A Principal Asked Me at Smith's If I'd Come Back and Sub

"You still have your license, don't you?"

Kim Hadley asked me that on Thursday afternoon at Smith's, by the bagged apples, one hand on her cart and the other holding her phone as if she'd been caught mid-text. She runs an elementary school a few miles from ours, and I know her the way you know people in a town this size, from three different places at once. A third-grade teacher at her school is going out on leave in November. Until then she needs daily subs, and after that she'll need someone for longer. "You wouldn't have to say yes," she told me. "Just say you'll think about it."

Ben was in the cart seat working a cheese stick down to nothing, and he picked that moment to hand me the wrapper like a receipt. I said I'd think about it. I also said my license had probably lapsed, and she said that was a form.

I got home without the apples.

Does an old teaching license still count for substitute work?

I don't know yet, and I'd like to tell you I spent Friday finding out. What I did was open the state's licensing page, read the first screen twice and closed it, then looked at the second screen on my phone while Ben ate lunch. Those pages are written for people who already understand them. The district office would tell me over the phone, and I haven't called.

I'm not sure why I'm stalling, though I think a form is a small thing and a phone call is the first real step, and I'd like the first real step to feel less like being carried along by somebody else's schedule. Kim's November is not my November.

The Wednesday I ran reading groups for Lily's class

Last March, Lily's second-grade teacher sent home a note asking for parents to staff the Wednesday reading rotation, and I put my name on it before I'd thought about it, which should have told me something. A neighbor named Joan took Ben for two hours. I sat at a low table with five seven-year-olds and a decodable reader about a cat named Gus, and one boy kept guessing every word from the picture. Without thinking I slid an index card over the illustration, and he looked at me like I'd taken his coat. Then he read the word. My hands had known that move since before Caleb was born, and I hadn't known they still had it.

Forty minutes in, I wasn't thinking about anything but the table, and that hadn't happened to me in a long time, and I mean that as a plain fact, with nothing sad in it. At home my attention goes four directions before breakfast.

Joan texted at 10:50 that Ben was fine and had asked for the dog twice, which was the part that stung, though I couldn't have told you why while it was happening. I sat in the Odyssey in the pickup lane afterward feeling tall and a little flat at the same time. I went home and made scrambled eggs for dinner at 6:15, and Caleb pointed out that eggs were breakfast, and nobody else cared. It was one morning. I'd never claim it settles anything, but it's the only evidence I've got about what going back would feel like, and it points in two directions.

Who has Ben, and what does the day cost?

Everybody tells me subbing is flexible, and it's true that you choose which calls to take. They leave out that a call comes at 5:30 in the morning and you have forty minutes to be somewhere with a bag of picture books and a cheerful face. A flexible schedule is only flexible if somebody else's morning can bend to meet it.

My mother is in St. George, four hours away and not available on a Tuesday. David works from home on Thursdays, and when I said that out loud he said he could take Thursdays, then looked at the calendar on the fridge and said most Thursdays. The preschool I looked at wants children to be three by September 1, and Ben turns three on October 30, so he missed it by two months. Joan has been kind, but Joan is a person with a Thursday of her own.

The pay I found online for a daily sub was lower than I'd assumed, and I'd have to count what child care for Ben would take out of it before it counted as income. I wrote a while back that you should count your dinners before you sign anyone up for fall, and I owe this question the same arithmetic. I haven't done it yet because I suspect the answer will be uncomfortable in one direction or the other.

There's a study that's been in my head all week, and not for its numbers. Madelaine Best wrote this for the Chartered College of Teaching, in Britain, about teacher-mothers returning to work:

"Nearly 60% of respondents reported receiving no return-to-work support, including no meetings, induction, or mentoring. One teacher described being 'completely...thrown in' without reintroduction to workplace systems."

It's a different country and different schools, but I'd still bet that Utah in November looks about the same from the inside, because nobody onboards a substitute. You get a key and a seating chart and a sticky note about the fire drill.

Being asked is not the same as being needed

I'm going to say a hard thing about myself. Part of why I keep thinking about Kim's question is that I liked being asked. A woman who runs a building of five hundred children looked at me in a grocery store and saw somebody useful. What I've got is a Tuesday and a laundry basket, and it felt good to be seen as a person with another life in her, even if the life is eleven years old.

It's a poor reason to say yes and a poor reason to say no. If I say yes because it was flattering, I'm taking a job because of a compliment, and the third-graders deserve a better reason than that. If I say no only because Ben is little, I'm treating my children as the obstacle, and they aren't. Ben is a person I like being with. I'd just also like to be somewhere else some days, and I'm allowed to notice both.

Mosiah 4:27 has been my permission slip for a long time:

"And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order."

I tend to stop reading after the first sentence, and the second half doesn't let me off. The verse asks me to count my strength accurately, which could mean I've got more than I've been admitting. I'm not sure yet that it does. My plan for now is to call the district about the license, and to ask for one Thursday in October as a trial before anything in November. If the phone call goes badly I'll tell you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to renew my teaching license to substitute?

It varies by state and by district, and in Utah it can vary by which office you reach on which day. Call the district and not the state, and ask what they'd accept from someone with an old license. They get this question more than you'd think, because a lot of us are sitting at kitchen tables with the same form.

Is substitute teaching a good way to ease back in?

It's a good way to find out whether you want to ease back in, since you can stop whenever you like, which a contract doesn't allow. But a day of subbing is a full day on your feet with twenty-five children who aren't yours, followed by dinner. Don't let anyone describe it as light.

What do you do with a toddler on the days you work?

I don't have a tidy answer. You need a person you trust and a backup for the morning that person is sick, and the backup is the part nobody plans. I'd rather work that out before saying yes to a school than after.

Should a mother of young children feel guilty about going back to work?

No. Some families need the income and some mothers need the work and some need both. I don't think the Lord keeps a ledger on which kind you are. I do think it's wise to decide on purpose with your husband and not drift into it because somebody was kind to you at the grocery store.

I haven't decided, and I'm trying not to pretend I've decided. What I still don't like is that the question only ever comes to me. Nobody has stopped David by the apples to ask if he'd consider taking a few days at a school, and when I tried that thought out on him he laughed, which is fair. I also don't like how quickly I got my hopes up over one question. And I don't like that I can't tell yet which part of me wants to go.

with love, Melissa