“My son, Ryan, started kindergarten the year I retired from teaching. I took it as a sign, a coincidence worth paying attention to. I spent twelve years teaching, encouraging, caring for, and loving my students. As Ryan was about to embark on his own twelve-year public school career as a student, I hoped he would encounter teachers doing the same thing. I hoped my teaching career counted as a deposit in the good karma bank and that Ryan would be on the receiving end of the dividends.”
The paragraph above is an excerpt from my personal essay, “My New Career.”
And, I’m happy to say “My New Career” has recently been published in Santa Fe Writers Project Journal Issue 32/Spring 2025.
You can click here to access the entire Issue.
And if you’re short on time, click here to be taken directly to my personal essay.
Though I do hope you’ll have a chance to read through the other pieces in the Issue. There are fiction and non-fiction works as well as poetry, and they all speak to the Journal’s theme of “Renewal.”
WendyKennar.com 
What a beautiful essay, Wendy! I can relate so much. My youngest was around the same age (1st grade) the first year I left. It was really hard for me to be in a school setting, actually, for a good while. It really felt like a reckoning with personal identity when I lost that part of myself, but I also learned to dig deep and understand that my professional identity didn’t make me any more or less. Life is full of different chapters, as you say, and they’re all necessary to the story!
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Maria, thank you for your thoughtful comment and for sharing. You know exactly how it is! It’s so difficult to turn off that “teacher-brain.” I appreciate your support and am so grateful we crossed paths on Instagram.
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