Part 2: Meth Anne Goes to School
by Angie Cowan
I remember how excited I was to start kindergarten. … The feeling didn’t last for long. When the teacher often had to call me out because I wasn’t paying attention, classmates began to see me as an easy target far taunting. It didn’t help that my clothes were almost always dirty—as was the rest of me. Hygiene wasn’t a big priority for the adults at my house. All the joy I had once felt about going to school quickly vanished.
As the years passed, I learned more reasons to dislike school. My inability to concentrate frustrated me. My classmates called me lazy and stupid. I had trouble reading, and that meant I had trouble in every subject. Convinced that no teacher could ever like me, I decided to attack them first, treating them with hostility and arrogance.
When I’m on edge, I have a habit of picking at my skin. Because school made me so nervous, my arms were always covered in open sores. I had only to look down at my raw forearms or to see others at their desks quietly concentrating on reading their textbooks or to catch a stray glance from my teacher to start the paranoid cycle of thinking that everyone was talking about me.
It wasn’t so far from the truth. Teachers disciplined me frequently for failing to complete homework and returning papers signed by a parent or guardian. Anything I was supposed to do at home was a lost cause.
Sometimes my teacher would pull me aside to say, “Meth Anne, do you realize how far behind you are in your studies, and how important it is for me to reach your parents?”
What she didn’t know was that my mom was busy doing drugs and making methamphetamine in the house. She often forgets to feed me any dinner. The days I made it to school, it was only because I was able to wake myself up and get dressed on my own. Forget about breakfast. I was afraid to tell anyone those things. Whenever someone asked, I lied to cover up the truth.
I remember one day in particular that I didn’t make it to school. The night before, my parents were cooking methamphetamine in the kitchen when something went wrong. Kaboom! The house shook violently, and flames quickly engulfed my room as I fought the fumes and smoke to escape.
The next thing I knew, I was running crying down the street. Someone found me and took me back to the house where police were handcuffing and taking my parents away. I soon went to live with strangers.
Through the next few years I was shuffled from one foster home to another, and my academic problems increased with every move. I fell further and further behind in school.
Cowan is the school counselor at Carver Elementary and serves on the DFG Board of Directors