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I’m sitting at my desk once again, and it’s quiet today. It’s the end of the year, the holiday season is in full swing and the students have just one more day of school before they are home for the week between Christmas and New Years Day. I think about children a lot this time of year. Especially as they get older, no longer in my class or even the same building, but still they hold a small piece of my heart. I hope that they are becoming who they’re meant to become. I hope they have all the love and support they need to flourish into the kind of humans who will make the world better and fill it with love and grace and kindness. I hope that they have the kind of parents and siblings and extended family that make them feel safe to be exactly who they are. And I think about the fact that the ones who have come back over the years to say hi or check in with me are almost all queer or love someone queer. And I think about how in a few more years, my first crop of students will have graduated and started uni. I think about how much change they will have gone through by then. Internal changes, external changes. I hope they’ve been loved through those changes.
I think about the kids who have found the strength to come out to their families even when they aren’t sure if their families will accept them. I know those kids are likely to be having the hardest times over the holidays. I hate to imagine them in the kinds of scenarios wherein family members refuse to acknowledge or see them, or treat them as someone they’re not, but I know it’s happening. I think about my peers in uni, some of my friends who came out during uni had waited that long for a reason; it’s not that they didn’t know they were non-binary, it was that the stakes were too high to come out before then. It’s a lot harder to justify coming out when you figure you’ll probably be staring down homelessness if you do. I think about my former students who might be figuring themselves out now, and trying to weigh the options of whether to come out and lose their families but be themselves, or keep their families but lose themselves. I hope they know that I’d always take them in. I hope they know that my home is theirs. I hope they know we have extra bedrooms already waiting for them. I hope they know that I’ve been preparing a soft place for them to land since before we’d ever met. I hope they know I’d always choose to be their family. I hope they know they can choose me (us) back.
When I think about the stories I know of the kids who have suffered, who have had to cut ties with their family members, move out of their homes, leave behind siblings just to take care of themselves and be themselves…I feel an ache in my heart and in my guts like my chest cavity has been bombed and my insides are laid bare for the world to trample. I want so badly for everyone to have a safe, healthy, cozy, loving home, all year round, of course, but especially during the time when there is no school. For so many kids, school is where they feel accepted, they feel loved (by friends, by teachers), they receive attention, they are safe and well-fed…and those things are less true in their homes. So when school is on break, those kids don’t get to be in their happy place. But what a beautiful thing if they do feel my classroom is their happy place. I hope they’ll remember me when they grow up. I hope they’ll call upon me if they ever need a mentor, a helping hand, some good advice, a place to stay, someone in their corner.
There are so many kids out there who don’t have a place to be themselves during the holiday season. They have to pretend to be more masculine or feminine, they are forced to let relatives touch them in ways that make them uncomfortable, they are guilted into letting themselves be gaslit or emotionally abused or betrayed or abandoned because they somehow “owe” grownups “respect,” they’re bribed with gifts to behave a certain way or go to hours-long gatherings for grown-ups where children are afterthoughts. They’re seated at a kids table where no one pays attention to them and the other kids can get away with all kinds of terrible behavior because the adults just don’t care. They are told that they should be grateful for gifts when all they really wanted was for their dad or mom to pay some special attention to them this year. And that, that’s the hard part. Because I see all of their little faces when they come back…some return with a new brightness in their eyes, belief in a magical future, beautiful possibilities, feeling loved and cherished. And others look cold, alone, despondent, like they’ve lived through a war, and they very well may have.
So that’s what I am thinking about this time of year. I just hope they know I’m here for them, any time they need me. I’ll be here with my door open—clean sheets on warm beds and fresh towels in the bath—waiting for the ones who need a soft place to land.