The last day in August. Labor Day weekend. Thirteen years ago at this time, I’d already spent three days in front of my very own class, for the very first time. I spent the weekend curled up with my new puppy in my new apartment, trying to process this crazy, brand-new life I was living. I distinctly remember the relief I felt at having those three days to do exactly that and nothing else.
We start after Labor Day now, although our teacher in-service days began last week. I’ve been back at school for two weeks now. Not every day, but quite a few days. I’ve cleaned my classroom and made photocopies and lesson plans and have more still to do, although sometimes when I feel anxious because I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with one of my new preps two weeks from now I need to remind myself that during my first year, despite trying to get ahead each weekend, I still found myself planning Thursday’s lessons on Wednesday night. Now, planning units is much easier, and much more fun, and I know it will all just happen. I love reading and rereading things I’m going to teach. I love the creative process of planning how I’m going to do that -- for the first time in some cases, or how I’m going to rework something I’ve done before. It’s exciting. (I believe, again and again, that poetry will save us in the end, and that literature matters. I believe in connections. I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in these kids.)
This year, I’m still thinking of all of these things. Thirteen years in, I still get butterflies. But I still feel that this is where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and so I’ve shaken off the Sunday afternoonishness of mid-August and am planning to hunker down tomorrow and do some real work. I’m going to sail into next week excited to meet these kids I’ll be spending the year with.
Some things change, though. This year, I’m not wandering restlessly around my apartment or reveling in sleeping in one more time. Today, I spent my day smoothing my son’s hair off his sweaty forehead while he napped. I sent my daughter into the backyard to kick around her soccer ball. I made them lunch; my daughter ate hers quickly, while my son had to be coaxed. I tried to keep them separated as much as possible, because the last thing my daughter needs is to start the third grade with her brother’s cold. I napped restlessly myself, listening for my son. He woke me in the middle of the night last night, asking for water. He was cold, and then he was hot. I helped him out of the long-sleeved pajama top he’d insisted on sleeping in, tucked him in loosely. I took his temperature. Touched his cheek.
It is terrible timing, to have a sick child the weekend before school starts. The simple fact is that I must show up next week. Maybe by then I’ll have caught whatever my son is fighting; Lord knows I’ve caught plenty of bugs from my children over the past eight years. I can separate my children from each other, but I cannot separate myself, nor do I want to. They are entitled to my hands brushing their hair out of their sweaty faces, to my kisses after they drift off in a restless sleep. It’s part of the territory, even when it’s inconvenient.
“I’m stressing,” I said to Matt tonight, after both of our children were tucked into bed. “I seriously can’t miss anything this week. If he’s not better by Tuesday...I mean, I really think he will be, I think his fever will probably break tonight, but if it doesn’t, can you--“
He was already nodding. Yes, he can stay home if he needs to. I tried to breathe. We are so lucky. We can make it work. I can go to school. Even if I wind up feeling terrible, which I always assume will happen because I am a worst-case scenario kind of girl, I can go. I will survive, and we will survive. Of course will; I know this. And so I can reduce this moment to its simplest: my little son is sick, the only thing that matters. Not terribly sick, of course--he has a fever, and a bit of a cough. He is tired, wrung-out, cranky. This is not 2011, when he had a kidney infection, when he wouldn’t eat, when I stayed up with him at three in the morning, showering blearily in the middle of the night after he threw up all over me, when I e-mailed my principal to tell her I wouldn’t be able to make a mandatory staff meeting after coming home from the hospital, waiting for the results of a blood test. This is a cold, or allergies maybe. This is a common fever, this is restless sleep. This is childhood, and this is motherhood. And still. Still. My heart is anxious and my hands are restless. I know to let the fever run its course. I know the rest of us might get sick, or we might not. (Usually, we don’t. But there has been enough germ-sharing in our family that I always figure it’s safer to assume that will be the case, and then I can be pleasantly surprised.)
There are so many aspects of parenthood that aren’t fun -- who enjoys vaulting out of a warm bed in the middle of the night because a young child is crying, or throwing up, or needs to go to the bathroom, or needs a drink of water? I remember reading (years ago, when I was pregnant with Isaac, I think), some article on whether having children makes you “happier.” Honestly, I don’t think it does, at least on a day-to-day basis, because there is just so much bickering and whining and snot and poop and sticky fingers and drudgery. It’s not that I don’t think of myself as happy; it’s that I don’t think happiness is the point. I think of happiness as something superficial, I guess, and fleeting. What parenthood has done, though, is increase my deep, deep joy. How can I explain this? How can I explain that while of course I would prefer to sleep peacefully all night long, there is something I love about being the one to guide my son’s arms through his pajama top when he’s fussing at three o’clock in the morning? That it is a privilege to hold his head when he is feverish or ill? That simply being present for these people I love so much is a gift beyond anything I could ever find the words for which to ask?
Tomorrow morning, the last morning before it all starts again in earnest, I will rise early and take my son’s temperature before I eat my own breakfast and pray for it to be lower. I will drink coffee, whatever the thermometer tells me. I will have some time to myself in the afternoon to wrap my head around the week; Matt will take the kids while I write lesson plans, and read, and think. For the past couple of years, Labor Day has meant that he takes the kids to the zoo while I sit at a nearby sandwich shop and drink lattes or lemonade and work, but tomorrow maybe he’ll stay home with the kids and I’ll just go to Starbucks. Which is fine. Suzannah and I will pack her backpack and get ready for her Open House on Tuesday. Matt and I will cook dinner with the last of our fresh veggies for the week -- we’ll make a salad, find some way to use the last of our kohlrabi and beets before next week’s veggie box comes. Even if Matt has to stay home on Tuesday, we will be okay. This is the season of life we are in.
I’m excited for the school year, and soon I’ll be carried along on the momentum of it all. But in the meantime, this weekend has served not so much as a vacation, as a break, but as a reminder that life also happens within these small moments, glimpsed in between my grand ideas and my to-do lists: in tucking my son into bed and peeking anxiously through the door while he naps. In watching my daughter kick a soccer ball across the backyard. In hearing her giggle over some book she’s reading, tucked away in her room while her brother and I nap fitfully. It doesn’t make the bigger picture less important, but the smaller moments are the moments in which I live, and breathe, and love.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Friday, August 15, 2014
Cycles
I’m sure there are teachers out there who don’t feel the crippling Sunday-afternoonish anxiety of August, who don’t have back-to-school nightmares, but I don’t know them.
It’s not that the anxiety or the nightmares means we don’t love our jobs. These aren’t visions; they are simply part of the cycle. I’ve written about this before, and one thing Becca and I talked about before she flew back to China this summer was how we (mostly) deeply love the cyclical nature of teaching. We must go through this: the end-of-the-year exhaustion, the burnout, the desperation. The giddiness of early summer, the languid July days stretching before us, the early-August unsettling, and finally this: the panic, the fevered dreams. Mine usually involve a class full of every mean student I’ve ever had, the really awful ones. It’s a class full of only those students, to be clear, and in my dreams they become larger than life, terrifying in their insolence. I can’t get control of the class. They don’t hear me. It’s like that first horrible teaching scene in Dangerous Minds or any other dumb movie about teaching. As if the nightmares aren’t enough, during my waking hours I imagine all kinds of worst-case scenarios that have absolutely no basis in reality, but I dwell on them anyway, and soon I’m convinced that even if they’re not actually happening there’s a perfectly good chance that they might. I have hypothetical arguments in my head with people who have no idea they’re involved, and then I feel hostile towards them in real life. (Fortunately, this usually dissipates once I’ve actually seen the person involved, and usually I have the good sense not to mention it.)
There are a couple of ways to get off what my husband calls the hamster wheel in my brain. First, I reread journal entries from the August before my very first year of teaching. I’d just moved into my new apartment overlooking Puget Sound, where I lived alone for the very first time. I had a new pug puppy who ate half a drawer in my new kitchen the week I brought her home. My aunt and uncle lived nearby, but otherwise, I didn’t know a soul, having left my best friends back in Minnesota and Montana. Matt wouldn’t join me for a few more months. I was excited, overwhelmed, terrified, and lonely. I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing. Thirteen years later, I wish I could go back and give that girl a hug and tell her it’s never going to be this hard again. Which is mostly true, although I wasn’t miserable during my first year of teaching. I didn’t have time to be.
The second thing I do is watch episodes of The West Wing. No matter how anxious and stressed I am, ever, it will never be as terrible as being the President. I have comforted myself in this small way ever since Becca gave me a few seasons on DVD after Isaac was born. (I watched the first few seasons at two in the morning, nursing my son in the dark.)
“That,” I say to Matt, “is a stressful job.” He agrees.
And finally, at some point in August, on a day in which I feel I’m clinging to the last moments of our summer, I just have to go to school. I can’t wait until the week before school actually starts, even though I can do most of my planning at home. I have to go in with no real agenda other than spending some time reclaiming my space, remembering that my classroom is, in many ways, another home for me.
But it doesn’t look like home when I return each August. I clean it up before I leave in June: I clear the tables, get rid of all the extra projects students never bothered to take home save for the handful I want to keep, recycle the papers that were never picked up. The photographs of my children, my extra pens, my hole punch and stapler all go into a desk drawer, where they’ll remain safe over the summer. I have the students stack the desks in the back, and then I flip off the lights and lock the door.
The campus was quiet when I returned today. Registration won’t start for another week, although I could hear the marching band practicing down on the field. I opened the door to the computer lab of the English building and smelled the familiar musty scent of carpets drying from their late-summer shampoos. The inner room was piled with boxes and furniture; some teachers are shifting classrooms and are halfway through the moving process. My podium, I noticed, had been dragged in there, too. When I entered my own classroom, I was prepared for the chaos. The carpets were dry, and my desks had been unstacked, but they were scattered, shoved everywhere. My media cart was wedged in the back of the room; the side table on which I keep crates of kids’ portfolios was all the way on the other side of the room. One of my bookshelves was actually standing on top of my desk, still fully loaded with books. (It’s a small one, and fairly light, but still, I had to unload the entire thing to hoist it back to the floor. I didn't mind. It made it easier for me to wipe down the shelves.)
Suzannah and I spent a couple of hours in my room today. I had a vague idea of “stopping in” for a bit, but when I saw the state of my room, I knew I couldn’t leave until I’d set this small corner of my world in order. Suzannah embraced the task of helping me wipe down all the desks and asked cheerful questions about high school. She spends a fair amount of time there with me, and she seems so comfortable with the idea of someday being a high school student (though she envisions herself in my class, loyally selecting a desk near mine -- I do so love my eight-year-old). Today, though, I said, “Hey! You’re about to start third grade! Let’s just enjoy that for now, shall we?”
I tidied, wiped, sanitized, recycled, and rearranged until I felt sweat beginning to trickle down my back. I cleared away little odds and ends I’d meant to get rid of back in June. Suzannah smiled when she noticed the pictures of her and Isaac on my desk.
“How old is Isaac here?” she asked.
“Oh, gosh. Well, that picture’s a couple years old. He’s not quite two.”
“So...that means I’m five. Yep, that’s about right.”
This year, I’ve decided, I will actually add more current pictures of my children to my desk. It’s just that the two I have now capture them in such a beautiful, innocent moment on a lovely summer day, before Suzannah started kindergarten, a few months after Isaac learned to walk. I look at those pictures and I’m grounded, no matter how I’m feeling at school. Returning those pictures to the clean surface of my desk reminds me that every day, the world is new. It’s a good way to feel at the beginning of the school year.
And this is how I transition from crazy to calm, from dread to the quiet beginning of anticipation. From feeling unsettled to feeling optimistic. I begin to remember why I love this, even if I can’t put it into graceful words yet. I begin to remember that it matters, that I am about to return to my place as part of a greater whole.
Today I decided on specific days for planning each of my classes. I have a plan for planning, I suppose. In the meantime, I resolve not to be so crippled by anxiety that I can’t be present in the last sunny summer days with my family. We swim in Lake Washington, eat dinner on our patio, play in the yard. We go to the Elliott Bay Brewery and cross the street for ice cream at Husky Deli. We go to Veggie Grill and eat the breaded cauliflower appetizer off the summer menu. We’ll attend Matt’s company picnic, and the kids will play in the bouncy house and the splash park. We’ll squeeze in another family hike in the mountains. We’ll use up the rest of our sunscreen.
I’ll be ready, when the time comes, to return to my classroom. I always am. Even when I don’t feel it, I trust it -- I trust the process. I remember the sweetness of September. Until then, there are moments left of summer. I know I can’t keep them, but I can hold out my cup and let it be filled.
It’s not that the anxiety or the nightmares means we don’t love our jobs. These aren’t visions; they are simply part of the cycle. I’ve written about this before, and one thing Becca and I talked about before she flew back to China this summer was how we (mostly) deeply love the cyclical nature of teaching. We must go through this: the end-of-the-year exhaustion, the burnout, the desperation. The giddiness of early summer, the languid July days stretching before us, the early-August unsettling, and finally this: the panic, the fevered dreams. Mine usually involve a class full of every mean student I’ve ever had, the really awful ones. It’s a class full of only those students, to be clear, and in my dreams they become larger than life, terrifying in their insolence. I can’t get control of the class. They don’t hear me. It’s like that first horrible teaching scene in Dangerous Minds or any other dumb movie about teaching. As if the nightmares aren’t enough, during my waking hours I imagine all kinds of worst-case scenarios that have absolutely no basis in reality, but I dwell on them anyway, and soon I’m convinced that even if they’re not actually happening there’s a perfectly good chance that they might. I have hypothetical arguments in my head with people who have no idea they’re involved, and then I feel hostile towards them in real life. (Fortunately, this usually dissipates once I’ve actually seen the person involved, and usually I have the good sense not to mention it.)
There are a couple of ways to get off what my husband calls the hamster wheel in my brain. First, I reread journal entries from the August before my very first year of teaching. I’d just moved into my new apartment overlooking Puget Sound, where I lived alone for the very first time. I had a new pug puppy who ate half a drawer in my new kitchen the week I brought her home. My aunt and uncle lived nearby, but otherwise, I didn’t know a soul, having left my best friends back in Minnesota and Montana. Matt wouldn’t join me for a few more months. I was excited, overwhelmed, terrified, and lonely. I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing. Thirteen years later, I wish I could go back and give that girl a hug and tell her it’s never going to be this hard again. Which is mostly true, although I wasn’t miserable during my first year of teaching. I didn’t have time to be.
The second thing I do is watch episodes of The West Wing. No matter how anxious and stressed I am, ever, it will never be as terrible as being the President. I have comforted myself in this small way ever since Becca gave me a few seasons on DVD after Isaac was born. (I watched the first few seasons at two in the morning, nursing my son in the dark.)
“That,” I say to Matt, “is a stressful job.” He agrees.
And finally, at some point in August, on a day in which I feel I’m clinging to the last moments of our summer, I just have to go to school. I can’t wait until the week before school actually starts, even though I can do most of my planning at home. I have to go in with no real agenda other than spending some time reclaiming my space, remembering that my classroom is, in many ways, another home for me.
But it doesn’t look like home when I return each August. I clean it up before I leave in June: I clear the tables, get rid of all the extra projects students never bothered to take home save for the handful I want to keep, recycle the papers that were never picked up. The photographs of my children, my extra pens, my hole punch and stapler all go into a desk drawer, where they’ll remain safe over the summer. I have the students stack the desks in the back, and then I flip off the lights and lock the door.
The campus was quiet when I returned today. Registration won’t start for another week, although I could hear the marching band practicing down on the field. I opened the door to the computer lab of the English building and smelled the familiar musty scent of carpets drying from their late-summer shampoos. The inner room was piled with boxes and furniture; some teachers are shifting classrooms and are halfway through the moving process. My podium, I noticed, had been dragged in there, too. When I entered my own classroom, I was prepared for the chaos. The carpets were dry, and my desks had been unstacked, but they were scattered, shoved everywhere. My media cart was wedged in the back of the room; the side table on which I keep crates of kids’ portfolios was all the way on the other side of the room. One of my bookshelves was actually standing on top of my desk, still fully loaded with books. (It’s a small one, and fairly light, but still, I had to unload the entire thing to hoist it back to the floor. I didn't mind. It made it easier for me to wipe down the shelves.)
Suzannah and I spent a couple of hours in my room today. I had a vague idea of “stopping in” for a bit, but when I saw the state of my room, I knew I couldn’t leave until I’d set this small corner of my world in order. Suzannah embraced the task of helping me wipe down all the desks and asked cheerful questions about high school. She spends a fair amount of time there with me, and she seems so comfortable with the idea of someday being a high school student (though she envisions herself in my class, loyally selecting a desk near mine -- I do so love my eight-year-old). Today, though, I said, “Hey! You’re about to start third grade! Let’s just enjoy that for now, shall we?”
I tidied, wiped, sanitized, recycled, and rearranged until I felt sweat beginning to trickle down my back. I cleared away little odds and ends I’d meant to get rid of back in June. Suzannah smiled when she noticed the pictures of her and Isaac on my desk.
“How old is Isaac here?” she asked.
“Oh, gosh. Well, that picture’s a couple years old. He’s not quite two.”
“So...that means I’m five. Yep, that’s about right.”
This year, I’ve decided, I will actually add more current pictures of my children to my desk. It’s just that the two I have now capture them in such a beautiful, innocent moment on a lovely summer day, before Suzannah started kindergarten, a few months after Isaac learned to walk. I look at those pictures and I’m grounded, no matter how I’m feeling at school. Returning those pictures to the clean surface of my desk reminds me that every day, the world is new. It’s a good way to feel at the beginning of the school year.
And this is how I transition from crazy to calm, from dread to the quiet beginning of anticipation. From feeling unsettled to feeling optimistic. I begin to remember why I love this, even if I can’t put it into graceful words yet. I begin to remember that it matters, that I am about to return to my place as part of a greater whole.
Today I decided on specific days for planning each of my classes. I have a plan for planning, I suppose. In the meantime, I resolve not to be so crippled by anxiety that I can’t be present in the last sunny summer days with my family. We swim in Lake Washington, eat dinner on our patio, play in the yard. We go to the Elliott Bay Brewery and cross the street for ice cream at Husky Deli. We go to Veggie Grill and eat the breaded cauliflower appetizer off the summer menu. We’ll attend Matt’s company picnic, and the kids will play in the bouncy house and the splash park. We’ll squeeze in another family hike in the mountains. We’ll use up the rest of our sunscreen.
I’ll be ready, when the time comes, to return to my classroom. I always am. Even when I don’t feel it, I trust it -- I trust the process. I remember the sweetness of September. Until then, there are moments left of summer. I know I can’t keep them, but I can hold out my cup and let it be filled.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
These small moments
The thing about forming deep attachments to people is that they don’t always last. Or rather, the attachment might, but relationships change and fade away. This is the natural order of things. People grow up, move away, move on -- it happens. This is the rhythm of the universe. But sometimes, the relationships hold even as they change, and years later, you might find yourself gifted with a spectacularly beautiful day in which you spend time with people who meant so much to you years and years ago, and it feels, also, like the natural order of things.
Today felt like a gift. As a teacher myself I know how powerful and intense student/teacher relationships can be, and I also understand that despite their intensity, many of them -- most of them, really -- fade over time. People remember many of their teachers fondly (I hope) but they don’t necessarily stay connected. But I’m thirty-five years old, and still. Still! One of the people I always want to see when I go home is one of the best high school teachers I ever had (I spoke about her in the interview, thirteen years ago, that landed me the teaching job I still have today), and so we remain connected, years later. I love Becky, and I love her daughters, who I babysat for a couple of summers after I graduated. They were younger than my own children are now when I spent my days with them. They were candelighters at my wedding. And now they’re adults, twenty and twenty-three years old. I had coffee with their mother last week in Bozeman, as I always try to do when I’m there, and she mentioned that she and the girls were heading to Seattle for a few days this week.
And that is how I wound up spending the day with them today. We met at the Woodland Park Zoo, and I brought Matt and the kids, and it was just delightful beyond words. I couldn’t believe how much they remember about the time we spent together -- they were so young! -- but I love that they do, because they were such a defining part of my summer days for awhile. I took them everywhere with me. I remember giving them piggy-back rides around downtown Bozeman, driving them in the backseat of my new car, taking them to ice cream, to the park, to the pool. When Matt and I took our children swimming at Bogart Park in Bozeman less than two weeks ago, I told him about taking these girls there, too. They really felt like family more than babysitting charges; I brought them out to my parents’ house all the time, and when we took my grandmother out for lunch on our way to Bozeman on our recent trip she asked about them because she remembers them, too.
“You trusted me so much,” I said to Becky today. “I just kind of took them everywhere I went.”
She shrugged. “I knew you,” she said.
Today I watched these two young women interact with each other in this beautifully sisterly way, still so different from each other, still so completely fabulous. I watched them play with my own children, which burst my heart in the very best way. And I thought about how strange time is, how these two little girls have become adults while I still feel so much like my eighteen-year-old self sometimes, how they have their own lives now, and how utterly lucky I am to be able to share this day with them. I think about how much their mother has meant to me for over half my life now. I think about the moment today at lunch when my two little children were both tugging on their arms, and I don’t even know what to call that, really. I could only smile and say, This is so great.
***
I didn’t forget about writing down three positive things each day for seven days; in fact, I scrawled them in a notebook on our trip, but I decided not to work to hard to post while we were on vacation. The internet break felt really, really healthy and necessary. But! I’m back now, so here are twelve good things.
Huckleberry riesling and huckleberry ice cream. Swimming in Lake McDonald, the way the cold water closed over my head when I finally worked up the nerve to plunge in, the view of the mountains when I resurfaced. Field roast and baked beans cooked over the fire. Falling asleep in our tent, curled around our children. Walking to Apgar Village in the cool dawn because Matt needed breakfast supplies, buying a hot chocolate, and returning to our campsite for pancakes and French press coffee. Driving across northern Montana, taking the wheel on the Chester road -- maybe one of my favorite quiet stretches of highway -- while my family dozed. The sunsets east of Shelby and just south of Great Falls. The first shower after camping. Showing my children the house I lived in when I was their age, driving them past my elementary school, my middle school. MacKenzie River Pizza (twice) and Leaf & Bean coffee (a bunch of times). Pickle Barrel sandwiches and huckleberry soda in the park. Swimming at Bogart in the afternoon heat and in the rain. Hiking to Emerald Lake and Heather Lake and Grotto Falls. Losing my sunglasses, and finding them again next to a rock where I’d stopped to rest and adjust my boots. Running along the highway with a view of the Bridger mountains. My dad’s famous popcorn in his ancient popcorn popper. Date night at Over the Tapas: poached pear salad, goat cheese croquettes, grilled asparagus, and vegetable Wellingtons (which I told Matt were the best thing I’d ever tasted). The trout aquarium at the St. Regis travel center. Homemade huckleberry scones. A cute neighborhood pub in Coeur d’Alene. Watching my son break into a grin on the carousel at Riverfront Park in Spokane, especially after he thought it would be too scary. The way our house smells when we return to it after a vacation -- like home.
Is that more than twelve? I stopped counting. They are all small, simple things, but they are the things I remember most. The small things make me appreciate the big things: my family and this time we had together.
At our campsite at Glacier, Suzannah turned to me and said, “Four things made this a perfect day. First, we got to ride the shuttle to Logan Pass. Then, we had ice cream, and then we played in the lake, and then we had s’mores. When you get four things like that it’s a great day.” Later, as we enjoyed our dinner, she said, “Ahh. Milk and a fire. Perfect.” Indeed, this is how my children bless me every day. They remind me to be present, right here, in the simple joys of our lives. Perfection is found in these small moments: in ice cream, in jumping into a lake, in a chocolatey mouthful of dessert roasted over a fire.
Today felt like a gift. As a teacher myself I know how powerful and intense student/teacher relationships can be, and I also understand that despite their intensity, many of them -- most of them, really -- fade over time. People remember many of their teachers fondly (I hope) but they don’t necessarily stay connected. But I’m thirty-five years old, and still. Still! One of the people I always want to see when I go home is one of the best high school teachers I ever had (I spoke about her in the interview, thirteen years ago, that landed me the teaching job I still have today), and so we remain connected, years later. I love Becky, and I love her daughters, who I babysat for a couple of summers after I graduated. They were younger than my own children are now when I spent my days with them. They were candelighters at my wedding. And now they’re adults, twenty and twenty-three years old. I had coffee with their mother last week in Bozeman, as I always try to do when I’m there, and she mentioned that she and the girls were heading to Seattle for a few days this week.
And that is how I wound up spending the day with them today. We met at the Woodland Park Zoo, and I brought Matt and the kids, and it was just delightful beyond words. I couldn’t believe how much they remember about the time we spent together -- they were so young! -- but I love that they do, because they were such a defining part of my summer days for awhile. I took them everywhere with me. I remember giving them piggy-back rides around downtown Bozeman, driving them in the backseat of my new car, taking them to ice cream, to the park, to the pool. When Matt and I took our children swimming at Bogart Park in Bozeman less than two weeks ago, I told him about taking these girls there, too. They really felt like family more than babysitting charges; I brought them out to my parents’ house all the time, and when we took my grandmother out for lunch on our way to Bozeman on our recent trip she asked about them because she remembers them, too.
“You trusted me so much,” I said to Becky today. “I just kind of took them everywhere I went.”
She shrugged. “I knew you,” she said.
Today I watched these two young women interact with each other in this beautifully sisterly way, still so different from each other, still so completely fabulous. I watched them play with my own children, which burst my heart in the very best way. And I thought about how strange time is, how these two little girls have become adults while I still feel so much like my eighteen-year-old self sometimes, how they have their own lives now, and how utterly lucky I am to be able to share this day with them. I think about how much their mother has meant to me for over half my life now. I think about the moment today at lunch when my two little children were both tugging on their arms, and I don’t even know what to call that, really. I could only smile and say, This is so great.
I didn’t forget about writing down three positive things each day for seven days; in fact, I scrawled them in a notebook on our trip, but I decided not to work to hard to post while we were on vacation. The internet break felt really, really healthy and necessary. But! I’m back now, so here are twelve good things.
Huckleberry riesling and huckleberry ice cream. Swimming in Lake McDonald, the way the cold water closed over my head when I finally worked up the nerve to plunge in, the view of the mountains when I resurfaced. Field roast and baked beans cooked over the fire. Falling asleep in our tent, curled around our children. Walking to Apgar Village in the cool dawn because Matt needed breakfast supplies, buying a hot chocolate, and returning to our campsite for pancakes and French press coffee. Driving across northern Montana, taking the wheel on the Chester road -- maybe one of my favorite quiet stretches of highway -- while my family dozed. The sunsets east of Shelby and just south of Great Falls. The first shower after camping. Showing my children the house I lived in when I was their age, driving them past my elementary school, my middle school. MacKenzie River Pizza (twice) and Leaf & Bean coffee (a bunch of times). Pickle Barrel sandwiches and huckleberry soda in the park. Swimming at Bogart in the afternoon heat and in the rain. Hiking to Emerald Lake and Heather Lake and Grotto Falls. Losing my sunglasses, and finding them again next to a rock where I’d stopped to rest and adjust my boots. Running along the highway with a view of the Bridger mountains. My dad’s famous popcorn in his ancient popcorn popper. Date night at Over the Tapas: poached pear salad, goat cheese croquettes, grilled asparagus, and vegetable Wellingtons (which I told Matt were the best thing I’d ever tasted). The trout aquarium at the St. Regis travel center. Homemade huckleberry scones. A cute neighborhood pub in Coeur d’Alene. Watching my son break into a grin on the carousel at Riverfront Park in Spokane, especially after he thought it would be too scary. The way our house smells when we return to it after a vacation -- like home.
Is that more than twelve? I stopped counting. They are all small, simple things, but they are the things I remember most. The small things make me appreciate the big things: my family and this time we had together.
At our campsite at Glacier, Suzannah turned to me and said, “Four things made this a perfect day. First, we got to ride the shuttle to Logan Pass. Then, we had ice cream, and then we played in the lake, and then we had s’mores. When you get four things like that it’s a great day.” Later, as we enjoyed our dinner, she said, “Ahh. Milk and a fire. Perfect.” Indeed, this is how my children bless me every day. They remind me to be present, right here, in the simple joys of our lives. Perfection is found in these small moments: in ice cream, in jumping into a lake, in a chocolatey mouthful of dessert roasted over a fire.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Dignity/Adulthood/Whatever
We’re home again and I am, as they say, a hot mess.
On Friday afternoon my mom took the kids to the splash park, Matt went for a run on a trail he found in Bozeman, and I took my journal and my book to the Leaf and Bean. The day was hot, and it felt so lovely to duck into the coffee shop for awhile and sit at my favorite little table in the corner by the window. After awhile the sky burst open in a sunshower, and I watched the water steaming in the streets. By the time I left, they were dry again. I headed towards my car, looking forward to going home to change for our night out alone. And I tripped. Spectacularly. Over nothing. I twisted my left ankle and landed mostly on my right knee and my hands. My hands were only a little scraped, but I didn’t need to look down to know that my right leg was a mess.
And I didn’t look down--I didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead as I limped towards my car. Thankfully, I’d at least turned off Main Street by this time, so there’s the slight chance that no one actually witnessed my undignified fall; I hope not, anyway, because no one asked if I was all right, and I’d rather think it was because no one was actually there than because my hometown is full of jerks. Anyway, I tossed my stuff in the front seat and sat there for a moment, trying to relax enough to drive myself home and dabbing ineffectually at my bloodied knee with a scrap of tissue. (I have to admit that my main concern was how ridiculous my bandaged knee would look with the cute little dress I was planning to wear. And it was pretty ridiculous, but there was no way I was not wearing that dress. I bought it two years ago just to wear out on fun summer date nights, and I never wear it any other time.)
“Oh, Baby,” Matt said when he saw it. “Wow. See, this is why I worry when we go hiking.”
“I DIDN’T FALL YESTERDAY.”
“Yeah, but...I’m just saying.”
He has a fair point. Matt and I hiked up to Heather Lake on Thursday, which is something like 10 or 11 miles round-trip. (More for Matt, though. After we’d been hiking for about ten minutes he hustled back to the car at the trailhead to grab a rain jacket “just in case” -- we’d be gone several hours, and the forecast tentatively predicted thunderstorms. We ended up not needing it. He also turned back to search for my sunglasses, which I realized went missing from my head somewhere between Emerald Lake and Heather Lake. He didn’t find them during the 15 minutes he was looking, but I discovered them next to a rock on the way down. They must have slipped off my head while I sat down to adjust my boots.) Apparently, I’m klutzier than I would like to admit. (I would, however, like to take this moment to tell you all that my new hiking boots plus my new stupidly expensive inserts plus the way the guy at REI showed me how to tie my laces kept me from having blisters, which is a first. I HIKED FOR FIVE AND A HALF HOURS AND I DID NOT GET BLISTERS, except for one tiny one that barely even hurt so it doesn’t count. This has happened exactly zero times; I figured blisters were just something I would have to deal with if I wanted to hike with the big kids.)
When my dad saw my banged-up knee, he seemed confused.
“So wait, what did you trip on?”
“Nothing.”
“You just...fell down? Over nothing?”
“YES.”
“Did you black out first or something?” he asked, genuinely concerned.
“This is just what Shari does,” Matt offered helpfully.
Fast forward to Sunday night. We’d arrived home by early evening, in plenty of time for dinner, but since we’d been gone for ten days there wasn’t much in the fridge. Matt picked up some milk and a few other essentials to tide us over until our veggie box arrived on Tuesday. I didn’t have much of an appetite after sitting in the car for most of the hot afternoon (temperatures were well into the 90’s by the time we left Spokane around lunchtime), and the only thing I really wanted to eat was pho, so while Matt set about making macaroni and cheese for the kids I went to get some. I was back home with it in twenty minutes. And I’m not sure whether I was just tired and careless or whether the container was unusually full, but when I went to dump the noodles and tofu into the steaming broth, it slopped right over the side and all over my fingers.
I don’t think I’ve ever been truly, painfully scalded before. I was standing right next to the sink and thrust my hand under the faucet within seconds, so it could have been much worse -- but when I pulled my hand out of the water, thinking all I’d need to do was run some cool water over it for a few moments, I nearly screamed. I’ve never felt anything like it. It didn’t stop burning.
Matt filled the sink with cold water and I kept my left hand submerged while clumsily fiddling with chopsticks with my right hand. The phone rang as I slurped my pho at the kitchen counter. It was my parents, calling to make sure we’d made it home, and I had to admit that I was standing there with my burned hand in the sink while I ate dinner. I assured them it was fine, though; when it was actually in the water it felt mostly perfectly okay. They told me to be careful, and we hung up.
I pulled my hand out of the water, planning to dry it off and help Matt put the kids to bed. I made it halfway across the kitchen and turned right back to the sink. It hurt so badly I couldn’t keep from yelping. This confused me, since on the surface it didn’t look all that bad. A little pink, maybe, but certainly not alarming. I gritted my teeth and sprinted into the study to retrieve my phone. Back at the sink I spent fifteen minutes googling terrible things that can happen to seemingly innocuous burns when left untreated. The internet basically told me that I should head to the ER or I might as well go ahead and bid farewell to my hand. Burns to the hand can be “quite serious” and are not to be messed with.
Once again, I lifted it experimentally out of the sink. I didn’t see flames on the surface of my skin, of course, but it certainly felt like they were there. I told Matt I was planning to just cut the damn thing off. He sighed and said that was a terrible idea, but I didn’t really feel like I had his full attention. (The children did. Settling two children into their regular old beds after ten days of camping and driving and grandparents and fourteen deserts every day is a little nuts.)
“The problem is that I’m holding it together too well,” I said to him. “I’m just too calm. If I allowed my voice to betray the amount of pain I am in, you would all be terrified and rush me to the hospital.”
“Well, do you think we need to go in?” Matt asked reasonably.
“No,” I muttered. “But I’m going to have to sleep with my hand in a bowl of cold water all night long. At the table.”
“Sorry, Baby,” Matt said, as he chased our daughter down the hallway with the dental floss.
I sat there feeling sorry for myself for awhile. I tried to appreciate the fact that Matt had taken over everything since I’d rendered myself completely useless. I told myself that my hand looked more or less fine, so if I could just get through the first few seconds of burning when I pulled away from the cold water I’d be fine.
But every time I tried to keep my hand out of the water, I wanted to scream. The internet told me that this sensation should last only five to ten minutes. Maybe twenty or thirty. After an hour, the hand would surely be lost. In the meantime, I could try painkillers. I sprinted into the bathroom and held my hand underneath the cold water tap while I awkwardly tapped a few tablets out of the bottle of ibuprofen.
“Did you take ibuprofen?” Matt called out the next time he heard me yelp.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough,” I said. “I need a gin and tonic. Possibly two. The only way I am going to be able to get any sleep tonight is to be a tiny bit tipsy.”
He seemed unconvinced, but he was distracted and I am bossy, so he made me a nice strong one. I alternated between sipping that and trying to read a few pages of The Cuckoo’s Calling. Matt eventually went to bed, and I sat there with my burning hand and my scabbed leg and felt absolutely pitiful. Shortly before midnight, I wrapped my hand in a cold dishtowel I’d thrown in the freezer and managed to fall asleep, no doubt in part because of the gin.
Thankfully, my hand felt much better in the morning. Still tender -- the thought of putting it in warm water to shower made me cringe, so I put that off for the better part of a day -- but much better. As in, I felt there was the slightest chance I would pull through, and possibly be able to pick up the dog from the vet and make the kids' lunch.
So I survived all that only to lock myself out of the house yesterday, for the second time this summer. I am just not feeling like a very competent human being these days.
The first time it happened back in June, the kids and I were on our way to the splash park and it was fairly late in the day. We could have just played in the backyard and waited for Matt to come home; we could have even walked to Starbucks for a treat, since I’d managed to grab my wallet along with our towels and sunscreen. Yesterday, though, I was supposed to pick up my friend Becca and take her to the airport to catch her flight back to China. Also, it was barely noon. Waiting for Matt was not an option.
Thankfully, my brother lives only ten minutes away, has a key to my house, and happens to fly airplanes at night so is generally home during the day when I am prone to fits of stupidity like this. I was worried that I’d wake him up, but I didn’t see any other good options.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” (Oh, good. He sounded awake.)
“HI. UM, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? ARE YOU HOME? BECAUSE I LOCKED MYSELF OUT OF THE HOUSE AGAIN AND I HAVE TO GET BECCA TO THE AIRPORT BECAUSE SHE IS FLYING BACK TO CHINA AND IF YOU COME OVER RIGHT NOW I WILL BUY YOU ALL THE THINGS.”
He laughed, like he was totally used to me sounding so unhinged, and drove cheerfully into our yard a few minutes later. I hugged him (he was covered with sawdust or something from some mysterious project he’d been working on, but I did not care), told him he was my favorite person in the whole world, and took off. I managed to retrieve Becca and take her to the airport without incident, so there’s that.
Someday, I might manage to behave like a real adult, but my scabs are going to have to heal first.
On Friday afternoon my mom took the kids to the splash park, Matt went for a run on a trail he found in Bozeman, and I took my journal and my book to the Leaf and Bean. The day was hot, and it felt so lovely to duck into the coffee shop for awhile and sit at my favorite little table in the corner by the window. After awhile the sky burst open in a sunshower, and I watched the water steaming in the streets. By the time I left, they were dry again. I headed towards my car, looking forward to going home to change for our night out alone. And I tripped. Spectacularly. Over nothing. I twisted my left ankle and landed mostly on my right knee and my hands. My hands were only a little scraped, but I didn’t need to look down to know that my right leg was a mess.
And I didn’t look down--I didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead as I limped towards my car. Thankfully, I’d at least turned off Main Street by this time, so there’s the slight chance that no one actually witnessed my undignified fall; I hope not, anyway, because no one asked if I was all right, and I’d rather think it was because no one was actually there than because my hometown is full of jerks. Anyway, I tossed my stuff in the front seat and sat there for a moment, trying to relax enough to drive myself home and dabbing ineffectually at my bloodied knee with a scrap of tissue. (I have to admit that my main concern was how ridiculous my bandaged knee would look with the cute little dress I was planning to wear. And it was pretty ridiculous, but there was no way I was not wearing that dress. I bought it two years ago just to wear out on fun summer date nights, and I never wear it any other time.)
“Oh, Baby,” Matt said when he saw it. “Wow. See, this is why I worry when we go hiking.”
“I DIDN’T FALL YESTERDAY.”
“Yeah, but...I’m just saying.”
He has a fair point. Matt and I hiked up to Heather Lake on Thursday, which is something like 10 or 11 miles round-trip. (More for Matt, though. After we’d been hiking for about ten minutes he hustled back to the car at the trailhead to grab a rain jacket “just in case” -- we’d be gone several hours, and the forecast tentatively predicted thunderstorms. We ended up not needing it. He also turned back to search for my sunglasses, which I realized went missing from my head somewhere between Emerald Lake and Heather Lake. He didn’t find them during the 15 minutes he was looking, but I discovered them next to a rock on the way down. They must have slipped off my head while I sat down to adjust my boots.) Apparently, I’m klutzier than I would like to admit. (I would, however, like to take this moment to tell you all that my new hiking boots plus my new stupidly expensive inserts plus the way the guy at REI showed me how to tie my laces kept me from having blisters, which is a first. I HIKED FOR FIVE AND A HALF HOURS AND I DID NOT GET BLISTERS, except for one tiny one that barely even hurt so it doesn’t count. This has happened exactly zero times; I figured blisters were just something I would have to deal with if I wanted to hike with the big kids.)
When my dad saw my banged-up knee, he seemed confused.
“So wait, what did you trip on?”
“Nothing.”
“You just...fell down? Over nothing?”
“YES.”
“Did you black out first or something?” he asked, genuinely concerned.
“This is just what Shari does,” Matt offered helpfully.
Fast forward to Sunday night. We’d arrived home by early evening, in plenty of time for dinner, but since we’d been gone for ten days there wasn’t much in the fridge. Matt picked up some milk and a few other essentials to tide us over until our veggie box arrived on Tuesday. I didn’t have much of an appetite after sitting in the car for most of the hot afternoon (temperatures were well into the 90’s by the time we left Spokane around lunchtime), and the only thing I really wanted to eat was pho, so while Matt set about making macaroni and cheese for the kids I went to get some. I was back home with it in twenty minutes. And I’m not sure whether I was just tired and careless or whether the container was unusually full, but when I went to dump the noodles and tofu into the steaming broth, it slopped right over the side and all over my fingers.
I don’t think I’ve ever been truly, painfully scalded before. I was standing right next to the sink and thrust my hand under the faucet within seconds, so it could have been much worse -- but when I pulled my hand out of the water, thinking all I’d need to do was run some cool water over it for a few moments, I nearly screamed. I’ve never felt anything like it. It didn’t stop burning.
Matt filled the sink with cold water and I kept my left hand submerged while clumsily fiddling with chopsticks with my right hand. The phone rang as I slurped my pho at the kitchen counter. It was my parents, calling to make sure we’d made it home, and I had to admit that I was standing there with my burned hand in the sink while I ate dinner. I assured them it was fine, though; when it was actually in the water it felt mostly perfectly okay. They told me to be careful, and we hung up.
I pulled my hand out of the water, planning to dry it off and help Matt put the kids to bed. I made it halfway across the kitchen and turned right back to the sink. It hurt so badly I couldn’t keep from yelping. This confused me, since on the surface it didn’t look all that bad. A little pink, maybe, but certainly not alarming. I gritted my teeth and sprinted into the study to retrieve my phone. Back at the sink I spent fifteen minutes googling terrible things that can happen to seemingly innocuous burns when left untreated. The internet basically told me that I should head to the ER or I might as well go ahead and bid farewell to my hand. Burns to the hand can be “quite serious” and are not to be messed with.
Once again, I lifted it experimentally out of the sink. I didn’t see flames on the surface of my skin, of course, but it certainly felt like they were there. I told Matt I was planning to just cut the damn thing off. He sighed and said that was a terrible idea, but I didn’t really feel like I had his full attention. (The children did. Settling two children into their regular old beds after ten days of camping and driving and grandparents and fourteen deserts every day is a little nuts.)
“The problem is that I’m holding it together too well,” I said to him. “I’m just too calm. If I allowed my voice to betray the amount of pain I am in, you would all be terrified and rush me to the hospital.”
“Well, do you think we need to go in?” Matt asked reasonably.
“No,” I muttered. “But I’m going to have to sleep with my hand in a bowl of cold water all night long. At the table.”
“Sorry, Baby,” Matt said, as he chased our daughter down the hallway with the dental floss.
I sat there feeling sorry for myself for awhile. I tried to appreciate the fact that Matt had taken over everything since I’d rendered myself completely useless. I told myself that my hand looked more or less fine, so if I could just get through the first few seconds of burning when I pulled away from the cold water I’d be fine.
But every time I tried to keep my hand out of the water, I wanted to scream. The internet told me that this sensation should last only five to ten minutes. Maybe twenty or thirty. After an hour, the hand would surely be lost. In the meantime, I could try painkillers. I sprinted into the bathroom and held my hand underneath the cold water tap while I awkwardly tapped a few tablets out of the bottle of ibuprofen.
“Did you take ibuprofen?” Matt called out the next time he heard me yelp.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough,” I said. “I need a gin and tonic. Possibly two. The only way I am going to be able to get any sleep tonight is to be a tiny bit tipsy.”
He seemed unconvinced, but he was distracted and I am bossy, so he made me a nice strong one. I alternated between sipping that and trying to read a few pages of The Cuckoo’s Calling. Matt eventually went to bed, and I sat there with my burning hand and my scabbed leg and felt absolutely pitiful. Shortly before midnight, I wrapped my hand in a cold dishtowel I’d thrown in the freezer and managed to fall asleep, no doubt in part because of the gin.
Thankfully, my hand felt much better in the morning. Still tender -- the thought of putting it in warm water to shower made me cringe, so I put that off for the better part of a day -- but much better. As in, I felt there was the slightest chance I would pull through, and possibly be able to pick up the dog from the vet and make the kids' lunch.
So I survived all that only to lock myself out of the house yesterday, for the second time this summer. I am just not feeling like a very competent human being these days.
The first time it happened back in June, the kids and I were on our way to the splash park and it was fairly late in the day. We could have just played in the backyard and waited for Matt to come home; we could have even walked to Starbucks for a treat, since I’d managed to grab my wallet along with our towels and sunscreen. Yesterday, though, I was supposed to pick up my friend Becca and take her to the airport to catch her flight back to China. Also, it was barely noon. Waiting for Matt was not an option.
Thankfully, my brother lives only ten minutes away, has a key to my house, and happens to fly airplanes at night so is generally home during the day when I am prone to fits of stupidity like this. I was worried that I’d wake him up, but I didn’t see any other good options.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” (Oh, good. He sounded awake.)
“HI. UM, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? ARE YOU HOME? BECAUSE I LOCKED MYSELF OUT OF THE HOUSE AGAIN AND I HAVE TO GET BECCA TO THE AIRPORT BECAUSE SHE IS FLYING BACK TO CHINA AND IF YOU COME OVER RIGHT NOW I WILL BUY YOU ALL THE THINGS.”
He laughed, like he was totally used to me sounding so unhinged, and drove cheerfully into our yard a few minutes later. I hugged him (he was covered with sawdust or something from some mysterious project he’d been working on, but I did not care), told him he was my favorite person in the whole world, and took off. I managed to retrieve Becca and take her to the airport without incident, so there’s that.
Someday, I might manage to behave like a real adult, but my scabs are going to have to heal first.
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