“Unbecoming” was a word my Southern mom and grandmother used tongue-in-cheek, yet still powerfully. The word captured behaviors that were both immoral and unattractive. Whining for candy at the Bi-Lo grocery checkout (gluttonous, irritating), saying you needed something you merely wanted (hyperbolic, spoiled), arguing with food in your mouth, shouting of any kind. “Unbecoming” actions made you look bad and made life hard for people around you; the unique danger of behaving “unbecomingly” as opposed to “poorly,” “dangerously,” “ungratefully” or just plain “badly” was the implication you were being watched. It meant your audience — the warm glow of their attention, always a source of life and meaning —could sour on you. Leaving us with an occasional babysitter, cash for pizza on top of the piano, my mom also called out, “Y’all be sweet!” Not good, compliant, obedient, or rule-following— but sweet. Pleasing to the palate, nice to be around. She would often tell my bickering sister and me, “Now, don’t be ugly.” Later, I joked, “What if I can’t help it?”
Sometimes one of these phrases — unbecoming, be sweet, don’t be ugly — works its way up to my amygdala. I’ll have a hateful thought, and I’ll hear the swift click of closed-toe pumps in the hallway of my mind: “Well, that was unbecoming,” says a rather starchy Presbyterian Sunday School-teacher voice. I’m crouched and ready, prim and judgmental, to let myself know if I am at risk of losing my audience. Typically this just means I’m petrified of shit-talking. I treat all my texts as if they’ll appear in open court. My inner church lady is there to remind me, “Don’t be ugly.”
I think of To Kill a Mockingbird’s Scout Finch’s impossible call to be “sweetness and light” to her single father. I think of all the girls, particularly girls who grew up in the South, who have ever been exhorted to not be ugly. To act becomingly. To be sweet. To ignore and conceal not just impulsive bouts of selfishness, but also waves of legitimate anger radiating across their bodies.
My lizard brain knows the rules for women: an angry woman is perceived as crazy and/or as viciously unfair in her anger, almost never as principled or righteous or stronger for expressing it. So I’d often rather crawl over broken glass than say what I am really thinking. For this reason, my collection of parent-friendly euphemisms about students who seem indifferent to their work is as varied and well supplied as a wall for the gadgets of James Bond. For this reason, I’m afraid to call a fight with a friend a fight. A moment in my recent memory that one could call a fight, I mentally autocorrect to “argument” or “tough moment,” for fear that if I truly “fought” with someone, they would find me unbecoming and unbecome my friend.
But where does that leave anger, which, I am learning (as an adult in a pandemic) is sometimes there, whether I dust it in sugar and crush it under euphemisms or not?
This bizarre pandemic school year is concluding, and I join the bedraggled masses of educators who will emerge from this taffy-timed vortex looking puffier and feeling less patient than we went in. I am very lucky because I’ve had as much time in the real classroom as on Zoom. I’ve felt mostly safe. I walk rather than take the subway to work and the kids have masked faithfully during their half-days on campus. We have had the equipment we needed, for the most part. It could be much worse.
All of this is true. Yet I am tired of being nice.
I don’t mean that I don’t want to be kind anymore. I mean that being overtly positive, patient, and even jolly over Zoom, or behind a mask, often twice a day for each of the four grades I teach in order to accommodate smaller classroom numbers, is taking its pound of flesh out of me. I feel physically and emotionally drained. My eye has begun twitching from, I assume, the cognitive burden of teaching simultaneously to a computer and a room of muffle-voiced kids all year. While smiling. Now imagine doing that with Julius Caesar.
I am tired of reminding them to shout through their masks. I am tired of asking them kindly to turn their cameras on. I am tired of smiling so big they can see it in my swiftly deepening crow’s feet, visible over my own mask. I am tired of drowning in ungraded papers because I’m frantically planning lessons that I’ve run out of steam to implement creatively. I feel tapped out and ashamed that I’m running on empty, as if I should have this endless wellspring of energy and inventiveness and … sweetness to give.
So when a student uses the cleaning fluid to spray a classmate as a stupid joke, or when another totally spaces on the deadline for the Shakespeare recitation, or when a student requests a meeting and doesn’t show, or when another asks for an extension on the writing assignment but doesn’t use any of the feedback I gave his draft, or when another parent emails me to let them know that the “A-” really disappointed their child because Child worked so hard, I catch myself crumpling up whatever sheet of paper I’m holding. I feel angry. I feel like such a sucker for getting drawn into this trivia about which I stupidly, deeply care. I don’t want the feedback to go to waste because I want him to be a more competent writer. I want her to be confident and prepared for the recitation. I want Child to feel satisfied with a job well done, but aware that an A- was an accurate grade. But the good place these desires come from gets swallowed up by my blind, silent-howling rage.
For survival, I have therefore tried to let go this month of “being sweet,” a pitch of good humor which requires such a saccharine delight at seeing their little faces that I’m surprised it lasted this long. I want to reassure you that in letting go of being sweet, I am not going so far as to “be ugly.” I’m not a shouter, nor am I unkind. I don’t need to be either in order to manage my classroom. I’m not talking about showing my anger to them.
The leap I’m making is just to conserve my emotional energy so I can be more than a husk of a person by 5pm, and to acknowledge my angry thoughts privately, to myself. Some days, I simply don’t have joy to sprinkle like fairy dust over the Zoom window. I cannot be incandescently delighted by the fifth child who asks what page we are on. Sometimes my emotional reserves are so low that when I feel angry, I have to actually feel it.
I told my boyfriend the other day about my irritation with a school matter. I was tired enough that I didn’t bother making the usual caveats about how everyone was probably doing their best with the tools they had. Instead, I called them names. He listened and solemnly said, “Preach.”
He sat up late encouraging me: “Do you want to vent? Go for it. I’m here for it.” I have never felt more grateful to be seen, never more startled to be found acceptable. The next day I felt less like a smokestack and more like a real person.
This year has given many teachers more emotional labor in the classroom than we’ve ever had, and it has stretched me past my usual ability to ignore and conceal my frustration when my job feels hard. I have felt embarrassed to experience what I now acknowledge to be a normal human emotion in extraordinary circumstances. I learned it’s okay to feel angry. Feeling angry doesn’t mean being ugly.
This year gave me the gift of my finitude and pressed me to acknowledge the emotions I long ago linked with being “unbecoming.” In the past month, I’ve become acquainted with my anger, and it’s been a nourishing relief, like finally learning your barista’s name. I’ve embraced a little more of the unbecoming in myself. If I’m un-becoming anything, I’m unbecoming a person who was terrified that showing anger would make her unlovable. Life is too short to be angry. But it’s also too short to just be sweet.
Sarah Kate Neall is from Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She likes city walks, strong coffee, and people who take the trouble to call her by her double name. She lives and teaches in New York.