Dear Mrs. Williams,

I've been meaning to write this letter for awhile now. You made my first year teaching high school harder than it needed to be. Instead of a mentor you were a tormentor.

I don't need to recount all the wrongs. They don't matter. What matters is the realization of your motivation behind them. Many mentors would say they needed to be tough to make sure a rookie teacher has a solid start. You took it to a whole new level. There were rumors of teachers before me falling apart and the teacher after me being on the verge of quitting. The faculty knew what you were, yet were powerless to stop a tenured teacher. Maybe you had terrorized them in the past, because surely co-workers that had known you for years would have spoken up as friends to point out your folly. Maybe there was fear there too. I have no idea what was happening in the county offices. They said they had many complaints about you, yet their hands were tied until a more egregious offense.

My theory about you is that you are a small person in search of power. That's why you enjoyed the horse races so much. Imagine those tiny jockeys just controlling those massive animals. You were short, you were a woman and you were black. I can only imagine what growing up in the decades before mine were like. They left you with a taste of resentment that you had to pour out on those you had power over. There was a limit to what you could do to the students, because the parents in that county had all the say. So you brandished your power over the fledgling teachers.

What did you accomplish? Did you weed those that aren't meant for teaching from the herd? Or did you do the scholastic community a disservice by leaving us with a bad taste in our mouths for teaching?

I loved teaching, and I loved the students. What turned everything sour was my experience with you and the resulting realizations about the power of the faculty. If you don't have their support, a hard job becomes a burden instead of a challenge. Teaching is indeed a career where dinosaurs rule. If you happen upon an 'old skool' school, the tenured have the power and refuse to see any new ideas as good.

Even now though, years later, I smile at the memory of what my students accomplished. I feel that it reflects on me as a teacher. And nothing pleases me more about my relationship with you than to know that the students I taught, many of them your former students, passed the Standards of Learning under my care after they had failed through you. Somewhere, I managed to give them a spark of learning you couldn't impart. Napoleon has her Waterloo, she just doesn't know it yet.

Coming Out for WBFW

Yup, that's me. First the depression thing, now breastfeeding. It's World Breastfeeding week and I am finding that I need to reclaim my pride in the choices we have made for the family.

Of course, this isn't a huge coming out as not many read my blog. But it's not something I talk about much unless I know the person I am talking to understands.

We're a breastfeeding family. Not just a couple- mom and child- but the entire family. Without Pete's support I wouldn't have nursed past a few weeks.

To cut the six-year long story short, We succeeded. I researched, we continued. Through the terrible twos, through the move to Hawaii, through my pregnany, through the move from Hawaii...even through my labor with Jilliann.

Chase went to 4.5yrs before he weaned. For someone who doesn't know what it's like to nurse a child past a year, the idea of nursing a preschooler might be shocking. Having researched not only the benefits but also traditions and biology pertinent to breastfeeding beyond a year, I felt this was the right choice.

I'm not saying it's all roses and lovingly gazing into each others eyes. There are times I wished I had taken the path of least resistance and formula fed. It's easier to have someone else take that responsibility, easier to substitute yourself with other things and people. But when I thought about it, it really made me feel good to look at my child and know that I had something unique to give him...and now her too.

It's easy to put all the blames of parenting challenges on breastfeeding your toddler and preschooler. And yes, it does present it's own unique issues. Pulling of shirts, calling out for nursies in public places, feeling like a snack machine as your child goes about the daily routine. What's harder is remembering parenting is in and of itself a challenge. It's not for the meek and weak. Taking an easy way out just so you can live as close to your pre-child life as possible is doing a disservice to yourself and your child.

If the thought of nursing a child more than a few months old, or even a year old seems repugnant to you, do yourself a favor. Ask a mom who has been there. Keep an open mind, realize that if extended nursing was so wrong, the American Academy of Pediatrics wouldn't have changed their policy statement and specifically mentioned nursing beyond the age of three. The World Health Orginization wouldn't reccomend nursing at least two years...and speaking of the world, the average weaning age out there is 4yo. We have to ask ourselves what do they know, perhaps instinctually, that we don't. We like to think of the US as the great melting pot. In truth we are an ethnocentric culture that, on the whole, can't even imagine that we might be wrong when our average weaning age is 6mos. Years shorter than much of the rest of the world.

What are we taking from our children that they deserve? What are we withholding from ourselves in the name of 'progress'?