In thinking about this blog post I realized how many angels I know. People who make my life wonderful in big and small ways. But I realized the person who has had the biggest impact on not just my life but my son’s has to be his first kindergarten teacher; Miss Amy.

My son had been in day care part time since he was about two years old. And it was never easy. Never. Lots of tears. Tantrums. There wasn’t a person or a thing that could comfort him and my husband and I felt guilty and then tortured and then guilty for feeling tortured.  We were told by lots of people – most of his day care teachers, his doctor, our friends, strangers on the street that ‘he was a handful.”

At his pre-kindergarten physical our doctor brought up AD/HD. I was worried about Mick’s relationship with school and I didn’t know how I was going to handle the battle every day for the next 13 years.

Enter Miss Amy. She was young and blond, with really curly hair. She had glittery glasses and wore lots of jangly silver jewellery. Honestly, she looked like a fairy. Or an elf.  Mick was mesmerised. The first day of school, went about as expected. And the next month wasn’t much better. I volunteered in the classroom as often as I could and saw firsthand how patient Amy was with Mick. How she tried very hard to draw him out, but when that was impossible, she created a corner for him to be sad, or unhappy. He spent a lot of time in that corner.

But slowly, she started to win him over. Actually, all the difficult fringe kids were won over, largely because she paid attention to what those kids were playing and managed to incorporate the entire class in the play. For instance, Mick loved pirates, so the whole class started writing pirate books at the writing station, and creating  treasure chests in the art section. Another kid loved space ships and they were given the same treatment.

By the end of the year Mick loved school. No more tantrums, no more worries. He was on track with reading and had learned how to calm himself down and became a leader in the classroom, instead of a distraction.

Miss Amy had given him a lot of tools for dealing with his emotions, his friends and school in general. And she gave him a beautiful relationship with school and learning.  And for that reason, she’s my angel

Molly O’Keefe is a RITA-Award winning author with  22 novels in publication. She writes sexy contemporary romance  for both Harlequin and Bantam Dell. The third book in the Crooked Creek Series – Crazy Thing Called Love will be released Jan. 29. A prologue to Crazy Thing Called Love is in the digital anthology Naughty and Nice. She lives in Toronto, Canada with her family and the largest heap of dirty laundry in North America