Down that Road Again

Down that Road Again

I have a recurring nightmare—it’s not as frequent nowadays as it used to be. It’s always a different scenario, but always the same theme. In it, I make a poor cision and then, rather than backing up and starting over, I just keep going down that wrong road. Predictably, the situation always deteriorates. I’ve gradually come to realize that is my unconscious, but wiser self is talking to me in these nightmares.

I’ll give you an example from real life. When Jonathan was about 2 ½ years old, I enrolled him in a Montessori school. I had been a big fan of Montessori education for a long time, and had even had fantasies of one day owning my own Montessori school. Well, although Jonathan adjusted (eventually) to his new daytime activities and actually thrived (throve?) in the Montessori atmosphere, the school never was quite what I expected. For one thing, the teacher wasn’t certified as a Montessori teacher. So when just a few months after Jonathan began attending the school the teacher asked me if I’d like to be on the Parent Board that ran the school, I immediate said “sure” without any hesitation. I thought this might be a way to influence the school to hire a certified teacher.

The next step down this road was that the Board needed to elect new officers, and, somehow, I have no memory of this, I was elected President. Probably by default. Anyhow, I was now “in charge.”

After another few months, during which I attended two rather desultory Board meeting, the teacher announced that she’d like to go to school to study and get certified. Good for her. But tough on the Board members, as we’d have to hire another teacher sooner, rather than later. Within a few days, though, we heard that a certified teacher was interested in the position at our little school. Were we in luck or what. So, given that Montessori teachers are scarcer than Howdy Doody lunchboxes, we hired her, almost sight unseen.

Things went along fairly well for another several months, but then I began getting phone calls from some parents, making vague complaints that “something was wrong.” It was hard to pinpoint just what the problem was. One person thought the children were using the same materials over and over again. Another thought that the classroom seemed a little untidy. All came to a head, though, one Saturday afternoon when I got a telephone call from the teacher. She was quitting, effective immediately. When I asked what was wrong, she said something vague like she wasn’t going to be there anymore. When I asked where she was going, she gave a funny little laugh and said she didn’t really know where you went after you killed yourself.

Whooooo. I told her I would call her right back, and not to move. I called my friend who was the medical school chaplain and asked him what to do. He said to see if I could get her to the emergency room and he would meet her there and see that she got to proper resources. I called the teacher back, and asked if she would meet my friend at the ER, and she eventually said she would. Later I heard that she did go to the ER and must have gotten some help, but I never heard from her again. I think she went home to her parents’ house.

At any rate, we had no teacher for Monday. Between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning, I enlisted the aid of the part-time teacher’s aide and the office manager (the only two employees besides the teacher) to keep the school going for the short term. Both these women had some Montessori training, but were uncertified.

Now what. As it turns out, there was another Montessori school in town, so I called the teacher at that school for suggestions. She put me in touch with the President of their Parent Board, who let me know that they might be interested in merging the two schools, as their enrollment was not as high as they would like. Unfortunately (for me) the woman who was the President of their Board was the most God-awful women I’ve ever dealt with. When I think back on her, I always envision her in a dominatrix outfit, because that gal was the most dominating, controlling, bossy, opinionated society gal I have ever met. Not that I know that many society gals.

And, to make matters worse, it turned out that, years before, our school had broken away from the very school we were talking about merging with over a falling out between two sets of parents. Only one of the children in our school was a sibling of a child from that era, but old animosities and jealousies came flaring back up as that mother rekindled the flames.

But in the long run, we had no choice. There were no available Montessori teachers to be found at any price, and our salary wasn’t that high anyway, so despite the misgivings of some parents, we merged the two schools and inherited a teacher.

Jonathan and the other children liked the new teacher, nobody yanked their kid out of the school, and I became the Vice-President of the new School. Guess who the President was. The rest of that year passed uneventfully and at the next Board meeting, I resigned.

See what I mean? One poor decision—agreeing to serve on a Parent Board without knowing the first thing about what I was getting into, and the whole next year of my life is in an upheaval.

And that’s just one example.

But after years of the recurring nightmare, I finally began to see the pattern. And now I can only hope I’m wise enough to try to look down the road before taking that first step.