The Balancing Act

I hear the retching vomit and feel my breasts seize up. Even the mechanical waves of my pump can’t drown out the sick splattering on the linoleum floor under fluorescent lights. I’ve never understood fluorescent lights in schools. Research says they stress and strain, and yet they populate our buildings as if the sun might disappear one day.

I squeeze my breast like I saw in a YouTube video because the lactation specialist at the hospital was crap. But the drops into the bag slow from the sound of dry heaving outside the nurse’s closet. The only windowless, lockable door in the building to use as a place to pump milk for my child. I give up, thankful I’d pushed myself to pump over the summer so I have a stash at home to make up for these kinds of days. The nurse knocks on the door as I pull my shirt back on; I’m glad we’re friends.

She tells me to wait in the closet while she cleans up the vomit and grimaces an apology. While I listen to her work and speak soothing words to the student, I think about everything I wish someone would have told me. I wish I would have known that to make milk I would have to drink more water than felt humanly possible while trying to teach. I wish I would have known that to get that milk from my body, I would need to be calm and happy. And that in the twenty-five minutes I have to pump, down to twenty because of how badly I have to pee, it’s not easy to de-escalate myself from the hustle of the classroom. Ultimately though, I wish I would have known being a teacher would make me a better mom, and being a mom would make me a better teacher, so I could stop stressing about juggling the two evenly.

I had my epiphany two weeks into my pumping-from-work life. One of my students had been having an off day, slow to start the work, even more reticent to talk about what was going on. She snapped at me to leave her alone with some choice words just as my relief walked in the door so I could go pump. Blood surged through my body as I sped through the hall, counting down my time. I had stayed calm, I had tried to empathize. I felt burned. But she’s just a kid, I reminded myself as I sat down, attaching my body to plastic tubing and cold flanges. She’s someone’s kid.

It’s a concept I reminded myself of often when I first began teaching, but it held a new meaning now that I had a kid myself. Instead of looking at pictures of my own baby to stimulate my milk that day, I thought about hugging my student until her hurt subsided. It slowed my pulse long enough to watch a video of my baby’s new giggle. Long enough to make six and a half ounces to feed my child the next day at daycare where, ironically and fittingly, one of my student’s moms worked as a teacher. While I taught her child, she taught and cared for mine. Some days the trade-off made me laugh, and other days it made me bitter. But it decidedly made me better. More patient with my own child, more caring and empathetic with my students. 

Now that my baby is a toddler, I do not miss those twenty-five minutes, four times a day, of feeling stretched so thin I couldn’t do a good job at being a parent or a teacher. But I do miss the visceral way it pushed me to see my students in a new light. And it changed how they saw me, not just as a teacher, but as a human, a mom, who loved and cared.

Maybe if I read more pedagogical texts, I would have had this epiphany without needing a child of my own. Maybe, in that way, I was intellectually and empathetically weak when I first entered the classroom. But teaching is an ocean of possibility. And I can only swim so fast. 

So, when I emerge from the nurse’s closet to the sharp smell of disinfectant and bleach, I do not cringe like I might have in the past. The week before, I caught my own baby’s throw-up in my cupped hands and held him until he stopped shivering before we washed. Instead, I feel sorry the student will have to wait the twenty minutes for his parent to collect him from a vinyl couch his skin sticks to, under the uncomfortable brightness of the fluorescence that won’t let him rest. 

He waves at me from the corner, his hand limp, smile weak, and I feel the deep wash of love rush through my heart that he would brave opening his eyes to say hi to me. The same feeling I get when my toddler offers a hug without me having to ask for it. I know now that the push and pull between my students and my child is not a case of being stretched thin or never being perfect at either job. It’s not anything so fraught. It is the swelling highs and deep lows of a spring tide, in and out, back and forth. Balanced for only brief moments, but necessary for life to flourish.

-Sarah Dropek

Sarah is a teacher and mother living in Houston, Texas. Nonfiction work from her lifetime before parenting can be found on Mic.com. She writes and gardens in her spare time always with her toddler at hand as official Idea Giver and Roly Poly Hunter.