She left her handprints on my soul

She was mine for less than 6 months, but the mark she left upon my heart will last a lifetime. When you are attending college to become a special education teacher, it is a common refrain from professors and advisers and supervising teachers that you must learn to separate you heart from your job in order to avoid "burn out". Perhaps this is sage advice, but I can not fathom trying to educate a child without forming a relationship of trust with them and in turn, I can not imagine building up a relationship of trust and understanding without loving the child. The children in my class are "my kids" and I willingly take the risk of loving them, of letting them into my heart, because I simply do not know any other way to be a teacher or a human being. She was "my kid" during my first year of teaching, a rough year for any teacher and an especially challenging year for me as I was indoctrinated using the "sink or swim" method. Her arrival was timed with Christmas, and so she was my present for the new year- a beautiful little girl with a multitude of challenges, so medically fragile and willfully strong. For 5 months I celebrated her steps, I learned the meaning of each sound that she made, I puzzled over ways to prevent her from pulling out her life-sustaining tubes (trach and g-tube), I explored the world with her and her friends. Then with little notice, just weeks after her fifth birthday, she was gone. I had played the odds of teaching open-hearted and lost. At first coping was focused around her family- preparing a yearbook signed by her classmates (fingerprints that I labeled) and teachers/therapists, printing all of the photoraphs we had taken of her, gathering her artwork, colecting donations to help the family pay for travel expenses, and sending out cards to them that came in from classmates. Then coping became about making it through the rest of the year in the classroom where she was noticably missing. Finally it became about finding the peace to know that loving her was worth the pain of letting go, and that the risks are worth the rewards. Yet I could not settle on such an inward transformation not somehow being outward; this little life has forever changed mine and I needed (need) that to be evident. So in a delicate line-drawing upon my back I had a tattoo plaed of a child's cupped hands opening to release a butterfly. It is the closure I needed, the permanent reminder I hold dear of how one life short on years can have great impact, and the hope (faith) I have for the future that love is always worth the risks.