Struggling through with joy... |
kind of.
Struggling through with joy... |
Almost ten years ago my dad went from being a healthy-ish 66 year-old grandfather (who smoked filterless cigarettes, suffered from chronic stress and drank too much) to laying in a bed in ICU, hooked to a respirator, dying from septic shock. It took roughly 36 hours for him to go from showing flulike symptoms and texting me smart ass remarks to being sedated and intubated. He was never conscious again after the initial sedation.
No one knew what was wrong with him; we had to wear masks, gloves and gowns to be in the room with him because doctors were concerned he’d contracted the plague while out walking his Yorkie. And yes, I do mean that plague, the one that killed half of England so long ago. Every day, sometimes every hour, brought some fresh and horrific surprise: we were told if he survives he will probably be significantly brain damaged; his skin is much like that of a severe burn patient because his body is no longer nurturing it with any blood; he will likely need several fingers and part of his nose amputated; we are airlifting him to a burn unit across the state; his internal organs are failing. In the five or six days before he died, I constantly tried to adjust to a new normal. My mother, brother or I were in the room with him at all times. We had a makeshift schedule, with my mom rarely leaving my father’s room. Often his brothers and sisters visited, although it was incredibly difficult for them to see him the way he was, wrapped in gauze, looking bruised from head to toe, hooked to machines. We read to him, took turns taking breaks in the hospital cafeteria, took turns going home to spend time with our dogs. I tried to maintain a regular exercise schedule and shower only because I felt like I was losing my mind. Having clean hair seemed like a good idea. In a strange way, those horrible days prepared me for the current pandemic crisis. In the days after my dad died, I had a strong need to maintain indicators of normalcy. It became incredibly important to wear eyeshadow. I walked and walked and walked if I wasn’t jogging. I monitored my food intake in order to maintain a healthy diet. Now I am facing weeks at home with my husband and young children. Next week I need to simultaneously learn to teach remotely while homeschooling my own kids. I can’t hang out with my mother, whom I am used to seeing, hugging, and talking to several times a week. I can’t just run to the store to pick up milk. There will be no ordering of pizza or tacos. Which means I am clinging madly to my routines. I drag myself out of bed at 5:30 or 6 to meditate, shower, and apply makeup; I try to wear clothes I’m not ashamed to leave the house in, even though I won’t be leaving the house. I jog or walk or do yoga and try to limit my time online to cooking blogs and how-to-draw videos. I pretend leprechauns have invaded our home and fold socks like I’ve never folded socks before because sweet Jesus, if the socks are folded and the beds are made it can’t be that bad, right? And it helps. Just like it did after my dad died. In the years since his death I’ve marveled at how much he taught me even as I slowly had to let him go. On Sunday we had our last meal out for who knows how long, and the pizza place where we ate was blasting the same music my father played throughout my childhood. It’s cheesy to think our loved ones are speaking to us from the great beyond via satellite radio, but I’ll take it. I felt like my dad, who would’ve been wound just as tightly as I am about this whole crisis, wanting to scream commands at everyone he loves just like I do, was putting his hand on my shoulder to say, “It’s bad right now, but it will get better.” Just like it did after he died, and I dragged myself through each new day trying to be a human. Look, I wanted to tell everyone, I have eyeshadow on. I brushed my teeth. I’m handling this ok. And now I want to lean out the front door to my neighbor smoking in her pajamas and yell, “Listen, I know your scared, but I’m wearing eyeliner and I’ve got shitloads of food, so it’s all going to be ok eventually. Have a can of beans and some toilet paper.” Much like those days when my dad was dying, every day brings some awful news. I let my brain process it in small amounts. I try not to think about my mother, who is probably running all over town like a goddamn teenager instead of staying home the way I want her to. I try to believe my brother and his wife and kids will be just fine, that I am not bothered we are all so far apart. I try not to worry about homeless people and the waiter who served us last week and has a three-month-old daughter to care for and now has no income. I try not to consider what will happen if I can’t sit with my most beloveds if they get really sick. I try to pretend my students will learn virtually as much in our virtual classroom. I try not to miss them. Instead, I make dinner. I pray, and pray some more. I fall asleep on the couch with my husband just like I do most nights. We talk about books and ideas instead of work. We don’t say a lot about the things that bother us most, and he places a calming hand on my hip at night until I can sleep again. I think of all I’ve learned since my dad died. That bullshit line we always hear is true: all we have is today. Right now, today is not ideal. My focus has been narrowed down to our smallish house and what I can do to maintain a level of safety, contentment and happiness for my children. So we draw, and play outside, and we read books, and I remember those awful days of grief when I lost my dad, and I remember how I survived. I realize I am a better human because of them, and I hope these days will mold me into a better human too.
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My father had epic eyebrows. Unruly, wiry, thick, my mom trimmed them with tiny scissors every so often because they grew so long they hung in his eyes. When I was a little girl, I would pet them as he lay on the couch resting. He used those eyebrows to great effect, wiggling them when he said something outrageous, which was often, glowering with those great black hedgerows above his bright blue eyes when someone was doing something stupid. They slowly turned white as he aged, but they didn’t lose their power as they lost their color.
I inherited those eyebrows. Not nearly as bushy, thankfully, but with more curl because it isn’t enough for me to have thick, wildly curly hair. I also have thick, wildly curly eyebrows. As with many things I share with my father (skinny legs, a propensity towards anxiety, depression and dark thinking, a wicked temper) I resented my eyebrows for years. Initially I didn’t notice just how alike our eyebrows were, which may explain the paucity of desirable suitors in high school. Then I discovered tweezing and trimming and shaping, and my lifelong obsession with eyebrow maintenance began. I’ve tweezed so much, in fact, that some of the eyebrow hairs have given up and, thank God, simply stopped growing. But they still curl and grow freakishly long, so I continue to be groom them with an old toothbrush and trim them with tiny scissors. My eyebrow ministrations have decreased these days because I’m busy and middle aged, and I care a little bit less about how I look. Sometimes things get a little unruly, which is how I found myself staring at a long eyebrow hair sticking straight out at me last week. It refused to lay down even after I brushed it with my handy old toothbrush, and it popped back up after I layered a little eyebrow gel on it. “Hello!” it seemed to say. “Just a little visit from your dad.” I left it. I wear glasses most of the day, so the rebellious hair would likely go unnoticed. It is a reminder of all the things I share with my father, good and bad. A reminder I’m getting older, will likely age in some of the same ways he did, will hopefully have the privilege of living longer than he did. A reminder that for all my efforts at inner peace and calm, I am still his daughter, prone to overreaction and the great joy and delight that sometimes come with it. It is the gentlest touch from him, like his hand on my head when I was a little girl, reassuring me he was still there. It was a marathon day – 7 classes in a row before lunch, four more after, teaching from 8:50 to 12:20 with no breaks. I have to plan ahead on days like this like I might for a 5K: eat a good breakfast, finish my coffee before the first bell, drink just enough water to stay hydrated, but not so much I have to pee before 12:20. When I started in this position days like this ruined me for the evening. Making dinner was an impossibility and was usually consigned to my husband. Coaxing my kids into their pajamas brought out the worst in me. I snapped and stomped after them as they lilted into the bathroom to brush teeth, half dressed. Once they were in bed, I passed out on the couch while my husband read, no company to anyone but my elderly chihuahua curled in the crook of my legs.
Now it is April, and I’ve built my stamina. It’s beautiful outside, the sky blue and dotted with the fluffy clouds of spring. When I pick up my kindergarteners, the fifth class of my morning, we pause to sit for our mindful moment in the shade of the school. We breath our arms up and become butterflies, exhaling to fly. They seem calmed by this, happy, and I expect them to line up behind me to head into our classroom without incident. This kind of magical thinking might lead you to believe I haven’t taught for almost twenty years. Instead, I hear an enraged scream and cry, turning to see one of my students stomping to hide between the chain link fence and a trash barrel, his face red and wet with tears. “She cut in line!” he screams when I ask for an explanation, and my empathetic observations (‘I can see that you’re angry, let’s take some deep breaths’) give rise to the same sort of reaction I would have: no shit, genius. Leave me alone. So I do. We move where I can still see him and the rest of the class sits in front of me as we practice the ways to see 8, 9 and 10 on our fingers. I flash four fingers on each hand and they whisper their predictions to each other; I flash three on one and five on the other. We’re still essentially doing the number talk I planned on, but without the power point slides of ten-frames I had ready to go in our classroom. My angry little boy growls and yells when we look too intensely at him, which is to say any time I spend longer than two seconds checking on him. “We’re ready to head inside, please join us,” I call. He growls some more and curls into a smaller ball. We are alone out here on the playground. I’m grateful, then, for the random things my students hand me as they leave my classroom: I dig the stub of a pencil and a scrap of red construction paper left behind from the last class. I write I need a help with S., please come to the playground, and send two of the kindergarteners in to the office. I pray they find their way – it’s a big school and they’re prone to distraction – and continue with my lesson. I teach social and emotional skills, which, in kindergarten, is best instructed through play. It is their language. Today we are talking about pretend play as a way to develop empathy. Of course that’s not how I explain it to them. I say, “When we can think about what the person or creature we’re being looks like, sounds like and feels, we can also start to understand each other better.” They stare at me, unknowing, until I demonstrate. See? I am a horse. I feel excited to gallop, I whinny with happiness. Then I truly am a horse, galloping around my group of kindergarteners with glee, and they too are excited, and they jump up and join me in my galloping. I pray no one from the office comes out at just this moment. “Shall we all be happy horses?” I ask and we gallop and whinny around the blacktop. My angry friend is dislodged by this display of joy and horsemanship. He races over to join us in our galloping, tears dry, as the counselor walks out and surveys the scene with a bit of confusion. I look at her and shrug, then give the thumbs up. She shrugs too, walking closer to get an explanation. Later, I try to problem solve with the little girl who cut in front of her classmate. I’m not sure it’s effective. We have much more to learn about how our actions affect others, what an appropriate reaction is, that the world does not revolve around our wants and needs. Part of this will be learned, often with difficulty, in growing up. Part of this will be learned in my classroom, pretending, thinking, learning to breathe deep and manage when things get tough, talking it all over, and sometimes, by whinnying around the playground on a sunny spring day. My children and I participated in Vacation Bible School at our church this week. This is an annual rite of passage for many Americans in the summer, but I personally have never participated, either as a child or an adult. My mother said she took me to VBS once when I was little, but I have no memory of it, so it doesn’t really count. Although I do wonder if that week of singing and learning about Jesus somehow imprinted itself on my little soul and that’s how I found myself dodging water balloons thrown by a group of 4-8 years olds last week.
VBS was an intense experience for me. I still hang on to the wariness I felt most of my life toward religion. My father was a lapsed Catholic but his was the church we went to. My mother abandoned her religion in young adulthood, and while she never converted to Catholicism, my dad’s church was our default for Christmas and Easter. We rarely prayed before dinner, we didn’t often speak of religion and no one ever spoke of Jesus. We were wary, as a family, of born-again Christians, Mormon missionaries and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and as I grew older I saw most Christians as boring squeaky-clean do-gooders or massive hypocrites. Which they are, and I am, now that I’m a Christian. Because we’re human. We try, we fail, we get up, we try again. Singing about Jesus and watching cheesy videos about how Jesus rescues was a lot for me. It was a lot for my kids, I think, but only because they’re so young. The day we watched a video reenactment of a drowning boy who was saved by a friend brought up a lot of anxiety for my son. We had to talk about it over and over, about how God sent the friend to save the drowning boy. I emphasized how the boy was ok now, how God was there to save him, how he was even on a swim team later in life in spite of his bad experience in the water. All week we learned about how Jesus rescues. I struggled, all week, with anxious thoughts about how he actually doesn’t. Very often he doesn’t. I woke at night thinking about all the students I’ve had over the years who were abused, left for days without real meals save a crappy school lunch, about the toddlers and babies being separated from their parents at the border, about my own children and the challenges they will eventually face. It won’t seem like Jesus is rescuing them. They will feel abandoned, as I’m sure many of my students did, as those babies feel in the holding centers at the border where workers are instructed not to touch them, not to offer a hug of comfort or a pat on the back. In VBS we did activities to illustrate the idea of rescuing, and our young charges often got frustrated that their science experiments didn’t work fast enough, or didn’t work just right. I tried to point out that it’s often that way with Jesus. He doesn’t rescue in the way we want him to. As our pastor said in Sunday’s sermon, it is highly unlikely the second coming is right around the corner. We have to wait, to be patient, to see that God is intervening, eventually, but not in the way we might have imagined or hoped. We are instructed, as Christians, to be God’s hands and feet here on earth. This is one of the harder jobs we have, right up there with loving our neighbors as ourselves. I suck at it. I’m not a good friend, I lose my patience with my kids too often, I’m not as giving of myself as I should be to the people I love. Not to mention the powerlessness I feel when I see the homeless people camped out in our local parks. Should I take them food? Water? Sunscreen? Will I only be aiding them in their addiction? What of mercy, of letting go of judgement? I pray every day for help with this. It is something I will need help with for the rest of my life, to be God’s heart and hands here on earth, but it something I want to dedicate myself to for the rest of my life. VBS was hard for me. I’ve been an Episcopalian for over ten years now, and I still struggle with the divinity of Jesus. I love the idea, but I don’t believe it with my whole heart the way I believe in God and God’s grace. I feel like this is a profound sin, and yet I have to recognize it because the teachings and work of Jesus are what I value most about my faith. The idea that we are loved absolutely and without question, that we are forgiven, again and again, that we have an incredibly important job to do here on Earth, to love and work for all the people who are less fortunate, who need us. And we need to do it in a way that recognizes each person’s dignity, their equality. Their sameness with us. There is also the sheer un-coolness of unbridled love and passion for Jesus. I was a cynical, surly teenager and young adult. Cynical is so often the default for many of us. It’s easier to sneer and disbelieve than to be vulnerable, to say, well, maybe some of this stuff works. Maybe loving God fills that hollowness that drags me down like a weight every day. Maybe it helps me be more tender towards myself and everyone else, every broken human being, even the ones spouting hatred and idiocy who I really want to slap the dog shit out of, to quote my father. Maybe it brings me closer to mercy and peace. Maybe it is ok to love Jesus so much that once a year I bring my kids to Vacation Bible School, and we throw our hands in the air as we sing about how much Jesus loves us, and we eat popsicles and have water fights and do science experiments to understand God’s love. My pastor warned me that one day, when my kids are teenagers, they may not want to come to church anymore. That’s ok, she said. Don’t force them. Let them find their own path. For now, I am their guide, and I want them to know they are loved, they are cherished, they are forgiven even when they screw up royally. It’s a good foundation to start with, no matter where they go.
I am in a time of “I don’t know.”
I don’t know how to help a student who is struggling with anger. I don’t know how to help his teacher see that he isn’t acting out to hurt her personally, although he is starting to learn how to trigger her, and his connection to her is eroding because his anger triggers her anger. I don’t know how to get my daughter to sleep through the night, or how to share the burden of being with her when she’s awake in a way that feels equitable to my husband. I don’t know how to give a little more without resentment, and I don’t know how to make sure I take just enough for myself without feeling selfish. I don’t know exactly how or what I’ll be teaching next year. I have to make my own roadmap, and I’m afraid I’ll get myself lost with big ideas and not enough detail. I am alternately terrified and delighted by my new position. I don’t know who will be taking care of my children next year. I can already feel August zooming toward us like a bullet. I want to cling to these sweet days of part time work and Fridays off, when I still feel like I have time to breathe and be a human outside of my roles as teacher and mother. Springtime always seems to be full of these questions of I don’t know. It makes me edgy and upset. I recently read the book “The Seventh Most Important Thing” by Shelly Pearsall because some of my fifth graders read it. It is historical fiction based on James Hampton, a folk artist who created an amazing altar out of trash, which is sometimes on display at the Smithsonian. Above his altar is the sign “Fear Not.” My students created a poster after they read the book and at the top they wrote the words “Fear Not.” It’s a good message for them as they head into the unknown of middle school. It’s a good message for me, too. So often I find if I push too hard I come up with the wrong answer, or I do the wrong thing. I will try to move through my life right now with openness, taking time as needed to get calm and listen. Wait. Not everything will work out the way I want or plan; some things will be better than I expected, some things will solve themselves, some things will need a little more work. If I let go of fear I remember how many times it has happened in my life that the thing I dreaded, feared, worried over relentlessly, turned out better than I could have ever imagined. And even if it didn’t, I survived; there was some seed or kernel of goodness I learned from. Morning: Husband home, daughter half-dressed, bye bye
Afternoon: Questions upon questions deepen understanding, challenge Evening: Soccer! Previously unknown joy, with kids Night: Time to read. Time to sleep. I have a rare Monday off because, unfortunately, my mother-in-law had to have shoulder replacement surgery and one-half of our daycare equation is gone. My husband and I are covering the gap until my father-in-law feels like he can handle a recovering wife and at least one of our kids.
I promised myself I wouldn’t squander this day, as I often do with extra day off. After we dropped my son off at preschool my daughter and I ran a couple of errands. When we got home I strapped her into the job stroller and off we went on a jog around the neighborhood, followed by a short post-run yoga session punctuated with water spills and tackles from my toddler. I felt guilty to be taking so much time for myself. Ruby sneaked slices of apple to the Chihuahua and ‘helped’ me unload the dishwasher by tossing silverware in random drawers. I felt guilty that I was cleaning instead of playing with her. As soon as the kitchen was clean I changed out of my running clothes, splashed off my face while Ruby covered her mouth with concealer, and grabbed my phone, my purse and my daughter as we ran out the door. As soon as it shut, I knew. Click. I uttered a stream of curse words as Ruby asked, “Car?” “No car for us, Ruby. Mommy is an idiot who locked us out of the house with no car keys.” “Keys?” she asked, tilting her head just so. I shook my head and she settled into moving the duck yard ornaments around, leaving them forever looking like they got into a batch of fermented grass. I scooped her up and raced to the back of the house, hoping my flightiness paid off for once, that I’d left one of the back doors open. Nope. I don’t want to be that mom. My son was picked up almost twenty-five minutes late on Friday because of a mix-up with his grandfather. He’s often one of the last kids to arrive in the morning. Because it’s often more trouble than it’s worth to wrestle my daughter into her shoes, she wanders around the hallway outside his classroom in her sock feet while we sign him in. And now I’d locked us out of the house right when it was time to get him. I’m totally that mom. Thankfully, I had my phone, and even more thankfully, I called my mom and explained what I’d done. “Can you please get Thomas and come let us in?” “Oh honey! I look awful.” She chuckled. “Ok. See you in a bit.” Just like that, I had thirty minutes in the spring sunshine with my girl. There was nothing else I could do. I was locked out of the mountain of clean laundry and away from my computer. I couldn’t prep for lunch. It took me a while to stop berating myself, but when I was done my girl and I dug in the dirt, studied some bugs, and sat together on the step, soaking in the early spring warmth. I didn’t know I was praying for those extra minutes with her, but I got them. I’ve had no time to write until now. I feel depleted and a bit empty, disappointed in the goals I didn’t meet, the ways I didn’t give enough, searching for something interesting to write about. It has me wondering about our kids who come to school with very few of their basic needs met. Or only their basic needs met: food, shelter, a perfunctory kind of love. No wonder they sometimes struggle to find something to write about. Yet so often they still do.
Then too, I’m thinking about the girls I saw on my Facebook feed last night, an eleven-year-old and a high school junior, respectively, who spoke vehemently to thousands about the need for change in our nation, the high school student standing silent in front of the audience, tears streaming, for several long seconds, forcing all of us to realize the loss she and her classmates are facing. I am awestruck by these girls. I want to raise a girl like this: fierce, full of purpose, not afraid to speak against terrible wrongs. Oh, these beautiful children who fill up my life; the two precious little ones in my home, the hundreds who have passed through my classroom, the multitudes who are awakening our nation to its brokenness. You are, each of you, so precious. May we live up to what we owe you. May I live up to what I owe you. In the middle of the night my daughter cried out for her father, and after he left the room to comfort her I lay half-awake, thinking about water. Two nights ago the rain hammered on our roof and I took comfort in my snug home, thinking about the soaking the infant plants were getting in the garden, the rain a respite from the dry winter we’ve had. I remembered the rain we had the year before we moved back home, the days and days of rain that made many parts of our city an island, cancelled school for a week, left hundreds without homes. I thought of monsoons in wetter climates, when rain ceases to be good and is, at best, something to be endured, at worst, a vehicle of destruction.
I’m hard pressed to think of much that isn’t like this When I think of schools and education, this is how I think of it. A blessing for some, a place of refuge and hope, and for others? School destroys them, strips them of their humanity. Those are strong words from a teacher who absolutely believes in the power of education to changes lives. I hope, in my career, I have not been a teacher who strips my students of humanity, even in the most banal ways. But we all make mistakes. We all have bad days, bad years, even, when we are less than who we’d like to be. When I was in high school I had a few horrific teachers. Let me be clear: most of the teachers I’ve ever had have ranged from average to excellent. I don’t think I got a bad education in public school. My high school, however, was home to some serious racist, homophobic, sexist teachers. Freshman year, my algebra teacher, a man who looked like a skeezy, human version of Bugs Bunny, used to tell his female students the best way to earn an A was to wear a short skirt and sit up front. Preferably with legs open. I flunked. Sophomore year, my geometry teacher used the term “porch monkeys” on numerous occasions and forced me to stand in front of the class and explain why I was wore a “Make love, not war” t-shirt that said, while he sat with his stubby legs on his desk, sucked at his teeth and shook his head. Passed that class with a D+. My sophomore year, the speech and debate coach organized a student assembly where one of her students defended the idea that homosexuality should be illegal because it was so abhorrent. I quite speech and debate. That was the one that finally landed me in the principal’s office, asking him why he was allowing students to say such damaging things. My principal? He listened. He asked thoughtful questions. He agreed, the content of that student’s speech was incredibly hurtful. He apologized. He promised to speak to the speech teacher and the student. From that moment on, he knew my name and always acknowledged me with a smile. Not much else changed at my high school and I was miserable most of the time I was there, but I felt listened to and seen. I also had some great teachers in the following years, teachers who actually wanted to educate me, who were interested in helping me learn how to read critically, write well, or solve a problem efficiently. I knew, when I went to school, there were a few adults who cared about me. They made the days more bearable. Now we work to make school a place where children learn to make life more bearable. They still learn all the basics, and to a greater depth than I think they ever have before, but they also learn vital aspects of self-care I only started to learn about as an adult, when my life was in tatters and I had to figure some way to put it back together. I think this is a general trend in education, but the urgency in my community is greater because we lose several young people a year to suicide. We realize these kids are somehow lost, isolated and unable to find the help they need when they need it. We teach them how to care for themselves, where to go when they’re troubled, and we tell them every day, “You are valued, just the way you are. We care about you. We are glad to see you here.” No, not every single teacher will do this. Not every single teacher feels this way. But they muscle through because it’s a district directive. We’ve got to save our kids. Most of us have bought into this idea, one way or another. The teachers who haven’t? Many of them will leave, some will change, and I hope the force of all the teachers who truly care will flood our students with the love they need to sustain through the years with the teachers who don’t. I hope the good will overcome the bad. |
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