We were her last generation of kids before retirement. And this woman, she was absolutely not qualified to be around kids I swear to the gods. But everyone put up with her shit because “well you know she’s already retiring” and whateverthefuck.

This woman abhorred me. This woman is one of the major reasons for most of my insecurities and social anxiety that I am still fighting today (her and my kindergarten teacher, but that is a whole other story and I can only hope that woman met her untimely end as well)

She had two offspring: a daughter and a son. The son was her my-darling-baby-can’t-do-no-wrong favorite, she loved him and excused every action he ever did with the vigor of a true old-school Balkan mother. This was an adult, middle-aged man, still living with her and was, metaphorically speaking, still attached to her tit. I saw her son often, because he would often come to class, and sometimes even substitute her, despite not being qualified at fucking all.

Her daughter I only know through stories. She wanted to live her own life. She didn’t want to be a “good Balkan wifey” that her mother wanted her to be. She very early realized that her mother was a nutcase and left and got married to a man her mother didn’t approve of. My teacher resented her and basically acted like she never existed.

Which leads us to this next point: She favored the boys and detested the girls. In her eyes, all the boys were good darling children and all the girls were spoiled and bad, like her “horrible” daughter was.

By the time we got to the second part of elementary school (first 4 years you have one teacher and maybe one more for a foreign language, then you move on to homeroom teacher + teacher for each subject), the number of kids in our class was halved. Most classes had around 30-40 students. Ours had 24. They all transferred either to different schools or different classes because of this wretched woman.

And me, a very small, very loud and willful girl, who had her own pace and way of doing things, and did suffer from the case of being spoiled from being the youngest, very loved child by both parents and her two older siblings, was someone she absolutely did not like. Which led to four years of mental and emotional abuse. 

I was one of her main emotional punching bags, and every single thing I did was another excuse for her to belittle, insult and yell at me in some way or form. I never got any bee stamps on anything I did (the equivalent of golden stars aka the grading system for the first half of first grade), she belittled all my work, for things like “you didn’t color inside the lines well enough” or “you didn’t draw this square straight enough”, even for shit like simply not liking the way I drew during art class (keep in mind, first grade, I’m 7 years old here, who the fuck shits on a 7 year old for their “art style”, especially someone is a teacher)

I suppressed most of it, but I still remember some events, and I remember the general negative feeling of having to deal with her.

The event I remember best, no matter how much I try to suppress it, I was seriously sick for two weeks, with a high 40c temperature which made me borderline delusional. The day I was finally approved to go back to school, we had a test. My mother, who knew this came that morning to school with me, and asked her politely to not give me the test, that I would take the make-up test, because I was barely coherent for 2 weeks. 

This was common practice btw, especially if kids were very sick, like I was. One time a friend of mine, a boy, came back from having a very bad case of pneumonia, and she excused him from all tests we had that week. Every. Single. One. She let him read books during that time instead.

Back to the story; My teacher assured her she would not make me take the test, I can absolutely take the make-up test. My mother thanked her, and left. Before she left, she told me to make sure I take the few leftover antibiotics I had and when to take them, and told me not to worry about the test, that she talked to the teacher.

Cue the test. Cue my teacher ordering me to get a pen and paper out. I, a 8-year-old at the time, was confused, and felt my chest clutch as I told her, stuttering “But, I was sick. My mother was here, she told you.”

She scoffed at me. Scoffed. She told me she did not care. I had to take the test like the rest of the class. It wasn’t fair, she said, to give me special treatment. And how dare I imply otherwise. How could I be so spoiled to even think I would get special treatment. That she would not tolerate my entitled behavior.

The test went by, with me mostly staring blankly at the paper and the questions I knew nothing about, the only mark I left on it were my tears as my small little body shook with silent sobs. The only thing that interrupted my silent crying was her yelling at me to stop crying, which of course led to me sobbing harder.

She scrawled the biggest F I ever gotten, the grade taking over about 90% of the entire test paper. Needless to say, I came back home a crying mess, and the stress made some of my symptoms from the illness I was still recovering from, come back.

One time, my deskmate and best friend at the time, spilled pop-rocks under our desk. And every time one of us fidgety 9-year-olds moved our feet, they would start popping loudly. Guess who got screamed at and thrown out of the classroom and sat in the hallway for 30 minutes. 

My friend, a boy, tried telling her, he was the one who spilled the candy, and it was mostly under his side of the desk too, so most of the loud crunchy pops were again his fault, but she retorted, and I remember this clearly 

“Don’t lie for her! She-” her tone held a certain level of disgust “-is not worth you getting in trouble!”

My mother still feels guilt for not having me transferred to another class, because she listened to my wishes. I was very insistent that I didn’t want to have to leave my friends.