The Teacher and The Mother — A Short Story

Author’s Note: A typical workday brings many common thoughts and emotions for an adult. Sometimes, you’ll think ungenerous, intrusive thoughts about the people you interact with. Sometimes, random waves of anxiety will attack you when you’re just performing an everyday task. And you are always, always fatigued, by your professional work and by societal changes outside of your control. My Teacher is an ordinary adult just trying to get through the day.

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The Teacher came across the Mother outside the bathroom in the corridor. The Mother was furiously jiggling the bathroom’s door handle, which stubbornly refused to concede to her wishes. Below, at the Mother’s knee-level, a distressed girl-child hopped up and down in painful desperation.

“Mommy, I have to go!” she wailed. “Open the door!”

The helpless, haggard-looking mother seemed on the verge of tears, which quickly receded when the Teacher, at that moment a saving grace, a miracle worker, a Messiah bringing salvation, produced from her pocket a set of keys attached to a swirly, purple rubber wristband.

“Here, I’ll unlock it for you,” the Teacher offered.

“Oh, thank you!” The Mother’s relief and gratitude felt almost too much for the Teacher. After all, The Teacher was there to use the bathroom too. She hadn’t swooped in purposefully the way a protective vigilante spotting a robbery-in-progress would. She was simply at the right place at the right time. And yet the Teacher unlocked the door in a heroic fashion. The Mother and daughter rushed in at once.

In the bathroom, the Teacher, perched on the toilet, uncomfortably overheard the Mother in the stall next to hers, guiding her fidgety youngster through the process of going. The Teacher had no children of her own and privately wondered where such mothers stored their endless supply of patience. She also thought the child looked old enough to be fully potty-trained already. But of course, she didn’t know for sure. She was just a Teacher, after all. Not a Mother.

At one of the sinks, the Teacher rigorously scrubbed her hands clean, her mind already abandoning the Mother and the daughter. It confronted academic matters instead. Students’ homework that needed marking, students’ essays that needed evaluating. The Teacher visualised the stack of work undone as a paper mountain wobbling, threatening to topple over at the slightest wind of breath. A Tower of Pisa that wasn’t going to pass the test of time and attract generations of tourists. The dread crept into her hands, tingled under the hot cascade of water. It slithered up to her shoulders, which tightened accordingly. At this point, it was an all-too-familiar dance of nerves.

In the mirror, the Teacher regarded the tender violet circles under her eyes with resigned courtesy – as if they were an irksome colleague she had to be civil to, because they weren’t going anywhere, and neither was she.

Soon, the door behind her squeaked open, and the Mother and the daughter appeared at the sink next to hers. The Mother had to hoist her child up to reach the water streaming from the faucet. The daughter dutifully held out her hands to be washed. Yet another something this child just couldn’t seem to accomplish on her own.

There was a tremble in the Mother’s arms as she performed as her daughter’s almighty pillar. The child was reaching that age where she was getting too heavy to be lifted anymore. The day was coming when the Mother would set her child down and never lift her up again. The child would finally have to learn how to lift herself.

“Can I ask,” ventured the Mother to the Teacher. “Why was the door locked? It wasn’t locked before. We’ve used this bathroom a million times before.”

Ahh. There was a question the Teacher could answer.

“There were too many people coming into the building off the streets and using this bathroom,” the Teacher explained as she reached for a paper towel. “Now, only the businesses here have keys.” The businesses in question were a chiropractor’s office, a lawyer’s office, an art studio, and the tutoring centre where the Teacher worked afternoons and evenings. It was a busy building, with a constant stream of people trailing in and out like trampling ants.

“Oh, that makes sense.” The Mother set her daughter down, and the Teacher courteously passed her a paper towel to wipe her daughter’s hands with. “I should have guessed. Well, it looks cleaner in here now for sure. Nobody’s bringing their dirty brats in to mess it up!”

The Teacher didn’t respond. She wondered what a “dirty brat” looked like in the other woman’s mind, when her daughter had shirt sleeves colourfully stained with paint and couldn’t go to the toilet by herself.

The Teacher shoed away that thought immediately. No, that’s not fair. Nothing was fair, really. The locked bathrooms were a nuisance for everyone in the building, but especially in the tutoring centre, where five students at once could beg for the bathroom key. At best, three out of those five could be trusted to remember to bring the key back afterwards.

“Thanks again,” repeated the Mother.

“Don’t mention it,” replied the Teacher.

Back in the tutoring centre, the Teacher deposited the bathroom key back into the little glass jar on the receptionist’s desk. The Teacher herself had brought that little glass jar to work. It had once held a gourmet cheesecake from a bakery in her neighbourhood that had previously been a discount store. Where that old store and all its inventory had fled to, no one knew. That shiny new bakery with its delicate little pastries topped with cream and berries had sprung up overnight like a candy-coloured tulip, much to the delight of the Teacher’s mother, who’d come home with two cheesecakes on a whim. One for her, one for her daughter. A Friday night treat.

Once its contents were devoured, the jar would have ceased to serve a purpose if the Teacher hadn’t thought it could be a useful receptable for paper clips or bits of eraser broken off by bored, weary students who bent and twisted whatever was in their fingers. So many, too many students had restless fingers like that, fingers that always had to be playing with something, or there wasn’t a chance in the world they had absorbed a word she said.

“Can I use the bathroom now?” The Teacher’s student asked the very moment she sat down. The Student had heard the clink of the key in the little glass jar. Like the blare of the school bell, it gave them wordless permission to leave their seat.

Outside the tutoring centre there was a new wail, of the tired-child variety. It was the Mother’s child. Again. “Moooooom, I want to go home!”

A sharp rebuke followed. “Your brother’s not done his class.”

“Why does he have to have class?!” shrieked the Child.

“Be quiet, or you’re not going swimming on Saturday!” countered the Mother.

“Yes, you can go the bathroom,” the Teacher said to the Student, suddenly feeling very tired herself.