Shelby Andrews couldn’t do anything else but smile as her class full of Fulshear High School juniors stared at her in disbelief while her voice began to crack up. She still couldn’t believe it, and her classes were just as stunned. She had just lost her dad, and in two months, she would be having her second child.
“I lost my dad when I was about seven months pregnant, so that was extremely unexpected and it definitely threw me for a loop and I didn’t really know how to handle it at the time,” Mrs. Andrews said.
Mrs. Andrews has always been a person who tries to find moments of consistency in times of struggles, and this unexpected event led her to double down on her teaching commitment, even if she was still hurting inside.
“The first day after losing my dad was a day full of grief and full of emotions, and I just decided that I didn’t want to sit at home and get lost in that mindset,” Mrs. Andrews said. “So, I decided that I needed to return back to a sense of normalcy, and going back to work was going to give me that normalcy and also provide me with a little bit of a distraction.”
She wasn’t able to distract herself for too long, as just two months later, she was delivering her second child into the world. The contrast of emotions couldn’t have been more evident to Mrs. Andrews. She delivered a bundle of joy, but nothing could fill the dad-shaped hole in her soul.
“When I had my second child, it was one of the happiest moments I was able to experience, and I was in this kind of newborn bliss, but then at the same time, I would get pulled back into grief about my dad,” Andrews said. “I was extremely emotional and upset that my dad never got a chance to meet my daughter, so when I would think about that on a daily basis, it would cause a lot of emotions to come up while I was trying to take care of my daughter at the same time.”
Taking care of her newborn gave Andrews an outlet to cope with her father’s passing.
“(My daughter and I were) in this quiet peaceful space together where we just went through the same routines every day,” Andrews said. “I really got to know her and she just provided so much love in my life.”
After finishing her parental leave, Mrs. Andrews didn’t know what to expect when she walked into her English classroom for the first time in months.
“That was probably one of the best moments of my teaching career; to come into several classes and have people give me a round of applause because they were so happy to see me… It just warmed my heart that I had a group of students that cared about me in that way.”
