Dear Miss Smith, I am writing to you now to thank you for saving my life.

Maybe you knew you’d done it then, or maybe it was just all the teachers deciding it was better to be safe than sorry when it came to getting all of us kids on the same page.

From the kidnapping of little Adam Walsh to the preponderance of kids finding razor blades in candy offered by strangers making the local news, everything was on high alert around us as it was. The parents were freaking out even before the Satanic Panic stories that centered around the kids supposedly getting sexually abused in daycare centers across the nation by Satanists began to loop incessantly in the news. 

The days after the assemblies they marched us all into, one grade at a time are still a blur but the overall outcome of them giving us a kid-codified language of right and wrong when it came to interacting with adults across our class never got to be.

I just recall how we all talked about the craziness afoot in our respective first grade homes so easily and breezily thanks to them giving us little major work kids the words to describe the happenings without shame. I even met my best friend for the first half of my life comparing notes on the brick wall after that, both of us blowing spit bubbles at each other trying to drag out the time before either of us had to head home, back into our respective kiddie hells.

We may not have felt safe or protected at home for various reasons…but the things we did all end up acquiring was comprehension, clarity and this unspoken sense of camaraderie.

There may have been demons under the dressers or in the bedrooms butted up against our own, but none of us claimed those monsters as our own after that. & none of us really saw ourselves as being “alone” in whatever the adult nuts in our lives tried to rain down on us. 

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It was a gift. And all of us got through. Even those of us who stood and watched our parents come and try to call us liars ahead of time in case we told on them to you once they’d pressed us and found out what we’d all learned in school that week. Like me.

I never forgot you pulling me aside after they’d left after saying what they did about me. Your eyes. Without my having had to correct the record at all.

Knowing you knew they were lying on me to you in my face saved me. Knowing you understood without my having opened my mouth kept me defiant at my core for the rest of my childhood. & I don’t know what else was said or done beyond earshot throughout that year…but I know that before I hit second grade the abuse had indeed completely stopped.

In hindsight? Maybe it was just me and my siblings, the things that popped off on the way into second grade that made it clear that there was no space for any of it any longer. Or maybe, just maybe, off in the cut, in response to some parent’s night PTA posturing I never got the chance to see or even caught a whiff of…the superhero of my story behind the scenes had indeed quietly, and calculatedly…been you. 

Because I, alongside my local cohort of kiddo brainiac warriors that you got addicted to Brothers Grimm and other global fairy tales like you were suiting us all up for the wars we were in through no fault of our own, was shipped all the way across town to a full-on, new Honors Magnet facility… that utterly erased the in-between time most of us had been left to our own devices defending ourselves through until whomever was safe for us made it home. 

In hindsight… I know for a fact that every kid that I became tight with in elementary school on those long-assed bus rides to and fro had situations that made us not mind getting up early and going home late at all. And you teachers could have easily petitioned to keep us all in the smaller magnet program with you.

So…Thank YOU.

That, at 50 I can even imagine…you having made the call you did 44 years ago… one that watered the seed of defiant serenity in me that now undergirds an entire literary universe…is the space made by the grace embedded in you teachers organizing those school assemblies to give our lil butts the words, one grade level at a time…to protect our hearts and minds no matter what terroir of Hades we’d grown up having had to to traipse through. You were my first Superhero.

With Love and a lotta words,

AB