Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong

by Sophie Hudson

  This was never more evident to me than one morning when I was a few minutes late to my third-period class. I’d run down to the office after second period because, well, Mama called me. This was back before everybody had a cell phone, and sometimes, when Mama felt like she really needed to tell me something, she’d call the school secretary—whom she’d known for twenty years, probably—and ask the secretary to page me over the intercom. When Mrs. Griffin would remind Mama that I was in class, Mama would say, “Oh, that’s okay! I’ll just hold on. Thank you so much!”

  So inevitably Mrs. Griffin would page me over the intercom and say, “Miss Sophie? Can you run down here and take a phone call from your mother on line two?”—and I’d immediately leap to the worst-case scenario in my head. I’d walk to the office wondering who had died or what terrible tragedy had befallen our family, and when I’d pick up the receiver and try to collect myself before I listened to what was sure to be life-altering news, Mama would start talking:

  “Sophie? You having a good day? Now, I know you’re probably not ready to start thinking about this just yet, but I was talking to Chox earlier this morning, and we decided that we want to have a cookout at Dalewood this Sunday after church. Just family—nobody else. Chox and Joe have been repainting the lake house, but it should all be finished by then, and we just thought it might be fun to cook hamburgers and visit. What do you think?”

  “MAMA. I THOUGHT SOMEBODY WAS DEAD.”

  “Oh, heavens no. Sorry I scared you! I’m just making my grocery list and wondered if you could bring the potato salad.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll bring the potato salad. And please let me reiterate that I THOUGHT SOMEBODY WAS DEAD.”

  “Everything’s fine! Your daddy’s on the golf course, and I’m gonna run to Winn-Dixie in an hour or two. Have you talked to your sister or your brother?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I talked to both of them last night.”

  “Oh, good. Glad y’all could catch up. Well, I know you need to go to class, so be sweet! Love you!”

  It usually took a minute or two for my heart rate to return to normal.

  On the morning when Mama’s phone call made me late to third period, I was only halfway up the stairs when I realized there was a lot of commotion inside my room. When I finally walked in the door, the noise died down, and a precious, sassy girl named Shay was sitting on top of a desk, looking at me out of the corner of her eye and grinning like the Hamburglar.

  Shay had a huge crush on a boy named Kito, and her preferred method of flirting was to antagonize him. She’d try to trip him when he walked by her desk, she’d pop him on the side of the head if she disagreed with him, or she’d contradict whatever he said just for the fun of it. I don’t have any idea what they were “arguing” about while I was on the phone with Mama, but I do know that as I turned my head from Shay’s impish grin to the chalkboard at the front of the room, this is what I saw written in all caps—in bright-pink chalk, no less:

  KITO SMELL LIKE FART

  I probably would have gotten a lot madder if Shay hadn’t been so proud of herself.

  Plus, I was deeply—DEEPLY—tickled, only I couldn’t let it show. I made a big production of erasing the board to buy some time, and when I finally composed myself enough to reprimand Shay for her choice of words as well as writing on the chalkboard without permission, she grinned even wider. Her big hazel eyes were practically dancing with mischief, and when I was finished, she spoke up.

  “Okay, Señorita,” she said, invoking a fairly ridiculous way to address someone who often gave the word casa four syllables of distinctive Southern flair. “I won’t do it again. But I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong because . . .”

  HERE IT COMES.

  “. . . you never said, ‘Don’t write on the chalkboard’ on that list of classroom rules.”

  THERE IT IS.

  And please, by all means, if you’d like to draw up a flowchart or something to illustrate how I was trying to make my students live under the letter of the law JUST LIKE I’D ALWAYS TRIED (and failed) TO DO, have at it. It would be a good while before I realized that you only need about four general guidelines to create and maintain an orderly, fun learning environment. But one of my biggest teaching flaws was that I tended to focus more on the kids’ behavior than on their hearts, and for better or worse, that’s where I found myself with Shay.

  I took a deep breath before I responded to her.

  “You’re right, Shay. I have never specified that you couldn’t write on the chalkboard. I’ll give you a pass on that one. But I’m still gonna take issue with the use of the word at the end of your sentence. It’s not a kind thing to say.”

  Shay folded her arms as the grin disappeared from her face. I could feel every set of eyes in that classroom watching us.

  “And besides,” I said, “the English major in me can’t let go of the fact that you have a subject-verb error in your sentence. Because if I were your English teacher, I’d totally take off three points for that ‘Kito smell’ business.”

  See? I was a nit-picking, petty woman. I had let my guard down, and my real personality came out, and I could only imagine that I was about to have full-blown mutiny on my hands.

  Shay continued staring at me for five or six endless seconds, and then, much to my surprise, she laughed. “I’m sorry, Señorita. I shouldn’t have written that.”

  “Th—I mean, gracias,” I replied. “Now apologize to Kito, please. Um, por favor.”

  “Sorry, Kito,” Shay said.

  He lifted his chin toward the ceiling in acknowledgment.

  Then Shay spoke up again.

  “Wa-aaait a minute! I forgot to say it this way: Lo say-in-toe mucho.”

  Then she winked and gave me a thumbs-up. I was rattled as all get-out, but there was no room for recovery time. I had to start the day’s lesson.

  At some point, I hoped, I’d get comfortable with the disciplinary stuff. But I couldn’t imagine when it would be.

  When I was in high school, I never, ever thought about how emotionally exhausting the days must have been for my teachers. I know it’s typical for students to assume that their teachers have no life outside of school, and I well remember those awkward moments when I’d run into, say, my biology teacher at the grocery store. It always took a few seconds to process a sighting of a creature outside its natural habitat, and then the most mundane implications of seeing Mrs. Coleman in the produce aisle, for instance, would just blow my mind.

  She shops.

  She eats.

  She prepares food for her family.

  It was like watching an episode of Wild Kingdom.

  I quickly learned, though, that being on the other side of the podium was no joke. In fact, there were lots of days when I’d step out in the hallway between classes, walk down the stairs next to my room, then stand underneath those stairs and cry for thirty or forty-five seconds before I went back up to my room. The emotional ups and downs were significant; I was trying to find my way in terms of earning the respect of my students, and as far as that part of the job was concerned, it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been teaching Spanish or English or molecular biology (AS IF). We had a diverse student population, and while that meant my days were never, ever boring, it also created some challenges. The kids’ resentments and judgments and jealousies often bubbled to the surface.

  From that perspective, teaching Spanish was the easiest part of my job. Granted, my accent was terrible (this shouldn’t be a surprise considering that on my best days I sound like a cross between Elly May Clampett and Minnie Pearl), but I’d forgotten that in Spanish I there’s an initial fascination with the language—at least for most people—that lasts for two or three months. We recited the alphabet and practiced vocabulary words and worked our way through the textbook. Some days I was a hot mess and on the verge of a nervous breakdown by fifth period (my biggest lesson about teaching high school kids: yelling at them doesn’t solve a thing; it just makes them def
ensive). Some days the kids tried to take advantage of me and push my patience to its limit. Some days I’d plan a lesson that turned out to be as boring as dirt, so I’d punt and let the kids watch The Lion King in Spanish. Again. Even though they didn’t understand a word.

  I told myself that’s what subtitles were for.

  Gradually, though, there were two or three good days for every five or six bad ones. The kids and I started to figure out each other’s personalities. Most—though not all—of the troublemakers decided to at least try to trust me, and I tried to stop micromanaging them. I definitely wasn’t anything special when it came to teaching Spanish. In fact, if I saw any of those students today, I would probably apologize for not being a better teacher (and in case you’re wondering, I would apologize in English, not Spanish—because I probably wouldn’t remember how to say that whole sentence in Spanish). Nonetheless, I was totally surprised by how deeply I cared for those kids. Their stories fascinated me and broke my heart and made me laugh until I cried.

  By the time February rolled around and first-semester exams were behind me, I felt like I just might make it until May.

  Muy bien, right?

  One of the very best parts of being back in Myrtlewood was that I got to work with a lot of the people who had been my junior high and high school teachers when I was in school. Initially it was the strangest thing to sit in the teachers’ lounge with, for example, the person who’d taught me trigonometry and calculus and try to will myself to call her by her first name (“Deborah,” I’d silently practice. “Deb.” “Deborah.”), but after a few weeks, I started to adjust. I would forever see those women as my teachers, but to my surprise, I also started to see them as my friends.

  And here’s the part that sort of makes me want to claw my eyes out when it’s late at night and I’m thinking about all my early twenties new-teacher bravado.

  Looking back, I can absolutely see how immature I was when I would sit in that teachers’ lounge and share all the thoughts and theories and grand realizations that had occurred to me in all of my SINGLE-DIGIT MONTHS of teaching high school. Most of the women (and the reason that I’m specifically mentioning the women is because I didn’t really hang out with the men) I ate lunch with every day had been teaching for at least fifteen years—some for twenty, twenty-five, thirty—so clearly it would have served me way better to ZIP IT and sit back and listen.

  But what has occurred to me—as recently as the last four or five years, even—is that while I didn’t always listen, I watched those women like they were a Jason Bourne movie and I was afraid to turn away lest I miss a critical plot twist. I watched how they managed to stay laid back and low key no matter what was going on. I watched them use humor to win over the kids and diffuse just about any situation. All those ladies seemed to have a knack for mothering the young’uns who resisted authority, and when it came to sports and extracurriculars, they rallied behind those kids like nobody’s business. Their thoroughness and consistency spoke volumes to me, and while they didn’t talk about Jesus when they interacted with their students, their diligence and patience made it so evident that their work was their ministry.

  I don’t know. It’s tough to make generalizations about what every young teacher needs—and I’m aware that many, unlike me, make a seamless transition from college to the classroom. But in my opinion, it would do most beginning teachers a world of good to spend a couple of years in the kind of company I had in that teachers’ lounge. At different points as a new teacher, I flat-out blew it; I made a ton of mistakes and a slew of bad decisions, all thanks to my arrogance and my stubbornness and my insistence that I knew better.

  But those women.

  Those women.

  Their examples taught me so much about the stuff I didn’t think I needed to know.

  And it’s not lost on me that when I started working at Myrtlewood, I thought I was just taking a job.

  But as it turned out, I was getting myself an education.

  There are just some things that college can’t teach you, I reckon.

  The classroom wasn’t the only place where I was in the dead center of a learning curve—because those were some strange and trippy days in my personal life. And they weren’t “trippy” because I was embracing my inner flower child, mind you; I have been terrified of drugs ever since I was eleven or twelve and saw a made-for-TV movie where Helen Hunt tried PCP and then, in the middle of a hallucination, jumped out of a second-story window. That was pretty much all I needed to know to take a “NO THANK YOU, I DON’T BELIEVE I WILL” stance with illegal substances.

  Every once in a while being a hybrid of a chicken and a scaredy-cat comes in handy.

  But of all the stages of life I’ve experienced so far, those early working years were the weirdest. Technically I was doing things that adults do—paying rent, going to work, grading papers, even showing up at church occasionally—but I was constantly wondering what might be next. Some days I felt like I was back at the Clarks’ house “playing teacher” with Kim, and I think a lot of that was because I was living in my hometown. Life there was familiar and easy, to a certain degree, but nothing felt long term, much less permanent. My college friends weren’t there, and even though several of them had started their families, I wondered if I’d forever feel unsettled without them in my day-to-day. Plus, I was still very much known as Bobby and Ouida’s daughter—which was fine and good and wonderful—but it was hard for me to figure out new boundaries with my parents. I vacillated between craving their approval and their pats on the back—and then trying to convince myself I shouldn’t care so much about what they thought.

  (Here’s a hot tip to twenty-four-year-old me: just go ahead and accept that you will most likely never stop craving the approval of your parents, and as you get older, it doesn’t matter if you dig a ditch, have a baby, write a book, win an award, WHATEVER—you still want to hear your parents say, “I’m proud of you. You did a really good job.”)

  (Whether or not you actually did a good job will be completely inconsequential. You will be totally content with lip service.)

  (Good talk.)

  I kept thinking that I should feel completely at home in Myrtlewood; after all, everything was familiar, from friendly faces at the grocery store to folks in their perma-pews at church to the rhythm of the red lights on Mission Hill Drive. Gradually, though, I started to realize that even though Myrtlewood hadn’t changed that much in the seven years since I left for college, I had. I needed to figure out a way to be comfortable in my own space—which had a lot more to do with the interior of my heart than with my proximity to my old stomping grounds.

  And then, in addition to all that, there was the David factor—which, come to think of it, sort of sounds like a TV show about people who learn to demonstrate extraordinary courage in seemingly impossible situations. Like, for instance, when fighting with a giant.

  Please know that I’m just as sorry as I can be that my brain works like it does.

  Anyway.

  David and I did start dating after I moved back to Myrtlewood, but in the grand scheme of things, our relationship lasted about a minute. Well, maybe six minutes. I was very insecure—with a flair for the dramatic, no less—so we bickered way more than I think either of us had expected. Eventually we had a huge fight because I lied to him about something stupid, and that argument only reinforced the idea that the recurring theme for our dating relationship was WE ARE NOT READY FOR THIS. David was more accepting of that truth than I was, so after we broke up, he threw himself into his new job while I basically modeled my life after a heartbreak montage in an after-school special. I wrote lengthy journal entries by candlelight, I bundled up in oversize sweaters and stared into space, I listened to old Anita Baker albums, and I sang through my tears when I’d hear “Ghost” by the Indigo Girls.

  Needless to say, I did not see our parting of the ways as an opportunity to deal with my propensity for high drama.

  I couldn’t even watch Friends
without thinking, I RELATE TO RACHEL’S FEELINGS FOR ROSS SO MUCH, Y’ALL.

  It was the winter of my second year at Myrtlewood High before I started to have some healthy perspective about the breakup (better late than never, I suppose). I could totally see that I’d expected my relationship with David to magically make me happy and somehow erase all the internal questioning and doubting and wrestling that had marked the previous five or six years.

  But hindsight had helped me realize something I’ve never forgotten: it’s no fair to hold a man responsible for fixing something he had no part in breaking.

  And there just comes a point, I reckon—a crossroads—when it’s time to get honest with the Lord and yourself and move forward in the process of becoming a real-live grown-up.

  You can imagine my surprise when I realized that was exactly what I intended to do.

  THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW was all the rage when I was a little girl. I didn’t pay that much attention to it because I was too young to understand it, but more often than not, I was in the den when Mama and Daddy would watch. I vaguely knew the characters’ names and had a general sense of how everybody was connected, but mostly I’d just glance at Mary and her friends while I brushed out my dolls’ hair, wove pot holders on my little plastic loom, or fired up the Easy-Bake Oven. And really, there was only one part of the show I wanted to see every week: the end of the opening credits when Mary would throw her hat up in the sky.