reminders

I knew when I accepted a job at a parochial school that there would be many challenges; as a non-religious person, just this new proximity to people and their faith was foreign territory.
The first time I sat through mass, blood boiling over the hypocrisy of people who would claim to love and forgo judgement praying to their god that others be denied the right to marry, I knew that this promised to be tough in ways I hadn't anticipated.
And then I found myself sitting opposite a slight, plain-faced seventeen-year-old girl and wishing her infertile. I didn't keep wishing it, but for a minute I sent mental daggers and my own meaningless prayer into the universe that experience might teach her what I know that she does not.
She was explaining to me that when she becomes a doctor, she intends to be an activist of sorts, one that does her utmost to halt the twin scourges of abortion and in vitro fertilization. This was how I learned that the Catholic church preaches against the use of in vitro fertilization.
But you have no idea, you are just a child.
I wanted to explain to her that until she has sat on the crumpling paper of an examination table listening to an oncologist tell her that disease makes pregnancy risky and treatment may make it impossible, she cannot possibly write off medial procedures--let alone seek to make them unavailable--for people in circumstances she cannot possibly understand. There is just so very much she does not know.
She wanted me to help her with a college entrance essay, and I did, though my blood seethed thinking of the ways this girl would judge me if she knew anything at all about my life. I bit my tongue carefully, talked about writing conventions.

I work in a place where judgement comes easily, slipping off the tongues of coworkers without a second thought. It is difficult to get through a day without feeling casually judged or picking up little reminders that I am not playing by the right set of rules dropped carelessly by so many of my coworkers.
But generally, my classroom is a little haven of tough questions and good books, of patience and love, a place where value judgements are addressed firmly, with efficiency and sincerity. I suppose that's why it felt like such an affront when this girl attacked something so intensely personal and dear to me.
I don't let them do that to each other; it hadn't occurred to me that I might, however inadvertently, be the target.