I said it so many times during my 11 years teaching high school English: "I love other people’s kids too much to have my own.”

While preparing then to begin this new career, I anticipated feeling lucky to know the students that would soon be sitting in my classroom. Remaining committed to their well-being. Wishing, over and over, the very best for them.

Instead, my students enchanted me immediately. Within days, I began calling these tender, tenacious teenagers my lovelies. We laughed, and took care of each other, easily. Often. I marveled at their wisdom and seethed that Baltimore’s violence steals so much from them when they’re so young. We told each other “I love you” daily, and missed each other during school breaks. We were, and still are, devoted to one another.

Now, my lovelies range from not yet 20 to almost 30 and every age in between. To this day, when I run into them at coffee shops and while running errands, I squeal. After we hug each other hello, I devour their update: thrilled they’re excelling at the career they trained for in high school. Impressed, though not surprised, they’ve started their own businesses as hair dressers or tattoo artists. I’m honored when they ask for my feedback on their creative writing and happy to write their letters of recommendation for college or job applications.

Lovelies invite me to their baby showers and to say goodbye before they leave Baltimore for the military. I invite them to my own celebrations: housewarming and end-of-career parties. For almost a year, I’ve delighted in working with a lovely at a small, woman-owned business. We collaborate side-by-side (literally) on projects; I’m thankful for every day I see her.

The relief and joy of witnessing my lovelies’ success nourishes me. I wonder at who they’re becoming. Who they’ve always been. Especially when they go on to become educators themselves — nurturing, challenging and championing the next generation of lovelies — I feel a little bit awestruck. My lovelies have lovelies.

I’m a grandma.

One of these lovelies once tried to guilt me into accepting his project late; he enlisted my colleague and good friend to text me baby photos of him, hoping I would find him too adorable to resist, and accept his project after all. Now, he’s the ringleader of tag, relay races and soccer games at a nearby elementary/middle school, teaching physical education, but also how to live life lightly.

Another lovely now works where we met: Patterson High School. Back then, during class discussions, she demanded again and again that we work for more people’s basic rights. That we champion those most harmed by oppression. Whenever I talk to her lately, she’s hurting so hard for the school’s international population, hating that lovelies and their families bear the burden of other people’s bigotry.

Last semester, one lovely — who, mercifully, unmuted first and frequently during virtual school, and helped me endure those strange, lonely days — texted me photos from the kindergarten class he was student teaching. My favorite photo is of a little girl’s drawing of herself and my lovely, both thrilled to be by each other’s sides. She titled it “My New Friend.”

A lovely whom I never actually taught, but with whom I’ve been close for years, is hopefully about to become a teacher. He was class valedictorian, and I remember admiring the patience and humility with which he tutored his peers. When he recently asked me to review his resumé, I gladly agreed. Kids deserve teachers who don’t doubt that they can do it.

As happy as I am to have grandlovelies, to know that my lovelies have committed to classrooms of their own, I also — and always — want to protect them. To spare them from the parts of teaching that are absolutely awful.

The daily gamble teachers make: today might be the day you and the children assigned to your care could be killed in your classroom. The ever-worsening budget cuts and their disastrous impact on school communities and teachers’ responsibilities. The unwarranted and insulting treatment from school leaders — lack of trust in, respect for, or appreciation of teachers — that seems to grow every year.

But I couldn’t even protect myself; I left teaching, in part, because all of this became too much for me. As much as I want to, I can’t stop it from harming my lovelies, too. Instead I hope that they know to persevere only as long as it feels right.

In the meantime, I’m thrilled they’ve finally learned the secret truth: Snow days are even more exciting as staff than as students, summer breaks even more necessary. I wish my students-turned-teachers as many experiences of mattering to a lovely without realizing it and witnessing a lovely push beyond what they thought they could as possible.

Among the numerous criticisms of childfree people is that we allegedly won’t leave a legacy. Our lives are said to have no purpose because we won’t procreate, or even adopt. As usual, I disagree. Because even the small role I played in helping my lovelies become educators, doing all they can to propel the next generation of lovelies forward, proves that what I’ve done matters.

Loving my lovelies, and becoming a grandma to theirs, is more than enough legacy for me.