The Longest Goodbye.

The Longest Goodbye: How I Broke Up with Teaching

by Melissa Lammers

I was the teacher’s kid who swore she’d never teach.
I grew up watching my mother live in a cycle of grading and caring — a rhythm that sounded like exhaustion set to a metronome. I saw the way her eyes dimmed each Sunday evening, the way she carried her students’ pain home in silence.
I told myself I would do anything but that.

And so, of course, I became a teacher.

I tried other paths first, but the pull was gravitational. I told myself I’d do it differently — I’d fix it, modernize it, humanize it. I earned my second degree in education, believing in the promise of impact. The first time I stepped into my own classroom, I felt like I’d arrived at the center of something sacred. Chalk dust, laughter, the hum of fluorescent lights — all of it shimmered with purpose.

Then the system introduced itself.

Iowa schools are full of good hearts caught in impossible machinery. We don’t teach children so much as triage them. We pour from a cup that was emptied years ago.
Still, I fought.

I fought hard.
I fought hard.
I fought hard.

I told myself: I can make it right. If I love them enough, plan harder, stay later, care louder — I can make it right.

But the truth is, love doesn’t fix what’s designed to break you.

I quit once. I swore I was done. And then, like so many of us, I came back.
Because middle school is magic.

Those kids — awkward, brilliant, strange, and endlessly becoming — they are chaos incarnate and I adore them for it. They make me laugh until I cry and cry until I laugh. They will argue with you about everything and then hug you on the way out the door.

There’s an atmosphere in a middle school — a current you can feel shift when something’s about to happen. You can sense it before the first bell: the offbeat rhythm, the collective breath, the charge of adolescence. It’s electric and fragile all at once.

To teach middle school is to live inside a storm that you love.

But the storm changed.

Keep kids busy. Keep kids busy. Keep kids busy.
The mantra that replaced meaning.

Johnny has soccer at four, piano at five, tae kwon do at six.
They only have an hour with him before bed.
And then they wonder why he cannot sit still, cannot name his feelings, cannot listen.

Parents don’t know who their children are anymore. They hire other people to parent, then resent us when we do. They confuse busyness with enrichment, call it opportunity, and hand us the fallout.

Their child being busy is elite babysitting.
Give me quiet 1990s parenting any day — the kind where you rode your bike until the streetlights came on and came home to parents who looked you in the eyes.

Now we measure childhood in calendar squares and call it success.

Teaching became an ache that no amount of love could soothe.
I was grieving in real time — for my students, for my colleagues, for myself.
Every reform felt like rearranging deck chairs on a ship we were told to pretend wasn’t sinking.
I loved it anyway.
That was the hardest part.

Teaching was my first heartbreak.
I kept believing we could fix it — the curriculum, the politics, the parents, the silence.
I thought if I stayed faithful, the system would love me back.
But love built on martyrdom is not love. It’s survival disguised as purpose.

Breaking up with teaching wasn’t a clean cut. It was a slow unraveling — the kind of leaving that happens in layers.
First, you stop decorating your room. Then you stop bringing work home. Then one day you realize you no longer say we when you talk about the school.

It wasn’t betrayal. It was self-preservation.

Still, it felt like grief. I missed the hum of the hallways, the spontaneous laughter, the way a classroom breathes when something finally clicks. I missed the smell of pencil shavings and dry-erase markers and the orchestra of forty different pencil taps on desks.

I missed being someone’s favorite teacher.

Now, I live in the quiet that used to terrify me. I wake without a bell. I drink coffee without grading. I write about the thing that once defined me.

The truth is, I didn’t stop teaching — I just stopped disappearing inside it.

That’s what they don’t tell you about quitting: sometimes it isn’t running away; it’s coming home.

This is the longest goodbye — not because I regret leaving, but because I loved so fiercely I almost forgot who I was without it.

And now, in this gentler life, I’m learning how to breathe again — one quiet morning at a time.