IMpact.

There are some people you meet and they pass by unnoticed by you. Then there are others. You see them, meet them, and you pause. It is in that brief pause that a friendship can be formed and a relationship established.

I can pinpoint a few times in my life when I met someone, paused, and was impacted by their friendship and personality. They touched my life and because they did, my life is different. Impacted.

I remember when one person I passed by and met hugged me. I thought she was very strange for just...hugging me when I barely knew her. It turned out to be that she is one of those people. An Impact.

There are other people too. My freshmen awkward year of college my neighbor asked me for some help on some homework. I paused. We talked. And we are both now Impacted by each other and still fast friends.

It's funny how things like that work.

This year I have met my Impact. My teacher. She is the one I have been student teaching with. I'll admit, this student teaching thing has turned out to be much tougher than I first thought it would be.

Yet I would do it all again to meet and pause and not let her friendship and care pass me by. No one has loved me in such a motherly, yet unassuming way since my mom died. It's very very strange to feel the warmth of a mother's love again. She herself raised three kids. And she has come to seeing me as her own. I can tell. I feel I have been adopted. Without even knowing that I needed to be or wanted to be, there is a warmth inside of me that comes when she says, "I want you to be the best teacher you can be." It's such a undeserved sort of love. Unconditional. It humbles me because I did not ask for or expect for her to love me. She even told me one day that she worries about me. I cried really hard that day because, it's such a mom thing to say! It makes me think about what my mom would say to me. I'm not used to feeling entitled for people to worry about me. And no one worries more than a mother.

The surprising thing for me is that I don't feel like she's trying to be my mother. She's not. She's just....loving me.

How undeserving I am for this mentor, this friend, and this older woman to love and care for me. Her Impact on my life, I know, will echo through the rest of my days. I would have missed this time. This being loved time. And this growing up time. I think, for some reason, I needed to be reminded of this unconditional love. Not only because I need it, but because we all need it. We all need that person in our lives that says, "I love you, I will always love you, no matter what". Whether that be a friend, spouse, father, brother, sister, mother, God. We need to hear it and believe it. The kids I will teach will also need this love. What an Impact a teacher has. It is very profound. I am still trying to understand.