Cheekyteacher: The end to my era: How do you write a new best seller after Harry Potter?

Cheekyteacher: The end to my era: How do you write a new best seller after Harry Potter?

How do you write a new best seller after Harry Potter?--saying goodbye to a generation of book readers.



When the Harry Potter Children grow all the way up.

Tonight...July 13, 2011. Mark it on your calendars. Why? Because this is the last night of life as we knew it. Tomorrow night at around 3 a.m. begins a new era: life without Harry Potter. 

Sure maybe there will be re-runs and re-reads. But this is the last day of that “pins and needles” anticipation, movie marathon, book roundup--waiting for the final episode of the final book.

I speak not as a radical HP fan, not as an avid reader of the 7-book series, but as the mother of an 18 and 15-year-old whose childhoods were defined by J.K. Rowlings’ famous nerdy protagonist. And I find myself reflecting as a bystander, a fan-by-proximity. And what’s more...I find myself feeling rather nostalgic.

It began earlier this evening, when I took a break from the 7-movie marathon going on downstairs to look through Target ads for extra-long college sheets, and bottles of Tide and dry-erase dorm boards, and it occurred to me that my daughter, and the class of 2011, is heading off to college exactly as Harry wraps up his final quest on the big screen. And for me, there’s something sad and poignant in it--because I think we may have just seen the graduation of the last generation of kids that read books. I mean real, live, hard-bound, 700-page paper books.

She was only in third grade when that Troll Book order arrived with her first Harry Potter novel--The Sorcerer’s Stone--a monster of a book with an innocuous looking little wimp in glasses on the front cover. 

I told her she would have to wait for me to read it to see if it was okay for her to read--“not too creepy or Satanic” I think I  have said back then.

But I never got around to reading it. And doggone if that little skunk didn’t just go ahead and read it anyway.

And that's it--she was hooked. And a year later she had her little sister hooked. And by the time the fourth book in the series came out, I found myself elbowing through a giant crowd at Borders Books at 11 p.m. on a school night in order to the be among the very first to get The Half-blood Prince when it was released at midnight. 


That’s what moms do, isn’t it? You take your kids to the things they love, and I couldn’t help but grin and watch, baffled, as they hammered away fact, after fact in the Harry Potter Trivia contest. I mean, who else knows that Dumbledore’s full name contains something as peculiar as Albus Wolfrick Percival something or other? Well...Harry Potter fans, that’s who. My kids, that’s who. In fact, “fan” just doesn’t do it justice. These are children who feel as though Albus is their grandfather and Harry is a brother. (Ron and Jenny have a mum and dad, so they’re more like cousins) but Hermoine and Harry--they’re just part of the family. 

I wonder how many other moms have chuckled this week watching their grown kids lie in the hammock in the sun and re-read (no re-read is too mild) re-DEVOUR books 6 and 7 so every detail over every Horcrux can be fresh. As I listen to the voice of Richard Harris give way to Michael Gambon rumbling up from the basement, I wonder how many other families are running a 7-movie marathon tonight. My kids started somewhere around lunchtime and it will be around midnight by the time they’re done. Only nowadays they can drive their own friends home--no more tent in the backyard with an extension cord to the laptop or Ariel and Belle sleeping bags.

Years ago, three little kids rode a train to Hogwarts and stole my daughters’ hearts. Today, like time-lapse photography. they’ll watch Daniel and the gang transform from 10-year-olds into 19-year-olds in a span of less than 12 hours. 

And here’s the thing--tonight it’s the same thing for me. Tonight it feels like it’s only been a matter of hours. One morning I woke up and a third-grader was sneaking Harry Potter under the covers with a flashlight at night. In less than a month, I’ll be sending an 18-year-old away to college praying that Harry Potter is the worst thing she'll ever sneak. 

It’s like Slughorn’s fish--poof! It’s gone. It’s like magic of the worst kind. And tonight I can hardly bear it.


Tomorrow we'll probably set up our soccer chairs at the movie theater shortly after noon and wait in line with the hundreds of other fans who have come to see the last big-screen appearance of their childhood heroes.


This will be the fourth midnight showing of Harry Potter for me. Last time the temperature was merely a few degrees above freezing as we hunkered down with blankets, hats, and mittens in line waiting for the Deathly Hallows Part I.

I've actually read that one, and the one before that--I owed it to my girls. And, sure, I like them just fine. But the truth is I’m never going to be one of the real fans--the truly passionate, obsessive, trivia-memorizing readers of Harry Potter. I’m not.

So why do I go to midnight book and movie releases and sit through 10 hours of Harry Potter re-runs?

Because there are two girls in this house who ARE the real deal. Because Harry Potter has been part of shaping their entire childhood existence. He and Ron and Hermione have grown up with them like neighborhood kids, and I’ve been like the mom who watched out the kitchen window while they played. 

I was there when Harry grinned and climbed on the back of Hagrid's motorbike, and I will be there when he goes to the train station to say goodbye to his own kids. And then, poof, just like that it will be done. And life will move on in a new way. 

I love Harry Potter with all my heart because I have delighted watching my girls delight in these fanciful, fantastical novels with all my heart. And when those closing credits start to roll and hear that final theme music, I know I'll be bawling like a baby. 

Because saying goodbye to Harry Potter will signal the end to an era at our house. The end to four-person family dinners and movies; school projects and homework marathons; the end to days when girls could talk to cats, dressed up from a box of old clothes in the basement, built secret forts in the cedar trees behind the house and laid beside the pool with a two-pound novel inches away from their faces reading and reading and reading again. 


I wonder how long J.K Rowling grieved after she set down her pen having written that final scene on the platform. And I wonder if, sometime soon, she will pick her pen back up and begin a new story. It couldn't be easy after such incredible success, and you couldn’t really blame her if she never tried.

But I know one thing for sure. You can guarantee that after I give that final wave through the back windshield of the car as we pull away from the college, that as soon as the tears dry, I'll start scribbling on the next series of my life. Because if there’s one thing I’m a fan of...it’s of life... and of my daughters who have made it the best, best-seller ever.

In the beginning was the word—The dangers of grading...in the hot tub

I love to read. But even better, I love to read in the bathtub. There is something…call it amniotic…about soaking in warm water absorbing words. Now I just can’t imagine I am alone in this pursuit. I can’t help but feel that there are other literature lovers who, like me, love to turn the faucet on as hot as human physiology will permit— just short of shutting down from shock or coma—and then soak like human stew until the water cools to gazpacho.

But I am queen of tub reading. I have been since before my Judy Blume years, even before Beverly Cleary and Beezus and Ramona. Why, I have a wavy copy of Stuart Little that proudly shares a box in the garage with a sister paperback of Wuthering Heights that both look like they came through the CSU Library Spring Creek flood catastrophe.

I have read in the tub with Phineas when he jumped with Gene from the tree and I have wept over Little Ann and Big Dan with tears that were warmer than my bath water. It is a private affair—dim lighted and reclusive, and I have found I can get sometimes nearly three hours out of a good full tub of steaming hot water—enough to induce a complete mindless euphoria I like to call fictionoblivia.

But because of this word-n-water habit, good or bad, I have developed another habit—a bad one. GRADING in the bathtub. And it is this bad habit, I’m pretty sure, that led my husband to finally install a hot tub in our back yard. NO students in the world wants to know their teacher read their their essay on Raisin in the Sun while Lazin’ in the Tub. (I could go on with Grapes of Bath and more, but I’ll spare you).

So now the hot tub solves some issues. First of all…it solves that dilemma of reading essays in my bathroom, and the even better…the water NEVER goes cold.

But there is, as I have indicated earlier, one horrible side effect of grading term papers in the hot tub…a little something I like to call it the “distressed essay” look. This is the term paper that takes on the fluted paper muffin-cup-liner look—like the wavy edges of a 1950’s prom dress. I mean, no matter how hard you work to hold them up out of the water, one or two always seem to suffer the side effects of excess humidity. And short of ironing every paper before I return it, I have handed back one or two…or three…or six…papers with inky comments that bleed a little on the page or crinkle a little louder than the others when they’re handed back.

But last week beats all—BEATS ALL.

Last Saturday as I set up my stool and briefcase (filled with 120 American Lit. and AP Comp. research essays) beside the hot tub at 6:30 a.m., I did not foresee the future quite as clearly as I now wish I would have. I flipped back the cover, breathed in the steam, set down my portable mug o’ coffee and slipped carefully into the soup. It never occurred to me that my man had generously—per my directions—refilled the tub while he was hosing off the back porch the previous weekend, and that the level of the water had risen considerably.

I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not true. I DIDN’T overflow the tub. No, I leaned back and sipped my java, listening for the meadowlarks to wake up,  watching the sparrows dip and chirp above the pond, following the clouds as they meandered across the sky.

And then a voice in swim trunks came through the steam…”Mind if I join you?”

Yes, my best friend and husband had risen to soak in the hot tub with me, in quiet reverence of the morning and my silent quest to grade. And without another word, he sent a wave of water--just shy of the Tsunami that wiped out the coast of Japan the previous week—over the side of the hot tub right into my briefcase.

One-hundred and twenty papers…and average of seven pages …approximately 400 words per double-spaced page…I think it works out—if my math is close, which is always a variable in the equation—to approximately 335,000 words…UNDER……..WATER.

I spent the morning arranging them, and re-arranging them before the fireplace, praying for them to stop curling like milk in lemon juice and that the words would remain legible enough to read. And just as I reached the point of ultimate despair………..and for those of you who teach, you know what I mean………….the point where you realize you will have to admit to your students just how really stupid you really are……………..I heard the voice of Norman Mclean.

You know it. It’s from a River Runs Through it. And for those of you who haven’t read it, perhaps you’ve seen it, as narrated by Robert Redford (who has the voice of an archangel, I’m pretty sure). It’s the voice of my father, the fisherman, and his father and grandfather who fished before him. It’s the voice that pulls me home to my White River every summer, and the voice that makes me take my shoes and socks off by a stream. It’s the voice hovering over the face of the waters from the beginning of time. It’s the voice from the womb that draws me to water and words.

No wonder I grade papers in the hot tub. No wonder I read in the bath. It’s what I was created to do. Words and water simply go together. They just WERE…from the beginning. Mclean said it like poetry. It’s water and the words.

(Link) View more Robert Redford Sound Clips

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

P.S. Myriah, I’m so deeply sorry about your essay. I apologize from the bottom of my toppled pedestal. I’m just SO not perfect. 

My First Pat-down: Where's the teacher when you need her?

This...this...thing I remember.

I just flew in from our nation’s capital. You know, the place with the Pentagon and foreign embassies galore, and I have to say…the fellas in D.C. are serious about their airport security—very serious. Like serious, uniformed, guards at every check point barking, “Have your boarding pass in hand!” And TSA people shining ultraviolet flashlights into your luggage muttering, “It’s not your name I’m looking at.” Creepy, really.

So by the time I made it to the metal-detection area, I was completely taken aback, for it as it turns out this little thing called a “full body scan” is for reals. Maybe you knew that, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I’ve flown from a very large, very central US Aiport (whose initials start with DIA) to another very moderate mid-western Airport (whose name always followed, as I recall from childhood, Mutal of…) several times in the last couple of years and I’ve never seen these controversial virtual nudity machines. 

I just thought it was a bunch of hype—rumors about naked bodies through clothes—the kind of stuff that fourth grade boys used to play with their drug store “x-ray glasses.” They’d say,  “I can tell you have on white underwear,” which really required nothing short of rocket science seeing as how back in 1974 I think eight out of every eight fourth-grade girls wore white underwear. Still, it was scary. We girls knew this was some nasty stuff these boys were up to, and we usually told a teacher who confiscated the specs and told us there was no such thing as x-ray vision.

But no…turns out Mrs. O’Quinn, who was stuck on playground duty that week, was wrong. Now, thanks to technological advancement of the best kind, every fourth grade boy can get on his knees tonight and thank God because science has just made dreams come true for pre-pubescent boys. X-ray vision does exist. It’s alive and well in Dulles International Airport.

Now, I’ve stayed out of the great debates about civil rights and invasion of privacy that was THE hot topic back in November when these machines first surfaced. I guess I simply didn’t believe such a thing was possible, and even more naively I believed that if such technology did exist no self-respecting government, let alone a democracy, would allow it to be publicly installed. 

I mean, I believe in terrorists. I’m still as traumatized as any other American over nine-eleven. I believe, just as much as Virgil and Wyatt Earp ever did, that weapons shouldn’t be allowed in public where nine-year-old little girls go to shopping malls—and that no magazines other than the latest Marie Claire should be allowed onto campus in some college student’s backpack . 

And please don’t think for one minute I’m one of those guns don’t kill people people—I’ve been shooting .22’s and .32’s and 12-guages since before I was in training bras, and I KNOW guns can kill people. I appreciate a well-placed metal detector as much as any other patriot who stands and sings along with Lee Greenwood that “I’m proud to be an American” at the firework finale on the Fourth-of-July.

But the problem is that the SECOND line of that song goes “…where at least I know I’m free.” And today I’m hacked off because as big a platitude and as sappy as that song has become, I’m here to tell you that it simply is not true.

Yeah, I was free. Free to walk through a machine that scans my nude body onto a screen in an unseen observation room, or free to take a pat down. Admittedly you can’t expect too much from other world citizens—of which there are plenty at Dulles Airport—who have neither been educated in nor given  basic principle freedoms, who have never given lip service to human rights and who remain unaware of something called Civil Liberties. But were not some of us in line at x-ray this morning American citizens? Wasn’t there one other passenger flying with my this morning who has been raised in a country in which one has the right to determine and practice his or her own religion, the right to remain silent, the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of speech, of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances?

Well buddy...I'm about to ask for a REDRESS about UNDRESS. Today, as I stood lining up two...three...four...plastic bins to send down the rubber conveyor belt filled with all my personal belongings, I began to wonder what would happened if I forgot to stop:

What if— after pulling off my boots, my necklace, my bracelets, my belt, my coat and my sweater—I simply took three more steps and removed my dress, underpants and bra. It’s only another three steps—really. And then…let us not bandy words any longer… we could call it what it is—A STRIP SEARCH: a full-out, full-body, naked display of every man, woman and child that walks through security.

And as if this alone weren't enough to make a body gasp, could I just speak about the “posture” or position one must assume in order to have one’s naked image displayed for TSA to accurately assess on their flat-panel televisions—something akin to a pose most often struck for a:

A:  Photo shoot in a porn magazine

B:  Breast exam at the gynecologist’s office

C:  Death March for prisoners of war. 

Listen, Mr. TSA officer…Don’t  you stand with your arms crossed staring straight ahead like a junior Nazi officer at the door to Auschwitz barking out, “Remove your laptops! Remove your liquid items in plastic bags! Remove all shoes, belts, jewelry or other metallic devices…” and pretend that a VIRTUAL strip search is a legitimized technological option to an ACTUAL strip search—because you are wrong. The first time somebody asks one of my children to pose for the nudy-cam, I’m going to file a law suit. Last time I checked that was called child pornography—was it not?

How desensitized have we become? Has technology so overtaken our senses, so  allowed us to remove ourselves emotionally from a factual process that we no longer bat an eye at what is a legalized, systematic display of a person’s unclothed body and a grossly inappropriate invasion of privacy.

But nobody batted an eye.

I watched people squirm, laugh, and joke and then spread their legs and put their hands behind their heads like some sort of war criminal stripped naked in front of a firing squad and undergo this process simply because there was no other practical choice. There was nobody there to offer an alternative, nobody to give them an option. They were run through like cattle at a meat packing plant. And suddenly, in my eyes, it felt like a sick Twilight Zone reenactment of  the processing house at Treblinka or Auschwitz.

And nobody batted an eye.

In fact, check out the TSA page on body image scanners. No surprise, nearly 80% of flyers said they would be willing to undergo the full-body scan. But the fact is: there is no “willing” about it. It’s “Either line up for the virtual strip search or get a pat down.” There’s NOT a choice. Ask me. And the looks the guards and passengers give you as you dare to grind to a stop the giant cattle chute of technology is nearly enough to make you say, “Skip it, skip it…just joking, boys.” Except for me it wasn't.

Listen Madam Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano:

You want to see me nude? Then have the guts to ask to look at my bare body in the flesh. You want to see my naked body to see if I’m smuggling drugs or weapons? Then snap out of your euphemized, euthanized, desensitized un-world and ask me to strip.

I truly wonder…if my fellow citizens would have been asked to strip— to actually, not virtually, “remove all items of clothing” before entering the terminal area—I wonder if they would have risen up in protest. Or would they simply have endured one more stripping (no pun intended) of their individual rights in order to make a plane.

Am I alone with George Orwell and Margaret Atwood who force us to ask “HOW FAR, people?” How much personal integrity and privacy are we willing to surrender in the name of technology and worse yet in the name of terrorism? When are we going to realize that 97 percent of the nation is being asked to undergo a strip search to prevent 3 percent of the terrorists from sneaking a bomb on board.

Is there not something better? Somebody please tell me before I despair of purple mountains majesties,  sweet land of liberties, and home of the braves! Where are you Lee Greenwood, now?

How long is it before the fourth-grade boy on your daughter’s play ground isn’t fooling around any more? How long is it until you walk down the street and know that any pair of dime-store glasses is now the “real deal.” Will it be illegal to look through a person’s clothing at their naked body? Can perpetrators get actual (here’s an oxymoron) real-time virtual thrills from a neighborhood park bench?

C’mon, I’m not joking. Seriously,  just flip through a Sky Mall magazine and look at the micro video recorder glasses and bugging devices that are available now to the general public. Stuff that America gasped in shock over when Richard Nixon tried them out on George McGovern. Complete lack of integrity, complete stripping of civil liberties, complete lack of business and political ethics that WATERGATE WAS. 

And there’s another key word: WAS. Today, in this nation overflowing with virtual voyeurism, I’m afraid nobody would bat an eye at Tricky Dick's little spy games.

Our youth, and slowly by association our elders, have grown so very accustomed to seeing their images reproduced in a dozen different mediums, through a hundred virtual networks, and hearing their voices played on a thousand different recordable devices, that they no longer see the marvel of it, gasp at the wonder of it, or flinch at the invasion of it.  I’m fearful, if we don’t regain our senses soon,  that one fine day, not long from now, our senses will simply go completely numb. 

And maybe, right before they do, some of us older ones will remember that there was a time when we “just knew” something was wrong. We may not have known what it was called—we were too young for words like civil liberties and invasion of privacy--and we didn’t have the power to stop it on our own…but at least in fourth grade, way back long ago, we had the sense to tell the teacher. And she could always do something about it. 

But I was on my own this morning at Dulles. The playground monitor was nowhere to be found, and not one other soul seemed to even care. 

Cue Lee Greenwood on five, four, three... 

Harry Potter nothing;my first-grade teacher was a witch--a tribute to my mother

Is it just me or is there something concerning about that one?

Hermione step aside: meet Mrs. Eolne (and I didn’t spell that backward in case she has some loved ones…somewhere). And it is because of Mrs. E. that I have no problem, whatsoever, believing in witches. But when I was five years old, I had not, as of my first grade year, met one. (And for those of you who just want to get to the point about my mom and skip the witch part due to severe religious beliefs of severe scarring from flying monkeys..or both I guess.. then just go to the *)

Starry-eyed, and nearly literate, I began first grade able to read and write. Mine was the first generation after “See Dick Run.” We were the guinea pig 1970’s protégés of a little something called The Programmed Reader.

My brother and sister, however, were raised on Dick and Jane, the crazy wagon-pulling white kids with their dog named Spot. And my siblings made certain I knew how to decipher the secret “See Dick. See Dick run” code before starting first grade. In fact, come to think about it, considering the nearly library-sized collection of school books we have rubber stamped with “property of,” I’m pretty certain my brother probably stole the book from which I learned to read.

But first grade at Cantril Elementary held something much better than the

Image via Wikipedia

old brown and blue cloth-covered primers of the 1960’s. Oh yeah…we received shiny purple magazine-like readers with happy cartoon characters named Sam and Pam and their dog named Zip and a cat named Nip. And everything in those readers rhymed, and no word was longer than three letters.

I  guess the creators of Sam and Pam thought the “ck” blend of Dick and the silent “e” conundrum in Jane were problematic for young reader—not mention that the sentence “See Dick Run” actually contains two verbs, or the implied “you” subject creates two subjects, or that “Dick Run” is probably an implied clause reading more accurately “(you) see (that) Dick runs.”  Honestly! How did they ever expect kids to learn to speak English?

Well, these must have been the same geniuses who decided to print the answers to each fill-in-the-blank on the inside margins and then trust six-year-olds to cover their answers with a wide bookmark which could be slid, one answer at a time, to check the answers.

Ah yes! The programmed reader was born. The thought, I’m sure, was to give immediate feed back to the student and eliminate grading for teachers. The inventors probably thought it would create a generation of geniuses. What it created, however, was a generation of cheaters.

When I finished my programmed reader in a week, Mrs. E—who was so nearly ready to retire she probably drove an RV with a red Good Sam sticker in the back window to school—saw in me the fulfillment of every prophesy she had probably uttered during the first staff meeting after the district proposed the death of Dick and Jane. There is an old Asian proverb that says something about when the lawn mower was missing the neighbor’s son looked like a thief, and I think it probably fits here. But regardless, I was labeled a cheater and sent to the…get this…cloak room.

Now, as I’ve said before, I was well educated at home, and I’d had enough Grimm’s Fairy Tales to know that the only people who ever wear cloaks are witches.

Yeah …that’s right…try being five and going to the cloak room with the Wizard of Oz and those creepy little flying monkeys in your head. Not to mention that the witch masquerades as a normal neighbor riding a bike. I immediately saw through Mrs. E’s thin disguise as a gray-haired, pinch-faced, child hater.

She was much more than that, and I shudder to think of what might have happened if I had brought my dog to school. Wait!...I did bring my new puppy to school one time and he peed on the floor right in front of Mrs. E. (If that’s not proof positive, well then, what is?)

Suffice to say I became intimately acquainted with the cloak room, a small hallway-slash-closet between the classroom and the outside door that smelled of wet mittens and rubber overboots. (Remember overshoes? It was the day when you wore your regular shoes to school and you had cool little white, red or…god forbid…black rubber boots that had a little button and an elastic band to hold them snug around your ankle. And if you ever forgot those overboots, your mom made you wear Roman Meal bread sacks—those ugly orange ones because she was convinced that Wonder Bread was too overly processed to be good for you—over your shoes held up with rubber bands!)

I found myself in the cloak room the day Mrs. E said she had discovered a “long-necked giraffe” in the classroom. I couldn’t have been more thrilled, but when I asked her how it got into the classroom and where was she hiding it, I quickly discerned that this was secret teacher code for “cheater” meaning somebody was copying answers.

Another time I was knuckle-headed enough to suggest that apples, like the ones appearing on our daily phonics worksheets, did not necessarily all come in red. I tried to explain the value of a Golden Delicious and the tartness of the bright green Grannie Smiths—the preferable variety for apply pies. This information, however, was not greeted at all with the enthusiasm I was expecting, and then—when she called me “smart”—I was stupid enough to think she really meant it. So I was sent to the cloak room to “think about being smart.”
The worst and funniest time I was sent to the dreaded cloak room was the time Mrs. E had the lack of common sense to sing the ABC's to us and end with "Now I know my ABC's, tell me what you think of me." C'mon! It's asking too much! She asked!

(*There’s that asterisk) I know by now you are asking “how in the world is this a tribute to your mom?” So I’m going to tell you. My mom just turned 75 last week, and she is the most remarkable woman I have ever met. This Christmas she went snowshoeing with the family and kept right up with her 20-year-old grandsons. She drives off to Texas, she flies to California, she runs women’s groups, she sings in the choir. She is sharp, and funny, and smart, and perhaps the most loving and compassionate woman I have ever met.

Which is why I adore her.

But the thing that sealed her in my heart forever was that day in 1970 when I decide to quit school for the rest of my life. That February day I had come home for lunch (we lived right across the street from the school,and in those days kids actually had moms who were at home and made lunches—go figure) and I had had enough.

I wasn’t going back. I wasn’t going to spend another day in the cloak room. I wasn’t going to read another sentence about Nip and Zip. I still didn’t know how to color inside the lines and-–worst yet—I just couldn’t figure out how to not be me.

My dad, unfortunately, didn’t see the situation quite as tragically as I did. He told me to dry up, buckle up my overshoes and get myself back over to the school, “pronto.”

Well, I didn't.
As the tardy bell rang, I stood on the front step of the school crying my eyes out, completely unable to understand or communicate what had gone so horribly wrong with something that I had been waiting my entire life to begin.

My entire school career could have ended right there. I was ready to face my own misfortune—whatever punishment or retribution it contained—because anything at this point would have seemed better than, or could not have been as horrible as, going back to first grade.

And then I saw her across the street.

My mom appeared in the doorway of our house slipping on her heavy winter coat. Even writing the words now brings a rush of emotion over me. My eyes get as hot as they felt when I first saw her swimming her way toward me through my five-year-old tears. Somehow I knew in that moment that she had not only defied my father, but she was also risking her very life to face the witch of first grade. And she was coming to rescue me.

As she took my hand to walk me down the long tiled hallway to the first-grade classroom, I tried to secretly communicate the fear and terror awaiting her. But there wasn’t enough time.

And that’s when I knew for CERTAIN that my teacher was a witch because she had pulled a transformation spell. When my mom walked into the classroom, Mrs. E had disguised herself as a caring mothering-type, bringing me a “tissue” and asking “what’s wrong, honey?” It was nearly convincing—shape-changer that she was—she nearly appeared to be a real person. And I was afraid, more than ever, because I was scared my mother would fall under her spell. I was terrified my mother would believe and then leave me to suffer the repercussions after the spell had worn off.

But here’s why I love my mom: She didn’t buy the magic act.

My mom knows a witch when she sees one, and she always has ever since.

My mom was fearless, and she still is.

My mom faced the most disingenuous person woman in the world and never even broke a sweat; and she still doesn’t.

My mom made Mrs. E, without a single hateful word, back off, and quit making my life hell. And that’s what she still does.

My mom with the calm confidence of a woman of highest valor, saved my life; and she’s still doing it every day.

I love my mom. I just want to say it here for the entire world! Because for over 30 years, she has been saving my backside and loving me beyond my greatest fears.

She turned 75 a couple days ago, and it makes me wonder, at times, what I will ever do 30 years from now. I wish more than anything in the world, that I can someday be half as a good a mother to my daughters as she has been to me. I learned what a witch was when I was five years old, But I also learned that there is something a lot stronger than any witch on earth.

And that, my friends is woman of God’s dearest heart.