much creative freedom as I wanted, since every decision I made on what to teach and how I taught it had to be approved by someone else.