For twenty-one years, I lived on campuses where the line between work and life, home and vocation, blurred beautifully. My address changed — from the vibrant Spanish-language halls of Georgia to the red-brick dorms of Pennsylvania and, eventually, to the wooded stillness of Maryland — each place a classroom in how to care, to lead, and to belong.
At first, I thought I was building a career in education. What I didn’t realize was that I was also learning how to parent.
Athens, Georgia: A Dorm and a Daughter
Before the boarding schools, there was Athens — the University of Georgia — where I served as the graduate coordinator for the Spanish language dorm. I was newly married, a young educator living among undergraduates who moved fluidly between languages, cultures, and selves.
It was there that my first daughter was born.
She came home to a dorm filled with the sound of laughter, Spanish telenovelas, and conjugations drifting from study lounges. Students sang to her in Spanish, English, and French. I graded papers with her asleep on my chest and pushed her stroller past posters of Neruda and García Márquez.
It was the most natural thing in the world — to nurture, to teach, to be part of a multilingual web of care.
In those early months, I discovered that teaching and parenting share a grammar: patience, listening, trust. You cannot rush either one. Both require you to believe in transformation long before it’s visible.
In Loco Parentis
A few years later, at a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania, I stepped into a new kind of parenting. “In loco parentis” — in the place of a parent — is a phrase that sounds formal until you live it.
It became as real as walking the dorm halls at midnight, checking doors and hearts; as tender as sitting beside a weeping sixteen-year-old; as humbling as realizing that love doesn’t always mean approval.
At the Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania where I began, I was twenty-nine, old enough to guide but still young enough to remember what it felt like to be lost. They called me Profe Mónica — sometimes with affection, sometimes with exasperation. They tested limits and invited me into their chaos. What they didn’t know was that I was still learning, too — how to lead, how to listen, how to become.
Quaker education gave me the words for what my instincts already knew: care is a form of faith. To see that of God in everyone — no matter how loud, lost, or lonely — is an act of radical trust.
Dorm Lights and Small Miracles
There is something sacred about the life of a dorm. You learn the rhythms of adolescence — the slammed doors, late-night laughter, the smell of popcorn and body spray, the heartbreaks that feel like endings and beginnings all at once.
I kept a lamp lit in my apartment window as a quiet signal: I’m here if you need me. Some nights no one came. Other nights, there was a knock — a confession, a cup of café con leche, a silence shared across the doorway.
Those moments taught me more about love than any leadership seminar: to show up, to stay, to trust that presence alone can be enough.
Maryland: Learning to Let Go
Years later, in Maryland, I became an Assistant Head of School. The title suggested authority, but what I really practiced was accompaniment — listening beneath the words, noticing when someone’s frustration was really grief, and remembering that growth and discomfort are twins.
Leadership, I learned, was simply another form of parenting. I mentored teachers and junior administrators the way I once guided dorm residents: helping them trust their own wisdom, reminding them that care and accountability can coexist.
Schools, I came to see, are families in constant rehearsal — messy, imperfect, and full of love.
The Mirror of Motherhood
By then, I had two more daughters. My girls learned to walk on dorm carpets, to play on the quad, to wave at the high schoolers who once babysat them. They knew which teachers kept candy on their desks and which ones told the best stories.
They grew up believing that adults could be fallible and kind, that community could be both boundary and balm.
Meanwhile, I was still learning — from them and from the students I parented — that love requires elasticity. The teenagers who once called me Profe Mónica taught me to stay steady through storms; my daughters taught me to soften. The two roles informed each other until they became inseparable.
What I Carry Forward
Now, years later, my daughters are older, and I’ve stepped beyond dorm life into new forms of leadership and mentoring. Still, I feel the echo of those years — the late-night knocks, the morning meetings, the steady pulse of community life.
The habits I honed on campus have followed me home. I still pause before speaking when emotions run high. I still ask, What does love require of me in this moment? I still keep a light on — literal or metaphorical — for whoever might need to know they’re not alone.
I used to think of “in loco parentis” as a responsibility — a role we perform. Now I see it as a practice of belonging. To stand in for a parent is to stand in for love itself — not to replace it, but to extend it.
Parenting and teaching have never been separate callings for me. They are both languages of faith — in people, in growth, in the slow miracle of becoming.
I learned to parent by loving other people’s children.
And I keep learning — every day — through the ways my own children teach me to see, to listen, and to begin again.
