I’m here for the weather (and for the libraries)

It feels more like November than late September tonight. I opened the sliding glass doors into our backyard earlier this evening to feel a blast of wind and rain right at my face. Matt had just returned from a run; earlier this afternoon we actually had a little break in the rain and he went outside to dig up the remains of our tiny backyard garden. But the weather really hit once darkness fell.

And I love it. I do. Nights like this remind me of Tom Robbins:

And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world. Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from the desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs.
--from Wild Ducks Flying Backward

I’m here for the weather, too, and I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. Once I make my peace with the end of summer, I’m ready for the rain. I’m not really ready for it to be like this all the time yet -- I do love the golden afternoons with their yellow and red leaves against a pale sky -- but I do also love a dark, wild night. I suppose it says something about our household that I wasn’t really aware of the storm until I opened the door to face it, though. Our kids were playing mostly-happily in the family room, Matt was cooking his famous cabbage and potato soup, I was slicing pieces of the freshly-baked bread on the counter, and things felt comfortably warm. Not quite chaotic, but not quiet, either. The ordinary bustle of dinner and stories and jammies and bedtime negotiations masked the tempest outdoors. I find the contrast so cozy and magical -- maybe this is why I love this weather so much. I love hunkering down with a book and a mug of something warm to drink while the rain spatters the windows (this afternoon it was pumpkin spice chai and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple). I love falling asleep to the sound of weather, which is why one of my favorite memories from our camping trip this summer is drifting to sleep in our warm tent while rain fell on the roof of our tent, and it's why I love Sunday afternoon naps best when the afternoon grows dark under heavy skies.

So here I am, at the end of my glorious agenda-free weekend. Agenda-free, but not activity-free. For me, the difference lies in the fact that everything we did required absolutely zero advance planning. A trip to the grand re-opening of the library. A trip to the Elliott Bay Book Company (new books, plus a few quiet moments to sit and write in the cafe with a glass of white wine and a plate of warm bread and butter). Dinner at Veggie Grill, which both kids claim is their favorite place because they have the best “chicken.” (Hah!)

Sidenote: This has nothing to do with my weekend, really, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway -- I’m kind of amazed at people who expend so much righteous energy ranting about things like new libraries. In my experience, most of the people who comment extensively on news stories or whatever just need someplace in which they feel like their righteous indignation is heard, but my word. Apparently, some people don’t like the new design or look of the library, and this is accompanied by lots of ranting about tax dollars. (It occurs to me that these are probably the same people who talk about paying my salary with their tax dollars. If I give you the three cents, will you be quiet for a little while?) What if I do like it? At the risk of ridicule from all the haters, I must admit that I kind of do. And I pay taxes too! Matt isn’t in love with the design, but -- so what? We love libraries. We are a family who uses them liberally. I will happily support them with my tax dollars, with my presence, with my cheerleading, with whatever I can. Libraries are important. Also, I read a comment in which someone ranted about the “dumbing down of America” because the children’s section is now grouped by subject instead of by author’s name. To which I say: Find a real thing to be upset about. Also, as the parent of a three-year-old boy who loves books about fire trucks and rockets and cars and airplanes, this is fantastic! We check out approximately eleventy billion books each time we go to the library. Do you think I know who authors each book that strikes my children’s fancies? No clue! But my son can walk, on his own, into the section labeled “Things That Go” or whatever, and he is in heaven. I just let him go, and he chooses a bunch of books that look interesting to him. Sorry for not caring about whether he can navigate the Dewey Decimal system yet. “Dumbing down of America”? What is wrong with people? Why are we getting so pissy about children’s books in libraries?

Anyway.

I had a hard moment of Sunday Blues earlier, but that moment was short-lived. Today gifted me with everything I want from a Sunday: the best vegetarian pho in town for lunch, new flannel pajama pants (which I put on immediately after finishing my pho), a little quiet(ish) reading time, a nap -- a lovely, cozy nap in the living room that was mostly respected by my family, homemade soup and bread, one-on-one bedtime reading time with both kids, and a little cozy couch time with Matt. (We’re binge-watching season 2 of Homeland on Netflix right now.) I haven’t added piles of grading to my Sunday evenings yet, although that’s about to change (for the next...hundred months or so). It’s an ordinary night, full of things that, when I remember them years from now, will probably be indistinguishable from many, many other ordinary Sunday nights. But if this kind of coziness characterizes my memories from this time in our lives, I will hardly complain.

A little love letter to friends, books, storms, and afternoon naps

Earlier this week, Becca posted, “How is it still September? September has been happening FOREVER.” It feels true -- summer seems so far behind us -- but still, the weeks spin crazily by. Last Sunday night I found myself looking so greedily forward to where I sit right now. This Friday night, this couch, the kids asleep, and the promise of an agenda-free weekend, something we haven’t seen in what feels like a very long time. We’ve packed our days lately. I don’t regret any of our full weekends, because they’ve been full of spending time with people we enjoy, but also, I haven’t yet figured out how to emerge from that kind of weekend feeling well-rested and refreshed. Going to bed at a reasonable hour would help, but that particular habit has grown a bit rusty since last June. Also there’s this crazy teaching thing I do on the weekdays. That’s the part that always makes the time speed up. The endless motion, the ebb and flow, the rhythms of the days. It’s energizing and exhausting, both.

Tonight I went out to dinner with Kyanne and realized I haven’t seen her since I’ve been back in the classroom, and we had so much to process. Earlier this week I had a day in which I felt so down and discouraged, a day in which I listened to all the wrong voices, and I sent out a distress call of sorts. It was answered immediately. I had some good coaching, you might say, and by Wednesday my head and my heart were back in the game. May I never take for granted the teacher friends I have who get it, who carve out space for me to feel all the messy feelings, and who remind me exactly why I have chosen this. May I always carve out space in return.

So September has been very, very full, and lacking in Sunday afternoon naps, which is why I’ve had my sights on this weekend for about a month-and-a-half. Tomorrow we’re planning a trip to the Elliott Bay Book Company so I can buy The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri and Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood, followed by dinner at Veggie Grill for some of my favorite comfort food. And on Sunday -- which promises heavy rain and wind, according to the weather reports -- I am going to take an afternoon nap, and woe to anyone who dares to interfere. Our house will feel a little chilly because we haven’t yet turned on the heat, and I’ll curl up under my favorite blanket on the couch in the semi-dark of our living room, lulled to sleep by the sound of the wind and rain. October, I am ready for you.

Fall, and finding my groove again...

Yesterday afternoon the kids and I came home to discover one of the neighbor’s dachshunds had escaped from their yard. I was busy unloading our school things from the car and herding the kids through the back door when I heard the barking behind me. I know that bark, but it sounded awfully close. I turned around to see that sweet but rather shrill little girl wiggling with pleasure right there in my garage. So I scooped her up and carried her next door to her grateful owners, who had no idea their gate had been left open a crack, and somehow I wound up with their three (human) boys in exchange.

No, it was fine -- their oldest is Suzannah’s age, and the youngest is Isaac’s age, and there’s one in the middle, so they make pretty great playmates for my children. It’s just a lot of energy for a sunny afternoon at the end of a week, so I was grateful both for the weather and for our fenced, kid-friendly backyard. I was happy to host, but I was admittedly a much more cheerful host when I could tell those five energetic children they needed to find games to play outside rather than in the family room, where they tend to make short work of dumping every toy in the house onto the middle of the floor.

Yesterday, I thought, would be the last truly warm and sunny day of the season -- a fitting end to the week and a nice way to greet the fall. The news promised rain today, and mostly, I’m fine with that. Fall always feels like my favorite season, although I love the turning of every season. Still, when I woke to sunshine this morning, it felt like a blessing. Matt would be able to finish mowing our wildly overgrown lawn, and it was a beautiful morning for a 5k. The kids at my school put on their second annual Colorsplash 5k, and I ran it for the second time today. It was a ton of fun, as it was last year -- you want to keep me going on a run, especially one with some hills, then line the route with high school kids cheering. Especially kids who know me and throw brightly colored powder all over me. I’m telling you, my next ordinary evening run through the quiet streets of my neighborhood might feel a little anticlimactic.

Seriously, though, while I had no hand in today’s event other than showing up and running it, it reminded me that I work with really fantastic people -- both the adults and the teenagers. The teenagers were there at absurd o’clock on a Saturday morning to pull this off, and everyone had a fantastic time. Teachers, administrators, people running with strollers, people running with pets, and tons and tons of kids -- kids I don’t always get to see outside the classroom, kids who seem to be involved in everything, kids who I honestly didn’t expect to ever see at a school event that didn’t strictly require their presence without the threat of detention. I ran the race today with all of them, and it was a privilege.

I’m slowly -- slowly! -- finding my groove this year. I’ve been back in the classroom for a couple of weeks. I haven’t managed to settle into a routine bedtime, unfortunately, and I don’t do well with long stretches of not-quite-enough sleep; it colors everything. However, I get to work with a really great student teacher and a lot of absolutely fantastic students this year, and in the first two weeks of school they have filled me with joy and laughter and hilarity and absurdity like only teenagers can. I also have some challenging kids -- some of them (most of them) are really lovable. Some of them break my heart. (Often, those are the same kids.) Some of them make me want to drink wine straight from the bottle. All of them deserve the best I can give them, and those are the kids who inspire and require me to truly be at the top of my game.

In other words, it’s back to business as usual.

My girl

Me, during bedtime reading: Suzannah, you’re GREAT at reading. Why don’t you read to ME tonight?
Suzannah: Fine. I’ll read ONE page. Maybe two. But only two.
Me: But my throat is really tired! I’ve had to talk so much in the last two days!
Suzannah: Well, I’ve been working TOO.

The thing I forget every year is how exhausted my voice is after those first few days. How my throat aches. Look, I talk a lot, and I talk fast. I know this. But somehow, the first few days of classes are different than my normal wind-bagginess. Meeting groups of teenagers for the first time, getting to know them, introducing myself to them, talking to lots of people at once, all day long -- it requires an entirely different sort of energy.

I finally met my classes yesterday. We start late, after Labor Day. It seems that all of my teacher friends in different districts or different states have been back at this for awhile, and in the last week I’ve gotten antsy, mostly because I’ve been at school every single day for the past two weeks anyway. But in the end, I appreciated that my first day back was freshman orientation -- a planning day for me this year, since I don’t teach freshmen or have a freshmen advisory -- and my first day with my own students fell on a Thursday. For two days I’ve been on in a way I haven’t had to be in quite a long time, and if my first on day had fallen on a Monday, I think I’d be comatose at the end of the week. As it stands, I had grand plans for my first day back; I was going to spend my evening doing things like cooking a healthy dinner and going for a run before stories and bedtime. I thought I’d feel energized. What actually happened was that I made it home with the kids, decided we were having boring old spaghetti with jarred sauce instead of a recipe that made good use of our CSA veggies, changed into comfy clothes in which I had no intention of sweating, and poured myself a glass of wine while I settled the kids on the couch to watch something on Netflix. At first I was like, wow, I’m Mom of the Year, but then I decided that if any day calls for extending a little grace to myself it’s the first real day of teaching, and yesterday that grace looked a lot like a box of spaghetti and a bottle of wine.

Sometimes it’s hard to be your own friend. I’m working on that.

Suzannah started second grade this year. It’s nearly impossible for me not to write that in ALL CAPS. Second grade! Second grade is wonderful. I remember the summer before she started kindergarten; I pretty much felt like I was on the verge of tossing my cookies every day just worrying about it. Would she be okay? Would she miss me? Would she make friends? Would her teacher love her like I did? I am forever -- forever -- indebted to her wonderful kindergarten teacher, who did indeed love her, and who also had the gift of calming an anxious mama like me. I knew immediately that she would be fine, and I will always love her teacher for that. Last year I didn’t worry at all. We had a glorious summer in which I did not obsess over my daughter’s teacher or whether or not she would be okay; I knew she would. And I loved her first grade teacher just like I loved her kindergarten teacher. Truly, it is because of those two that my daughter loves school and has blossomed from a very cautious, shy girl into a confident young lady. (Okay, she still seems to feel terribly self-conscious about reading aloud; even in front of Matt and me she’s pretty quiet about it, her voice dropping not quite into a near-whisper but close. This is so interesting to me. Even though I teach English, I really firmly believe in not pushing “literacy” on young children, and so while we’ve read to and with our children since birth, we don’t drill them at all in reading and writing themselves. And it just happened. When my daughter picks up, say, a Star Wars book and reads it to me, I’m always a little surprised that she just flies through it and corrects me if I mispronounce something. Currently, she’s reading this awful R.L. Stine book she picked out for herself at the University Bookstore in Tacoma. But she still seems shy about people hearing her read.)

I asked her, the night before her first day, if she was nervous. She seemed perplexed by the question. “No, of course not!” she said.

“Are you excited?”

“I’m so excited!” she said, and grinned her gap-toothed grin. And she was. The next morning it was all Matt and I could do to convince her to walk over to the school so we could take pictures -- she would have preferred that we just drop her off in the car line so she could jump out and get on with things. We met her teacher last week, and Suzannah liked her immediately. That, in addition to the fact that most of her first grade class is in her second grade class (they are a sweet little group) and she knew that going in, made for a pretty easy transition. And when I picked her up at the end of her first day of second grade, her grin was just as big as it had been when I left her that morning. She flew into my arms and we walked, hand-in-hand, across the school lawn. She turned back.

“Wait!” she said. “I forgot to say good-bye to my friends! And I have to go say good-bye to my teacher! Can I go back?”

At home today I looked through the papers in her green folder, the note her teacher gave her about her three terrific first days of school, the pictures she drew and the “About Me” paper on which she wrote that her favorite subject is math (it’s true -- she really likes it and is really good at it, and I take absolutely zero credit for this) and she has a little brother and her favorite thing about summer was camping, and my heart filled right up with gratitude for this terribly ordinary thing, this transition we’re learning so well. Second grade. It’s not even a rite of passage, really, like a confirmation or a graduation. But somehow my daughter has become so much more -- and so beautifully -- herself, and it is such a privilege, and such a joy, to witness.

And when she ends her day by running back across the lawn to give her teacher a good-bye hug, I know in my deepest mama heart that we’re gonna be okay.