A Good Thief
To paraphrase a great educator, good teachers – and good writers – are good thieves.
I grew up hearing what seemed, as a child, horror stories about my grandmother’s adoption away from her family at about the age of eleven. She never said a word to me about that, or much else, but my father and aunt shared what little they knew in haunted, terrifying vignettes.
They’re all gone now, and toward the ends of their lives I saw their relationships erode as my grandmother made accusations and rewrote her will, then did it again. My aunt and father stopped speaking. Resentments brewed, and in the turmoil, I ultimately lost contact with that entire side of my family.
The North Dakota Children’s Home where the author’s grandmother was taken.
Courtesy of thevillagefamily.org.
I wondered then, and wonder still, what actually happened to my grandmother when she was young. How did her trauma, her experience of being singled out for rejection, imprint on her own children, and on those of us who came after?
I can’t answer those questions with any certainty, but a bounty of long-forgotten letters, and extensive research, allowed me to pull some of the curtain back on this century-old story. Thus, my first book, Dear Clara: The Story of a Shattered Family.
I was an early writer, hibernating in my childhood room (painted appropriately a contemplative shade of blue) and listening to The Monkees, The Beatles and The Stones on my turntable, while my imagination and my notebook took me beyond my limited suburban world. My hope of “making it” as a writer in my 20s and 30s led me to become a news reporter, columnist, and finally editor for a paper that no longer exists. It was great for a time, and then it wasn’t, as I’d married a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, an aspiring journalist like myself, and if you don’t know, reporters and editors typically work impossible hours. Morning papers “go to bed” after 10:00 p.m., long after the kids are done with homework and are sound asleep. Evening papers bring their editors in by 6 a.m., before those kids are even awake. We managed it for awhile, but as my husband explained to a supervisor once, “A family isn’t a 7-Eleven; you don’t just staff it.”
The need for more regular hours and family time led me to return to my other professional love: teaching. For twenty-four years I taught middle school English, writing and history. For those years, and the children I taught, I am deeply grateful. It’s true that the teacher learns from the students, and I learned so much from the resilience, trust, and stories shared in my classroom.
Early in my teacher training I came across a quote from the revered educator and author Harry Wong, who pointed out that “good teachers are good thieves.” We learn from one another, and we share our successes. I learned to take inspiration from my talented colleagues, and to craft what I gleaned from them into something I could use in my own classroom.
Isabel Allende points out that fiction writers are also good at taking from others. Like a good thief, I have procured, without asking, my grandmother’s tragic tale, and crafted it into something I could use. The story as I imagine it still haunts me. But writing Dear Clara has allowed me to understand what might have happened, and to be less terrified. I have even learned to forgive. I hope that in trying to understand what happened, I have done my grandmother, and her mother, sisters and brother, some belated justice.
