She was 17 going on 50 when we spoke that day; I was 41 or 42. Her mom was a handful of years younger than I was, working full-time in the school – as a 3rd grade teacher – where I was subbing the day I encountered her daughter. She was in my niece’s class (maybe?) in a small rural school that was also my Alma Mater. I had seen her around, knew who her mother was, but remember that morning well, because she was in the office, not in class, when we fell into conversation.
Her energy was intense, volatile, disruptive, fitting for a tall red-head who was chronically late to school despite her mother being an employee. She told me that if she had one more absence, she would be expelled, unable to graduate the following spring. This seemed to amuse her. It was clear to me that she was hot for attention of any kind, and negative attention would do, or so it appeared.
A teacher’s child not making it to school that often? Unthinkable. How was this possible? I spoke briefly to her mother, who said the equivalent of ‘Good luck with that, getting that one out of bed and into class’. It was clear to me that she’d given up. It was clear the child and mother were at loggerheads. It was also clear that her mother, while popular as a teacher, was a party girl. I hadn’t been back in my home town long before those details were apparent even to a casual – pre-fakebook – onlooker.
I don’t know if there was a biological father in the picture, although at one point the mother had a longtime boyfriend, or 2, or 4. There may have been sexual abuse issues; men prey on women, single moms whose young, vulnerable daughters and sons are their preferred cut of human meat. But again, I don’t know. I do know, I did find out, that her mother was infamous for having relationships with male former students, students no longer 8 or 9 years old, but rather 20, or 21. This made me feel sick.
Should I have intervened? I didn’t. I didn’t know either of them, and it seemed set in stone, concrete, already, including in the community as a whole. Plus, who the fck was I to interfere? I’d been back in my hometown for 5 minutes and was outraged while not wholly informed about a teacher neglecting her own child’s education and upbringing. Maybe that’s what it was? Maybe I was still adjusting? Maybe it was too complicated, as was my life at the time? Maybe?
But even if the kid was difficult and willful, surely there was a way, a method, an inducement, a carrot to dangle? Surely a family member, the principal, a close friend – someone, anyone – could help, intervene, holding both of these humans compassionately accountable? I didn’t know them or enough to ask, ‘Have you sought help?’ Too much water under the bridge by then, I suppose. Too late.
I am haunted by that moment, because this was not a stupid child. And she was a child, despite being 17 going on 50. I am haunted by her, by her untapped, unrecognized potential in that moment and since. I am, or rather was, also unsurprised by her dying in her 30s, around the same age her mother was when I first met her. And who knows what traumas her mom had been through, including, now this, the death of her daughter.
She left 2 kids behind. An overdose. Her partner dead less than a year prior. Just numbers. Both kids under 10 years old. What a waste. What a sad, terrible loss upon loss. I am sorry I didn’t know her better. I’m sorry I was able and chose to do nothing other, nothing more than hear her out that morning. However short her life, still, she haunts me.