Jesus Speaks to his Mother and the Disciple

The following is a Stations of the Cross reflection prepared by South House Volunteer Tia Clifford.

Working at the Academy of St. Benedict the African, my site placement this year, has challenged me to utilize skills that I have had in the past, but not used in this way. I practice organization when sorting items for the classroom. I practice compassion when the students get frustrated or injured, and I practice patience when I repeat a direction over, and over, and over again. When I first started working as a kindergarten assistant I called someone who has been a great source of constant love and support in my own life, my mother’s former co-worker and best friend and my pretend Aunt Dorothy. My mom and aunt Dorothy worked in adjacent Kindergarten classrooms for 31 years and I’ll admit, some of their stories scared me away from ever wanting to work with five and six year olds. Naturally, when I did find out that my site placement was me in Kindergarten, I reached out for advice. Aunt Dorothy explained working with kindergartners to be a unique experience that is a mix of being compassionate and motherly as well as being a relatively stern disciplinarian.

Many of the students in my class had not been around adults or children that they are not related to before this year. I look at the young mothers who drop off their crying children at school and I imagine how difficult it must be to leave and walk away from your struggling child for the sake of their growth and development. [It is a wonder how they ever do it. On my own first week of Kindergarten, my mother followed the bus in her own car and came into school to watch me from the window of the classroom every day until she was asked to leave.] Many times I have been pulled out of the classroom by mothers asking me to talk to their child to convince them to stop their tears and come into school. In many ways it feels like these mothers are passing a “motherly baton” over to me for 9 hours and trusting me with keeping them safe and passing some wisdom and tools to keep them safe. After all of the growth that I’ve witnessed and been a part of, all the hugs and I love you’s in the middle of lessons, all of the conversations that lead to changed behavior and nicer words, and after being called “mommy” a few hundred times I really have begun to feel like the kindergarten class at Academy of St. Benedict the African is a part of my family.

When Jesus spoke to his mother and disciple from the cross, he said “Woman, behold, your son” and to the disciple, “Behold you mother”. The ties of family are so important that even amongst the physical pain and emotional turmoil that Jesus was experiencing at the time, he looked down from the cross to make sure that his mother would be loved and taken care of in his absence. While the two or three jobs that the mothers of my students leave for are not as final and arduous as Jesus’ passion and death, it still requires an incredible amount of trust to leave your child in the care of someone else. It is truly an honor and blessing that I am someone a parent can put their trust in to take care of their child.