Before I go on I need to clarify some things that might have been misunderstood.
Let me explain the development of some of those coping capacities. Teaching I found to be hard work. It wasn't the classroom part I minded. I've long had good presentation skills, and that part was easy. But the planning turned into drudgery. Paperwork had to be completed, and lessons prepared. I usually set Sunday aside to take care of all that. I eventually developed a pattern of planning two weeks ahead so I could have every other Sunday off.
The worst time of year was just as school let out for the summer. There were the end-of-school programs to plan, final grades to get out, reports to send to the conference, and a school building to be cleaned and secured.
My first year I nearly sweat blood in anticipation of the event. But when the time came I dug in. Suddenly it seemed I had it all done. It hadn't been that hard or that time-consuming.
As these types of events continued I learned not to worry about things ahead of time. Just deal with them as they came, work honestly and diligently, and the loose ends would fall into place.
At the end of my third year of teaching the school board announced that they woudln't have enough money to support the school next year and would have to close. I wasn't too worried about a job as I believed the conference would find me another without a lot of hassle.
But I did worry about finishing the closing. That involved a lot of extra work. I had to inventory the books, send extra reports to the conference, and pack everything away neatly with documentation on what went where. Again I fretted, but the actual job didn't take nearly as long as I'd feared.
The four years I spent in Mio were relatively quiet and gentle. Over time as the students got used to me and I to them I developed a very relaxed system of discipline. But that fourth year I started hearing ridiculous complaints about the school and my teaching.
It didn't take long to figure out what was happening. The family doing the complaining had a close relative who had lost a teaching job. They were trying to arrange a new job for him.
The people of the church that supported the school knew this individual, and I gathered that he wouldn't be hired whatever else happened. In other words, the job was mine if I wanted it. But I began to get restless.
The signals from the conference were that they wanted me to stay there. I now know why. The person they brought in to replace me left a school where he had taught for over a decade. The school closed the next year, and that teacher ended up taking a non-denominational teaching position. (As I recall, he did substitute teaching for a while.)
The conference probably expected this to happen and didn't want to displace someone to a school that had a doubtful future. But they did respect my wishes and scheduled me for a few interviews.
Meanwhile a good friend of my wife's called from her high school position in New York State to say that a position was coming open that might be just the thing for me. It was at the Rochester church that was linked to my church near Newark.
I interviewed at both schools in Rochester, and left with an offer of employment from the one my wife's friend had told us about. I did not get a chance to meet my new superintendant, who had to be away the night I appeared for interviews.
When I returned to Michigan I placed a call to the associate superintendant who had supervised my interviews in Michigan. She gave me the impression that my chances weren't good there and that I should take the offer I had in hand.
I might note at this point that the attitude of the conference toward me had cooled by then. I have an idea it was directly related to a confrontation I had with the pastor of that church. I won't go into that because I'm not keen on self-justification.
I will say that in my church, as in many others, the clergy hold an elevated status among church workers. Nobody ever came down to hear the issues and mediate the conflict. It was just assumed that the pastor was right. The actions of the Catholic Church in relation to abusive priests is just another manifestation of this phenomenon.
So in the summer of 1996 I announced that I was leaving. The pastor in question announced his departure a week or so later, and he suggested to me that without me there he didn't feel capable of dealing with church problems. Rather interesting, coming from the man with whom I had clashed several times.
After investigating the cost of a move my wife an I decided to move ourselves. We rented a 24-foot Ryder truck with an auto dolly to tow one of our two cars. Then we crossed Ontario to New York.
Based on the cost of living in Rochester, the conference (a different one) offered a "cost of housing" allowance that would boost my pay by some $4000 a year. My wife and I figured up what we could afford, and found a luxury townhouse some five miles from the school.
Life was definitly looking up. I spent over a month at the school rearranging the classroom, clearing off the unlicensed software on the school computers and planning for the school year. I also went with the new pastor to visit all the families who would or might send students to the school.
At first I liked this pastor. He was energetic and positive and seemed open to new ideas. But to give an example of what he was really like, his wife worked full time as an RN. She also had all the duties of a pastor's wife, including maintaining a model home. And he insisted that she volunteer time at the local school. I admire the woman for being able to handle the pressure.
He was demanding with his congregation, too. At his near insistence, the school board voted additional dress restrictions on the students. Guess who got to enforce them?
It didn't help that I'd heard a lot of "history" about the school. My wife's friend, parroting information from the superintendant, had told me how hard this pastor had been on the previous teacher. They claimed it was because he was biased against women.
But when I got there I heard (and found) a very different story. I heard about loose supervision, second rate academics, and a slovenly personal appearance. And once I met the woman, I tended to believe the people from Rochester.
Later I visited an old friend who lived near the boarding high school where my wife's friend worked. He said they were glad to get her and that they heartily approved of her creative teaching methods. I suppose someone got a good deal out of the whole thing.
Then the school year started. I wasn't prepared. I'd had it so easy in Mio the last couple of years that I didn't develop an organized plan of discipline. Furthermore, like any young people, the students were going to try out the new teacher.
And with me attempting to insert order where there had been none, and academic rigor where having fun had seemed the order of the day, the students were hard to manage. Within a month I was a basket case.
I would sit in the classroom and dread the hour when the students would arrive. I looked forward to the end of the day more ardently than the students did. The few outings I took the students on were nightmares from my perspective.
I found the students nearly uncontrollable, rude, disrespectful, and destructive. I had to ban any ball kicking in the gymnasium (a luxury I'd never had before) because the older students would kick the ball so violently. It seemed they were trying to damage property.
One of the worst moments was the parent who came to complain about that restriction. I had, of course, to stand my ground. I wasn't used to abuse like this from church members, and in my seriously depressed state the brief confrontation was draining.
I even recall walking the drive outside the school, crying because I was so miserable. But even so I kept telling myself that things would get better, that I would weather this storm. And I wanted to stick it out.
My wife was barely coping herself, but she tried her best to support me. We now know that she too was suffering from an undiagnosed mental disorder (bipolar level II). She's had a hard road finding help, but that's her story to tell.
She's the one who arranged the doctor's appointment on Columbus Day. I didn't dwell on the work situation with the doctor, I explained the current symptoms and the health history that had led up to it.
Maybe I need to explain the symptoms. I had no appetite and rarely ate. My digestive system came to a near halt. I tried yogurt and even bacteria supplements trying to alleviate the problem. The doctor diagnosed depression.
I wanted to scream out, "I can deal with the stress, I'll get over the feelings. I need help with the physical health problems!" And this particular doctor never explained to me that the health problems were one of the symptoms of my disorder. He put me on Paxil and told me it would take a couple of weeks for it to have an effect. And he warned that the physical symptoms might worsen before they got better.
Tuesday I went to school. Wednesday I was so sick I had to call in a substitute. She had been a teacher at that school when I first started teacher education classes, and she'd married someone who worked for an older couple I knew from the small church.
The superintendant called, and I explained to her what the doctor had said. She wasn't very understanding and wasn't happy with my uncertainty over whether I could hold up. She demanded that I give her an answer by the end of the day on whether I would stay or not.
I was in no condition to give such an answer. But as I thought about it I recalled that I had never really felt at home in the classroom. I had done it for seven years, and I felt that I had done well. But I never identified with teaching the way I had with broadcasting. Maybe it was time to get out.
I called a friend of my parents, someone I'd known as an elementary school student in Mississippi. She was now doing counseling. She grilled me several times during our hour-long conversation, insisting that I was just taking the easy way out. I had no answer for that. At the end of the conversation she told me that had been her test to see if I was really comfortable with the decision to give up a career.
That night I announced to my superintendant that I would not be staying. I don't think that's what she wanted to hear. She warned that she would never give me a reference if I quit immediately. I didn't care. I didn't intend to return to the classroom.
We agreed that I would stick it out on Friday (I had already arranged a special assignment on Thursday that would take me out of the classroom. In the process I had to face a dilemma of ethics. I announced to the students Friday that I would no longer be their teacher.
As expected the question came up. Had the students' behavior caused my problem? In order to avoid empowering the students and to respect the teachers who would come after me, I had to say it was just because of my illness. I said it as asked.
But I worried because I wasn't sure it was true. I know today that it was, that if I'd already gotten treatment for my depression I wouldn't have hit such a low. I stopped taking the Paxil after Friday morning. Sabbath (Saturday) we visisted my wife's friend. I was still feeling queasy and my appetite was still low, but within days all the physical symptoms disappeared.
The financial blow, however, was devastating. We returned to the house we owned in Michigan, and I partially supported us by substitute teaching around the area. This reinforced my feeling that it wasn't the classroom, it was the other responsibilities I had not enjoyed.
I went from a $30k job to $50 a day work with no benefits. At one point I had to carry my wife to an emergency room where she bled all over a treatment room floor. We couldn't pay the bill, and we had to apply for an assistance program.
Unfortunately we were already several thousand dollars in debt. I was still recovering and left the finances to my wife. She kept borrowing on the cards to meet expenses.
We'd sold one of our cars in Rochester before we left. The other one gave out on us at the beginning of a planned trip south. My folks gave us an old Oldsmobile they were retiring.
I didn't get around to serious job hunting until around April (we'd moved back the first of November). But even so I didn't find a job. In early summer I got word that the CompuServe forum sponsored by the worldwide church needed an assistant sysop. I got a positive reponse from the sysop.
We traveled, at our expense (went on the cards), to Silver Spring, Maryland to interview for the job and to take some tests required by the church for all clerical employees at Church World Headquarters. But when we visited there we got the distinct impression that the sysop had gone out on his own on this and didn't have full backing from his superiors.
Meanwhile we had placed the house back on the market. In August things started to happen fast. I had visited Arkansas to interview for a teaching position in the state. We negotiated a sale of the house and had a deadline to move out. And the sysop called saying he had a temporary full-time position.
I wanted to take it, based on my experience that I usually impressed my employers and proved my value to them in relatively short order. But my wife balked. One of her disorders is agoraphobia, fear of crowds, and she threatened to leave if I moved to Maryland.
We had an offer to live for a while at my parents' house in the UP. And my wife worked out an invitation of sorts for us to live with her parents. The house had sold, we had to move, and I had to decide. I opted for Arkansas.
We moved near the end of August, the hottest month. None of the jobs I had interviewed for in Arkansas panned out. I subbed for three days in the Malvern schools, tried my hand for one day at selling radio time (I'm not cut out for sales), and eventually landed an industrial labor job through a temporary agency.
That was nearly seven years ago. We got onto a non-profit debt retirement program (we were forced to or we would have gone bankrupt). That part is over now, to our great relief. We're still getting back on our feet (hard to do when you're nearly 50) and depression still oppresses me with the difficulties ahead.
But life is good. I really enjoy my responsibilities at work. Yes, I still work at the same factory. I have a role in the local church, I volunteer with a Bible-oriented website, and I have a weekend job at a clear channel station in Little Rock, AM 1090, KAAY.
So when health problems arose again in early 2003, and the doctor diagnosed depression again, I had the background to understand and accept the diagnosis. We're still struggling to find a medication that works and doesn't have unwanted side effects. But when I've been on the ones with side effects my overall health has been better.
This has been difficult to write. The memories aren't so oppressive today, but I'm finding that they still have power. And I'm hoping that this reinvestigation of the issue will help me come to terms with the past and root out the seeds of bitterness that could poison my life in the future.
You might ask if I am bitter. Am I angry that doctors did not diagnose my problem earlier, angry that my superintendants didn't have the knowledge to understand what was going on, angry that I had to endure the financial hardship associated with my breakdown.
I'm finding that there are some such feelings buried deep, but I'm committed to forgiveness and understanding. Even today few doctors have the training to recognize the symptoms of depression. I only got the diagnosis this time because my primary care physician was alert enough to know when a problem was beyond his skill.
At any rate, with my own lack of knowledge of the disorder, I probably wouldn't have accepted the diagnosis earlier. That's one of the reasons I write this. The general public needs to be educated so they'll be ready for the help that's available when they need it.
As for the superintendants, I believe they were doing the best they knew how. We are all caught up in the trap of this world's unfair systems and unreasonable expectations. We all have to cope the best we can.
So I close by repeating my expectation that God has a plan that will end the craziness; a plan that will take the willing away from this evil world and give them a home where love and acceptance prevail. It truly is a blessed hope!