I am a special education teacher. A lot of the parents don’t give a shit about their kids, especially the parents of special education students. I can say this because only about seven out of twenty parents actually come to their scheduled parent/teacher conference.
It is often a relief that some parents do not come. Coming up with nice things to say about their kids is always tough. Basically, I have to lie to their fucking faces. I feed them with a load of BS. I do this for two reasons. First, I have so many negative things to say about them, that throwing in a positive every now and then alleviates the tension during these conferences. Second, I force myself to say nice things so the parents don’t go home and beat their kid’s ass. Seriously, this happens a lot where I work.
Only one of the parents showed up today to meet with me out of the six I had scheduled. And I am convinced that the only reason this mother showed up was because we have called Child Protective Services on her so many times, that she now fears losing her daughter, who is severely fucked up, and she will be the mothers meal ticket for the rest of her God-Awful existence.
A few things you should know about this mother before I get into the content of the conference.
1) She works at AM/PM
2) She has two kids from 2 different fathers, and has never once been married.
3) She lives with her two kids in a large, low income-housing complex.
4) Her son is overall a nice kid, who I feel bad for because he has to play “mom” to his younger sister.
5) Her daughter, who is in my class, was born addicted to crack-cocaine and with fetal alcohol syndrome. She is a cute girl, but can barely function. She knows about 25 words, two of which are “Fooker” and “Bitch”. I work with her on menial things such as drawing lines, signing colors, color recognition, and counting 1-3. She has severe behavior problems. She kicks, hits, screams, bites, etc. Mostly, this is due to her inability to communicate any other way. Still, it’s ridiculous.
Today’s conference with the mother proved to be something that I found worthy of submitting to your site.
It was my intention to recommend to the mother that her daughter be transferred to another school that has a Behavior Disorder program, where her needs would be addressed better. There is little I can do for her when I am instructing a class and she is sitting at the table screaming to me that I am a “fooker”.
I told mom about this transfer and she flipped. She started to cry and plead that her daughter HAD to stay where she was. Why? I really don’t know. Maybe she likes parenting barely functioning kids. Whatever the reason, it has to be serious, as she started giving me a detailed account of her past, leading up to the birth of her daughter. Here it is
Six years ago she decided that she wanted to kill herself. She was an alcoholic, a drug fiend, and was injecting heroine into herself multiple times a day. She lived near a railroad, and had familiarized herself with the times that the train came through each day. She was going to have the train hit her. The night she decides to do it, she gets really loaded and pulls her car up to the train tracks. She parks the car, and proceeds to shoot-up heroine and drink alcohol. The time is nearing for the train to come through, so she starts her car, and prepares to pull onto the tracks. Just then, her car is hit VERY HARD by another car, driven, ironically enough, by a drunk driver. The impact causes her car to fly forward about 50 yards, past the tracks. The car that hit her is now on the tracks. The train comes through, blasts through the car, and kills the drunk driver. She freaks out because she is still alive and knows the police will be on the way. She has drugs on her, and is severely intoxicated. She does the smart thing and drives home.
She decides that the next night she is going to attempt the same sort of death. She does the exact same thing; pulls her car up to the track, gets regally fucked up, and waits for the train. As she is waiting, a bus pulls up in front of her, between her car and the railroad tracks and completely blocks the way to the tracks. Just then, the train comes through.
This completely depresses her, and rightfully so, considering she is such a wasteoid that she can’t even kill herself.
A couple days later, her boyfriend is getting all geared up to go hunting, as it is opening day for hunting season. BING! The light in her fried brain goes off, and she decides she is going to let a hunter shoot her. So she constructs herself a deer suit. Literally gets fur, and builds herself a fucking deer costume. She was describing this to me, and all I could think was Silence of the Fucking Lambs.
She completes her costume and goes out into the woods wearing it. She is out in the woods drinking, doing drugs, when she hears some rustling. She thinks that this is her chance, so she starts making some noise in the bushes, crunching leaves and shit, when she hears “Lady, WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?"
It was the fucking park ranger! He immediately radios for assistance, and she is literally drug out of there in an "I love myself" jacket.
All of this while she was pregnant with her daughter, who is in my fucking class.
And people wonder why I drink so much.
