A little unexpected grace

I reached kind of a breaking point this week.

It's just that everything -- everything -- went wrong. Teenagers I normally like turned nasty. Teenagers who normally challenge my patience and my sanity made me want to quit. We're being asked to do so many new, confusing things this year and then we read perky little things in newsletters about how all the changes are going to simplify teacher's lives, and I'm sorry, things like that make me feel just a teeny bit hostile. And I'm convinced my building has a mold problem, which is probably why I've been sick for this entire flipping school year, but don't worry, my seniors are used to me coughing through their orals.

It all culminated in being told by a kid I really like, a kid with whom I have a great relationship, that I was unfair, and that his grade was "fucking bullshit." There was that, and then there was the class that came afterwards, in which about ten sixteen-year-old boys decided to see how many times in a row they could fart loudly without my being able to tell which one was doing the farting. At which point they got the THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS speech from me. I mean, whatever, so they were being immature and ridiculous -- you know what, even good sixteen-year-olds do this sometimes. Trust me. But there was that, and there was this other kid, and there were these other things, and there were a bunch of my best students turning in totally crappy work and then whining about their grades, and it was just a very, very, very bad day.

(Teachers need to be very careful when venting about such things. If we tell the wrong people -- even the wrong friends, people who mean well and who love us but who have no idea what it's actually like to work with real kids in real schools -- we're likely to hear all sorts of opinions on public education how horrible "kids today" are when what we really just need is someone to listen. It's funny; I realized that I still feel terribly protective of the very kids I pretty much want to strangle when other people start telling me about everything that's wrong with them and "the system.")

(That said, this time around, this week, I felt nothing but support from the people who love me. I guess I talked to all the right people.)

(And I'm breaking my No Writing About School rule, but let's be honest: any teacher reading this has probably had this class.)

It's not as though anything that happened this week is something I haven't seen before. But I'm sick, I've been coughing for days, I'm tired, and everything that could go wrong, or feel wrong, did. In the space of a single day. Students, co-workers, The System, all of it. And wow, that can really mess with one's perspective.

So I broke my No Crying At School rule at lunch on Wednesday. I sat at my desk and sniffled until about five minutes before my next class. I survived until the end of the day, at which point I fled to my car and cried the entire way home. I told Matt that I was taking the next day off, that if I didn't give myself some actual breathing space I would definitely probably get myself fired on purpose the very next day. It wasn't pretty; I'm normally a lot more resilient.

As it turned out, that mental health day saved me. I don't even remember the last time I took a day off just for me; my birthday in 2008, maybe, a day on which I elected to stay home and scrub my kitchen in peace. My "sick" days are reserved for my children, because they are of the age of fevers and ear infections and colds that require me to leave my job and pick them up. Last year Isaac's kidney infection meant that I used up a lot of sick days I hadn't planned on. And whatever -- this comes with the territory of having children; it is what it is, and there's no point in whining about it. But I don't even take sick days for myself, and taking a completely frivolous day off when I wasn't even on my deathbed seemed awfully self-indulgent. But it saved me. I drove to Seattle, spent two-and-a-half hours at the Elliott Bay Book Company, sipping coffee and writing and book-shopping. I took myself out to lunch. I read a hundred pages of a book I wasn't teaching. I bought myself a cupcake. I didn't grade one single paper.

I didn't actually expect anything to get better, though. I assumed I'd come back to a terrible note from the sub, and that everything would just suck forever. I bought myself a peppermint mocha on the way to school and braced myself for, I don't know, everything. Total misery. (A not-terribly-secret part of me believes that if I set very low expectations, I will be pleasantly surprised.) Here's what actually happened today, though:

The student who was so upsettingly confrontational on Wednesday was polite and engaged today, and after class he asked if we could talk -- at which point he made a very sincere and heartfelt apology, and we had a really good conversation. I don't think I realized until that moment how much that one thing had upset me, because if that would have been the only thing to go right today, it would have been enough.

I also had some really, really great conversations with a couple of colleagues I respect and trust; I turn to them when I need perspective, and they delivered. I laughed a lot with some of my good friends. I realized that my circle of supportive friends is bigger than I realized, and the circle of toxic people on the edges of my life isn't as big or as powerful as I sometimes think it is. I taught my senior class and realized that there has not yet been a single day this year that I haven't looked forward to them -- even when they make me a little nuts, even when they frustrate me, I really love them. Every single one. They're such a fantastic group of kids. And then I found myself sort of liking my regular juniors at the end of the day, even though they were horrible on Wednesday.

And then a girl who seriously hated me last year brought me a pumpkin roll with cream cheese frosting. (I cannot for the life of me figure out why, but this year she has decided she either likes me or hates me a little less than all her other teachers, because she brings me baked goods all the time. Delicious ones that appear to be not poisoned, even.)

At home, my kids played relatively nicely together and I had them both bathed by seven o'clock. Matt and I made popcorn and drinks and curled up to watch stuff on Netflix. We're making lovely weekend plans. I can breathe, literally and figuratively. I haven't had a coughing fit since my last class of the day. I have some papers to grade, but now, on Friday night, with the weekend stretching before me, it seems manageable. I might feel good enough for a run in the morning.

My sudden good humor is almost irritating even to me. But I'm full of gratitude anyway -- for the breathing space, for the perspective, for the grace.