At least they don't say ANTEE-GAWN this year...

I know I've said I won't write about school on this blog, and that's still mostly true, but raise your hand if you could use a good laugh today? That's what I thought. This little gem is too good not to share.

First of all, let me say that I love my sophomores this year. (Actually, I love all four of my classes -- isn't that scary? I always thought it was a rule that at least one class per year will have you drinking wine straight from the bottle on Friday nights.) My sophomores are just so stinking adorable this year. A little loud, and very fifteen, and lacking in filters between their brains and their mouths, but mostly really cute.

Anyway, today they were working in groups. Each group was assigned a different theme from Antigone (think ancient Greek tragedy) and they were making these big charts relating to that theme, using quotes from the play to support it, blah blah blah. So I'm hanging back, just watching them work and listening to them chatter, and I notice one boy drawing a pig on his chart. More specifically, drawing a person in a toga holding a leash with a pig on the end of it.

Me: Hi. Um, why is there a pig on your Antigone chart?

Kid: I thought that instead of a dog, they had a pig.

Me: WHO had a pig?

Kid: The family! You know, like instead of having a family dog, they had a family pig.

Me: There is no dog. There is no pig. WHERE in the play is there a pig?

Kid: In the rough draft? It didn't make the cut?

That was ten hours ago and I still can't stop laughing about it.

On the fickle nature of toddlers...

Suzannah has been purely delightful this week. This, I've learned, is life with a toddler. Last week, I'm pretty sure I wondered aloud at least once a day whether it would really be such a bad idea to box her up and ship her off to my parents, who usually respond to my complaints about whining and attitude and tantrums with "Well, she just needs Grandpa and Grandma." Or, more helpfully, "No, she's not [crabby, unreasonable, stinky]. Have you tried [giving her a more appetizing dinner, reading her a story, being more competent in general]?"

Okay, just kidding. My parents are actually very awesome, but they laugh at me a lot and, I suspect, exchange plenty of knowing glances.

Anyway, this week, Suzannah has been just wonderful. She's in a good mood in the afternoons; we play a lot, and we sing a lot, and we read a lot. (A lot.) She gives her daddy huge hugs in the morning before he leaves for work and waves cheerfully.

"Buh-bye!" She calls. She says buh-bye to everything these days. Buh-bye, bathwater. Buh-bye, house. Buh-bye, doggie. Oh, wait, except she really means that. No, seriously, the dog is looking at her, she is standing right there by her table and watching her eat breakfast and why am I not doing anything about it? Buh-bye! Buh-Bye! Away! AWAY!

It's actually a little heartbreaking when she uses buh-bye that way. She uses it on either Matt or me at least once a night, and she tends to alternate. On Monday night, for instance, I wasn't allowed to go near her after her pajamas were on. She wanted Daddy to do her nighttime diaper, she wanted Daddy to help her brush her teeth, she wanted Daddy to bring her a drink of water. When I went into her room to check on her, she howled, "No! Daddy! Buh-bye! BUH-BYE!" She waved at me. "BUH-BYE!"

Last night, it was the other way around. I have to tell you, I think I handle this better than Matt does. (Hah. This is the true test of whether Husband reads my blog, isn't it?) His feelings get hurt and he usually tells Suzannah that she's going to Make Daddy Cry, which, as you would imagine, does not particularly interest her. I'll grant you that it can be a little sad when my tiny, distraught daughter sobs BUH-BYE and waves at me through her tears, but I get over it. Especially since the last time she did that, it was about four o'clock in the morning.

"She wants you," I mumbled to Matt. Then I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I watch the sun burn circles in the sky

Finally, the rain comes again.

I love fall for all the usual romantic reasons: the changing colors and their fleeting vibrance, the sweet damp mulch of leaves under my feet, the scent of woodsmoke on the frosty air, the transition to sweatshirt weather, pumpkin spice lattes, cider, trips to the pumpkin patch. Near the end of August, I become increasingly neurotic. I do not relish the last days of stale afternoon heat, especially once I return to school; teaching is much easier in more subdued weather.

I always miss Montana at this time of year -- I miss the mountains rising above the golden fields, the colors in the trees and the snow in the mountains. The first frost, the first crunchy layer of snow on the grass. Two years ago, while I was on maternity leave for a semester, I traveled to Minnesota with Suzannah and my mom for Concordia's homecoming in October. We spent a couple of days in Bozeman, and I realized it was the first time in six years that I'd been to Montana during the fall.

Carmen drove home with me for mid-semester break in October of our senior year. I remember so clearly one golden afternoon of that long weekend; we climbed through the barbed wire fence at the edge of my parents' property and made our way down to the creek. We found a bridge consisting of wooden planks placed across two logs that stretch across the water and sprawled on our backs, our legs dangling over the side. I tipped my head back until I was upside down, gazing at the sky and water and inverted trees. A gust of wind shook the remaining golden leaves clinging to the branches, and they swirled above our heads in colorful flurries before drifting down to land gently on the water, the ground, in our hair. It was a moment of such still perfection it was hard to believe it was real. I watched one perfect leaf dip and twirl until it landed and the current carried it downstream. The beauty of it almost hurt with its simple intensity.

But I love where I'm at, too. I think the trick, for me, is to make sure I get out of the city a time or two during the fall. Last October, I played hooky from a day of "professional development" and went to the pumpkin patch at Remlinger Farms with Suzannah and the other kiddos at her daycare. The drive was beautiful, a reminder that I don't have to drive six hundred miles for hillsides rich with autumn colors.

This week, though, I'm simply grateful for the rain. Mornings are quiet and foggy again, and my nerves aren't quite so jumpy. It's easier, somehow, to find that beautiful balance between motherhood and teaching and everything else, the reminder that each part of my life feeds the rest.

This face can cure anything

Suzannah, wearing her daddy's hat


"CORN!"


This is the first thing I see some mornings...and it's my favorite.


Behold, our ARTWORK! Suzannah did all of the painting. I contributed the eyes and the pipe cleaners and the little smiles on the caterpillers. Oh, but she actually stuck the eyes on, so nevermind. We keep meaning to cut leaves out of the painted paper bag.


She makes this smushy face a lot.

The small things make everything better

When Suzannah sees Matt wrap his arms around me or kiss me, she immediately drops whatever she's doing and runs to us and demands to be picked up and squished into the middle of our hug. We are happy to oblige, since she's such a squishy little babyhead, and toddlerhood often makes her too busy for cuddling.

"Sandwich!" We cry. "Suzannah sandwich!"

So now, sometimes, even when Matt and I are doing our own thing but happen to be in the same vicinity, Suzannah will shout, "SAMMY!" Which is our cue to scoop her up and squish her between us and cover her with kisses and threaten to munch on her tummy or ears.

Okay, that part is me. But what a yummy little sammy she is.

Like mother, like daughter

Ever since my daughter was born, people have said she looks exactly like her daddy. One person I teach with even called her Matt's "Mini-Me" for a long time. Now, I am not opposed to this, because my husband is a good-looking man, and also, my daughter is simply gorgeous. There's just no other way to say it. I'm not complaining about anything, because she's perfect. It's just that sometimes, it'd be nice to hear that she has some of me in her, too. I mean, she came out of me. I swear she did. I was there. I saw. (Well, in all fairness, when my mother saw Suzannah's first ultrasound picture, she immediately proclaimed, "The baby has your nose!" And I guess that's sort of true -- which is fine, since my nose is one body part I've never taken issue with.)

Now that Suzannah is older, though, I see more of me coming out. Some things are obvious, I suppose. She loves her books quite passionately. She loves her baby doll, loves to carry her around and feed her and put her to bed (I had some deep attachments to certain dolls and stuffed animals from quite a young age). She's a weird little neat-freak in ways that perhaps go just a touch beyond that normal toddler obsession with "order." She knows what she wants and grows easily frustrated when we don't immediately get it. She's a playful soul. She loves water. Her emotions are huge, and sometimes they get the best of her.

But there are things I can't quite put my finger on, too, things I can't explain or identify or point at. When she falls asleep at night, I often tip-toe into her room and snuggle her a bit -- just to kiss her soft little cheeks, stroke her arm, smell her hair -- and I feel such a deep recognition somehow, such a profound sense of knowing this little person. Sometimes, that feeling hits me when we're locked into some mother-daughter conflict, when I've told her no or failed to properly accomodate some immediate desire and she's angry with me, howling her red-faced fury to the heavens. It goes to my core sometimes, even when I want to laugh, or when I feel frustrated at my two-year-old's sheer lack of reason. I know what the world feels like sometimes, and reasonable or not, it's hard not to just howl myself when things seem unfair or too big to process like an adult.

I'd make a crack here about how that's why gin and tonics exist, but my mom reads this blog.

Anyway.

Last weekend, when I went back to the farm for my grandfather's funeral, I had two mini-revelations.

First: I was upstairs with my mom in her old bedroom, and on her desk is a picture of me. I'm about two years old, and I have that one ridiculous curl on top of my head; like Suzannah, I didn't have much hair at the age of two, but my mom made the best of it by twirling it all around a single curler. But that wasn't the part that struck me. For the first time, when I looked at a picture of me I saw something in my face that I see in my daughter's face now.

"Suzannah looks like me a little here, right?" I asked my mom. She seemed surprised.

"She looks a lot like you," she said.

Second: When my grandpa retired from farming in 1988, my dad filmed the auction. Recently, my mom converted the old VHS tape to DVD, and we watched it after my grandpa's funeral last weekend. It was fabulous for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it captured the essence of what I'll always remember about my grandfather and our relationship with him. That grin. The way he walked, the way he lifted his hand in greeting to everyone. The way he'd casually sling an arm around my brother and me, rough and affectionate. I loved it.

What I didn't expect to see, though, was a shot of me, by myself, climbing on to his four-wheeler. I leaned back, oh-so-casually, because I was so cool at the age of nine. I wouldn't look directly at the camera; apparently I was shy. (It's okay not to comment on that, people.) My mom called my name. I turned slightly, almost coyly, my bangs falling over my forehead. I smiled. And in that moment, the twenty-nine-year old me saw something in the nine-year-old me that was eerily familiar -- because it's the same look I see in my two-year-old daughter. That same sideways smile, the same look in her eyes.

I don't even remember who first cried, "That's Suzannah!" But it felt good to know that other people saw it too. And maybe I shouldn't even need that, because I know she's very deeply my daughter, but it kind of made me want to pump my fist in the air and say, look out, world, here we come, my girl and me.

And it all begins again...

It's nearly nine o'clock as I write this, definitely past Suzannah's bedtime. She's in bed, but she's not sleeping, nor does she seem remotely interested in sleeping. Tonight, she's just talking, talking talking talking, rattling off every word she's ever learned, punctuating her stream-of-consciousness chatter with "Okay!" every now and then. Matt and I are trying to follow what in the hee-haw she might be talking about, but I think she really just likes to play with words. She's my daughter, after all.

I've been quiet here lately, due to the frenetic beginning of another school year and a very fast trip to Montana over the weekend for my grandfather's funeral, but things are settling down and I'm finding my groove again.

I was flipping through old journal entries, and I found this:

I feel good tonight and I've felt remarkably calm this weekend. I'm noticing a pattern, now that I am about to begin my fourth year of teaching. Something happens the weekend before the kids arrive. I stop panicking long enough to trust that everything will be okay, that everything will just happen. And even on a deeper level, that the universe is actually pretty kind. It's a vague and unspecific but completely comforting feeling. I felt it enter with my breathe last night as I walked across the parking lot after my workout, this generic "everything will be okay" feeling. I remember writing something similar in my journal three years ago, when I had every reason in the world to be terrified -- living in a new state, a new city, beginning a new job and wondering if I had what it takes to do it well. I've had it every year since then. I don't know what it is, but every year, on the weekend before school officially starts and my kids arrive and I find myself hurtling into the incredible momentum of teaching teenagers again, I somehow, miraculously, remember to breathe. And trust. And believe. These moments are the whispers that keep me moving and believing.

What's interesting is that the shape of my life is so different now, but that feeling, that golden September optimism, is still there. I suppose it's a sign that right now I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be.

Raise your hand if you can believe that this is my eighth year of teaching English. I know. Also, I meant it when I said I wasn't going to write about school on this too-public blog; the stories I tell are really too juicy and dangerous for that. You're just going to have to buy my book.