Struggling through with joy... |
kind of.
Struggling through with joy... |
I taught for 13 years before I became a parent. Although I tried to be sparing in my advice, I did advise parents, often because they asked. One thing I always told them was to let their children read what they want at home. Don’t try to make them read chapter books too early, I said. Let them read Captain Underpants and comic books. Home reading should be for fun and relaxing.
Becoming a parent humbled me in teaching and in life. I’ve never thought I had it all figured out, but having kids revealed just how challenging and individual small humans are. Thankfully, my son is well-behaved and sweet and likes school most of the time. I feel so lucky to be his mom, which is something moms say but I really do. It’s a joy to watch him learn and grow. Sometime between kindergarten and first grade reading clicked for him. In spite of the pandemic shutdowns and an entire quarter of online kindergarten, he became a reader. We worked with him, of course, to learn the nuts and bolts of reading, including lessons with his retired-teacher grandmother. I heeded my own advice and only did it when he seemed interested. Because I’m a teacher and his father is a librarian, books are in abundant supply in our house, and we read to our kids all the time. His grandparents read to he and his sister all the time. They love books because of this. On a recent trip to the library, however, I found myself doing what so many parents do: pushing him to be the reader I thought he should be. T. immediately found a LEGO book, then a Star Wars graphic novel. He draped himself on a kid-sized couch and started reading, oblivious to the world around him. “Don’t you want a chapter book?” I asked. He ignored me. I darted around the shelves of the children’s section, choosing a book or two of my favorite authors and selecting some I thought might appeal to him. “What about one of these?” I asked, putting the small pile next to him. “Uh-huh,” he said, not looking up from his Star Wars comic. I thought teacher thoughts. He’s ready for chapter books, I thought. How can I teach him to hold on to text when he just keeps reading graphic novels and LEGO how-to books? Then I thought: Oh. My. Goodness. I’m turning into an a-hole parent. Putting my agenda on him. He glanced at the pile to please me. “I’m just not interested in these right now, Mommy,” he said politely. Then he went to the computer and searched for LEGO Ninjago books. And guess what? He read all weekend. He read his books, then the picture books his sister chose, and the Sunday comics. He read so much that we had to take his books away until he agreed to get dressed and brush his teeth. He loves to read, and that is all I want for him. Reading is a refuge and a comfort for me, and I want it to be the same for he and his sister. It will be, if only I can take my own advice.
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My daughter trots in at 6:10, hair wild and eyes squinting against the light. “Can we write?” she asks. She’s caught on to my daily writing habit and I swear she wakes herself up so she can be a part of it.
We move out to the couch where there is more room for us, and I type while she sits with her journal in her lap and her purple pen scribbling away. She’s four and loves to write in what looks like pre-school cursive. She makes grocery lists. We need tortillas and coffee, she informs me, but no milk. She peppers me with questions and observations. “I didn’t like the egg drop soup,” she says. “M. doesn’t sit in circle time so the teacher gives him a puzzle.” A pause. “Do T. and I get Covid shots?” I can hardly complete a thought or a sentence. I am frustrated and touched by this time with her. In the past she preferred being with her father in his office, sitting on his lap while he typed or playing with trains on the floor. Now I’m the main event, and while I miss my time alone with my thoughts (a lot) I also recognize the preciousness of this time with her. My teacher brain revels in the idea that this is good for her development of fine motor and language skills, but I also know she might hate writing by the time she gets to school (please, no!) Nothing is guaranteed. My mother brain reminds me how fleeting these frustrating days are, how these small moments build bigger bonds. I love her deep brown eyes peeking out from the maelstrom of her bangs, the serious way she gazes at me as she tells me about the little kids who cry in her preschool class. I wonder if she’s ever one of those kids, my beautiful and moody girl. My writing partner. For the past three years I have purchased a planner that includes a habit tracker. In fact, I paid more for this planner, it was so important to me to create and maintain good, new habits.
There is a lot of room for improvement in the way I live. No one ever ever observes me and says, “That LaReina is a real type-A person. She knows how to get things done.” They might say, “That LaReina really knows how to create a fortress of books she wants to read around her bed,” or “Boyo, LaReina is an ace at ignoring piles of laundry and baking cookies instead. Look at how she’s left that pile for three weeks! That’s impressive.” So I decided, three years ago, to put real, consistent and precise effort into improving. It’s worked to some degree. I meditate every day. I’m on time to work more often than I’m not. I exercise at least a few times a week. The laundry is still a problem. Earlier this week my son wore a shorts/warm up pants combination that was questionable in terms of fashion, but clean. This week, though, I’ve thrown caution to the wind and I’m not completing the habit tracker. I haven’t even cracked open my trusty little black planner. I ran out of time to do it Sunday night (laundry) and avoided it Monday. I grew rebellious Tuesday, thinking “Eff that habit tracker, I’m not doing it!” And here we are on Wednesday. All hell has not broken loose. I’ve still meditated every day, and on Monday I walked two miles. I feel kind of free, not having to visit my habit tracker and think, “Can I fill in a half circle for exercise if I did a brain break with my students?” It turns out I have actually developed some good habits. It turns out it’s ok to take a little vacation from self-improvement. Next week I’ll get my little black planner out again, and I’ll keep trying to improve. This week is acceptance week I always struggle with time, but it’s especially bad lately. I think I have what my mother calls a ‘poor time concept.’
This weekend I learned about a Japanese concept of pause in a podcast, but it’s greater than a pause. In the podcast it was explained as arriving at a place early enough to take a look around, or having the time to just be with a poem after you’ve read it. I long for this kind of time but I don’t know how to cultivate it. Nearly every moment of my day is scheduled. As a teacher, I am working from the minute I walk into my classroom until I leave it. I know of teachers who take a short walk at lunch and I used to sit in the lounge to eat, but none of those things seem possible now. How do I work this concept of pausing, of having bubbles of time to simply be and experience before moving on to the next thing? Instead I find myself angry and resentful of all the things that take me away from bubbles of time: demanding children, colleagues who constantly open the door between our classrooms, meetings, the need to prepare decent meals or fold laundry. I sometimes feel as if I am drowning in my obligations to others an never meeting everyone’s needs, least of all my own. Then I feel incredibly selfish. I chose motherhood and teaching. I adore my demanding children, who are demanding because of their age. I don’t have a solution to this problem of time. I keep searching for advice, but too often it comes from people who are not in the same situation I am in. I think, perhaps, the solution is to suck it up and make time. Get up 15 minutes earlier. Gently close the door between the classrooms sometimes. Read the poem and sit, just for a minute, before making dinner. Find the time. How do you find the time? For Lent I have given up inactivity. And wine, some weeknights, and social media. Coward’s choices, if I’m honest. It is not so hard to give up wine and social media. I love to move, so giving up physical inactivity is not truly a sacrifice.
It is the inactivity of my spirit, of my conscience, of my soul that I want to let go of. As the forty days of Lent wear on, I find what holds me back is not a basic laziness but fear. I am afraid. Sunday morning fear kept me from answering a knock on our door. We have complained about our newspaper carrier a few times of late. The paper arrives midmorning or not at all, and now she has started putting our paper with the neighbors. My husband had just called again and let them know we had to walk to our neighbor’s house to get our paper for the past three days, and when I heard the knock I spied a pink fleece hood. I was certain it was the newspaper carrier coming to yell at us. I entreated my husband to open the door. He’s good at getting yelled at and dealing with people who are a little unhinged. He does it all the time at work, and sometimes at home. He lumbered from his office where he’d been working, opened the door, and there stood a young Black man wrapped in a pink fleece blanket, holding a book from the free library in our front yard. His smile and eyes were wide open. “Can I just take this?” he asked, holding up Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. My husband nodded. “Yeah, man, take as many as you want. That’s what it’s there for.” The young man nodded, smiled, and I yelled weakly from behind my husband, “You can have as many books as you want!” He nodded again as he descended our front steps, taking just the one book. Fear kept me from opening the front door and having that interaction. I was so touched by the young man’s consideration, which my husband pointed out was wise self-preservation. Our town is not always friendly to people of color and I’m sure he had reasons to be cautious. All the same, I’d missed out on a sweet interaction because I was afraid. And if it had been the newspaper carrier, I could have handled it. I’ve learned to deal with irrationally angry parents and enraged four-year-olds, after all. Fear has kept me quiet all these years quiet. I silenced my voice because I feared being ridiculed. And surely I would’ve been, I will be, but fear and silence become their own burden far greater than the sting of rejection and ridicule. I’ll keep giving up inactivity, a little bit of wine and Facebook. They are good sacrifices to make. Maybe I’ll give up a little fear, too. Recently at bedtime my husband sang, “There were five in the bed and the little one said: Roll over, roll over,” and my son lifted his eyes from the book he was reading and grinned. T hopped up with excitement and started singing along, quietly. Now that he is seven and officially a reader, he often ignores this part of the bedtime routine altogether to bury his head in one or another of the library books that litter the living room.
When he was a baby, T loved this song. I sang it to him every naptime and every bedtime. I held him and sang it when we had a hard night, because it was one of the few songs I could sing in-key almost all the way through. The song was often a surefire way to comfort and quiet him. I sang it until I was hoarse on a long trip home after my uncle’s funeral. Because I was the youngest and ostensibly had the best eyes, I was the primary driver on that trip. My aunt, uncle and mom took turns sitting next to T and playing with him as we drove over the continental divide, through the ski towns of Colorado. Our trip to my uncle’s funeral was all the winter beauty we take for granted, filled with vast blue skies, the bright white snow of the mountains a sharp contrast to the evergreens. The trip back was what we’ve come to expect living in Colorado: a winter storm moving out ahead of us, the roads icy and snow-packed, and no choice but to move forward. I needed to get back to work, and everyone just wanted to be home. The trip stretched from five hours to seven, and we were driving in the dark with a tired, cranky toddler and four exhausted adults. As we finally descended from the mountains and through the canyon that leads to our town, T had had enough. It was dark and he’d been in his carseat far too long. He was sick of not being able to move and having his schedule upended for days. He cried and cried, and I sat behind the steering wheel, sweating, unable to do anything. We were still at least 45 minutes away from home. “There were five in the bed and the little one said: Roll over, roll over…” I started. He grumped a little but started to quiet as my mom stroked his little chest. The outlines of the mountains around us faded as I sang and sang. I looked in the rearview mirror and my mom nodded to encourage me to keep singing, so I did. My uncle dozed in the seat next to me. I had driven these roads so often in my adult life I could nearly do it in my sleep. I lived on the opposite side of the state for 20 years, only moving home after my father died and I married. When I got the call that my father was gravely ill, I drove through this canyon alone in my ridiculous sports car. It was silent as a tomb. I couldn’t bear listening to any music and there was no one to sing to, no one to comfort. Just me, driving toward a whole new life I was ill-prepared to live, letting go of my father and finally becoming, at 36, a real adult. His death marked the beginning of a slow, new phase of letting go: a few years after he died, his sister's husband passed, and then my mom’s brother. This is a blessedly slow phase. My mother is a daily part of our lives, and although I haven’t seen my aunt and uncle much because of the pandemic, they are near, providing love and encouragement and occasional presents from afar. They are with me, in this new life: motherhood, middle age, marriage. The surest thing I know is that life is never all one thing: it is never just grief and no joy; it is never just burden with no relief. I’ve felt at times that it is, that I can barely pick myself up and go on, but distance gives me a fuller picture. The blessing of the nurse who held my mother and cried with her the day my father died; the man who reached out to me in my grief, let me cry and rage and stare out the window for hours at a time, and married me; the prayed-for son fussing in the back seat next to his doting grandmother and great-aunt. His spitfire little sister who reveals my impatience and capacity for joy. The calm that comes with the aches and discomforts of middle age. The remembrance of a song that carried us through to home. I have a literal pain in my neck. It started yesterday and it’s worse this morning, running from a spot just next to my spine up to the base of my neck. There will be no sudden head movement for me today, although I think I probably look like I have excellent posture. If only I could sit still all day, looking forward, the pain wouldn’t bother me.
This spot always flares up when I’m stressed. It’s a little red flag waving at me. Slow down and do some yoga, it tells me. Go to bed on time. Let go of something. In my years as a teacher and a human adult living in modern times, I’ve learned how important it is to listen to the signals my body sends me and tend to my own needs as much as I do the needs of others. Taking just a little bit of time to care for myself pays dividends in the classroom and at home. I’ve grown weary of the term self-care, but taking care of ourselves is an unselfish act. If I’m rested, fed, stretched, if I have had just a little time to myself to read or think or write, to be something other than just a teacher or a mom, my heart and mind are open to the needs and joys of my young charges at home and at school. I appreciate them more. I’m a better teacher, a more patient mother, a kinder wife. So today’s slice will be short, because I need something different than my writing time today. I’ll be doing gentle neck rolls and rubbing essential oils between my shoulders hopes of being able to turn my head at some point today. It will give me time to think of my next slice, a surprising form of self-care that isn’t always fun but always teaches me something about myself and the process of writing. The daily rush up the stairs, chiding the students to be quiet, walk carefully, all the things they need to tell me in the short time since I’ve seen them last must wait until we’re in our room. I’m tired this morning. Grouchy. Two nights of little sleep and always too much expected: two reading lessons instead of one, a math test for two grades, the next two days filled with meetings and little to no plan time. Preparing one grade for state tests, making sure the other grade is staying on track, maintaining interventions for the ones who need it most. Keeping hands washed and tables sanitized and masks up and never seeing enough of their faces. Always overwhelming, much more so this year.
I look up the stairs and see the 4th grade teachers coming down. There’s not room for me to walk next to my kids, so I say, “I’m just going to scoot in behind you, M.,” a gentle warning because he doesn’t like sudden change and close contact. He’s new, only three weeks in and already strictly adhering to our routine. If I stray one minute from our schedule he will let me know. He crosses out the questions he doesn’t want to answer, flops onto the floor if he’s overwhelmed by directions, and yells if our read aloud bores him. He’s ecstatic when he gets to be helper or wear his hat in school. He takes my hand, easy as that, let’s me in close, guides me up the stairs and into our day. I feel it, physically, in my heart. Why I put up with all the burdens of this job. All the garbage mandates and relentless reminders that I will never do enough in the eyes of the system. Why I come back, every year, 21 years now. It’s not for the insurance and summers off. It’s for this. A small warm hand in mine, the unexpected acceptance of this boy. These tiny, ineffable gifts that are woven into every teaching day. Sunday night as I tucked my four-year-old daughter in, she smiled and asked, “What’s insomnia?” My heart gripped in the same way it does when she says, “My tummy feels funny.”
Insomnia is an ailment I do not want her to know. It is the sly creature that creeps into my psyche several nights a week, most weeks, dark and quiet, claws digging in to my brain and taking hold. It fills me with doubt and fear and general anxiety. It inflates small problems and digs trenches in my soul as I think the same thoughts over and over. What if, what if, what if…. Insomnia, too, presents solutions. In my repetitive thoughts I’ve often found resolve, a new path, resignation. When I was young insomnia woke me and whispered, “You don’t love him anymore,” showing me a path out of an abusive relationship. Just last night insomnia gave me permission to make practical changes in my reading instruction for the next four weeks. Insomnia can be mundane. Insomnia deepens my appreciation for my cat, when I tiptoe to the couch on the worst nights and invite her up to comfort me with her warm purr. Her slight weight pins me back on earth, where I belong, where this sleepless night will pass. Insomnia reveals the tenderness of my husband, who wakes with me most nights, pats my hip or rubs my back, silently signaling that I am not alone. Insomnia has been my nighttime companion for most of my adult life. I am slowly learning to accept it, which somehow makes it less powerful. I didn’t say all these things to my daughter. I kissed her forehead and replied, “Insomnia is when you have a little trouble sleeping.” She nodded and tucked her head under my chin, readying herself for sleep. It often happens when I am making dinner and I am most stressed about time. I run into the bathroom to pee, flush the toilet with the carefree attitude of a woman whose plumbing always works, and hear the telltale splashing on the floor as I wash my hands. The curses begin, screams of rage so loud my husband comes running in a panic, the children gather at the door to see my holding our bath mat aloft and pointing at the toilet. The terrible, terrible toilet.
Our house isn’t that old. It was built midway through the last century, a simple house for midcentury middle-class folks. It isn’t a fancy house but it’s good enough; warm and snug in the winter, sunlight streaming in the back door every morning, just small enough to be cleaned manageably but large enough to escape each other, when needed. I love our little house, but sometimes, our little house doesn’t love us. The master bathroom, where the dreaded toilet resides, was added recently. In spite of this, the toilet looks old, the seat chipped in a way that makes me wonder if the people who lived here before had especially sharp tushies. Did they install a second-hand toilet, some gem found in the backyard of a neighbor’s house? Why, whenever it rains, do the toilet and the washing machine join forces to emit a sewage smell that briefly wafts through the kitchen and living room? Thank goodness we live in a semi-arid desert where rain is a rarity. Soon we will have the time and money to call a plumber and repair the toilet, or replace it. I’m sure it will cost more than we’d like to spend, and I’ll resent the toilet even more. I try not to use the h-word very often. I think it has a way of weaving vehement and unnecessary negativity into daily life. But I hate this toilet. I hate that I need to stand guard every time I flush it, ready to turn off the water or grab a plunger. It enrages me that something so basic is denied me – a toilet that flushes easily, every time. It also reminds me how lucky I am to have two toilets, or indoor plumbing at all. When I helped build houses in Mexico we were excited to have actual walls around the outhouse, which was a toilet placed neatly over a big hole. No need to flush there, but plenty of sewage smell. I chastise myself, just a bit, for failing to recognize my privilege. Then I flip off the terrible toilet as I ready myself to flush. |
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