Mum Doctor

Mum+Doctor

Hours on end are spent designing and creating the perfect personalized Homecoming mum. When it’s finally done, you take a step back, recollect the blood sweat and tears you’ve shed, and admire your masterpiece. You get to school the next day and everyone is complimenting your mum and gawking in awe, but then a piece of it breaks off. Disappointment and despair engulfs you till you are just sitting there with a broken mum that you can’t fix. But, do not fret for Mrs. Bennett is here to save the day.

Mrs. Bennett, the art teacher in Rm# 1715, has been appointed by students to become “The Mum Doctor.” The week of Homecoming many mums break or have pieces fall off. Over many years of being the mum doctor, Bennett has learned a few ways to prevent tearing or fix detached ornaments.

“A lot of the girls don’t know to wear a sports bra, so they’ll wear a normal bra and then the lopsided weight will rip the shirt where the pin is at,” Bennett said. “Things happen, so we’ve found that if you wear a ribbon around your neck instead of wearing a pin, it’ll be a halter and will be balanced. Or if someone wants the pin then they could  put the pin through the shirt and then wrap the pin around the bra strap.”

Bennett has been the mum doctor for around 6 years and hopes to continue this tradition of helping students mend their broken mums.

“2013- 2014 was my first full year here, and so for homecoming the kids just started knocking at my door ‘cause the teachers would say go see the art teacher. So word got around and the next thing you know there’s knocks at my door. Then suddenly I just took on the role of mum doctor.”

Many would think that there is no big deal to mums, but Bennett can account for the amount of girls whom walk through her door with tears in their eyes.

“I understand the heartbreak, because when a piece breaks and it took so much effort to get it in the first place, they have the saddest face sometimes. Besides, it’s also homecoming and it’s such a big deal here in Texas.”

Bennett may have started as the mum doctor to help the students, but later discovered that she can do so much more by displaying good habits to the student body.

“If we want students to behave in the same way then we need someone modeling that same kind of kindness,” Bennett said. “Because if you want it then you have to show it, so this is me showing my students and the students around me of the kindness to be shown.”

Bennett is doing this one small act of kindness in hopes that the people around her will know that doing a kind thing doesn’t necessarily have to be grand, but that it could be as small as helping a girl fix a broken mum.