Amy Wise Rothschild

To Teach, To Touch

The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t that I had longed for a younger sibling—someone to care for, or else, someone even smaller than me, to absorb the family pain. The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t to stick it to my father, who had trained me like a prize thoroughbred to complete the family’s quest for status. I was the Kentucky Derby winner now settling on its haunches in the grass, swatting flies with my tail. DGAF. What even is a Triple Crown. The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t that I wanted to be a mom so badly that even at twenty-one I didn’t want to make moves that would later set me up for a career versus family collision (spoiler: it happened anyway). The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t the same reason I babysat—to poke around in people’s cabinets, observe how parents behave when tightening neckties to head off to the office holiday party, how they empty their pockets and loosen them when they arrive home. What they say to their children at drop-off in the morning, tiny backpack with dinosaur spikes hooked in one finger over a broad, linen shoulder. How they respond when they get the phone call that Ollie or Ella bit or got bit. The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t that in my first weeks of college, I met formidable women who considered concern for children a radical political act and a rewarding intellectual endeavor, and who had made it their life’s work. The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/ wasn’t that, a sophomore, few weeks shy of twenty, I had fallen in love with a fiercely intelligent, loving and kind man, a junior, and knew that this man (boyfriend, partner, now spouse) had ambitions the size of a continent and I would need to make my career compact, portable. Polly Pocket. The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/ wasn’t that I could afford to be—I had no debt, and some part of me knew that through Superman’s career we’d be financially secure. A well-located one bedroom, then two-bedroom, then three, near transit stations and coffee shops where baristas make swirling leaves from foam. A night at the Kennedy Center seeing Alvin Ailey, a week by the sea in August.

The real reason I became a preschool teacher was/wasn’t to heal —to get a chance to do childhood again, this time, as the grown-up. To be the one sitting on the floor with my back to the wall and knees tented, sitting, just, sitting with a four-year old and her feelings. To learn to say to her, “you’re feeling angry right now, so angry. You are worried you will always feel this way. You won’t. This feeling is just visiting. I promise. I know.”

Amy Wise Rothschild grew up in Potomac, Maryland and writes from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review prize for poetry.