I was in the wrong line of work. It doesn’t matter that my passion is a creative one, I could have found success in a normal field, like a normal person, I’m sure of it. But I was led into education, which is a story all its own, the leading was so powerfully clear. So distinct was the voice of God when I realized my calling to the classroom, that I don’t even ask why His plan was for me to enter a field I am wholly unqualified for. Educators should be patient, organized, enduring. They shouldn’t get burned out after five years and then slog through the next eight. It was thirteen years total. Thirteen years of overwhelming stress and crippling anxiety over what fire I was going to have to put out that day. And the next day, and the next, and the next. No, I don’t ask why. Maybe one day it will be revealed to me the grand purpose those years served, but you’d better believe the moment I saw the opportunity to jump ship, I dove head first.
As I was falling, careening toward this new and terrifying world of writing full time, there were moments of disillusionment, but there was something else too. Something lovely. It was the hope of what adventures lie ahead, and who doesn’t relish in romanticizing their life’s work, when it is something they love doing. My imagination was on fire with ideas that I would actually have time to polish when I put pen to page.
One of my imaginings, I will never forget. It was almost like a vision, coming out of nowhere, and was so clear, so precise, and entirely tangible to me. It was a volume—a huge, thick book with hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still see it. It wasn’t one I wrote though. This volume was important enough to be fantasized about, because in its pages it contained information about my identity.
It’s not that this book about my identity was going to be written and really exist; I didn’t think that at all. I took this fantastical vision to mean one thing—that on this journey I was going to find stuff out about myself, and I. couldn’t. wait.
Fast forward a couple of years. I completed a novel, it won a contest, and I was working on a novella to be published with Scrivenings Press. Not only was I on track to realize my dream of being an author, my husband and I were also on track to be empty nesters—oh, sweet freedom. We were very close, with our younger a Sophomore in high school and our older about to be married.
It was three weeks before the wedding when we got the call. I would say it was the last phone call I expected to receive, but that would imply that it was on the list of phone calls I expected to receive. No, this was nothing we could have anticipated—it was other-worldly. “We have a baby for you,” they said. A baby? Who said anything about a baby? Sure, we wanted to adopt, but that was over ten years ago, before we aged out—before we gave up. That dream was not on our radar anymore, not even a little.
We hung up the phone and spent hours talking and praying and toying with the idea that saying yes could be a possibility. Then, when I was exhausted and unable to think anymore, curled up in the fetal position in bed, still fully clothed, my husband touched my shoulder and said, “What book will you read to her first?”
He knew what he was doing with that statement, and God did too. We took that baby girl home from the hospital, and she officially became part of our family six weeks later. She is two and a half now, full of spunk and effervescent with questions. She asks us things that make my teacher heart sing, because I can tell she’s thinking. She asks us to identify structures and machinery, she asks what people and animals are doing, she asks where the people she loves most are when she’s not with them, and she asks why, why, why, why, why.
I’m still out of full-time public education. It is the perfect fit for some people, blessed as they are with that gift. I am not so gifted. I hope to never return to that arena. But God is allowing me to teach. To scratch that itch. To watch a little one learn and soak up all that life has to offer every single day. Every new phrase, every new skill, every new interest. It is life-giving.
There’s another question she asks. It’s not exactly academic, and the first time she said it, I was taken off guard. She asks, “What’s your name?”
Not to strangers.
She asks us.
She asks me.
When she asks “What’s your name, mommy?” What can I say? Rachel, I answer. And then I want to thank her. For wanting to know me, for being interested in my humanity beyond my role as her caregiver. Who am I really? Well, there is one person standing here in front of me who cares enough to know. God gave me someone who cares enough to ask.
I did not know this baby was coming—I could not have possibly guessed or predicted that this child would enter my life. Never in my wildest dreams did I see myself mothering a toddler in my forties. Yet here she is: my unexpected blessing, my charge, my commitment, my built-in plans that can’t be broken. My little angel who belts out The Longest Time by Billy Joel from her crib. She is part of my identity now. She is part of that volume in my vision. So when she asks, “What’s your name?” I’ve started answering, “My name is Rachel, but you can call me Mommy.”
Because that is who I am.
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