Is your kid being hit on by her teacher?

Would you know if she was?

Would she tell you?*

The first inappropriate attention I can remember receiving from teachers was in seventh grade. Comments about classmates’ breasts; rides home from school; calls on my private phone.

Shoulder massages.

By high school I had a more complete understanding of how flirtation could work to my advantage.

Hall passes, excuses from class, little bits of padding here and there, as long as I could remain in classes with certain malleable male instructors.

Occasionally I hit a bump, the odd required class, but it wasn’t as though I couldn’t pass; I was bright and capable, just attention starved and increasingly lazy.

My friends gave me a little grief, but I think they were also a little impressed.

One of the teachers was openly hostile toward me, I assume because she felt I was receiving preferential treatment from her department head. I stood for election of the club she advised and then quit when I won, just to piss her off. I was all that.

I’d like to say I matured and settled into my studies as high school progressed. I’d really like to be able to say that; life might have turned out very differently.

No, I had hit on a system. No pun intended.

I was a little drunk with power, something I had never had a sense of before. At home I was invisible, but at school I was attractive. I was witty and bright (though you’d never have known it by my grades).

I actually tried to drop out after junior year, thinking I’d just jump into community college, but my parents would have none of it, and I was sucked back in by October of my senior year.

Irony of ironies, in March, I was told I didn’t meet graduation requirements.

I had finally run headlong into that rarest of beasts: the male teacher who expected me to follow the syllabus, precocity be damned.

I was screwed.

If the story was about my educational opportunities, we could wrap up here with a catchy moral.

But, no.

As I’ve said before, you won’t catch me lobbing stones from my crystal writer’s garret.

By the end of senior year, I was installed in an apartment with my best friend and involved with a teacher who had left his wife to ponder the fate of our relationship and theirs.

And no, I didn’t share all of this with my parents or guidance counselor.

And although it’s probably tempting to write this off as a product of my latent need to work through my own adolescent issues, this was what a quick search of the Sacramento Bee site pulled up on October 6th with the key words “teacher student relationship arrested”:

ROTC teacher charged with sex with 13-year-old
Published on Wed Oct 5 10:48:56 PDT 2011
Investigators say an [49-year old] ROTC teacher had a two-year sexual relationship with a student that started when she was 13 years old.

River Valley High teacher accused of molesting student
Published on Thu Aug 18 15:54:32 PDT 2011
Yuba City police report that they have arrested a River Valley High School teacher on suspicion of annoying or molesting a child 17 or younger.

Editorial: An agency that should protect kids is a mess
Published on Sat Apr 9 00:00:00 PDT 2011
The state agency responsible for reviewing allegations of misconduct of teachers and school administrators, and disciplining and revoking credentials when warranted, is in complete disarray.

And then there were the various stories from around the country over the past few years about female teachers having babies by their male teen students.

And the stories that never make the news. Like mine.

And the other girl in my high school class involved with—well, it’s not really my place to start outing everyone else, but suffice it to say, there were others; there were rumors.

Here is the part where I say that everything turned out all right eventually. That after years of counseling I worked through my issues and am now able to see how I was exploited and taken advantage of, that I am stronger for the experience.

Or maybe that when I became a parent it completely changed my perspective.

But again, no.

You’ve heard all that before. You’ve probably been running that in your head already.

I’m going to flip the script.

I’m going to say what I didn’t—or couldn’t--say 30 years ago.

That it’s complicated.

I didn’t initiate or enjoy the attention that other students and I received from teachers in junior high; it felt creepy.

At first.

But when you’re a teenager struggling to find your place in the world, invisible (in my case) or neglected or abused at home, navigating each day through an unpredictable sea of hormones and fickle friendships, that kind of attention—personal, focused, attention—can seem like the patch of calm sea you wait all week to find.

And then, if you’re one sort of person—probably female—you realize, perhaps for the first time,that with sex appeal comes control. Maybe the only bit of control you’ve wielded in quite awhile (quite a while being like dog years in the life of some teens, and quite horribly literal in the lives of those less fortunate).

Power over an adult.

Jackpot.

That is part that parents don’t like to hear.

This is my truth.

I threw everything I had in my emotional toolbox into seducing that teacher into leaving his wife. I was not coerced. Not cajoled. Certainly not forced into anything in any way.

As I got older, unraveling those feeling became more difficult, not less.

Becoming a parent, made it more so.

I have a son. I look at him, like most parents, and I think, “ How in the hell could..?”

But I know different.

I know different.

But this is not about me.

This is about them.

They will drink. They will do drugs. They will drive too fast. They will overeat.

They will spend time with the wrong people. People you do not expect.

Or, D) All of the above.

Assume this.

The important question is not if they will do the things that teenagers have done since the beginning of time.

The important question is Why?

Why is what makes all the difference.

*Use of the feminine pronoun here is strictly arbitrary and for convenience.