In Remembrance of Me: Perspective

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Perspective

I spent a lot of time last night waffling back and forth between being mad, embarassed, depressed and feeling like I'd been raped by The Teacher from Shreveport LA.

But this morning kind of put that problem in perspective for me. My humiliation at the hands of someone I don't even know and will hopefully never meet pales in comparison to what one of the social workers is going through today. She does case work with twin boys with a mentally ill mother. Late last week, the mother called her to come help because the woman's boyfriend beat her so bad she had to be taken to the hostpital. So the social worker spent most of a day getting things squared away with the mom, the police, the boyfriend and the boys. Yesterday, she finds out that not only is the mother not pressing charges, the boyfriend has moved back in. Being a mandatory reporter, she is obligated to call Child Protective Services, which she did and filed a formal complaint. This morning I started getting angry calls from the mother and in the background I could hear the boyfriend egging her on. She has been calling all morning trying to find out when the social worker will be in the office, which I refuse to tell her. This poor girl devotes her life to helping people and her reward is to sit at her desk in fear for her life from the mother of the children she's trying to protect.

So yeah, Teacher in Shreveport, you shook me. You made me feel small and worthless, but, as Elenore Roosevelt said, No one can make you feel anything unless you let them. I hope you got a charge out of it. I hope it made your day. But there are more important things going on in the world than you and I'm doing what I can to contribute to the good parts. And dwelling on you is distracting me from that so I'm going to work on letting it go.

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
--Confucius

posted by Unknown at 10:35 AM :: ~#~
(7) comments

7 Comments:

I just read yesterday's post..I thought teachers were suppose to broaden kids minds not close them to new ideas? I also wonder about copyright issues..shouldn't she have contacted you before using your journal as class material? It also sounds like an invasion/breech of privacy to air your personal life without speaking to you by email or even snail mail for your input.

Changing the subject, my heart goes out to the girl at work. She goes above and beyond to be thanked by having the situation aggravated by occurring once more. It sounds like you handled the situation beautifully!

By Anonymous, at 11:45 PM

Thanks Eliza. (hugs) As for The Teacher, I don't think she ever really considered me a person. The way she picked only negative things from my blog, digging all the way back to 2004 to find some of it and not even getting half of it right. The tone of the whole thing was mocking and disrespectful. The only thing that really had me freaked out was that she emailed my address and phone number to 100 people. I know it's pretty much public domain information, but still.

And yeah, we were all kind of hovering around our poor social worker yesterday. The really sad thing is even though she was scared of retribution, she still felt guilty for turning the mother in to CPS. She knew it was the best thing for the kids but she hated to potentially break up the family. I work with really great people. :D

By Unknown, at 8:42 AM

Stay safe, and stay strong. You do good works, and are setting a fine example for your youngsters. And the rest of us. That poor teacher. It's sad that given all the really bad stuff on the net she had to pick on you. She's proabably just jealous that you are fighting the good fight, and winning on occassion. See, and you thought the stock broker guy who found you looking for Kimber Guns was a nut job.
My mom worked in domestic relations for years, and had to deal with some of that same stuff you do in your office. You handled that fine as well.
It's amazing how much the media picks at issues, and then loses sight of the fact that we are all, in the end, just human. We feel hurt, and anger, and some days just want to make it home in one piece and hug the dog. Love ya!

By StSquirrel, at 9:41 PM

Thankies, m'dear. As I value your opinion much more than some wack job I never even heard of, I am feeling much better about things.

We all do the best we can with what we got, or at least we should. ;D

Luvs ya back.

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