Building in the Rain

What I Carry Into The Classroom

I am not a morning person, but every morning, I get up and go to work anyway, not just because it's my job, but because I actually look forward to it. I look forward to my students, my colleagues, the rhythm of the day, and the version of me that shows up when I walk through those doors. Work has always been a place where I feel capable, purposeful, and grounded.

HOWEVER, these last few years … getting to 7:30 am (the start of first period) has gotten heavier.

As I stated in a previous blog, I have my own children at home who are fighting their own battles that I cannot always see or fix. My children are navigating the kind of personal and social pain that follows them home uninvited. I am managing their realities while also managing myself, and some mornings the weight of it all is sitting right there on my chest before my feet even hit the floor.

I get up, though. I get dressed, and I go because on the other side of that commute is a classroom full of kids who need me, colleagues who feel like family, and a version of my day that I can actually control. Therefore, I push it all to the back of my mind: the worry and the frustration about my children's situations and the things I couldn't resolve last night and won't be able to resolve by 7:30 am or even 2:30 pm. I tuck it away, not because it's gone, but because it has to wait. My students can't wait. The lesson can't wait. The kid in the third row who needs somebody to show up for him today cannot wait, so I show up every time.

What I'm only now beginning to admit to myself is that somewhere along the way, my classroom became my refuge. The bell rings, and I get to be Mrs. Haley, the one who has the answers, who sets the tone, and who knows exactly what she's doing. From 7:30 to 2:30, the world outside that building doesn't exist. My children’s battles and heartbreaks don't exist. It's just me, my students, and the work. I didn't realize how much I needed that until I started dreading 2:30.

When that last class emptied out and the building went quiet, something shifted in me. The refuge closes. The tucked-away weight comes rushing back, and I know what's waiting: the hard conversations and the mom problems that have been patiently sitting in the back of my mind all day. I love my children more than anything in this world, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little sad when the work day ends. That's hard to admit, and it feels like a confession I wasn't ready to make.

However, this blog has always been about telling the truth, even when the truth is complicated, even when it doesn't make me look like the mom I want to be, even when it's just me processing out loud and figuring it out as I go.

Honestly, I carry a lot into that classroom, and I carry even more back out.

What My Students Don't Know

Every day, I stand in front of fifteen to thirty teenagers (each period I teach) who are carrying their own weight, their own home situations, their own silent battles, and their own versions of the heaviness I bring through that door, but every day, I choose to show up for them anyway. It’s not because I have it all together or because my life is easier than theirs. It’s because I know firsthand what it means to need someone in your corner who refuses to fold. The irony is that they don't know that some days they save me right back.

The kid who finally gets a concept he's been struggling with for weeks, the girl in the back who writes something so honest it stops me mid-sentence, or the class period that just clicks (where the conversation goes somewhere unexpected and everybody is alive in it) … those moments don't care about what I walked in carrying. They just show up and remind me why I never stop coming back. I don't always tell them that, but it's true.

What the Guilt Gets Wrong

For a long time, I’ve felt guilty about finding refuge in my work on hard days, as if loving my job during my hardest seasons somehow made me a less devoted mother or as if the relief I felt walking through those doors was a betrayal of the children waiting for me at home. I'm learning that that's not true.

Showing up at work (especially when my personal life is hard, when the weight is real, and when I would rather pull the covers over my head and disappear for a day) is not abandoning my life at home. It is one of the most important things I can model for my children: Life goes on no matter what we're going through. That means we still have to show up — not perfectly, not painlessly, but consistently. Ninety percent of the time, we get up and go, and that matters more than they know right now.

I'm Not Just Telling You — Watch Me

I want my children to build their own and better tables when the world won't make room for them, but I need them to know that I'm not just saying that. I lived it, and I'm still living it. I started kNotED by Kimani in the middle of professional rejection … again, the kind that makes you question everything you've built and everything you thought you were worth. At the same time, I was faced with the possibility of being moved from one grade level to another because of someone else struggling to do their job. (Fortunately, the move didn’t happen.) At the time, I could have folded. Instead, I resolved to let the administrative decision be whatever it was going to be, and I built something of my own — a business where nobody could move me, reject me, or decide my value. That was my table.

The Nia’s Family series (my children's book series about growing up in a blended family) started as a single story that I wrote in 2016 (or 2017) in a hospital bed, recovering from a mastectomy. The main character, Nia, is me. I wrote my own story (the little girl I was, the family dynamics I navigated, and the childhood that shaped everything I became) while lying in a hospital, uncertain about my future and fighting for my life. My world was as uncertain as it gets, and I went back to the beginning and wrote myself (little Nia) anyway. I didn’t have a publishing plan. I had no clue what I was doing, but telling that story felt like the only thing I could control when everything else felt out of my hands.

After I wrote He’s Not Your Dad, that story sat for years because I didn't know how to get it into the world. Then in 2024, I found a self-publishing coach on TikTok who changed everything. I invested in myself (my time, my money, my trust), and in 2025, the Nia’s Family series became real — a real book in real hands, built by me, for my community, on my own terms.

Through all of it — the professional setbacks, the hospital stays, the years of not knowing how, the weight of solely bearing my children's struggles while showing up for everyone else — I kept going. Of course, it was hard, and the timing was never right. Life goes on, though, and I refused to let mine pass me by while I was waiting for things to “get better” before I started building. Things didn't “get better” first. I built anyway.

What I Need Them to See

I need my children to know that no matter how ugly life gets, there are still good things worth focusing on. I want them to know that the bad does not cancel the good. They need to know that they can be in the middle of a hard season and still find something (a classroom, a student, a colleague, or a moment) that reminds them why they're still here and still fighting.

I need them to know that even when the world is being ugly to them (the mean peers, the immature adults/leaders, the tables they were made to feel too small to sit at), they have enough and are enough to show up as their best selves — not despite the hard stuff, but sometimes because of it. Additionally, if they’re uninvited or not invited at all to the table, they need to know that they’ve already been equipped with what it takes to build a better table (opportunity or experience) and make it exactly how they want it: open, inclusive, and welcoming of everyone who deserves a seat. I don't want my children to feel the need to shrink themselves to fit into a space that was never designed to hold all of them. I want them to design their own space and make it beautiful.

That's what I did and still am doing. Every single day, I walk into that building, push my weight to the back of my mind, and choose to show up. I'm building something … for my students, for my own kids, and for myself! I carry a lot into that classroom, but I'm starting to understand that some of what I carry in (the resilience, the refusal to quit, the ability to find joy in the middle of hard) is exactly what needs to be seen … by my students, by my own children, and by me.

That is the table my children will inherit, not the finished product, but the blueprint and the proof that you don't wait for the storm to pass. You figure out how to build in the rain.