Well, it finally happened. I'd been trying to get through to my boss about a kid that was a real problem in one of my classes over the last few weeks. I vented about it here, and got lots of support, but it kept up. We're just about out the door for Fall Break, and the kid comes back to my homeroom for some smartass, just to hassle me some more as I'm about to leave school for the holiday.

Big mistake. I'd talked to my supervisor about it, I'd issued him a written warning, all the stuff you're supposed to do. For weeks. So now I just got angry. Fortunately, I didn't do anything inappropriate, but I just got angry and said so, using the word "angry", and said it was time he shaped up and knocked off the bad behavior. He cried (!?) and went and called his father who came down to school to get after me for allegedly "abusing" his son. Oh, brother.

I stood up to Dad, though, and told him about the pattern the kid had of cutting my class, lying, cheating, all the stuff he's been up to. Turns out my boss didn't want to deal with him because he'd done it in her class before he took mine and she just swept it under the rug.

I try not to let my PTSD mess up my ability to choose my battles, and I don't have correct every kid or right every wrong. But I do have my limit, and this kid knew very well I'd had enough. So even though the dad made a few threats and called me a name or two, in the end I think even he could see I cared about how his kid did in school and that things weren't quite the way lying junior painted them for him. We'll see.

Whew. I could have done that better, I know, but I truly did the best I could. For weeks I posted here about it, I tried to get my boss's support in heading it off (and see why she tried to wash her hands of it), strategies from therapy. It's taken a lot for me to have a teaching career at all between hospitalizations for PTSD and so forth over the years, so I really, really didn't want to jeopardize my position, and I'm paranoid about that, I admit.

But even though it ended up in conflict anyway, it wasn't as bad as I thought. My own trauma history has led me to dread conflict because growing up in a violent home where conflict meant blood, bruises, sometimes broken bones, madness, screaming threats, and cop cars pulling up to the house.

One time my father beat my mother so badly she had to be taken away on a stretcher by the ambulance when I was 12 years old. Yet even so, as he, in his guilt after beating her, came up to her bedside in the hospital to console her, she reached out and grabbed him by the testicles as hard as she could right there in front of family, doctors, cops, nurses, and everybody. As much as he deserved it, it was not a pretty picture. Oh, home sweet home.

So I can tend to catastrophize if I feel I'm getting angry. Yet it's a legitimate emotion. I'm not saying I'm right because I get angry, but I have the right to that emotion like anyone else does. Still, when I feel it building, I get desperate. Afterwards, I feel just freaked out. But tonight, though I'm recovering from today's conflict, I don't feel I have to quit my job and move to another city and start over, or any of the things that come to me when I feel stressed and ashamed just because I reached my limit.

Anybody ever here in this kind of PTSD emotional place before me?