LISTEN TO HER ORAL HISTORY
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The second time I came home wet in my pants, my mother really got mad. And the following day, she came to school with me and she was to confront the teacher and ask the teacher why she didn´t allow her son to go to the bathroom whenever he needed to. And the teacher -- I don´t remember her name but she was a very tall, thin white woman with a very cold and very stern type of character. And she always had a tendency of yelling at her students. So after a while she was talking to my mother, she yelled at a couple of students and my mother noticed how she was relating and really abusing the students. So she gave my mother some lame excuse. She said that she never permits her students to go to the bathroom during class and those are the rules and she´s not going to break it.
So my mother very nicely and very humbly tried to explain that I´m not in a condition to hold it in and that the last few days I came in -- came home wet in my pants and that she should take some consideration because children can´t have that kind of resistance. And the teacher just flat out told her in a very stern way that she´s not going to change the rules. So my mother then turns around and she goes into her bag and she pulls out a knife. And she turns around and grabs the teacher by her shirt and points the knife at her throat and the teacher was so terrified. She was so scared and so shaken. And then my mother pushed her back in a very very rough manner. Then she quietly folded her knife and put it back in her bag and then she said I want you to think about this. And then we went back home because she didn´t let me stay in class. So any way, the following day I went to school and I raised my hand and she let me go to the bathroom and that day everybody was going to the bathroom. It was a very funny experience, but it seems to me, my mother had to take on a whole other posture -- a whole other character from a very soft-spoken, humble woman to someone with a knife,threatening the life of this individual who was abusing her students. That´s something that always stays in my mind because it was a chance she took that could have gotten her in a whole lot of trouble.