It’s hard to believe that I have now been retired from teaching for eight years. I worked in education for thirty-two years of my life. Like all professions, it has its ups and downs.

There were so many days that I would walk out of school and say that I had had a Wendy’s day. That meant that I had thoughts of quitting teaching on that particular day and taking a job flipping hamburgers at Wendy’s.

Fortunately, I never did that because I loved my job, and I loved my kids. There were so many funny things that happened when…

The trials of parenting a teen

From the bottom of his expensively sneakered foot to the top of his scowling face, he reminds me that I am a failure as a parent. I’ve been down this path three times before. He is the fourth teen to live in my house.

Parenting a teen is a special kind of hell. With every slam of a door, he reminds me that if teens came into the world ahead of babies, the human population would become extinct.

There are those dreaded words, “Hey, mom.” I cringe. I know what’s next. Spoiler alert: He’s not going to say, “I love…

It was a Friday afternoon. I waited in the car pick up line in front of the high school. My 16-year-old son was due to get out of school at any moment. The final bell rang, and students streamed out of the high school. My son was not among them. Frustrated, I called him. He would often sneak off to the parking lot to talk to his friends and leave me to wait. That would turn out to not be the case this time.

He answers the phone and tells me that he and a friend were hiding behind the…

Tales from a Starburst spitting middle school teacher…

Bless that poor students’ heart!

Count down till school starts. It’s year seven without me. I retired after 32 years. It was a good run but I’m all “runned” out. I have a drawer full of funny stories. Here is one of my favorites.

You know teachers keep candy in their drawers. The purpose supposedly is to reward students but I confess the person who gets rewarded the most is the teacher. I can claim this habit along with pre-Michelle Obama school lunches for the beginning of my weight gain.

So in…

When I was a child, I didn’t talk to people. I didn’t want people to talk to me, and I didn’t want them to touch me. As you can imagine, I didn’t have many friends, and people didn’t respond positively to me. I have no idea why I was like that. I know that I wanted to have friends, and I wanted people to like me, but I was too scared to come out of my shell to do it.

One example of my shyness is when I went to visit my older sister’s church. She was singing a solo…

There’s a dead guy at our hotel, and the coroner has arrived.

The traffic in downtown Atlanta slowed to a crawl. I swallowed my apprehension as the car I was driving crept along in the middle of half a dozen lanes. Surrounded by thousands of vehicles, I see the car beside me jerk as it was rear-ended by the car behind it. Sweat pooled under my arms and my gas foot trembled. I wanted to be out of that traffic, and I had a long way to go before that could happen.

My sisters seemed unaware of my distress as…

When I brought my beautiful baby boy home almost twenty-five years ago, I did not know that I would still hear “what’s for dinner?” these years later.

Those are words I dread because if left up to my husband and me, dinner might be a salad or a sandwich or both. Next comes the dreaded comment. “I don’t like that. You should have told me that’s what was for dinner.”

Meanwhile, his seventeen-year-old brother rarely eats at home. When he does, he fixes himself a sandwich, cooks himself some eggs, and takes care of himself.

This leaves me scratching my…

Pray for us! We’ll need your prayers!

My sisters and I have one aunt left. She is ninety-one years old and lives just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. We missed seeing her last year. Thank you, COVID. But now we’ve had our shots, I knew it wouldn’t be long before my oldest sister started hinting.

“I sure would love to see Aunt Beulah,” she says.

“Mmh, hmm,” I reply non-committedly.

It’s not that I don’t want to see her. I most certainly do. It was Aunt Beulah who first took me to church. She would dress me up in my older…