Ready for a Little Brother

The kids here are always asking me why I don’t have any kids, sounding all too similar to what I assume my and Lenny’s parents are also thinking. “Five years of marriage?! It’s about time you gift us with a grandchild.” (To be fair, they’ve never said anything so overt, but sometimes the eyes say it all…)

A few weeks ago, about eight of the eleventh grade students pulled me aside during lunch and said, “Miss, we have something we need to talk to you about… We’ve decided we’re ready for a little brother. Or a sister.”

To which I said, “I think you’re talking to the wrong person about that. Your parents might be better able to assist you with your request.”

“No, Miss, we mean a little brother from you and Mr. Speiller. You’re like our parents, and we are ready for you to have a baby,” say they, with earnestness brimming from their eyes.

“What?!” says shocked me. Long pause. Now where to start a response to this statement. “First of all, I am NOT your parent, and if you ever refer to me as your parent again, there will be serious academic repercussions. Second, I appreciate you telling me that you are ready for a ‘little brother,’ but I am pretty sure that I need to be ready, not you. And right now I am not ready.”

They look at me with disappointment in their eyes, knocked down, but not out for the count. I am sure they will petition me again. They’re perseverant little buggers. Because why wouldn’t I want to birth a child in the rural mountains of Honduras, far from a modern hospital of any sort?

I’ve noticed that the culture here does not seem to understand the concept of waiting to have kids. Teen pregnancy is a big problem here, and young mothers are the norm. In fact, the whole concept of family is different. Marriage is rather uncommon; womanizing men are. Women put up with a lot of crap from men, and the whole idea of the strong, vocal, liberated woman is still pretty new. Lots of parents leave the home to find work in another part of the country, or in another country altogether, and the kids are left with little stability and little oversight as they figure out life on their own.

A few months ago, one of my seventh grade students asked me – in all seriousness –  if Mr. Speiller and I would want to adopt her. Well, just break my heart right before I have to teach the class how to divide fractions! Daniela and her twin brother, Jorge, who has a mental disability that makes him very challenging to manage during class, pretty much raise themselves. Their mother is in the US, working and sending money back to their aging grandma, with whom they live. Their dad is somewhere else in Honduras, doing his own thing. Daniela’s older sister, who was a ninth grader at our school last year, got pregnant, dropped out of school, and is now raising her own child at the very mature age of sixteen.

Knowing that this is quite possibly the future of beautiful, spunky, smart, stubborn Daniela is hard to take in. And if adopting her was a realistic option, we probably would consider it. But it’s not.

There are a lot of things that Lenny and I want to teach these kids. Yes, the Pythagorean Theorem is amazing! Yes, the Bible is full of wisdom and mystery and meaning! But sometimes we wonder if the most important thing we are to teach them is the beauty of a loving, stable family. A family where the man and the woman are equal, and each has a valuable voice. A family where commitment and loyalty are prioritized. A family where you can wait to have kids until you’re in your 30s (gasp, gasp!).

I pray that Daniela will notice that our family is different, and that she will somehow wade through all of her feelings of abandonment and adolescent angst, holding fast to the reality that someday her life and her family could be different too. In the meantime, any boys who come near her will have to answer to me!