#it's only 10pm can we save the existential shit for like 2am please

[withthekeyisking-writer]

Personal prose because I just had to get it out of my head. If you read it be gentle I literally wrote this just whatever came out of my head, it isn't edited <3

I got told I would be a great mother by the parent of one of my students last week.

I can't say I've been ruminating on it, but it has come back to me a few times since then. At the time, I thanked her. She told me my advice helped her be a good mother, and that I would make a great one someday, too. She said it was obvious I have some innate sense that makes me so good with children, and any child I had would be lucky to have me.

I thanked her. She was being kind. She thought she was being kind.

And she's not wholly wrong—the childcare side of being a teacher has come easily to me. I can't describe why, I've never been in professions before this where I engaged with kids, but I know how to adapt to be what people need and honestly, kids are no different in that regard. They have needs and wants same as adults. Usually they're far more clean cut and obvious, at that. It isn't hard for me to understand what my students need and fit the position.

But I do not think this translates to motherhood—parenthood—the way everyone seems to think it does.

I am good with kids. Now, I can even say I like kids, which wasn't a statement I was sure of a few years ago. I like teaching them. I like being good at understanding them. I like the idea that I would be a fantastic parent.

But by god would being a parent kill me.

My mother was not made for motherhood. And I got lucky—she was a phenomenal mother for me and my siblings anyway. This was not the path she chose but it was the one she ended up in and she wasn't going to leave us strandad. She was going to be for us what her parents weren't for her. And honestly, I'm surprised it didn't kill her.

My mother passed a lot down to me. The shape of my face, my dark humor. We share the same expression when we get angry, and the same grin when we are surprised. And the strongest thing she gave me, something that burned strong in her soul and burns strong in mine, is the need to run.

I attended four universities with four majors in three years before ultimately giving up on college. I worked three jobs in two years before ultimately giving up on that entire career path and moving to start somewhere different. I every relationship before the one I'm currently in, I have been the one to end, or become so distant in that I force them to end it. When I'm stressed I get on a train and go away, always spending the entire ride convincing myself to come back. I stand in the doorway of a bus depo and fight the urge to just…go.

My mother was this person, when she was my age. Dysfunctional in relationships, trying her best, an artist's mind with a wanderer's soul. She was not made to marry my father and have three kids and pick a career path that had nothing to do with any of her interests, and then work that job for the next 30 years. She was not made for this life, and more than that, she did not want it.

My mother is in her sixties now, and she loves me and my siblings more than anything. But she is also a deeply sad woman, one filled with What Ifs, and though she will never say it I know she sometimes regrets saying yes to my father. It's baked into every story she tells me from that period of her life. It's burning in her gut every time she talks about the life she might've lived.

My mother was a wonderful one. And I think maybe that woman was right about me—maybe I'd be a great mother, too. My sister once told me the same thing. So did my co-teacher. So did my boss. So did a bunch of other parents of my students. Maybe I would be great at it.

But I see the exhuastion in my mother's eyes when she thinks no one is watching. I see the way she sighs when people point out the way life has gone.

Maybe I'd hide it better from my kids. Maybe I'd hide it far, far worse, and fuck up their childhood.

Maybe I'd run out on them all together.

(That idea shouldn't already bring me a level of bliss.)

I don't know. But I do know I don't want that. And I don't want to do that to anyone else.

In just over a month, I will no longer be a teacher.

Maybe that will remove the incentive for people telling me these things.