My Teacher Fell in Love with Me

A word of warning for my daughter

Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash

I hope my daughter is spared the kind of teacher who takes her aside and in a hushed voice tells her she’s special: she’s not like the other kids. That she’s got something. The kind who turns off the lights in his office after school — so anyone looking in won’t ‘get the wrong idea’. The kind who sends her text messages to check she’s okay, because after all, she’s unhappy — and doesn’t need him to tell her so — but his concern leaves her wondering whether, perhaps, she’s fundamentally not okay. Whether there isn’t, perhaps, something broken that needs fixing? Whether he, with his kind words, and all his experience and knowledge, and all his special attention, might not be the one to fix her. A man who talks a little bit too much about her in the staff room — the other teachers tell her so, and it thrills her; who wants her to like the things he likes; who buys her books and writes inscriptions in the front: with love. A man whose politics are just right, whose allegiances are spot on, whose heightened sense of injustice makes him an instrument of good — nothing to be misconstrued here, since he could outline his intentions with clarity. He could write an essay about it.

I hope she’s spared the kind of teacher who believes he’s the one who best knows how to cater to her particular talents, because he and she are alike. In noticing her specialness he makes himself special too: a connoisseur; a visionary among the half-asleep. Who else could understand her but him? The two of them, bound together in his spell…

What I really mean is that I hope my daughter doesn’t need to hear these things. I hope her sense of self isn’t so weak, and her need for attention so overwhelmingly strong, that her all of her talent is funnelled into composing siren songs to attract saviours. Turning her talents to bling - bright lights flashing S.O.S.

I hope instead that her talents flourish along with her, as a part of her — to become passions to occupy, delight, enthuse, and empower her. Like Theseus’s string, I hope her talents will lead her out of the labyrinth and away from the Minotaur. I hope her talents are a means to an end and not the point in itself. I hope her talents don’t always nod and curtsy for men. I hope they don’t need to demurely hide themselves in order to offer such men the thrill of “discovering” her, as if for the first time. I hope she doesn’t, in other words, keep trying to reverse engineer herself: to keep scrubbing off knowledge because it might scare away men. I hope she won’t need to pretend not to know herself just to puff a man’s sails as he tells her, in hushed tones, exactly who she is. I hope she never mistakes another’s weakness for her as weakness in herself and a need for such attention. I hope she does not contort her being into subtly reassuring another person that there is nothing inappropriate about their inappropriate attention: of doing everything in her power to assure him that he is a good person for fear that if she points out he isn’t, he’ll cut her loose.

Walking a tightrope between herself and the one measly source of love apportioned to her.

I hope she is never so ashamed of her own desire that she has to hide it and contort it and elevate it and ennoble it. I want her to be able to see desire and the basic realities of bodies and sex, and not first warp her desire through grand narratives of love and redemption and protection. To see desire as a bald fact, naturally arising from the proximity of two bodies drawn together by: taste, circumstance, background, society, patriarchy!, myth, conditioning, notions and proclivities, genetics, chance, engineering, failure, success, The Past, the present, the future — or whatever strange combination of factors determine who we are attracted to.

I hope my daughter doesn’t remain in a waiting room all her life, at the beck and call of those diamond hunters who congratulate themselves on digging such rough specimens from rock, to cut into stones and set in gold. (They don’t understand that a diamond is only itself and nothing more until its held in the hand — at which point ‘value’, measured against potential price in auction, is ascribed… They don’t understand that a diamond ceases to grow when its taken from the environment which creates it: and that a diamond’s properties are not for anyone else).

And if she isn’t spared such an encounter, then I hope, years later, that she won’t still be turning it over in her mind. This— what do you call it? a friendship? a mentorship? — — a relationship?? — -and still be wondering what it was: feeling a knot in her belly and the mix of dread that she failed to live up to The Man’s predictions. I hope she doesn’t find herself still ashamed for the feelings that she can never fully extricate — even as her understanding of herself grows clearer, her sense of the world more realistic, her perception of the man more acute. I hope she doesn’t let her shame at the particular form of her own first love lessen the sense of injustice she has for herself — even when he would tell the story differently.

If this seems too pointed, too strangely specific, let me clarify: what I mean is that I wish I was spared this.

I’ve struggled to process this episode because of my shame about desire. But as I’ve gotten older, and the more I’ve run a fine tooth comb through this first real relationship in my life, I’ve begun to see my desire — my want of this man — as an innocent, if integral, component of this story. I am not one to censor desire in others — we can’t help what and who we are attracted to, though we can — and should — help what we do about it. At 36, I know enough about desire’s ordinariness to understand that it was not my desire — or even his — that makes this story disturbing: but what he did about it. How desire was hidden, suggested, implied, covered-up, excused, ridiculed (mine), defended against (his). The official story was of a good man helping a lost, dysfunctional girl: and enduring all of her immaturity and inconsistency in service of this duty of care. Into this official version, everything out of kilter could be explained away and excused.

It prevents me from dealing with the real trauma here: of having a simple story inextricably bound with my nascent sense of self.

The fact remains that I was attracted to him. A crush. I wanted him — perhaps even quite apart from the slew of promises and predictions he made for me. An entire parallel narrative ran alongside that of him being the helper, and me being a needy child — a narrative of want. When I started writing this I wanted, again, to amass proof: if I can prove to you that he stepped over the line, that he was out of order, then I prove he loved me — he wanted me — and in doing so, I free myself from the shame of my own desire. It’s this desire — puppy love, a crush — that I felt radiating off myself, that i hated myself for, that i imagined was a source of humour and ridicule to those around me who tolerated this man’s attentions of me. Aww, she has a crush, they must have said: and I hated him because I saw that this was what they believed, since their silence implicitly condoned him. I wanted to stand here and lay the instances down and say: no, you see, when your backs were turned, it wasn’t like that. He made me responsible for his feelings too.

This is not at all an article about parenting: I’m not oppressed with worry that my daughter will find herself in the same situation that I did. But it’s the only way I have of getting to the point — I can visualise, by imagining my daughter instead of me, the total, abject wrongness of it all. And in the hypothetical, I can justify talking so much about nothing. There will be people who want to read this simply to get to the juicy bit. Whatever moral opprobrium we cast on predatory teachers, the form the story takes is so ingrained in popular culture that I feel I can only justify writing about this if there’s sex: unless I deliver for you. Unless, at some point in this article, I really get naked: or you can imagine in place of my avatar, some adolescent everygirl on whom you can project your repressed fantasies.

There’s no sex here — not the way you want it. And like the good teacher, you can’t have my body either: you won’t be able to scroll down to about the 3/4 mark and find a description of a nubile teenager; not as a a lithe body, or as a cadaver; not even as a suppurating wound. I’m here, yes, in these words — but I’m not all here. Lives have stories, plural, and these stories often run in parallel. Perpetual woundedness can exist alongside burgeoning competence … the me who writes this is different from the me it’s written about, and different again from the me who will get up tomorrow morning and make breakfast for my daughter. It’s preoccupations are also style — commitment to the form in which I write — and though words gather around my theme, beyond the bounds of the essay, they rarely fill my mind as they used to.

(the girl in me who’ll always feel untouched, yearning, ashamed — whose love wants uttering — lives alongside the woman in me who is married, has sex, and is unashamed about her body).

Perhaps it’s appropriate that nothing happens — the story going on and going on, never getting to the climax. Always existing as pure potential — which is what my teenage self was to this man. Not naked means not naked yet. Until, like Miss Havisham, one finds the writer weathered, aged, in bridal attire, still trying to get to the point, to the point, to the…

Being told I was special felt so necessary at sixteen that I couldn’t bear not being special, once the teacher in question tired of the demands I made upon him — once it became apparent that my boundaries couldn’t be transgressed — because I was too awkward, too angry, too resistant, too thankless — and it transpired I wasn’t going to conform to his version of events, to be his pet forever, or be transformed by his attention and help, as he wished I might be.

The unspoken contract, you see, was that I neutralise the danger of his desire by being innocent — endlessly innocent. By refusing to comprehend that some other layer of intention lay beneath the official version of his pure, self-sacrificing wish to help me. And with that help, my own nascent desire was continually humiliated. In secret — sitting together on trains, walking through the streets of London late after school, in cafe’s where he offered to ‘talk’ to me — I navigated and parried his flirtation, excited by the implications which always stopped short of full admission. In public, however — in school corridors, on crowded trains, in the martial arts classes he invited me to on weekends in his bid to help me integrate body and mind — he fully inhabited his guise as the maverick teacher, making charitable space for a child in need.

But that’s the problem. I was needy: I was a child in need. It was necessary , therefore— for my emotional wellbeing — that these needs be met. And perhaps it was his unconscious calculation: it did feel necessary, and therefore it made him absolutely necessary. It was intoxicating for both of us. His barely checked enthusiasm for me was a lifeline, a rope, a hand to hold in the dark when there wasn’t any: to be special was like having a searchlight in the vast cosmos finally find me out — and I was out so very far, clinging to a wreck in the outer-reaches of the dark, with nobody to call me home.

He called me home, I thought: or at least he called me to him — and in this way, defined himself as home. When nerves overcame me, and I failed to turn up to one of the meetings he arranged in his office, after school, or on the weekend, he messaged me: Where were you? You disappeared.

When I wasn’t where he was, I wasn’t anywhere. I dematerialised. He gained substance while I lost it.

Like a homing pigeon I returned, again and again, to the source: I wanted to be special. He said I was special, and he was older than me: 41. And so I stayed close to the source of the light — to him, since without him, I couldn’t be special. In telling me I was special, he made himself special: interweaving himself into my life, my psyche, my youth, my history, my memory. Even now, long since I ceased contact (with difficulty), I cannot change the fact that he is part of my past. More than an experience, now, he is irreversibly part of who I am.

When he took me under his wing, I wanted it — the feeling of guidance, of being ushered into an adult world with all of its secrets. I wanted a sure hand guiding me in, I wanted to be pulled against my will — since there was no other way. I’d learnt, growing up, that since I was not allowed to ask for what I wanted or needed, I had to hope someone would come along and give it to me, even when I didn’t ask for it. Even when I didn’t actually want it.

To need to be special is to crave exclusiveness — to exist outside of everything, not needing anything else. It is not redemption from loneliness — it’s another kind of loneliness.

I am not afraid for my daughter — in part because I’ve experienced all this, and the childhood which made me vulnerable to such a person: and I know I am giving her a different kind of upbringing. One in which she’ll always be able to speak her mind.