Looking Behind the Curtains

Life is full of curtains.  

There are stage curtains, window curtains, curtains that separate patients in hospitals, and we even have a curtain that hides our toilet.  However, some the most interesting and necessary curtains are the ones we put up to hide the parts of our lives we don’t want anyone to see.  

I got a glimpse behind one of those curtains today, and it was very humbling.  

I teach eighth grade boys Sunday school at church.  We were talking about our testimonies when a boy, we’ll call him Pepe, who recently made a profession of faith asked if he could give his testimony to the class.  

I’ve known Pepe for several months, but to tell the truth, the only thing I know about him is the fact that he has a great smile.  It’s one of those incredibly infectious smiles that can brighten any room. 

Pepe started talking and only a few of the other boys in the room were really listening.  Most were engaged in kind of half-whispering, off task conversations…but after about the first sentence, you could have heard a pin drop.  

Pepe talked for about 20 minutes and I’ve never been around that group of guys when they weren’t talking until today.  

Out of respect for Pepe and his unique situation, I’m not going to go into specifics.  What I can say is that first my jaw hit the floor.  Next, it took every ounce of strength I could muster to not become a blubbering idiot. 

This is a church in a well-to-do area of Dallas.  This is an area that I never would have expected anyone to have something like this behind his or her curtain.  But maybe I just haven’t taken the time to look. 

Like I said, life is full of curtains.  

And I need to pay more attention.

Where's that coming from?

It was a Tuesday night, and Melissa and I were working on creating a budget kind of thing.  She was using Excel, a program that I have no desire to understand or know how to use, when I decided to shoot to Baker Brother’s to get us some food.  

I hopped in the convertible and took off.  

I was carrying the bags back into the house, when I heard this beep.  

It sounded like the sound our alarm makes when the front door is opened, only not as loud as usual.  I glanced around to the front door, but it was closed.  As I was putting the bags down on the kitchen counter I heard the beep again, only it sounded like it had moved.  

“What is that beeping sound?” I asked the whole house.  

“What beeping sound?” Came the puzzled reply from the computer room.  

"BEEP" 

“There is goes again!” I said. 

Melissa met me in the hallway.  “I don’t hear anything.”   

Looking at me like I was crazy, she stared at me as we waited…and like clockwork, it beeped again.

“I don’t know what it is, but it sounds like it’s over here.”

“BEEP”

“Wait, now it sounds like it’s over there!”

"BEEP"

“It keeps moving!”

This conversation went on for about half an hour and we were all getting frustrated, because it didn’t matter where I went in the house it never got louder or softer, or closer or farther away. 

At this point I gave up and decided that whatever it was I was going to either find it later, or wait until it made itself known to the world. 

I was at the end of my rope! 

That’s when I reached into my pocket to take out my wallet and phone.  However, what I at first simply assumed was my phone was actually the pager Baker Brothers had given me to alert me when my order was ready.   

And then I heard an irritating, yet familiar – 

"BEEP!"  

"normal"

 I’ve always put myself in the category of growing up in a “normal” home.  I assumed my home life was normal and that most people had families and family relationships that were similar to mine.   Don’t get me wrong, I fully understood that some people had more material possessions than me and that probably even more people had less than I did, but I assumed that, for the most part, families were all like mine…loving and supportive. 

Maybe I’m naïve, but that’s what I had always believed.  

The last 15 years that I’ve spent as a teacher in public education have done nothing, if not proven to me that what I thought to be a normal home life is sadly A-typical. 

When you meet parents who don’t even know what grade their child is in, it becomes painfully clear why school isn’t a priority for their poor child. 

Or when you have a student who tells you their parent will “whoop” them if they get in trouble one more time, you begin to feel like a Boy Scout with a box of Band-aids who’s looking down the barrel of a gun.  

My first few years as a teacher, I would hear depressingly negative conversations in the teacher’s lounge and shake my head in disbelief.  Not disbelief in the things I was hearing about, I knew things like that were happening in the world, but rather disbelief in the fact that these teachers who I knew and admired were allowing themselves to have such a pessimistic view of life. 

Then came the day that I heard myself, out of frustration with an overly difficult situation, mutter the same kind of negativity that only a few years before had cause me to shake my head in shame.  I had gone over to the dark side. 

How had this happen?  Did I change, or had the scales simply fallen from my eyes and now I could see the world as it really is.  Negative. 

Maybe it’s wisdom, maybe it’s courage, maybe it’s age, but a few years have passed since I was violently forced into the real world, and I’ve learned how to see past the negative.  

Is it still there?  You bet it is.  However, for every student I have who’s home life is unbearable, I’ve got three or four who may be struggling educationally, or financially, but who have parents that are concerned and eager to do whatever they need to do to help their child succeed. 

I think the few tough cases take so much of my attention as an educator, that they seem bigger than life.  I’ve just got to work harder at focusing my attention on the positive…and life should be “normal” again.

 

Note:  This started off as a very different piece that it became. I was angry about a situation as school, but I couldn’t really write about that, so I was simply trying to vent.  Being forced to think through things as I was writing, my mood and perspective changed.    

Thanks for being my therapist.