Keeping It Together

  Because wanting love again feels like your dirtiest secret It’s 2am, and you’re going over visa forms and custody schedules in your head. Bills are piled on your desk. Your ex just sent another text about who's picking up the kids. And then, out of nowhere, this thought sneaks in: What if I could fall in love again? Almost immediately, the shame hits. Fast and hard. The Fairy Tale You're Too Old For You're a grown woman, a mother of two and a professional educator. You have stretch marks and a mortgage and parent-teacher conferences to attend. Yet, last week, you found yourself watching that Korean drama your Year 10 students won't shut up about. The one with the perfect male lead who says all the right things and looks at the girl like she's the only person in the room. You told yourself you were just trying to understand what the kids are into these days. Professional development, right? But the deep dark truth is, you were indulging in a dirty secret in the se...

  Your worst fear isn't divorce - it's that moment when everything spills out in class When I was in junior college, our class made a teacher cry. I don't even remember what it was that triggered it, but I guess we were just being awful 17 year olds. All we knew was suddenly, she ran out mid-lesson in tears. We were mortified. What had we done? What we didn't know was that her fiancé had just broken their engagement. As 17 year olds, we were only capable of a very basic level of cognitive empathy. We didn't know how it felt, but we just knew that a broken engagement was a sad thing to go through. So we collectively wrote her a card of consolation. Now, as an adult, a mother and educator who had gone through divorce, I'm understanding the full spectrum of what she must have been going through. Perhaps she was feeling, "Why is everyone bullying me?" I also wonder, did the other teachers whisper about her in the staff room? The news definitely spread to...

Breaking the myth of the perfect educator and discovering self-worth beyond the classroom As educators, we often hold ourselves to impossibly high standards. We believe we must be perfect role models - people who have it all together, who make all the right choices, who exemplify wholesome lives without complications or messy emotions. Divorce, then, feels like celestial punishment when it happens; it becomes a source of deep shame, making us feel unworthy of standing before our students. But let's pause for a moment. Read that expectation again. Doesn't it sound utterly ridiculous? We would never demand such perfection from our colleagues, our friends, or even our students. So why do we impose this unrealistic burden upon ourselves? The Moment Everything Changed Years ago, when my divorce was still fresh, I found myself in an ordinary moment that would teach me an extraordinary lesson. I was waiting with a 7 year-old student for her parents to arrive. As we chatted about holid...

For every mother who's sobbed in the shower so her children won't hear, wondering if choosing yourself means failing them. The Question That Keeps Every Divorcing Mother Awake At Night It's 2 AM and you're staring at the ceiling again. Tomorrow, your daughter has her end-of-year English exam. You should have helped her revise, but instead, you spent the evening navigating lawyer emails and trying not to cry in front of her. The guilt is crushing: "Am I ruining my daughter's life?" You replay every moment - every tear she's seen, every family dinner that's now awkwardly silent, every time she's had to comfort you when it should be the other way around. The voice in your head whispers: "She'll never recover from this. She comes from a broken family now." But that's just what you think. What the voice isn't telling you is this: Your daughter isn't watching you fail. She's watching you survive. The Truth In Y...