The Principal

It wasn’t until I was in middle school that our school system started doing “in service” days. You know, those wonderful Fridays you had no classes, but the teachers had to work. I loved those days.

However, on this particular in service day, I had to go to school. I was in drama and dance and we had a dance competition coming up. We had to practice. My mom dropped me off in front of the school and told me she was going to stop by the office, since she had recently volunteered to help the PTA.

We practiced for hours. It was fun. Afterwards, we were all standing outside, chatting, waiting for our parents. Soon, though, I was the only one there. Me and our dance coach, who was anxious to leave. I saw our Principal’s Bronco in his spot, so I told her I’d go into the office and call my mom. When I got closer, I saw my mom’s van parked on the other side of the Bronco. Apparently, she’d been here the whole time. I told my coach she was here and went inside to find her.

The moment I walked into the office, I felt the air change. I couldn’t quite place what I noticed, what I was feeling, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good. I heard a noise come from the principal’s office, so I went over and knocked on the door. There seemed to be a lot of sudden movement inside, but I couldn’t place why that would be unusual or weird.

When he opened the door, I saw my mom inside. Me, being me, I walked right in, sat down at his conference table and started talking. My mom cut me off however and said we had to get going.

When we got home, my mom went straight back to her room and got on the phone (it was the only place we had a phone in our small house). Something was amiss, but I didn’t know what. I hovered outside her door. I caught snippets of the conversation:

“I don’t know what that was, but I liked it”

“We need to figure this out”

“Yes, I will be there in 10 minutes”

Sure enough, my mom  came out of her room and told me I needed to keep an eye on my brothers while she met a coworker to drop off some stuff. She was gone for 3 hours. Her coworker, called 10 times while she was gone. Wondering where she was. She, obviously, didn’t go meet him. Something wasn’t sitting right with me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

When she came back, my mom declared that we were going to spend the night in a hotel!! We LOVED spending the night in a hotel. We loved swimming in the indoor pool, jumping on the beds, being messy and not having to clean it up-hotel life was AWESOME. We were so excited as we ran around gathering our stuff. Still, I knew something was wrong. We weren’t exactly rolling in money. The only time my mom did stuff like this was . . . when she felt guilty. Like the time we were at Ed’s dad’s house and his wife (not ex, as my mother claimed at the time) came and got into a fight with him and he got arrested. We got to stay in a hotel then too.

Once we checked in, my mom took my brother to go get dinner. I looked out the window and watched the car pull away. The lights shined in my eyes and I suddenly felt it hit me like a punch in the stomach: my mom was having an affair with the principal.

To be honest, I can’t claim I knew exactly what “affair” meant at the age of 12. What I did know was that my principal was married and in my gut, I knew that whatever was happening started that very day.

I wasn’t wrong. As the school year progressed, my mom and the principal didn’t do much to hide from me and my brother. I think they assumed we were too young to pick up on what was happening. So many parents make the mistake of thinking their kids are too young to understand. I, of course, told Joe what I thought was happening. We both stood by, helpless, as the principal began coming over to our house 1 or 2 times a week. He’d hang out with us and my mom would send us to bed early. Joe, the braver of two of us, once deliberately walked in on them having sex on the couch. The principal tried to hide under the blanket, while my mom yelled at him to go back to bed.

Lucky for Joe, he wasn’t in middle school yet, so he wasn’t subjected to daily interactions with the principal, like I was. He made it a point to stand outside the building where I had my first class to say “hi” to me every morning. As time when on, I hated him and took advantage of the situation. I was openly mean to him and ignored him whenever he came around me-especially if my friends were there to hear. I wanted to hurt and embarrass him-they way he and my mom were hurting and embarrassing me.

All of my friends were buying these Adidas shoes with a white, hard toe and stripes down the side. I hadto have these shoes. When my mom finally bought them for me, I was overjoyed. This was short-lived, however, because she had to tell the principal all about it. He decided it would be funny to tell kids I didn’t know, to come up to me and tell me they liked my shoes. From morning and through lunch, kids wouldn’t leave me alone, telling me they loved my shoes, the principal, smirking and laughing in the background. I am not sure if he wanted me to feel good because so many people liked my shoes, but once again, I felt humiliated. I asked my friend Ebony to trade shoes since we wore the same size. She was wearing the knock-off Birkenstocks that were so popular in the 90′s. In fact, after that day, I maybe wore those Adidas shoes once or twice, finally getting my own pair of sandals, which incidentally, I wore exclusively for 10 years after that.

I was never close to my mom and I never trusted her. We never had the kind of relationship where I could talk to her openly. She tried to pretend we did, but I knew all too well she used anything you said against you and lied to suit her needs. Therefore, I never said anything about her and the principal, even though it tormented me. Joe and I would spend hours talking about it, but we both knew we were helpless. There was nothing we could do about it.

We lived in a small neighborhood on the base. Our house was on the corner of the major intersection and everyone passed it to get home. There were many kids around my age in the neighborhood, so, naturally, we all went to school together. I wasn’t the only one who knew the principal drove a Bronco and soon enough, kids began asking why the principal was always at my house. I always told them my mom was on the PTA and my mom was helping with school stuff, but eventually, that excuse didn’t work anymore. I am sure their parents gossiped with other parents about it. I am sure the kids overheard. Before I knew it, everyone in my grade knew. Kids whispered about me all the time and I stopped hanging out with almost everyone. I would sit alone at lunch, it was better than watching the kids give looks, tease and whisper.

And then one day, I had had enough. I don’t remember exactly what had happened. Someone said something in a class and I ran out of the room. It was sixth grade lunch and the principal was in the cafeteria. I walked up to him and told him I had to talk to him. I began crying. Through my tears, I told him that Joe and I knew everything. We saw them having sex, we read the cards he sent her and we know they lied about whatever they had done 2 weekends ago (that’s a whole other story). I cried and cried. The principal listened and told me he was so sorry. He said that he knows what was going on between he and my mom wasn’t right and that they have been trying to figure it out. I don’t remember how we left it, but it felt good to get it out.

On my way to the bus that afternoon, I asked the principal if he told my mom what I said. He said that he would leave it to me. Ha! Little did he know, that I had placed all my hope in him, to end it, or something. There was no way I was telling my mom. She would flip out.

When she got home from work, she was normal and I felt safe. That is, until, I heard the phone ring and I knew it was all over with. My mom screamed for me to come in there and when I walked through the door, she slapped my face so hard I fell down. She began yelling at me, calling me a liar. She told me that I couldn’t do any of my school activities anymore. I told her that I had practice for the play all day tomorrow and the play was next week. She said as long as I was a liar, I couldn’t do anything. I went to my room and cried and cried.

She eventually came in and told me that if I apologized to the principal for being a liar and telling lies about him, I could be in the play. The next day, I stood in front of a man, who just the day before admitted the truth to me, and told him I’m sorry I told lies about him. He accepted my apology. To this day, I can’t believe two adults-one of them my own mother-could do that to me.

After that, they eventually broke things off. I am unsure of exactly what happened, but he stopped coming around. The school year was almost over and he announced that he wouldn’t be back next year, he was going to be a principal of an elementary school. I was so happy he was gone.

I heard, a few years later, that he lost his job at that elementary school because he got caught sleeping with a teacher. His wife divorced him and he never got to see his kids. My mom, never dated again after him. In fact, this past July was the first time she started seeing anyone since I was 12 years old. It was never my intent to put her off dating, I just didn’t want her to sleep with my married principal.

I didn’t think it was too much to ask.

To this day, she denies she ever slept with him. Joe has even said to her, point blank, I saw you having sex with him. She always gets angry and says Joe was too young to know what he saw. I don’t believe she’ll ever admit the truth. She has too hard a time with it. The Truth. It’s one of the reasons we’ll never be close.

It’s no surprise, that later in life, I generally only slept with married men or guys who had girlfriends. Although, that has as much to do with my dad, as my mom. I never felt right in a “real” relationship. It’s been a tough road for me and Michael, in that respect.

This is also one of the reasons Joe and I are so close. We survived this together. This is the point in our life when we stopped fighting and antagonizing each other and started depending on each other. This is the point when we became best friends and told each other everything. He is the only one who can understand my soul because he was right there with me, in the trenches. He’s the one who came into my room when he heard me crying and made me feel better. No one else can be that person.

And I need that person.