Letting go of who you WANT to be...

This past fall, around the anniversary of my mother's death, I was being urged by good friends and my therapist to have a ceremony to help me "let go" of my mother. I didn't want to "let go" of her. I felt like I had just met her, and I thought that if I "let go" of her, she would leave my life completely.
I wrote a series of blogposts about this, about how much I didn't want to let go of my mom. Shortly after posting them, I received an email from Shundo (the former Ino at the zen center). In it, he thanked me for the blogposts and said "A phrase came up for me while I was at Green Gulch that may be helpful: letting go of something doesn't mean that you are getting rid of it; you are putting it down, and if you pick it up again, you will have a different relationship with it."
This helped. It echoed what my therapist had been saying about how it was only by letting go of my imaginary mom that I would begin to see my real mom. It also loosened up my grip on her: imagining that I was only putting her down for a while, instead of leaving her completely, gave me the security to begin to unfurl my fingers because I felt like she would still be there even if I did let go of her.
I've shared this teaching with a couple of people who were going through transitions in relationships and they've found it helpful too. Recently, however, I found it helpful in a totally unexpected way.

I had been studying myself as a teacher- trying to notice what triggered me, what upset me, what I was afraid of. One of the most common things that came up for me was test scores. I don't know why, (I wish I did) but I never seem to be able to increase children's test scores in a significant way. There may be a little increase here or there but often, their scores either stay the same or decrease- and I hate that. I hate the idea that a kid would know less after spending a year with me than when they walked in the door. Also, I have found, that the kids' whose scores do increase, tend to be kids who were doing pretty well anyway. For some reason, they seem to improve while the kids who were really far behind, the kids with whom I spend the most time, put in the most effort, either stay the same or decrease. This frustrates me to no end because a big reason why I became a teacher was to help those kids, to be "that teacher" who somehow "saved" those kids. It's how I evaluate myself as teacher. I only consider myself a good teacher if I increase the test scores of the kids who struggle.

At the beginning of the school year this year, I got a letter from a former student of mine. My impact on this particular student had always baffled me. She did well in school- she wasn't a 'straight A' kind of kid, she was more of a sincere, interested, hard working kid- and I thought that our year together had gone fine. As she progressed to fourth and fifth grade at our school, she would often visit my classroom to say hi or to talk about how things were going.
One afternoon, she came to my room in tears. Things had been really difficult for her and she needed a grownup to talk to and she had come to my room as a safe place. She simply ran across the room to me, put her arms around me, and cried. I let her cry, until she was done. We didn't talk much but she expressed to me what was upsetting her. I told her the grownups would take it from here and brought her back to her mom (who was wondering where she had gone). That year, she visited a couple of other times when she was upset, but her mom also shared with me that my name had come up in her assignment about people who had had an impact on them.
I was still confused by this. I hadn't improved her test scores, she hadn't become a better student, her home life was fine; in my mind, I hadn't made any impact on her yet she seemed to think I had done something significant.

And then this year she had her little sister deliver a letter to me (she's in junior high now so she's at a different school). I won't divulge the contents of the letter because what she said in the letter was simply that she wanted a place to share her private thoughts and that I was the place where she felt safe sharing them. She didn't want feedback, and definitely didn't want anyone else to read them. But the letter closed with the words, "I trust you to do this for me," and that hit me. I was the place where she felt safe, I was the one who she could trust.
I got this letter the same week that my new kids were sharing in class meeting that what they liked most in school was 'the teacher,' and this time, I actually believed them. I believed that they liked me because of the way I was treating them: I was seeing them for who they were, encouraging them, accepting whatever they had to offer as their selves.
And these two events made me start to think that maybe this is who I am as a teacher. Maybe I'm not "that" teacher who "saves" those kids by improving their test scores. Maybe that's just not what I do. But I was afraid to "let go" of this idea of myself. I wasn't comfortable just "giving up" on improving their test scores because I was so bad at it. I worried that by "letting go" of this idea of myself that it would just go away and I'd never increase their test scores, and that seemed like a bad idea all around.

But then I thought about what Shundo had said, that 'letting go' didn't have to mean 'throwing away,' it just meant 'putting it down' for a while and that sometimes, in putting it down, we can develop a new relationship with it. And I thought that maybe I would have a new relationship with myself and test scores if I would just put them down for a while.
I also noticed that in focusing so much on trying to be that teacher who I wanted to be, that one who "saved" kids by improving their test scores, I had been blind to the things that I was as a teacher. I hadn't seen the impact that I had on this little girl, hadn't recognized the importance of whatever it is I do that makes kids feel safe.

I still don't know who I am as a teacher, and maybe I'm not one thing, but the kids are telling me that what's important to them...is that I accept them no matter what. I need to listen to that, see my role in that, accept that this is part of how I manifest myself as a teacher. And in the mean time, I also need to "let go" of my 'dream' self, my idea of who I am, my ideal, my goal, my concept of what really matters as a teacher, because that image is keeping me from seeing who I actually am, and who is beneficial to the kids.