I'm still here

I went for a late-afternoon run today, wearing shorts and a t-shirt instead of my winter outdoor running gear. I cannot even begin to describe how wonderful that felt.

I'm sick with about my thirtieth cold of the year and, quite frankly, I feel like crap. I'm coughing up horrifying things in the mornings, I'm coughing my way through my seniors' orals this week (Dear IB people: please do not choose any of my students' recordings to listen to), I'm congested, I'm worn out, and I'm completely out of patience. I haven't been sick like this since my first year of teaching, when I was adjusting to living in a brand-new state and figuring out how to teach for the first time and also teaching in a classroom that possibly had some really nasty mold. (It smelled like a possibility, anyway.) So I'm forced to draw the inevitable conclusion that this year has just been absurdly stressful enough to wreak this sort of havoc with my immune system.

In case it hasn't been obvious, I've been kind of avoiding this blog lately. (Sidenote: you know what I hate? The word blog. It seriously sounds like something I coughed up this morning after a night of allowing ropes of mucous to congeal in my chest. You're welcome.) It has not been the most spectacular month. We all came through sinus infections and ear infections and colds in January; a few weeks ago, 2.5 members of the Winslow household were hit with the stomach flu (Matt is the .5, as he only felt sick enough to consider working from home one day and didn't have much of an appetite for a few days, but he did not spend the wee hours of the morning throwing up like his wife and son did, although that, thankfully, happened on different days). Once we'd all sufficiently recovered from that, Suzannah and I came down with the same crud we're battling now, which means that both of us have had sort of stinky attitudes this week.

Let me tell you what Mama Guilt feels like: You spend an afternoon and evening really battling your stubborn firstborn, because she is so obviously trying to turn into a teenager at the tender age of five. She is, in your eyes, sassy and defiant and obstinate and whiny, and you have just had it with the attitude problem already. And you're not feeling all that great, and you haven't gotten enough sleep. For that matter, neither has she, because she's been allergic to sleep since she was conceived and sometimes it makes her a little owly. By the time you finally get her into bed, you feel like all you've done is bark at her all day long, and when she doesn't want extra snuggles before bed you take it really personally but also think her attitude still kind of stinks. And then -- then! -- she wakes up totally, completely congested in the morning, and it's so obvious that she feels pretty rotten, and suddenly her behavior from the day before makes perfect sense, and you feel like the biggest jerk in the whole world. Thankfully, your obstinate firstborn is pretty willing to forgive and forget, especially when you allow her to pick a Special Dinner (instead of forcing her to take a thank-you bite of the curried quinoa with toasted almonds and veggies you made the night before).

(Special Dinner, in this case, happens to be Kraft macaroni and cheese shaped like Cars -- the Disney kind.)

So anyway, I haven't been writing a lot, because it's all been snot and puke and diapers and tantrums. Also, some really upsetting things have happened at school in the last couple of weeks, and as much as I want to write about it, I can't -- mostly because this space isn't right for that, and because it involves really personal details of my students' lives. I've struggled with this a bit, because while I want to talk about what it's like to work with these kids, not only do I need to honor their privacy but I need to protect myself as well. And not just in the obvious sense, but in the sense that a teacher needs to be careful about sharing the raw, sometimes painful reality of working with kids -- because people forget that they are kids, and they tend to use such stories to make sweeping generalizations about public education or The System or whatever else people have opinions about, and I'm just not in the mood. I write a lot of recommendations every year for kids who go to Ivy League schools, and I love them a lot and it's a huge, huge privilege to teach them, but I also work with a lot of at-risk kids, and they're the kids who keep me up at night. Because I love them, too, and when I talk to other people I find myself growing strangely, fiercely protective of the kids who make my life a particular hell sometimes.

I can feel myself starting to write in about twenty different impassioned directions right now, and I have a lot of stuff to finish up by tomorrow, so I'm going to stop there. What I really signed on to write about was how good today's run felt, despite the hacking cough. Just to feel the sun on my arms, to smell the wet earth full of spring. Soon, the cherry blossoms will scatter on the breeze and flutter over the sidewalks, and I'll retire my cold weather gear for several months. I needed this run.

Other things have been good, too. I had a wonderful birthday weekend, in which my brother and sister-and-law stayed with the kids while Matt and I had a fancy grown-up dinner date at a restaurant that was decidedly not kid-friendly (no crayons! No grilled cheese!), and on the next day -- my actual birthday -- Matt gave me time to nap by myself for two glorious, restorative hours, and then he took me to the Elliott Bay Book Company where I shopped recklessly for books while he played with the kids and then we all went out for Indian food. That was a pretty perfect day.

And teaching isn't always upsetting. Today, in fact, two former students paid me an unexpected visit. One was even kind of a punk for me last year, and I always thought his feelings for me fell somewhere between contempt and vague amusement, but then they went to about three different places looking for me. Because I've spent the entire week doing senior IB orals I've had a sub for my regular classes, and they were in the library today, so the boys went to my room, then to the main office, and then to the library. The parked themselves there until I showed up at the very end of class to check on my kids, and then they presented me with chocolate (good chocolate! Lots of it!) and stories about what they're doing now and hugs, and that felt really awesome.

(Someday I will write about what it feels like to teach a kid who will be the first in his family to graduate from high school. I will write about his smile, about how it's impossible not to grin back at him. Or I'll write about the girl who started the year announcing loudly that she hated to read because it's a stupid waste of time, but last week she wrote three solid pages on Zeitoun in one class period and said, "Well, okay, this book is interesting.")

The lows of teaching are pretty low, I'm not going to lie. I've been at this for ten years, and I still have moments of wondering if it's worth it, if I'm cut out for it. I've had more of those moments this year than I've had in a very long time. At the same time, though, the highs? They're why I still believe this one true thing: that this matters, and I'm still -- for now, at least -- exactly where I'm supposed to be.