My “Before”

Thursday 17 September 2026

On Sunday I wrote out the list of things I am not going to do, and the last item on it was that I would not start any of this properly until there was a teacher at school involved. I said I was asking Ms. Shafqat this week.

It took me until Thursday, and I want to write down why, because the reason is not flattering.

I wanted to do it in person. I meant to catch her after advisory on Monday, but I had a test that period and my head was entirely somewhere else. Tuesday she wasn’t around. By Wednesday evening I understood what was actually happening, which is that waiting for the right moment had quietly become a way of not doing it. She is away at the moment. So I stopped waiting for a corridor and wrote it down instead.

The project part was not the hard part. I have explained the project to my dads, to this blog, and to myself about forty times since June. I can do that bit.

The hard part was one sentence near the middle: that I have two dads and that I was born through surrogacy. She almost certainly knows already. It is not a secret, it is on forms somewhere, and both my dads turn up to concerts and back to school nights. But there is a difference between a person knowing a fact about you and you deciding to tell them. I typed that sentence, deleted it, and typed it again, and the second time I left it alone.

What I asked for, in the end, was two things. The first was small: several of the competitions I want to enter this year ask for a current teacher or advisor as a contact, in some cases to confirm that the work I submit is my own, and I wanted to ask her before putting her name down rather than after. The second was the real one.

I asked whether she would consider being faculty advisor to the project. I said I did not think I should do this on my own and did not want to, and that I wanted a small group of adults attached to it so it was grounded in something more than the enthusiasm of an excitable fifteen-year-old. I used that phrase. I read it back three times and kept it, because it is true and because I would rather say it about myself than have someone else think it quietly.

I also told her why I was asking her specifically, which is not only that she is my advisor. It is that I want someone who will tell me plainly if they think this is a bad idea. That is a harder thing to find than it sounds. Most adults are kind to fifteen-year-olds with projects.

I offered to send her the blog. I am not sure whether she will read it. It is a strange thing to hand a teacher fourteen weeks of your own thinking and then sit in her class on Tuesday.

No reply yet. She is away and I told her not to rush. The waiting is fine. The asking was the part I had been avoiding, and it is done.

— D.