My Mother Is A Teacher

When I was a girl, my mother taught me how to read a map. In the early 2000s, on the verge of GPS and Siri evolutions, my mother hated the idea of relying on technology for a sense of direction. She hated relying on technology for anything.

“You should know how to read highway signs,” she used to say, and quizzed me sporadically whenever the route was new.

“Do you know where you are?” she would ask.

Today, I do.

My mom was born independent. The daughter of Guatemalan immigrants who arrived in the U.S. just two months before her birth, my mother learned Spanish and English as her first languages. As the oldest of four, she learned to look after her younger sister and brothers while her parents worked. When she passed the entrance exam to Boston Latin Academy, my mother crossed the city alone each day for her education.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when my mother became a teacher, but still I worried. Maybe it was because she had been an architect until then. Maybe it was because I knew how much she loved designing kitchens and living spaces like the ones she had done in her parents’ home. Maybe I worried at the thought of her standing in front of a classroom filled with teenagers like myself. Maybe it was because I knew the way students could act and the words they could whisper.

The year I left for college, my mom began teaching Spanish at a public high school in Massachusetts. She had been a teacher before, at a small, private middle school where class size rarely exceeded 15 students. But this was high school, in a town with over 60,000 residents. This was the big leagues.

My mother has always been a teacher, in so many more ways than the academic definition. She taught me to know my mind and trust the feelings deep in my core – my gut, my intuition. She taught me to be aware of where I was in the world, to walk down well-lit streets, and to know who was walking behind me. She taught me to say please and thank you, to speak in a friendly tone when being introduced, and to never trust too quickly. She taught me to say no to boys I didn’t like and set boundaries with the ones I did. She taught me to fix things that were broken and to not spend money I didn’t have. Just as my mother teaches her students a language foreign to their tongues, she taught me our family’s culture foreign to this country. She made huevos rancheros with black beans on toast and taught me to dance to Selena while she cooked.

I used to think my mother was a serious woman, that her rules and low tolerance for attitudes were traits of impatience. But if my mother was strict, it was only because she was raising my brother and I to show respect where it was deserved. And who deserved it more?

I hope the students my mother teaches will see the teacher my mother is to me. I hope they’ll learn more from her than just language, I hope they’ll learn confidence and strength. I hope they’ll learn from the creativity that colors her classroom and her passion that grades their homework deep into the night. I hope they’ll appreciate the rest she never gets and the hours that don’t match her pay. When they speak to my mother, I hope they’ll use the polite words and kind voices she taught me so long ago and thank her for the time she gives and the knowledge she pours into their weeks. I hope they’ll sit in my mother’s classroom and let my mother teach them more than just words, because my mother is a teacher, and she always will be.