Writing myself back into a state of gratitude

Yesterday, right at 2:10, I received a call from my daughter’s school -- the health room. I learned two years ago that the end of my school day perfectly coincides with her last recess of the day, because this has happened approximately once a year since kindergarten. That first year, her friend Kathryne was “helping” her do a flip on the bars and it ended badly. Last year she was hit in the face with a rope on field day (they were mostly calling to warn me that when I picked her up that afternoon it’d look like her face had been branded, but she didn’t want to quit field day, much less go home). Yesterday, there was yet another incident on the bars that led to the nurse handing me a sheet on head injuries and letting me know how to monitor her for a concussion. She had some swelling and an abrasion, but no disorientation, and her pupils seemed normal. Still, the nurse warned, you can’t assume anything -- she’d seen children with concussions who initially seemed just fine. And while Suzannah was quite upset after she got hurt -- which is unusual, as she is normally incredibly stoic about illness and injury -- she did seem mostly fine. Still, I found myself creeping into her room to rouse her periodically for several hours after she went to bed last night, thinking SECRET CONCUSSION! Today she still seems perfectly fine, even rather proud of her battle wound. She still wanted to go to gymnastics this morning, and she couldn’t wait to tell her coach about her injury.

My anxious mama heart is pretty relieved. And while of course I hate that my children ever have to be hurt, maybe it was okay that I left school earlier than I had planned yesterday. I was trying to squeeze in a meeting and a really unpleasant referral before I left yesterday, and I had to abandon both of them to attend to my daughter’s more pressing needs. I wish she hadn’t hurt herself, but it took me out of my own headspace which, at the moment, was that bad neighborhood at four in the morning that Anne Lamott likes to write about.

I had a couple of spectacularly horrific days this week. Some weeks are like this. I can’t put specifics on this public blog, but it doesn’t really matter anyway -- I suspect weeks like this are part of any job that requires this level of emotional investment. The lows can be awfully low, and two afternoons in particular left me feeling so defeated that all I could do was sink into the couch and cry it out. (Unfortunately, one of those couches happened to be at school. I’m fairly adamant about not crying in front of students, but one of our administrators wasn’t quite so lucky to escape it. Look, I am emotional person. Love me or leave me.)

That said, on Thursday night I sat down to write it all out, and I managed to write myself back into a state of gratitude. Because:

I work with people who love me and have my back. A few of them are the best friends of my adult life.

I know that I can e-mail Kyanne and Becca and sound insane and they will write back almost immediately and make me feel slightly more human.

A bad day in three of my classes is still a pretty good day.

I get to laugh a lot, every single day.

My job is a lot of things, but boring is not one of them.

I have one tough class, and a lot of days with them feel just really, really bad. But when it’s good, or when I feel like I’m connecting with a kid the world has already written off -- even if it’s just for that day -- I can’t even put into words how that feels. I wish that happened every single day, with every single kid, but when it does happen, that is what I carry home with me. That’s the class that makes my heart bigger.

(Make no mistake: that is also the class that has me drinking wine straight from the bottle some nights, telling my husband that I picked the worst job in the entire world and he should be sorry he married someone so dumb, and crying into my hands because it feels so overwhelming and futile sometimes. But that’s where I go right back to feeling grateful for the people who get it because they’re right there with me.)

Every single year, I meet incredible people and get to spend a lot of time with them. And when I’m lucky, they stay in my life even after they graduate.

Even on the worst of days, I come home to a really lovely life. Even on the worst of days, I know my children will make me laugh before bed, and I’ll be smothered with kisses and hugs. And for some reason, my husband still seems to like me even when I seem completely unhinged.

The lows of my job are low. Heartbreakingly, gut-achingly low. But the highs are incomparable to anything else I think I could be doing with my life. Partly, I suppose, I need to write this down to remind myself that it is true. It does not always feel true, even though I know at my core -- always -- that it is.