In appreciation for the men and women who have died in military service to our country. May their selfless sacrifice be honored and remembered always.
Monday, May 26, 2008
My Story: From Overachiever to Self-Perpetuating Catastrophe
If I had tried to write this in exact chronological order, the result would have been too fragmented to be readable. There is a lot of overlap of crisis intertwining with other events in my life. In order to maintain continuity in the events, I had to do some backtracking on the chronology at the transitional points.
I was born in the mid 60's and grew up in a culturally diverse, economically depressed city. Although socioeconomically mixed, it was a struggling city. My family lived in a very modest, but decent neighborhood. I am the oldest of four children, with a sister who is close to my age and two brothers who are substantially younger. My father worked for a major airline, and he was the most involved father in our neighborhood. During school vacations, he would let us come to his work long before they ever had Take Your Daughter to Work Day. He used to bring weather satellite pictures home for us to take to school. That is not such a big deal now, but it was then. At the dinner table, he would quiz us on math facts and geography. Because of his unusual work schedule, he was the father who was most available for school field trips, and we made him do it. Once, we came with the bright idea that he should make us an ice skating rink in the backyard, and he came through for us. To appreciate the magnificence of this feat, you would have to understand the size of the yard. Very small. He even carved a bench into the snowbank for us to rest. My mother was a highly skilled typist, who was able to work part time hours for what was full time income for many women at that time and still be very available to the family. She was also a very talented artist in her spare time. It is impossible to explain was so great about my mother by describing anything she did. It was more about the effect she had on people. She had INSIGHT.
My parents were strict, but kind. Both were high school graduates who had only taken a few college classes, but the placed a very high value on education. Impeccable grades and impeccable behavior were not optional. They expected us to WORK. After snow storms, my mother would send my sister and me to shovel the walks of the elderly folks in the neighborhood. Sometimes, the neighbors would offer us money, but we were not allowed to take it. School was my life. I was one of the top students, and I finished high school ranked in the top five in a graduating class of about 300. I was also a National Merit Scholarship Semi-finalist, National Honor Society, etc., etc. Originally, I wanted to be a teacher, but my teachers told me that job wasn't good enough for me. I conformed to overachiever expectations, and planned to become a doctor instead. Most activities outside of school never worked out for me. I had wanted dance lessons so badly, but I got bored and dropped out. Everyone was moving too slow. I wanted everyone to speed up. I did take accordion lessons for a couple of years. I really wanted to learn how to play the drums, but that option was not on the table. I have a keyboard now, and I can play a few simple things, although it was an adjustment. I wish I were better at it, but I haven't had the time to spend on it. The drum idea is still impractical.
When I was 14, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was pregnant with the first of my two brothers. She was only 33 at the time. Surgery was planned for immediately after my brother was born. Then we ended up with another medical crisis. My brother was born two months prematurely, and the prognosis was guarded for awhile. He spent two months in the hospital, and my mother had her surgery right after that. The biopsy indicated that her cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes, and the prognosis was excellent. About a year later, my mother had to have two back surgeries for a herniated disk. She had had a bad fall years before, and had always been in some pain from it. It finally became a crisis, and she spent the entire summer in the hospital. Then my brother had to have two surgeries to correct problems associated with his premature birth. Then my youngest brother was born a few months before I graduated from high school. When my first brother was born, I had thought he was an interesting specimen. But I was not looking forward to going through that again. Fortunately, no major medical emergency this time. I did get used to having him around, and he was okay. Throughout my high school years, I spent most of my time helping out the family, which had a severe impact on any kind of a social life. My sister helped out, too, but she was more in demand socially than I was. Since we were close in age, we had a lot of common friends, and they had to choose between us. I lost out. Not because they thought I was so bad, but because my sister was more fun. I was keeping my grades up, but I was struggling with any extracurricular obligation. My so called friends from school decided it would be a good time to knock me off my pedestal instead of helping me out with anything. There were some benefits for them. By the time I graduated, I had no friends.
In the fall, I began attending a fairly well known college to which I had been awarded a full academic scholarship. Because of all of the family hardships and isolation, I was very unprepared for the social environment. I was also floundering academically. Suddenly, many years of schooling for a career that I did not even want stretched endlessly before me. In my first semester, I dropped out before I flunked out. I knew I would be losing my scholarship, so I decided to cut my losses. My father was very disappointed. He did not speak to me for a year. My mother was okay with it. She saw how miserable I was, and she just wanted me to be happy. For the next year and a half, I drifted aimlessly through a series of low paying part time jobs. The first of these jobs was pumping gas at a convenience store. My neighbor was the store manager, and she was in desperate need of trustworthy people. She hired me. It was a fun job in the summer, but I didn't like it so much when winter came. After a few more not worth mentioning jobs, I landed a full time gig at an insurance company. When I applied for the job, they wanted someone who could type 35 wpm. I could only type 27 wpm. The human resources person had a negative attitude toward me, but she sent me on to the claims manager. He decided that he would rather hire someone smart than someone who could type. I was hired as a claims clerk. The place was a mess. My first job was opening the mail, and finding the relevant files so that the claim adjusters could do the necessary work. It was a numerical filing system, and everything was misfiled. The stack of unmatched mail was sky high. I went through every drawer and got it organized. The claim adjusters were forced to do their own filing because no one would do it for them. I took that job away from them. I did not want them messing up my new system with their hazardous filing tactics. I cleared up all of the mail, and then started to do everyone else's work, too. Pretty soon, the office was cleaned up. In my spare time, I would read the big claim files. A claim adjuster position opened up. A few people were offered the job, but they turned it down because their seniority meant there would not be much of a salary increase. At first, I did not think to apply for it, but I saw that no one else was interested. I didn't know how they would react to a 19 year old with only six months with the company asking about the job, but I went and asked about it, anyway. It turned out that the claims manager was waiting for me show up. I got the promotion. After a few years, I did leave that job for a while to pursue other goals, but I did have a second employment experience with the same company. When I went back, I immediately became unofficial crisis management. There were times that I would be handling three desks and training new people for the open positions at the same time. On the department goals, I set records and then broke my own records. No one else even came close.
At the same time that I was getting that first promotion, my mother's health deteriorated. The diagnosis was delayed a few months by an incompetent doctor, but it turned out her cancer had come back. This was a shock to everyone because the original prognosis had been so excellent and she had already passed the five year survival milestone that was considered cured. It had been six years. The cancer had returned in a very aggressive form, and she ended up in a coma before we even knew what was wrong. She died within a few months at the age of 38. I was 20, my sister 19, and my brothers 6 and 2. I was back to taking care of my brothers again, this time with the expectation of permanence until they didn't need me anymore. I was happy to do it because I knew it was what my mother would have wanted. It was the last thing I could do for her.
Two years after my mother died, I had gotten bored with my insurance job. I decided to give college another try. I did not tell anyone I was applying to college until I was sure it would work out. My father had been very disappointed with my first crash and burn. I went back to my original aspiration of teaching and chose elementary education. I finished my first semester with a 4.0. That was a relief. I wasn't sure if I had it in me anymore. At the same time that I returned to college, my sister moved out suddenly. The family situation had been very tense for quite a while. My sister and father argued constantly, which was surprising because they had gotten along well before. Previously, I had been the one who had a somewhat contentious relationship with him. When they would start arguing, I would leave the house, sit on the deck with my head in my hands, feeling hopeless. I felt like I was the only one who was even trying to make things decent for my brothers. At the same time my sister left, my father started dating a woman he had met at church. I found about their marriage plans when they started house shopping. They never said anything to me directly. They eventually told me that I could continue living there until I finished college. I went along with it because I did not have any other plans. That arrangement lasted all of one month. There were major adjustment problems, and I was scapegoated for all of it, even though I spent most of my time there in my room. She yelled at everyone constantly. She could never just say what the problem was. I did not like the way she was treating my brothers, and I said something to her about the verbal abuse. My father told me to me to leave and gave me two months to find a new place to live. I was out of there in three weeks.
Within a few months, I walked straight into a predator, although I did not know that was what he was at the time. I met my ex in college. In the library, no less. We became involved, eventually married, and had a daughter. The first violent assault happened with a few days of my daughter's first birthday. Over the period of three and a half years, there was a total of three violent assaults with injuries, threatening and terrorizing that did not cause physical injuries, and the other typical types of abuse that go with it. Emotional and psychological abuse. I cannot remember whether he verbally abused me. He may have tried and given up. I am a very difficult person to verbally abuse. I am oblivious to it. He did verbally abuse our daughter and he terrorized her as well. Always careful not to leave injuries. She did have one unexplained injury, but I was never able to get to the bottom of how it happened. My daughter started to develop some serious problems with her development at about the age of two. She had severe speech and language and behavioral problems. Her physical development was barely moving either. I tried to talk to her pediatrician about it, but I was blown off. I finally took my daughter to a screening through the school dept., and she was evaluated for special education and placed in a special ed preschool program. Reading the evaluations for the first time was EXCRUCIATING. There had not been a violent incident in two years, and I guess I thought things were getting better. At this point, I realized things had not been getting better. He had been sabotaging a lot of things, and I was just avoiding any kind of confrontation about it. I had to confront him about his parenting issues. He was refusing to go to any of the school meetings, and he would not get involved in any constructive way. Everything I tried to change to help her, he would sabotage. The situation became very tense, and that led to another assault. I gave him an ultimatum. Get professional help, or I was cutting him loose. He refused, and I filed for divorce at the age of 29. I thought his communication had been very clear, but he seemed very surprised by my follow through. He escalated to death threats and stalking. After six months of this, I was just about nonfunctional. Weeks at a time with no sleep or food. The system does nothing about stalking, and they expect "victim" to be a full time job. With a special needs child and a full time job, I already had too much to do. Everything went under. After I was forced out of my job, there was nothing left to do, but sit around playing cat and mouse games with him. I scraped together the last of my resources and moved away. After a lengthy and very hostile three and a half year custody battle, I was awarded sole legal custody. He started out with automatic unsupervised visitation and worked his way down. After his visitation was finally suspended, he was given a plan to restore it. He has never taken the first step. It is now too late, because my daughter is old enough to decide for herself.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I did graduate from college, summa cum laude with a B.S. in Elementary Education. [Now I know what the BS stands for] I minored in Sociology. I did my student teaching at an inner city school that was run by the best principal I have ever met. She was amazing. I heard that the school was in chaos when she first arrived, and she turned it around. There was a wonderful sense of community and an atmosphere of safety in the middle of a somewhat edgy neighborhood. At the time I finished college, it was not that easy to get a full time, stable teaching job. Constant budget cuts and layoffs. I had had to interrupt my education in the middle to earn enough money to continue. By the time I finished, my daughter was two years old and her problems had started. Her father fell through on some of his promises, which worsened the financial situation. Because of all of the hardships, the family could not tolerate the instability required for me to get into teaching. That led to my second employment experience with the insurance company.
After the divorce, I went on Oprah. She waved her magic wand, made all of the consequences disappear, and I lived happily ever after. Wait a minute! That is not how it happened at all. I did not go on Oprah. There is no magic wand. The abuse in my life did not stop there. There was a new form of torture awaiting me called special education. Incredible incompetence. Crisis after constant crisis. It NEVER ends. In my life, crisis is never a yes or no question. It is always multiple choice. I have even had dreams about torture because of this situation. I probably should not have written that because the people who might be reading this don't even know me. Maybe I should explain that my dream was set up like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. You know the bad thing is about to happen, but you don't actually see it. A school bus figured prominently in my dream, so I would have to conclude that the school district was culpable for it. I have spent about a dozen years working around the system to give my daughter a chance at a decent future. I have done a lot of the restorative work with my daughter on my own outside of school.
If that is not enough catastrophe for you, I do have another one. During the first few years of my daughter's special education experience, I went to work in special education. I had a few interesting experiences at an alternative school working with behaviorally challenged middle school boys, but it was only a temporary position. I was facilitating a student's transition back to public school. When that job was over, there were no positions open that were a good fit for me. I took a job in the school district that my daughter attended. I had been very involved with my daughter's education, and they knew me pretty well. At one point, I had been invited to participate in some of their professional training. The trend at the time was to forge more collaborative relationships between the schools, parents, and the community. Foolish idealist that I was at the time, I took the job because I believed they were sincere about improving the conditions. I did know there was some dysfunction there, but I did not find about the level of deception that had occurred with my own daughter's education until I got to see it from the inside. My daughter had participated with the same program the year before, but had moved on to the next school up in the district. It was a fiasco. I ended up in a severe ethical conflict over unsafe practices in a program that had no guidelines for the practices they thought they were using. They were not disclosing these practices to the parents, either. In the beginning, I was confused about how the program was working because it was very different than what they had described to me. All I got was evasion. Then the sabotage started. Later, I found out that all of the people using these practices inappropriately did not even have the training to know what they were doing. I ended up speaking MILD truth to the wrong power and got myself canned. I was in a probationary period, so I did not have any rights. That was the only job I have ever lost that way. Although there is no chance I would be considered employable by schools because of the nasty politics, I would never go back to that. I am not interested in being an agent of abuse. I am still trying to work for positive change in the system, but I no longer stupid enough to believe that I can do it from the inside. I am now on the outside.
I am now a very marginalized person. Because of all these catastrophes, I have had to downsize my life quite a bit to cope with the stress. Struggling at the poverty level, but still surviving.
My story is a pretty good example of what happens when nobody does the right thing. My daughter's story is the example of what it takes to overcome that problem.
I was born in the mid 60's and grew up in a culturally diverse, economically depressed city. Although socioeconomically mixed, it was a struggling city. My family lived in a very modest, but decent neighborhood. I am the oldest of four children, with a sister who is close to my age and two brothers who are substantially younger. My father worked for a major airline, and he was the most involved father in our neighborhood. During school vacations, he would let us come to his work long before they ever had Take Your Daughter to Work Day. He used to bring weather satellite pictures home for us to take to school. That is not such a big deal now, but it was then. At the dinner table, he would quiz us on math facts and geography. Because of his unusual work schedule, he was the father who was most available for school field trips, and we made him do it. Once, we came with the bright idea that he should make us an ice skating rink in the backyard, and he came through for us. To appreciate the magnificence of this feat, you would have to understand the size of the yard. Very small. He even carved a bench into the snowbank for us to rest. My mother was a highly skilled typist, who was able to work part time hours for what was full time income for many women at that time and still be very available to the family. She was also a very talented artist in her spare time. It is impossible to explain was so great about my mother by describing anything she did. It was more about the effect she had on people. She had INSIGHT.
My parents were strict, but kind. Both were high school graduates who had only taken a few college classes, but the placed a very high value on education. Impeccable grades and impeccable behavior were not optional. They expected us to WORK. After snow storms, my mother would send my sister and me to shovel the walks of the elderly folks in the neighborhood. Sometimes, the neighbors would offer us money, but we were not allowed to take it. School was my life. I was one of the top students, and I finished high school ranked in the top five in a graduating class of about 300. I was also a National Merit Scholarship Semi-finalist, National Honor Society, etc., etc. Originally, I wanted to be a teacher, but my teachers told me that job wasn't good enough for me. I conformed to overachiever expectations, and planned to become a doctor instead. Most activities outside of school never worked out for me. I had wanted dance lessons so badly, but I got bored and dropped out. Everyone was moving too slow. I wanted everyone to speed up. I did take accordion lessons for a couple of years. I really wanted to learn how to play the drums, but that option was not on the table. I have a keyboard now, and I can play a few simple things, although it was an adjustment. I wish I were better at it, but I haven't had the time to spend on it. The drum idea is still impractical.
When I was 14, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was pregnant with the first of my two brothers. She was only 33 at the time. Surgery was planned for immediately after my brother was born. Then we ended up with another medical crisis. My brother was born two months prematurely, and the prognosis was guarded for awhile. He spent two months in the hospital, and my mother had her surgery right after that. The biopsy indicated that her cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes, and the prognosis was excellent. About a year later, my mother had to have two back surgeries for a herniated disk. She had had a bad fall years before, and had always been in some pain from it. It finally became a crisis, and she spent the entire summer in the hospital. Then my brother had to have two surgeries to correct problems associated with his premature birth. Then my youngest brother was born a few months before I graduated from high school. When my first brother was born, I had thought he was an interesting specimen. But I was not looking forward to going through that again. Fortunately, no major medical emergency this time. I did get used to having him around, and he was okay. Throughout my high school years, I spent most of my time helping out the family, which had a severe impact on any kind of a social life. My sister helped out, too, but she was more in demand socially than I was. Since we were close in age, we had a lot of common friends, and they had to choose between us. I lost out. Not because they thought I was so bad, but because my sister was more fun. I was keeping my grades up, but I was struggling with any extracurricular obligation. My so called friends from school decided it would be a good time to knock me off my pedestal instead of helping me out with anything. There were some benefits for them. By the time I graduated, I had no friends.
In the fall, I began attending a fairly well known college to which I had been awarded a full academic scholarship. Because of all of the family hardships and isolation, I was very unprepared for the social environment. I was also floundering academically. Suddenly, many years of schooling for a career that I did not even want stretched endlessly before me. In my first semester, I dropped out before I flunked out. I knew I would be losing my scholarship, so I decided to cut my losses. My father was very disappointed. He did not speak to me for a year. My mother was okay with it. She saw how miserable I was, and she just wanted me to be happy. For the next year and a half, I drifted aimlessly through a series of low paying part time jobs. The first of these jobs was pumping gas at a convenience store. My neighbor was the store manager, and she was in desperate need of trustworthy people. She hired me. It was a fun job in the summer, but I didn't like it so much when winter came. After a few more not worth mentioning jobs, I landed a full time gig at an insurance company. When I applied for the job, they wanted someone who could type 35 wpm. I could only type 27 wpm. The human resources person had a negative attitude toward me, but she sent me on to the claims manager. He decided that he would rather hire someone smart than someone who could type. I was hired as a claims clerk. The place was a mess. My first job was opening the mail, and finding the relevant files so that the claim adjusters could do the necessary work. It was a numerical filing system, and everything was misfiled. The stack of unmatched mail was sky high. I went through every drawer and got it organized. The claim adjusters were forced to do their own filing because no one would do it for them. I took that job away from them. I did not want them messing up my new system with their hazardous filing tactics. I cleared up all of the mail, and then started to do everyone else's work, too. Pretty soon, the office was cleaned up. In my spare time, I would read the big claim files. A claim adjuster position opened up. A few people were offered the job, but they turned it down because their seniority meant there would not be much of a salary increase. At first, I did not think to apply for it, but I saw that no one else was interested. I didn't know how they would react to a 19 year old with only six months with the company asking about the job, but I went and asked about it, anyway. It turned out that the claims manager was waiting for me show up. I got the promotion. After a few years, I did leave that job for a while to pursue other goals, but I did have a second employment experience with the same company. When I went back, I immediately became unofficial crisis management. There were times that I would be handling three desks and training new people for the open positions at the same time. On the department goals, I set records and then broke my own records. No one else even came close.
At the same time that I was getting that first promotion, my mother's health deteriorated. The diagnosis was delayed a few months by an incompetent doctor, but it turned out her cancer had come back. This was a shock to everyone because the original prognosis had been so excellent and she had already passed the five year survival milestone that was considered cured. It had been six years. The cancer had returned in a very aggressive form, and she ended up in a coma before we even knew what was wrong. She died within a few months at the age of 38. I was 20, my sister 19, and my brothers 6 and 2. I was back to taking care of my brothers again, this time with the expectation of permanence until they didn't need me anymore. I was happy to do it because I knew it was what my mother would have wanted. It was the last thing I could do for her.
Two years after my mother died, I had gotten bored with my insurance job. I decided to give college another try. I did not tell anyone I was applying to college until I was sure it would work out. My father had been very disappointed with my first crash and burn. I went back to my original aspiration of teaching and chose elementary education. I finished my first semester with a 4.0. That was a relief. I wasn't sure if I had it in me anymore. At the same time that I returned to college, my sister moved out suddenly. The family situation had been very tense for quite a while. My sister and father argued constantly, which was surprising because they had gotten along well before. Previously, I had been the one who had a somewhat contentious relationship with him. When they would start arguing, I would leave the house, sit on the deck with my head in my hands, feeling hopeless. I felt like I was the only one who was even trying to make things decent for my brothers. At the same time my sister left, my father started dating a woman he had met at church. I found about their marriage plans when they started house shopping. They never said anything to me directly. They eventually told me that I could continue living there until I finished college. I went along with it because I did not have any other plans. That arrangement lasted all of one month. There were major adjustment problems, and I was scapegoated for all of it, even though I spent most of my time there in my room. She yelled at everyone constantly. She could never just say what the problem was. I did not like the way she was treating my brothers, and I said something to her about the verbal abuse. My father told me to me to leave and gave me two months to find a new place to live. I was out of there in three weeks.
Within a few months, I walked straight into a predator, although I did not know that was what he was at the time. I met my ex in college. In the library, no less. We became involved, eventually married, and had a daughter. The first violent assault happened with a few days of my daughter's first birthday. Over the period of three and a half years, there was a total of three violent assaults with injuries, threatening and terrorizing that did not cause physical injuries, and the other typical types of abuse that go with it. Emotional and psychological abuse. I cannot remember whether he verbally abused me. He may have tried and given up. I am a very difficult person to verbally abuse. I am oblivious to it. He did verbally abuse our daughter and he terrorized her as well. Always careful not to leave injuries. She did have one unexplained injury, but I was never able to get to the bottom of how it happened. My daughter started to develop some serious problems with her development at about the age of two. She had severe speech and language and behavioral problems. Her physical development was barely moving either. I tried to talk to her pediatrician about it, but I was blown off. I finally took my daughter to a screening through the school dept., and she was evaluated for special education and placed in a special ed preschool program. Reading the evaluations for the first time was EXCRUCIATING. There had not been a violent incident in two years, and I guess I thought things were getting better. At this point, I realized things had not been getting better. He had been sabotaging a lot of things, and I was just avoiding any kind of confrontation about it. I had to confront him about his parenting issues. He was refusing to go to any of the school meetings, and he would not get involved in any constructive way. Everything I tried to change to help her, he would sabotage. The situation became very tense, and that led to another assault. I gave him an ultimatum. Get professional help, or I was cutting him loose. He refused, and I filed for divorce at the age of 29. I thought his communication had been very clear, but he seemed very surprised by my follow through. He escalated to death threats and stalking. After six months of this, I was just about nonfunctional. Weeks at a time with no sleep or food. The system does nothing about stalking, and they expect "victim" to be a full time job. With a special needs child and a full time job, I already had too much to do. Everything went under. After I was forced out of my job, there was nothing left to do, but sit around playing cat and mouse games with him. I scraped together the last of my resources and moved away. After a lengthy and very hostile three and a half year custody battle, I was awarded sole legal custody. He started out with automatic unsupervised visitation and worked his way down. After his visitation was finally suspended, he was given a plan to restore it. He has never taken the first step. It is now too late, because my daughter is old enough to decide for herself.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I did graduate from college, summa cum laude with a B.S. in Elementary Education. [Now I know what the BS stands for] I minored in Sociology. I did my student teaching at an inner city school that was run by the best principal I have ever met. She was amazing. I heard that the school was in chaos when she first arrived, and she turned it around. There was a wonderful sense of community and an atmosphere of safety in the middle of a somewhat edgy neighborhood. At the time I finished college, it was not that easy to get a full time, stable teaching job. Constant budget cuts and layoffs. I had had to interrupt my education in the middle to earn enough money to continue. By the time I finished, my daughter was two years old and her problems had started. Her father fell through on some of his promises, which worsened the financial situation. Because of all of the hardships, the family could not tolerate the instability required for me to get into teaching. That led to my second employment experience with the insurance company.
After the divorce, I went on Oprah. She waved her magic wand, made all of the consequences disappear, and I lived happily ever after. Wait a minute! That is not how it happened at all. I did not go on Oprah. There is no magic wand. The abuse in my life did not stop there. There was a new form of torture awaiting me called special education. Incredible incompetence. Crisis after constant crisis. It NEVER ends. In my life, crisis is never a yes or no question. It is always multiple choice. I have even had dreams about torture because of this situation. I probably should not have written that because the people who might be reading this don't even know me. Maybe I should explain that my dream was set up like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. You know the bad thing is about to happen, but you don't actually see it. A school bus figured prominently in my dream, so I would have to conclude that the school district was culpable for it. I have spent about a dozen years working around the system to give my daughter a chance at a decent future. I have done a lot of the restorative work with my daughter on my own outside of school.
If that is not enough catastrophe for you, I do have another one. During the first few years of my daughter's special education experience, I went to work in special education. I had a few interesting experiences at an alternative school working with behaviorally challenged middle school boys, but it was only a temporary position. I was facilitating a student's transition back to public school. When that job was over, there were no positions open that were a good fit for me. I took a job in the school district that my daughter attended. I had been very involved with my daughter's education, and they knew me pretty well. At one point, I had been invited to participate in some of their professional training. The trend at the time was to forge more collaborative relationships between the schools, parents, and the community. Foolish idealist that I was at the time, I took the job because I believed they were sincere about improving the conditions. I did know there was some dysfunction there, but I did not find about the level of deception that had occurred with my own daughter's education until I got to see it from the inside. My daughter had participated with the same program the year before, but had moved on to the next school up in the district. It was a fiasco. I ended up in a severe ethical conflict over unsafe practices in a program that had no guidelines for the practices they thought they were using. They were not disclosing these practices to the parents, either. In the beginning, I was confused about how the program was working because it was very different than what they had described to me. All I got was evasion. Then the sabotage started. Later, I found out that all of the people using these practices inappropriately did not even have the training to know what they were doing. I ended up speaking MILD truth to the wrong power and got myself canned. I was in a probationary period, so I did not have any rights. That was the only job I have ever lost that way. Although there is no chance I would be considered employable by schools because of the nasty politics, I would never go back to that. I am not interested in being an agent of abuse. I am still trying to work for positive change in the system, but I no longer stupid enough to believe that I can do it from the inside. I am now on the outside.
I am now a very marginalized person. Because of all these catastrophes, I have had to downsize my life quite a bit to cope with the stress. Struggling at the poverty level, but still surviving.
My story is a pretty good example of what happens when nobody does the right thing. My daughter's story is the example of what it takes to overcome that problem.
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