Recently I saw a Tweet from a kindergarten teacher that was quite concerned about the law in Florida to limit sharing of information about sexuality with children in kindergarten through the third grade.  He was quite upset that he wouldn’t be able to tell his students that he had gone paddleboarding with his partner over the weekend. Can you imagine those poor tots going without such important information about aquatic sports?

It got me thinking about what I knew about the sex lives of my teachers in those years at Mark West Elementary.  In kindergarten, my teacher was Mrs. West who always made sure we brought our beach towels to lay down on for nap time. Though I didn’t think about it at the time, her title, “Mrs.” indicates she was married. Or had been married. She might have been divorced or widowed and I would have never known because to my recollection, she never talked about her husband. These same things would be true about my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Rudenal, the woman who made me sit outside the classroom when I talked too much.  And “Mrs.” was all I knew about the love life of Mrs. Clarke, even though she taught me in the 2nd and 3rd grade.

I don’t recall having any interest in their married lives, let alone whether they cruised the local bars while their husbands were out of town. I do know that in such sad, unenlightened times, they had married men. (The options back then were so limited.)