Mountain Mama Your Children Are Crying

“Almost Heaven, West Virginia…” those words incite a sense of pride in me. The pride that comes with waking up in Morgantown on the dawn of a brisk fall Saturday. The pride that comes with sitting at my great-grandmother’s sick bed and listening to her talk about growing up in a coal camp. It’s watching We Are Marshall on the big screen with my mother, who I was lucky enough to watch graduate with her Master’s Degree in special education from that school. It’s my father recounting stories of his grandfather who died in a coal mining accident, saving two others and risking his life. It’s the way my grandmother pronounces wash with an "r" between the "a" and the "s."

To the rest of the country, West Virginia is looked at as a dark spot, but the only reason things are so dark here is because since our inception we have been keeping the lights on for everyone else. West Virginia was a state birthed in the midst of a country tearing itself apart. Fighting is in our blood. It mixes with coal dust and mountain air and the knowledge that mountaineers are always free.

But even the strongest soldier gets tired. Even the survivor loses the will to go on. West Virginians are at that breaking point. There isn’t a family that has gone untouched by the monster that starts its life as a pill and takes its nastiest form inside of syringe held in a shaking hand. There isn’t a family that hasn’t known the gut-wrenching panic that settles over your whole body at the sound of two words: mining collapse. West Virginia and her people were born fighting and we continue fighting still, but it’s round ten and the punches keep coming and we’re sabotaging ourselves.

There are a lot of things we take for granted in this world. Guarantees are a figment of an optimist’s imagination. Waking up is a gift. Having a roof over our heads is a gift. Access to a free, appropriate public education is a gift. Roads to drive on, police to protect us, firefighters to save ourselves and our families when the worst happens, correctional officers who spend nights in our jails instead of at home with their families are something we aren’t guaranteed in life. These services are not provided by robots. These services are provided by individuals who are willing to put others before themselves and sometimes before their families.

Public employees are the glue that keeps the state from falling apart.

My mom worked at a bank during the early years of my life. She’d graduated college with a degree in business and was a teller for years. When I was ten years old she quit that job and started substitute teaching in the county. I didn’t have her as a teacher much, she eventually went on to get a degree in special education and worked in that field for over a decade. I can remember this time as a time of change for her and for our family. It was a good change. I no longer had to go to daycare. My mom no longer came home and napped for an hour because sleeping was the only thing that felt good. When my dad got sick and had to go on disability, my mom’s job as a teacher paid the bills and kept the lights on in our house and put food on our table. I would walk into my mom’s classroom, she started working at my high school my freshman year, and I wouldn’t be the only person calling her mom because she genuinely cared for her students and they were the brothers and sisters she was never able to give me. The month of March was dedicated to caffeine and Ibuprofen and doing my homework at a desk while she wrote IEPs at hers.

My mother is my role model. She’s the most selfless person I know and that is the reason that on May 12, I will graduate with my own Master’s Degree in special education.

Most of my peers in this generation are lucky to get a job in the field they study for in college. I was fortunate enough to get hired just one year after my college graduation as a special educator at the high school my mother worked at and I had attended. Getting to work alongside her and all the wonderful teachers in my life was something that I didn’t expect to happen. When I had followed the country roads to Morgantown, I never thought they would lead me back to my hometown. But they say to bloom where you are planted, and in my opinion there is no soil more nourishing than the dirt of southern West Virginia.

I am twenty-four and less than two months away from being on this Earth a quarter of a century. On a teacher’s salary I can afford a small one-bedroom apartment. I pay my bills on time (for the most part) and live off of a diet of easy and inexpensive meals that usually revolve around pasta (Italian roots grow deep in my family tree). I don’t tithe my ten percent but when I have the cash I drop a dollar or five in the offering plate on Sunday morning and when a cashier asks me for a donation for St. Jude’s I can usually contribute. I buy my cat’s food at the Dollar General that is between my home and the school I work at. I am by no means destitute or starving, but consider myself broke or what my father calls ‘apartment poor.’ And as of right now, I am still on my mother’s insurance but every new day brings me closer twenty-six and when it is time for me to take on that responsibility on my own.

I don’t mind responsibility. My five years in Morgantown instilled in me a sense of independence and self-reliance. I do what I can for myself and I don’t like asking for help unless I need it and I feel like the above statements could describe the lives of many public employees in West Virginia. That is if you change the details and move some words around. Some have it better, some have it worse and I can’t help but fear that the majority fall into the latter category.

My life is good. I get to wake up every morning and go to a job I love and see faces of kids who depend on me, who laugh with me, and cry to me. I get to share in their triumphs and help them in their times of defeat. I go to football games and basketball games and cheer on these kids who have everything ahead of them and then I look and wonder… in ten years what kind of West Virginia will these kids have? Country roads to almost Heaven or a highway to hell?

How do we tell the mountain mama that her children are drowning? How do we empower her future when those responsible for the job can barely put food on the table and have to pinch pennies and work second jobs just to survive? It doesn’t matter how often we scream at the capitol and at the people who are supposed to lead us. It always seems like the gilded gold dome at the top deafen their ears to our pleas and cries for help.

We do not have enough teachers in our county to fill all the vacant spots and positions. I travel around town and notice the absence of the peers I grew up with and graduated with because better opportunities lie elsewhere. We cannot expect to grow as a state when we keep cutting those responsible for taking care of her at the knees. We cannot expect to grow as a state when our teachers and other public employees have to debate whether or not to go to the doctor or buy groceries that month. Our state needs to do what is right by us and stop stepping on the hearts we have for service to our state and communities and using us as a doormat.

My favorite part of traveling to Morgantown for WVU’s homecoming in the fall is the drive. As I look out at the bright leaves on our rolling hills I feel that mountaineer pride well up in me. I don’t think about the highway workers who keep the roads safe to drive on. I don’t think about the police that keep us safe every single day. I don’t think about the patient driver’s ed instructor that taught me how to drive. And judging by how things are going not very many people in the capitol building do either.

We deserve more than what they are giving us. We deserve more than to be talked at and around. We deserve more than a passed buck here and an excuse there and a "We swear this will help" or yet another broken promise.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our pursuit of happiness is in danger if we have to be followed around by a large cloud of stress every day. Our liberty is being threatened if we have to fit certain health requirements not to have to sell a kidney in order to get an antibiotic for strep throat. And it’s evident that our lives mean nothing to the people in charge if they don’t listen to us when we tell them to fund PEIA.

I wouldn’t have known that quote if it hadn’t been for an inspiring history teacher. I wouldn’t have been able to write this if hadn’t been for teachers who dedicated themselves to my education. You wouldn’t be reading this if it hadn’t been for teachers who dedicated their lives to yours.

If things don’t change, if those that are supposed to lead us don’t wake up, it might not be long before our country roads don’t have much of a home to take us to.