THE MEMOIR
My Teacher Called It Love
He was my middle school teacher. I was thirteen years old.
What I believed was love was grooming.
My Teacher Called It Love is Saleema Hicks Robinson's true account of the grooming and sexual abuse she endured after a trusted middle school teacher exploited her trust, manipulated her understanding, and gradually assumed control over her life.
Written through the eyes of the thirteen-year-old girl who could not yet recognize what was happening—and the woman who now understands it—this memoir reveals how grooming disguises abuse behind trust, authority, affection, and the language of love.
This is not a story about a forbidden romance. It is the story of a child who was groomed by an adult she was taught to trust.
BEHIND THE TITLE
Before I understood it as grooming,
I understood it as love.
The title My Teacher Called It Love reflects the language that shaped how Saleema understood the relationship as a child. At thirteen, attention felt like care. Trust felt like safety. Secrecy felt like protection. And the actions of a trusted teacher were presented as proof of love.
It would take years to understand that what had been called love was something entirely different.
This memoir returns to the story through the perspective of the girl who lived it—while carrying the understanding of the woman who can now give the experience its true name.
The title preserves what she was told.
The memoir reveals what it was.
INSIDE THE MEMOIR
A story about what grooming looked like before there were words to name it.
TRUST
What began as attention and understanding slowly became a relationship built around emotional dependence and misplaced trust.
CONTROL
As boundaries shifted, secrecy, isolation, and manipulation became increasingly difficult to recognize from inside the relationship.
TRUTH
Years later, the experience could finally be understood beyond the language once used to describe it—and named for what it was.
The memoir does not ask readers to see a forbidden love story. It asks them to understand how a child came to believe that it was one.