Spring 2011

As my physical recovery from the accident improved, I found myself questioning what had happened to my life more and more, specifically the end of my marriage, which I had never really grieved. It felt as if everything had happened so quickly between the heart attack and car accident, with little time to process splitting from my husband and leaving my home.

Now that I had time to think about it, I wondered if I’d actually come out on the other side of a mid-life crisis. I was in my early forties, married to my high school sweetheart, and miserable in every aspect of my life (except being a mom). Did other people feel this way? I hoped I wasn’t an anomaly. I hoped having a mid-life crisis was a real thing.

So I researched.

First, I looked up the actual definition for mid-life crisis. Google said it was “an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence that can occur in early middle age.” Yikes, that sounded a little like me, but I needed more proof to determine my case.

During my next round of investigation, I found statistics somewhere out there in Internet land that said only two percent of marriages are between high school sweethearts, and if they wait until at least age twenty-five to get married, seventy-eight percent of them will have a ten-year success rate. We were engaged at eighteen, married by twenty-two, and still together eighteen years later. I was astounded. We had actually beaten the odds, even as teenagers who hadn’t even figured ourselves out yet.

At least I know I hadn’t.

After more research, one study by The Guardian, based on 50,000 adults from Australia, Britain, and Germany, claimed that mid-life crises were real and that life satisfaction declined from early adulthood to its lowest point between the ages of forty to forty-two (before rising again to age seventy). Mid-life is considered stressful, and though it is also associated with parenthood, children had no effect on a mid-life crisis or its cause. And as if that weren’t enough evidence, I also read on the Huffington Post that women were more likely to go through a mid-life crisis earlier than men—between the ages of thirty-five to forty-four.

Whoa. It all fit me perfectly. I was forty-one and had three children when it happened, and judging from the statistics, I wasn’t the only woman to ever feel the way I had.

All of the research certainly provided a baseline against which to decide my plight, and I was almost convinced. Then I found the writing. My writing. The writing of some previous version of the Aimee who would later find herself sitting in front of a computer Googling mid-life crisis.

That’s when I knew for certain.

Tucked into a folder of miscellaneous writings from the fall of 2008, just months before I turned forty, and only a year and a half before I left my marriage, I found a scrap of paper with this written on it:

Life is a continuum of chance and choices, decisions deliberate and random, and as shifts occur, we simply live, moment to moment and day to day. Where will time take me? Do I have to be the socially correct, morally acceptable wife and mother and teacher and role model or can I just be imperfect, sad, questioning, normal, and human Aimee? I don’t understand. I don’t know who to be. And I don’t know how to figure it out. Who will guide me?

Those thoughts, bigger than my head could hold and spelled out in ink by my own hand, were the ultimate confirmation.

Self-diagnosis: mid-life crisis. It made so much sense. Evidently, I had lost myself.

And yet I’d made it through. So maybe it was time to consider forgiving myself. I certainly could use all the help that forgiven Aimee could provide right now.

• • •

Once upon a time, I was a pretty good teacher.

It was all I’d ever wanted to be.

(Well, I mean, besides Cinderella, but I understood pretty early in life that might be a bit hard to pull off.)

I had wanted only two things from life—to be a teacher and to find love—and not only had I failed at marriage, but my job recently had lost its luster, too. My ho-hum life bored me, and in the years leading up to the accident, I wondered if there was something more out there for me.

I never imagined being anything other than a teacher, though. I never had a Plan B. For me, it was teaching or nothing.

In fact, I probably wasn’t even in kindergarten before I had my first classroom. My dad hung a black piece of slate as a chalkboard in our basement toy room so I could play “school,” and I gathered stuffed animals and Barbies around it for lessons. I even filled the pages torn from Dad’s old gradebooks with their made-up-student names. I wanted to be just like him.

Finishing college, I vowed to become that one teacher—the favorite—that every student loves. The fantastically creative, inspiring, and entertaining Best Teacher Ever.

And I did.

I won awards. I was granted fellowships to study and write. I joined networks, shared exemplary teaching and resources, and traveled to conferences in cities all over the country. I was even a contributing author to Today I Made a Difference: A Collection of Inspirational Stories from America’s Top Educators (Adams Media, 2009).

Contributing author! A high school English teacher’s dream!

But after almost two decades in a profession in which extrinsic rewards were rare, my head and arrogance swelled as my accomplishments accumulated. Soon, I believed that only I could do what I did. That other teachers should learn from me. That the field of education needed me.

And among all the accolades and trips, even as I found independence and confidence, I lost sight of what I loved most about teaching: my personal relationship with it. With my classroom. With my students.

It had lost its magic, so I stopped giving it my all. I stopped putting in the creativity and passion that I had in the past. All because I thought I deserved more.

Huh, interesting. Kind of like my marriage.

Maybe there was no such thing as happily ever after. Or maybe it was just a mid-life crisis. Either way, I had been putting on a front, sloughing away days that no longer glistened the way they used to. Days that felt like they belonged to jobs others complained about.

And I certainly didn’t believe any longer in the hallowed, English-teacher inspiration I’d once hung above the chalkboard at the back of my classroom. “You are the author of your own life story,” promised the skinny strip of green bubble letters outlined in neon pink. What teacher-catalog bullshit. Eventually I would become a character in my own life, unsure of who was writing the story.

But even so, and much to my surprise, when I returned to school on January 18, 2011, against the better judgment of doctors and attorneys, I discovered that my classroom was just what I needed.

I needed its therapy. I needed its community.

Instead of spending long days alone, thinking about what had happened to my life, I was back in my comfort zone surrounded by teenagers, once again fueled by their energy. Students didn’t ask me about what had happened, because most of them knew, but they listened if I wanted to talk. And sometimes, their unfiltered and honest words or questions gave me just enough of a poke to shake me out of the anger and guilt I was holding on to.

They treated me gingerly, as if I could break at any moment, and some even seemed to be in awe of me. I talked with a lisp from the flipper still filling in for my knocked-out front tooth. I also walked with a limp and had visible scars on my arm and foot.

Regardless, I sat in a chair at the front of the room and relished in being alive and back in my classroom. I wrote alongside my students, expressing my feelings and fears and trauma, and I welcomed sharing the literature of Great Britain that I knew so well. Considering how to read it, how to analyze it. How to see life and the human experience reflected in its pages.

Soon, it was obvious that I hadn’t given teaching enough credit the last few years, and I started to regain sight of why it had once been my passion. I fell in love with it again.

I needed my students now even more than they needed me.

• • •

Feeling back at home in my classroom, I filed papers and put books away, lost in the chatter of teenage girls, until I heard the choppy propellers of a helicopter.

Oh no. Life Flight.

It was just before prom, and local law enforcement officials were sponsoring a mock crash for our students. They had set up the wreck in the student parking lot where everyone would gather to watch the follow-up scene as if it had happened in real time.

But I refused to attend. I just couldn’t do it, no matter the cause.

Sure, I understood the point, and yes, I believed in it. Early in my teaching career, I had even advised the LHS chapter of SADD—Students against Destructive Decisions (Students against Drunk Driving back then)—and had students sign the Prom Promise for an alcohol-free evening.

But the trauma of our own crash, very real and not even ten months old, was all too fresh. So I opened my classroom as a place of refuge for the girls who were with me that night. We didn’t need to re-experience it.

The noise of the helicopter moved closer and grew louder while we questioned and vented—Whose idea was this mock crash? How could they do it so soon?—but eventually our discussion turned to normal “girl talk” and gossip.

I wondered what kind of impact this mock crash was having on the rest of its audience. Yes, it was probably a short-term deterrent—I mean, how could it not be?—but at the same time, as I had just witnessed with these girls, teenagers were teenagers. Indestructible and immortal. Unbreakable. And kids forget.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among teenagers aged sixteen to nineteen, and the likelihood doubles when teens drive while under the influence. After alcohol, marijuana is the drug most often found in the blood of drivers involved in crashes, and in fact, drivers with THC in their blood are roughly twice as likely to be responsible for a deadly crash or killed than drivers who hadn’t used. Recent statistics showed that in the past two weeks, one in eight high school seniors drove after marijuana use, and sixty-five percent of them were more likely to get into a car crash than those who didn’t smoke.

But educational efforts like this mock crash usually focused only on drinking and driving. I just didn’t understand.

We had become a part of the statistics. And so had Zach Ryder.

The truth was sobering.