When my mother left the second time, I cried in my father’s arms.
He tried to comfort this seven year old as best he could, but the grim reality soon settled in. He would have to find a daycare for my three year old brother and hire after school babysitters for me. He managed both tasks, but every weekday was a mad scramble as he readied children for school, dropped off the little one at daycare, put in a full day of work, retrieved the little one, fixed dinner, helped the older one with homework, made them wash up, and finally, sent them to bed. Meanwhile, my mother was out singing for money.
Despite having a husband, two children, a house, and a dog, my mother often felt unfulfilled, and why not? She had married at nineteen, shamed by purity culture for having premarital sex with my father, and strongly discouraged to live on her own. The only acceptable solution by society’s standard in those days was to marry my dad, but four years into the marriage and three years into parenting meant she had missed learning about her adult self. So when a dashing young man promised a traveling singing career, she left us. Eight months later my dad took her back, but one fateful day at a State Fair, another man invited her to his singing troupe, and so she broke our family, forever.
While my family seemed shattered in a million pieces, it was public school that kept me together. No matter the fighting of my parents, the chaos of spending every other weekend with her, or the bad mouthing everyone in the family engaged in, my teachers dutifully educated me on new mathematical operations, science, history, how to read and write better, and modeled how to treat other people. Every day, they took my attendance, taught me something new, called on me with the raised hand, and kindly noted my progress. One year, after I accused a teacher of writing a nonsensical word “noone” on the board, she instructed me to pull my desk to the middle of the room. It was then the gap between the two words that formed the phrase “no one” became apparent. Responsibly, she sent me to the school nurse where I promptly failed an eye exam, then took a note home to my father. Soon, I was sporting Strawberry Shortcake glasses and no longer making baseless accusations.
Later still, when I was adjusting to a new stepparent, home, bus ride, and school, it was new teachers who welcomed me warmly and made me feel like I belonged in those brightly-colored halls. They taught me astronomy, cooking, French, how to swing from the uneven bars, and how to use a bandsaw. School librarians recommended books then showered me with recognition for having borrowed so many. No matter the rough adjustments in family life, public education distracted me, relaxed me, and kept my interest so strong that I was soon inviting my dad to awards ceremonies so that he too could have a piece of happiness.
Even though I didn’t participate in sports, new worlds of competition, speed, and prowess opened up to me through extracurricular activities like Latin certamen and trivia clubs. Answering questions was FUN, but more importantly, public-speaking and voluntary research were practiced and improved. And one day, I skipped a year of college, and another day, I graduated from college, unlike either of my parents. Public education had given me everything my family couldn’t – stability and the skills to accomplish long term goals. No matter what family crisis popped up, public school steadied and readied me for anything I chose because it is more than reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Public education is a foundation for life.
Because public education is never to discriminate against its students on the basis of race, color, religion, language, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, or disability, it is ostensibly the guaranteed access for generations of Americans to quality instruction that can improve their skills, health, and relationships. And our hard-earned tax dollars allocated for it can never go to private or parochial schools where the same levels of transparency and accountability don’t exist, but where they still enforce purity culture.
Someday, I hope marriages will stop ending in divorce, not because of Project 2025’s nightmare agenda to end “no fault” divorces, but because people won’t feel forced to marry the wrong people in the first place. Until that happens, I take solace in public school groups for students of divorced families. These groups give students the opportunity to not suffer alone, but open up to one another, to get through the difficulty together, and to forge a new way ahead.
And isn’t that exactly what we want to teach our children?