5 mins to share your story….5 minutes to change your life.

In November of 2013, I was searching the MACUL website and I came across those words…5 minutes to share your story.  The conference was calling for Lightning Speaker to do an Ignite talk.  I remember screaming out loud as I read through the description, “YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!”  It was like someone went inside my brain and decided to present me with the exact stage I hoped existed.  I was in the beginning stages of my first year of a massive mid life career change.  I had left my job as a full time college faculty member to reinvent myself as an elementary teacher and all I wanted to do all the time was talk about teaching kids.

If passion is my byline, then teaching is my muse. From the beginning of the school year, I kept wandering around the halls thinking,” I can’t believe they are paying me to do this job.”  Reading stories, dressing like Wonder Woman, playing math games, and growing bean sprouts with kids felt like Christmas every single day.  I was utterly in love with teaching my first graders, and I could tell from the bear hugs I got, the feeling was mutual.  A lightening speech would be the exact platform to share my story.

It was Thanksgiving Break so I decided to get up early and write out a script.  It took a couple of hours, and when it was finished I read it over and over drinking in every word.  It was a perfect description of my journey.  It talked about why I had started out teaching K-12 then left for a decade, only to return.  It was an explanation of my life and it helped me make sense of the detours and road stops.  All I had to do was add slides and upload to YouTube.  I was going to share my story and change my life.

You can’t begin to imagine my devastation when I opened the application again during my winter break to realize…I missed the deadline.  I cried for an hour, sitting at the computer with tears dripping off my chin and into keyboard.  My nephew knocked at the door arriving early for the school he attends with my boys.  I commanded him to sit down and I delivered my Lightning Talk to him.  I can still see his 12 year face peering quizzically at me.  “Yes, Auntie. It’s good.  Why are you crying?  Can’t you try again next year?”

A whole year to wait…a whole year to learn…and finally I realized a whole year to revise.

In that year of waiting…I pulled out my script every month or so, just to read it again.  And one day I realized it was all about me, instead of being about them.  I was telling my story instead of theirs.  So I made a decision to give myself permission to throw all my work away and start over.  I walked away from 20 hours of labor in the middle of my most challenging workload because I needed EVERY SINGLE word to count for them.  I needed words to give voice to why I set my alarm for 4AM, why I cried over their hurts, why I spent so much money on my classroom, and never had time for lunch in the lounge.  I needed words to remind all the teachers and people within earshot not to give up on me…or them.

I wrote it down and threw it away at least 10 different times.  I drew pictures in my mind, ran laps around the neighborhood, thought about my speech in the shower, and still couldn’t find the words.  Words have always been my friend, they had never failed me before but now none were good enough.  I realized I needed an analogy, something so POWERFUL it would change the way teachers viewed children and help them to see them differently. But, as the year slipped by…I was running out of time.

One day in late December as I was driving to school with my six year old daughter we were listening to Charlotte’s Web.  Listening to this story with her was like hearing it for the first time.  We laughed at Wilbur’s backflips, tutted at the Goose, and when Charlotte gave up her life, we both sobbed.  Sitting in my car outside my Title One Building holding her close, I whispered into her ear, “We are like Charlotte, Eden.  We will find good words to write in the webs of people we love.”  And so Support Webs from the Gap was born.

It is my love song, as Charlotte would say, “My Magnum Opus”.  I carefully crafted every single word, and purposefully planned each phrase.  I have pushed myself to live out the message of this speech in my classroom and in my home.  It has been a struggle.  There have been days when I have been so exhausted by the challenge of working with kids, the price for belief so great that I have had to pack it up and call it a night knowing that sleep with restore my faith

The night before I gave my speech was especially terrible.  My oldest son, let me down.  And weary from the strain of the moment that was almost upon me, I collapsed into tears on his bed ready to give up.  He gathered me into his arms, “Mom, you don’t know how to quit.  That is what makes you so great.  Mom, remember what you wrote in my web…it’s, ‘Hero’.  It will save me Mom.  Now go and say it for them.”

And so standing on a MACUL stage in the middle of March, I removed the curtain and let a crowd peer into my soul.  And all of those hours spent memorizing lines and laboring over syllables slipped away as my talk became a battle cry for the children from the gap.  If you get a chance to listen…I hope this is a image that sticks with you like it has with me.  I hope you see someone you love and the web you have over them.  I pray you decide to choose a label of hope.  And know that I am with you…beside you…believing together we can  all become something more.