As students were filtering in for the 8am class in late February, plopping their backpacks on the floor and huddling around their friends’ desks before I banished them to their assigned seats, one of them squinted at me as he put his books down. “We started rehearsals for the spring play yesterday Ms. Johnson,” he said. “I feel like I know too much about you now.” Two other students at another table looked at me and nodded.
When I opened my email on my first day on the job, I saw an email from the theater director, asking if I’d be willing to sit down for an interview in his quest for faith stories for the spring play. I followed my thought of I’ll be completely honest and they’ll decide whether or not they want to use it (which is increasingly becoming a sort of guiding principle for me, for better or for worse) and didn’t quite think through the logical consequences of my students hearing it all. I wondered, briefly, if I should have censored myself a bit back in October.
“Well!” I shrugged and smiled a bit sheepishly. “I guess that it is a little weird knowing all that stuff about your English teacher.”
From the start, I’ve had a complex relationship with when the appropriate time to play the “dead mother” card is and with how it shapes who I am. The best reasoning I can deduce these days is that it’s about control, as it always is with me: I want to dispense the information when I feel it is relevant to the situation. I did not open up my classes talking about my mother this year, but her picture was on my desk. When students asked why I was taking a day off and if I was going to do something fun, I had to take the wind out of their sails and say I was celebrating my mother’s passing. I bared my soul in this interview—that then got melded with my mother’s own essay, my eulogy from ages past, and other eulogies—because I could clearly say Lori is my mother, and I love her and I miss her and she influences who I am professionally, but she is not me.
Coming back to Massachusetts and back to my old school meant losing some of that control. This community knows me and knows my mother—it is not in my control who knows and who does not. If parents recognize me, typically at sports games, it’s a fifty-fifty shot of whether they are actually recognizing me or if they say, “Are you Mrs. Johnson’s daughter?” Some days, that recognition is a comfort. Other days, it’s a press on a bonedeep bruise.
As I watched the spring play this weekend, I wondered a bit why I went through with it. I willingly marked myself as Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, naming myself into a legacy that I have not lived up to this year. I talked a big game about connecting with and pushing forward my students back in October, and in May I look at what I have done—it’s not enough. I want my students to have Mrs. Johnson as a teacher, to have the teacher who they will come back for vocab Jolly Rangers and tell stories about to their children, but they are stuck with me, Ms. Johnson.
At the same time, though, I want my students to see me as a person, not just a droning adult that is stuck in her ways and doesn’t let her students have any fun and doesn’t understand that writing skills are irrelevant in the age of AI. In the play, I was honest about my faith and how I don’t always feel like a model Christian, not so they can throw tomatoes at me but so they can also see that living out faith doesn’t always look like strongly proclaiming Jesus’s love from the rooftops and praying for two hours a day. My story doesn’t have a tidy ending—I am living it right now. I am finding my footing in this new school, figuring out how I can hold clear boundaries for my students and still communicate love and care and honesty.
If I had a choice, I would have my mother back and take the consequence of having a much less interesting faith story. I would rather my students have Mrs. Johnson rather than Ms. Johnson. But she is not here, and I am, and I did air out all my dirty laundry for everyone to see. I’m hoping my students can appreciate the messy middle that I am in, that they and the rest of the community will recognize the power in authentic admissions of faith, particularly in the unfinished ones.
I cannot close Pandora’s Box—my students will have to live with the knowledge that I have complexities beyond confiscating their phones and telling them to wipe down their lunch tables. A terrifying prospect for us both, but I trust that good will come of it.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
