Yesterday was hard. I was looking back at my first year of teaching for something I am working on and wanted to get clear about some specific dates. I looked back at some old emails just to get the timeline right in my head: when I applied for my training course, when I did some pre-training work experience, when I interviewed for my first placement, etc. Of course I knew only too well that looking back at that time period - the summer of 2010 - would also bring with it memories and emails of that horrible August morning the phone rang and a police officer informed me that my dad was dead.

A major part of that first year of teaching was making the - probably wrong - decision a few weeks before my first term began to actually go ahead with the training in spite of the massive gut-punch our entire family received with that phone-call. I have never forgotten that I juggled learning how to be a teacher and my first year on the job with dealing with the fallout of my father’s death. Not only the emotional fallout that comes with a parent dying, but the administrative fallout of being, thanks to his and my mother’s divorce, his next-of-kin and therefore executor of his estate. I have never forgotten that my first full day in my placement school I had to take a call from the coroner who had only just received the repatriated body from Sweden, where my dad had died, and needed to give me his report before the funeral could go ahead. Never forgotten that my second week in school I had the Thursday off to attend dad’s funeral, and that those first weeks I spent my evenings writing up my lesson observations alongside writing his eulogy.

But then, in my head, I just sort of cut to: and then it was all sorted. The balancing act succeeded, I got qualified and I got my first job and all was well. Looking back at the emails and the chronology of things I realised how much I had forgotten and how much I had gone through in those first three terms.

Somehow, while learning on the job how to be a teacher - a tough training year in itself, without any extra burdens added, one I had seen bring other people to the brink with simply its normal level of stress - I not only had to come to terms with the loss of my parent but also had to deal with the following:

• Discovering my father had fathered a child with someone else outside of our family; being contacted by this hitherto unknown half-sister and having to undergo DNA-testing, etc. to confirm her story; meeting her for the first time and dealing with the shock of all that.

• Looking after my 93 year old grandmother who lived, alone, a hundred miles away in Manchester and who, before his death, dad had called every day at six pm and visited every weekend that he could. Having to become both a son and carer to her alongside being her grandson.

• Learning the rules of probate and dealing with solicitors, etc. to put dad’s affairs in order, including getting our old family home ready for sale and putting it on the market, even having to deal with a break-in at the property as it lay vacant.

• Having to be there and stay strong for my grieving sister who was also understandably devastated by the loss. Having to be kind and accommodating for dad’s partner whom we had only been recently introduced to. Having to find space in all that for my own grief and self-care too.

• Falling out with my mother over her use of emotional blackmail because of hurt feelings as I balanced respecting dad’s final wishes with things she claimed he had promised her in their divorce (despite the legal paperwork making no mention of it and dad’s written wishes contradicting what she said). We didn’t speak for about a year as a result and the damage done by things she said was never really repaired.

• Oh, and we also decided to move in the Spring of that first academic year, buy our first house and get a mortgage after a lifetime of renting (though, thankfully, my wife did literally 98% of the work on that and I just had to pack and unpack after a few days visiting and agreeing to properties in my semi-zombie state).

When I saw all these things in order, and realised they were happening as I also had to meet deadlines for assignments on my training course, plan lessons, mark work, change schools because of issues with my first placement, look for my first job, write applications and attend interviews, and also, of course, learn all about religion so I could actually teach RE after a lifetime as an atheist philosophy student focused exclusively on ethics and politics instead of theology, I was stunned at the fact I had survived it all in one piece. I was stunned I had survived at all.

That somehow in that same year I managed to also fit in a Christmas reunion gig with my band, Academy Morticians, and visit America during half-term to attend a friend’s wedding, blows my mind.

And that was only my first year on the job. Still to come would be the next year, when my mother’s hospitalisation and diagnosis with multiple myeloma in Birmingham took place on the same day my grandmother broke her back in a fall in Manchester and I found myself having to sell gran’s house and move her into a care-home at the same time I was reconciling with, and coming to terms with, my mother and her terminal illness, her ruined kidney and life on dialysis, trying to get her out of hospital so she could spend one last summer back in her homeland of America. All at the same time as I was becoming Head of Department with very little experience under my belt. Or the year she died on the same day as I was being Best Man at my best friend’s wedding, just a few months before gran died too, and then our cat of nearly ten years; having to sell yet another dead person’s house and be executor to two estates at the same time.

I am not special, and the point of this is not for you to say wow, how brave of you to go through all that. Others may not have the exact same story, but most of us will have their own version of it. My mom, a teacher, worked her own last term unknowingly starting to die from the cancer that would kill her, in a lot of pain but muddling through, hoping to get better. My wife, a teacher, went to her own work with all of the above happening to me and resting just as much on her own shoulders. I know colleagues who have had years teaching while going through a divorce, going through complicated health problems, going through health problems with their children, caring for elderly parents, planning a wedding, having a baby, losing a baby… Heroically and, yes, probably stupidly, coming into work every day in spite of everything going on in their lives and putting on a brave face from bell to bell so that they can teach the young people put into their care and do the best they can under the circumstances. And it doesn’t even have to be so life and death. Perhaps the stress is something more mundane - a bathroom renovation, a broken boiler, building an extension; little, crucial things that make life less-than-easy and, in the midst of it all, calling contractors and engineers, making appointments that don’t clash with your time in the classroom, they are there planning lessons and marking work, answering emails and preparing resources; teaching your children.

I guess the point of this post is just to remind ourselves that Covid-19 is merely the latest bullshit thing we teachers have had to somehow - amazingly - do our jobs around. The year we juggled all the everyday stresses of the job with surviving a global pandemic. Another one to add to the history books. Maybe it will even be two or three years of it, depending on a vaccine. Like the run of bad luck I had at the start of my career with three deaths in my family, one after another; or the teacher who spent years teaching alongside bouts of on and off chemo for the cancer that just wouldn’t die; or the teacher whose husband left her and had to take a year or two to reconstruct her life all over again from scratch on top of her demanding job. These crazy periods happen, and they will likely happen again. They either kill us or we get through them. They’re not fun, and we will probably look back one day and cry as we ask ourselves how we coped; may, even, wonder if we ever really did. But, like all things, one way or another they do eventually come to an end.  

We got through this shit once, we can get through some shit again.