January can be a difficult month. It’s long. Packing up the Christmas decorations is not my favorite chore. Returning to school after two weeks of winter break is tough for both students and teachers, for various reasons -- the readjustment is hard both for those of us who had a wonderful, restorative vacation and those of us who had a darker time of it. And then in the midst of this January slump, we have to get ready for semester finals, and kids are stressed and there is all this grading and I’m trying to call parents and get kids to dig in and get shit done or at least not give up all hope if they’ve been floundering because I know that sometimes kids who make terrible decisions in October can and often do pull it together by March. And then it’s also the month when my children always seem to get their worst colds, and inevitably I’m always stressed about how to juggle staying home with sick kids with semester finals and worried about getting sick myself. The dread, as it turns out, is worse than the reality: that this is a season of life, that colds can and will happen, and we will roll along and deal with it.
This week there are stacks of notebooks on my desk at school, papers bundled together with brightly colored binder clips on my desk at home, papers spread across my dining room table. I stay up too late on school nights. I make lists. On Monday, I will grade all of my freshmen reading logs. On Tuesday, I will grade all of my sophomores’ close reading assignments: color-marking and passage analysis. I will grade five junior composition books each day this week so I don’t have to haul a giant armload home. I will grade all of their commentaries on Thursday night.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I sip mug after mug of green tea and grade papers on the couch while I watch reruns of Friends after the kids are in bed. It’s not efficient, but it is comfortable. At 11:45 or so, I give up, pack up for the next day, and crawl into bed. On Friday I pack the remaining comp books into my car and head home with them, determined to blast through them as soon as I get home with the kids. I will finish grading them before five o’clock while the kids watch Home Alone 2, and then we’ll head to West Seattle to meet Matt for dinner.
I pour a glass of wine. I write comments with my purple Pilot Pen. I prefer green, but it’s the end of the semester, and I’ve run my green pens dry.
(I fell in love with these green pens so many years ago, back in my high school creative writing class. I wrote in my notebook on one difficult morning, “Just give me a green pen, and everything will be okay.” And my teacher responded, “You’ve learned the secret of small, everyday miracles.”)
Even in the midst of this grading, the work that, at this time of year, seems like nothing more than frenetic drudgery, there are these small gifts. In all of these awkward teenage sentences there are some that sing. I know perfectly well that I’m not teaching a bunch of future English majors but I am teaching a few who love language like I do, and I am teaching some who are learning to let their minds and hearts open a bit more all the time. One boy accepts a grade that is less than the one he wants, but he says, “I actually read this book, and I loved it.” I’m teaching kids who are doing things they didn’t think they could do.
And of course there are also the kids who give up, or never tried to begin with. There’s the kid who fights me every single day, the kid who needs the attention of everyone else in class all the damn time, the kid whose contempt for me, for school, and for his classmates casts a shadow in my room even though I know there is more to his story than the one he shows to me. But on a Friday afternoon in January, as dusk falls across my backyard and I sip my wine and read these sentences scrawled in a notebook, I feel like I’m just muddling through the only way I know how. Sometimes I think there are other jobs I could do, and even be objectively good at. But as crazy as I feel in this one, as heartbroken, as discouraged, as frustrated, I’m not sure anything else could bring me this kind of joy. A boy loved a book. A girl wrote passionate sentences, far more than she was required to write. A girl stopped by my room to hug me after school. A boy smiled when he understood that he is going to pass English.
I’m counting on all of this to carry me through the end of the semester with a reasonable amount of grace and good humor, because it is all too easy to be sucked into a giant collective pity party about how terrible everything is. I threw just such a party for myself the other night. Isaac had a deep, chesty cough, and Matt came home with a sore throat and clogged sinuses. I suggested unkindly that next time he felt like he was getting sick, maybe he could let me know before I started cooking a dinner he wouldn’t be able to taste and the kids wouldn’t eat anyway. And then I burned the damn dinner. And then Matt told me about some changes that are happening at work, and naturally I heard, “I’ll definitely be quitting my job, just so you know, so please freak out right now.” (He indicated nothing of the sort, and possibly my almost-freakout wasn’t strictly necessary.) I decided to sleep in the study, figuring my sniffling husband would get better rest without my rolling him over all night long when he started to snore -- and also, truth be told, hoping I’d avoid his cold germs. But then I crawled into bed with Matt anyway. It was warmer there.
I woke up yesterday morning determined to look forward to the day. Doesn’t that sound so obnoxious and trite? But it’s true. I made plans right away.
“We’re going to pick up Isaac right after school,” I said to Suzannah over breakfast, “and then we’ll make popcorn and watch a movie.”
Her eyes lit up. “Isaac!” she said. “Mom says we can do popcorn and a movie after school today.”
“And it’s show and tell today!” he cried.
Oh, bless them.
And then I got a text from Matt, suggesting we meet at the Elliott Bay Brewery for dinner because he knew I probably wouldn’t be in the mood to cook. Can we go to Veggie Grill tomorrow night, then? I replied. Sure, he said. All of it so ordinary. Popcorn. Dinner out at a place we go to all the time. The promise of a Saturday out in Seattle -- Pacific Science Center, maybe, but it doesn’t even matter. Something. Just the four of us, doing ordinary things that we might do on any ordinary Saturday. These are the things I remember about our weekends, these beautiful ordinary moments. Holding our children’s hands between us, walking through the rain on Seattle streets, singing in the car, sharing a smile if our children nod off in the backseat, rolling our eyes if they play their latest version of the Stinky Feet game at top volume.
I look forward to all of it. And that’s what gets me through January: finding things to look forward to, from tiny little gifts of time to myself, say, an hour to curl up on the couch with a book on a Friday afternoon, to the promise of a three-day weekend in Leavenworth with my husband and children and brother and sister-in-law. A different view of the mountains. Snow. Fog that settles over our neighborhood in the quiet evening, without the biting cold of November. The knowledge that the cherry blossoms will be bursting over the sidewalks two months from now, that the smell of spring will work itself upwards from the damp earth.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Friday, January 9, 2015
So this is January, and here we are
The Friday night at the end of the first week back after winter break feels so much more necessary than the first weekend of winter break.
I wrote that almost exactly one year ago, at the end of my first week back at school after winter break. It feels equally true tonight. I e-mailed Becca in China this morning and said something like, “Nine hours from now, I will be wearing pajama pants.” True to my word, I was home with both kids, changed into sweats, and making popcorn by 3:45. We watched movies; the kids built spaceships in the family room; I sipped wine and read a few pages of Redeployment. I just wrapped myself up in our lovely afternoon, in the knowledge that the kids will wake up early tomorrow morning but can read or play on their own for awhile. I brought home some papers to grade, but only a few. Tomorrow we’ll go out somewhere, the four of us, and we’ll eat dinner someplace and the kids will color at the table and bicker over the crayons, and they’ll be silly and tell jokes about toilets because lately toilets are apparently hilarious, and Matt and I will try to be annoyed but we’ll smile at each other across the table at the simple goodness of it all. This family. This life.
When Matt came home tonight, we cooked a cozy dinner together and I talked his ear off. I told him everything about my week. I told him about the kid I love who’s been suspended this week, about how desperately I love her and want her to be okay, about how every single odd is stacked against her but I stubbornly believe that something at her core is good. Today one of her teachers from last year found me after school and said, “I hear you’ve taken her on. Good for you. In my entire career, she’s literally the only one I’ve asked to have removed from my class.” I smiled a bit and said, “Hey, no judgements here. I get it. She’s a tough one.” And she is. But somehow, she’s one I cannot get out of my head. She’s one I thought about every single day over winter break, hoping she was okay. She broke my heart when I realized how quickly she responded to such simple things: holding her accountable, telling her she could go ahead and be pissed at me, fine, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Giving her a hug every day, plus an empty drawer in my classroom to keep her stuff in when she doesn’t go home at night, which is too fucking often.
(I teach so many kids like her. But this one -- she’s special to me. Don’t ask me why; I can’t explain it. And I’m not unique, I’m not better than the people who teach in the trenches with me. We all have these kids, those of us who show up every day for them. It is my hope, my desperate prayer, that when I can’t handle a kid because he’s an asshole, or because we just can’t connect, then someone else will.)
(I know perfectly goddamn well that she will break my heart. Again. More.)
I talked about the girl who never gets enough to eat, how I finally just showed her where my stash of crackers and granola bars is and said, “You don’t have to ask, okay? Just come get it when you need it.” I talked about the kid who never says a word to me in class, ever, but who sends me tentative and vulnerable e-mails about the writing she passes off as fiction. I talked about the kid who is really angry with me today because I made a phone call home, and he’s probably going to get yelled at a little bit and he might lose his cell phone for a few days. (But I also know his mother, and she’s great. I don’t call home when I suspect a kid might be hungry or unsafe. I won’t phone a mother who calls her daughter a whore, or when I worry that a father will break something in his son.)
I talked about the kids who make me laugh, which is easy because they make me laugh every day. I talked about the students who’ve come back, the ones who have graduated and are off becoming even more themselves in brilliant, beautiful ways. I’ve had coffee with a couple of them in the last few weeks. Some stop by my classroom. They fill my cup in ways they can’t possibly realize.
I talked about how I don’t know how to reconcile the disconnect I feel between teaching kids and talking about teaching kids.
And Matt listened, because he’s a good husband and a good friend, and finally he wrapped me up in a hug and said, “Your job comes with all the feels."
Monday was sort of spectacularly horrible. I’m not a new teacher, so I felt I’d set appropriately low expectations for the day. But then one of my classes managed to lower the bar to a previously unachieved level of suck (I’m pretty sure I’m loosely quoting my friend Kyanne here). It was almost comical. I started the class feeling glad enough to see them, even enjoyed them for about three seconds, and the one kid said something so assy to me that the entire class did that “OOOHHHH!” thing. Good God. Thing is, I knew the kid didn’t mean it, I knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, and his face went immediately pink, and he slouched in his chair. But after that, class was just pretty much over. (Later, he said, “I’m really sorry. That didn’t come out at ALL like it sounded in my head.” And I wasn’t even that upset, because that much was obvious to me.)
It wasn’t a great day, but it wasn’t the kind of day that had me seriously considering other careers, either. All the same, my thoughts were roiling that night -- I couldn’t relax, couldn’t turn them off. I replayed the day, again and again, an endless reel of film in my head. I was exhausted. I actually crawled into bed before the kids; they tucked me in. And then I was up again two hours later, unable to sleep. Matt found me reading on the couch before he went to bed, which was, I don’t know, sometime before one in the morning. (The next day he said, “Uh, you actually looked sort of crazed.”) I went to bed with him then, but I couldn’t fall asleep. At 2:30, I got up and ate a bowl of cereal, thinking that might settle me a bit. At 3:37, I got up to prowl around the house for awhile. I briefly considered doing a workout video in the family room, because Jillian Michaels would kick the shit of out my insomnia, right? At 4:15, I curled up on the couch, worrying that my tossing and turning would keep Matt awake. Shortly before 5:00, I crawled back into bed, where I think I dozed for forty-five minutes or so.
This wasn’t a night of restless or bad sleep, the kind that had me wondering if I’d slept. I was wide awake. I felt insane. I kept hearing Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” and “Jingle Bell Rock” from Home Alone in my head, alternating back and forth. I became increasingly paranoid. By the time I finally dozed off, I was convinced that admin at my school hated me and wanted to run me out of teaching.
But I drank a lot of coffee, and I felt more or less okay by the time I got to school. One of the administrators I’d imagined was totally out to get me stopped by my room to ask me a perfectly ordinary question and we wound up having a lovely conversation. My paranoia eased. I had a good day with kids. I had a great afternoon collaborating with some very cool people. I picked up my children. We ran errands together. I felt productive and sane. My eyes had begun to burn by then, to the point where I almost didn’t feel quite safe driving, but all in all, things were okay.
Matt brought home some Tylenol PM. I took it. I slept.
And tonight, on this cozy Friday night in early January, I can look back and appreciate all of that. Things are okay. We’ve all survived. We’re all back, fumbling through this work together. As I write this, my children are tucked into their beds, hugged and kissed and secure in the knowledge that they are loved. Matt and I are watching a movie and cuddling our anxious and aging pug, hoping she’s more or less okay with us for a little while longer. My students, I hope, are easing back into their own routines. It’s not that anyone feels overjoyed for winter break to end, but for some of them, even if they think they hate it, school is safety, it’s security, it’s clear expectations and rules they can try to break, it’s the one place they might experience something that looks like success. And for me -- well, honestly, by the end of break, I started to miss them.
Right now, there is no other place I want to be than here: my house, wearing flannel pajama pants, watching Despicable Me with my two beautiful children or watching them build Lego spaceships. Kissing my husband in the kitchen. Sinking into the couch when the kids are in bed. I’m tired. I’ve felt everything this week. I want to drink wine and read a book I’m not teaching. Tomorrow morning Matt will brew coffee and we’ll have waffles or pancakes and I might go for a run in the damp January air, and then I will take Suzannah to gymnastics. We’ll go to church together on Sunday, and probably at some point I’ll eat pho and read a story or two in The Sun and maybe, just maybe, squeeze in a nap.
But I also know that I’ll be back in the trenches on Monday, just like my girl returning from her suspension, and I’ll be waiting with my arms and my heart wide open. I feel I’m ready for that, too.
I wrote that almost exactly one year ago, at the end of my first week back at school after winter break. It feels equally true tonight. I e-mailed Becca in China this morning and said something like, “Nine hours from now, I will be wearing pajama pants.” True to my word, I was home with both kids, changed into sweats, and making popcorn by 3:45. We watched movies; the kids built spaceships in the family room; I sipped wine and read a few pages of Redeployment. I just wrapped myself up in our lovely afternoon, in the knowledge that the kids will wake up early tomorrow morning but can read or play on their own for awhile. I brought home some papers to grade, but only a few. Tomorrow we’ll go out somewhere, the four of us, and we’ll eat dinner someplace and the kids will color at the table and bicker over the crayons, and they’ll be silly and tell jokes about toilets because lately toilets are apparently hilarious, and Matt and I will try to be annoyed but we’ll smile at each other across the table at the simple goodness of it all. This family. This life.
When Matt came home tonight, we cooked a cozy dinner together and I talked his ear off. I told him everything about my week. I told him about the kid I love who’s been suspended this week, about how desperately I love her and want her to be okay, about how every single odd is stacked against her but I stubbornly believe that something at her core is good. Today one of her teachers from last year found me after school and said, “I hear you’ve taken her on. Good for you. In my entire career, she’s literally the only one I’ve asked to have removed from my class.” I smiled a bit and said, “Hey, no judgements here. I get it. She’s a tough one.” And she is. But somehow, she’s one I cannot get out of my head. She’s one I thought about every single day over winter break, hoping she was okay. She broke my heart when I realized how quickly she responded to such simple things: holding her accountable, telling her she could go ahead and be pissed at me, fine, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Giving her a hug every day, plus an empty drawer in my classroom to keep her stuff in when she doesn’t go home at night, which is too fucking often.
(I teach so many kids like her. But this one -- she’s special to me. Don’t ask me why; I can’t explain it. And I’m not unique, I’m not better than the people who teach in the trenches with me. We all have these kids, those of us who show up every day for them. It is my hope, my desperate prayer, that when I can’t handle a kid because he’s an asshole, or because we just can’t connect, then someone else will.)
(I know perfectly goddamn well that she will break my heart. Again. More.)
I talked about the girl who never gets enough to eat, how I finally just showed her where my stash of crackers and granola bars is and said, “You don’t have to ask, okay? Just come get it when you need it.” I talked about the kid who never says a word to me in class, ever, but who sends me tentative and vulnerable e-mails about the writing she passes off as fiction. I talked about the kid who is really angry with me today because I made a phone call home, and he’s probably going to get yelled at a little bit and he might lose his cell phone for a few days. (But I also know his mother, and she’s great. I don’t call home when I suspect a kid might be hungry or unsafe. I won’t phone a mother who calls her daughter a whore, or when I worry that a father will break something in his son.)
I talked about the kids who make me laugh, which is easy because they make me laugh every day. I talked about the students who’ve come back, the ones who have graduated and are off becoming even more themselves in brilliant, beautiful ways. I’ve had coffee with a couple of them in the last few weeks. Some stop by my classroom. They fill my cup in ways they can’t possibly realize.
I talked about how I don’t know how to reconcile the disconnect I feel between teaching kids and talking about teaching kids.
And Matt listened, because he’s a good husband and a good friend, and finally he wrapped me up in a hug and said, “Your job comes with all the feels."
Monday was sort of spectacularly horrible. I’m not a new teacher, so I felt I’d set appropriately low expectations for the day. But then one of my classes managed to lower the bar to a previously unachieved level of suck (I’m pretty sure I’m loosely quoting my friend Kyanne here). It was almost comical. I started the class feeling glad enough to see them, even enjoyed them for about three seconds, and the one kid said something so assy to me that the entire class did that “OOOHHHH!” thing. Good God. Thing is, I knew the kid didn’t mean it, I knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, and his face went immediately pink, and he slouched in his chair. But after that, class was just pretty much over. (Later, he said, “I’m really sorry. That didn’t come out at ALL like it sounded in my head.” And I wasn’t even that upset, because that much was obvious to me.)
It wasn’t a great day, but it wasn’t the kind of day that had me seriously considering other careers, either. All the same, my thoughts were roiling that night -- I couldn’t relax, couldn’t turn them off. I replayed the day, again and again, an endless reel of film in my head. I was exhausted. I actually crawled into bed before the kids; they tucked me in. And then I was up again two hours later, unable to sleep. Matt found me reading on the couch before he went to bed, which was, I don’t know, sometime before one in the morning. (The next day he said, “Uh, you actually looked sort of crazed.”) I went to bed with him then, but I couldn’t fall asleep. At 2:30, I got up and ate a bowl of cereal, thinking that might settle me a bit. At 3:37, I got up to prowl around the house for awhile. I briefly considered doing a workout video in the family room, because Jillian Michaels would kick the shit of out my insomnia, right? At 4:15, I curled up on the couch, worrying that my tossing and turning would keep Matt awake. Shortly before 5:00, I crawled back into bed, where I think I dozed for forty-five minutes or so.
This wasn’t a night of restless or bad sleep, the kind that had me wondering if I’d slept. I was wide awake. I felt insane. I kept hearing Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” and “Jingle Bell Rock” from Home Alone in my head, alternating back and forth. I became increasingly paranoid. By the time I finally dozed off, I was convinced that admin at my school hated me and wanted to run me out of teaching.
But I drank a lot of coffee, and I felt more or less okay by the time I got to school. One of the administrators I’d imagined was totally out to get me stopped by my room to ask me a perfectly ordinary question and we wound up having a lovely conversation. My paranoia eased. I had a good day with kids. I had a great afternoon collaborating with some very cool people. I picked up my children. We ran errands together. I felt productive and sane. My eyes had begun to burn by then, to the point where I almost didn’t feel quite safe driving, but all in all, things were okay.
Matt brought home some Tylenol PM. I took it. I slept.
And tonight, on this cozy Friday night in early January, I can look back and appreciate all of that. Things are okay. We’ve all survived. We’re all back, fumbling through this work together. As I write this, my children are tucked into their beds, hugged and kissed and secure in the knowledge that they are loved. Matt and I are watching a movie and cuddling our anxious and aging pug, hoping she’s more or less okay with us for a little while longer. My students, I hope, are easing back into their own routines. It’s not that anyone feels overjoyed for winter break to end, but for some of them, even if they think they hate it, school is safety, it’s security, it’s clear expectations and rules they can try to break, it’s the one place they might experience something that looks like success. And for me -- well, honestly, by the end of break, I started to miss them.
Right now, there is no other place I want to be than here: my house, wearing flannel pajama pants, watching Despicable Me with my two beautiful children or watching them build Lego spaceships. Kissing my husband in the kitchen. Sinking into the couch when the kids are in bed. I’m tired. I’ve felt everything this week. I want to drink wine and read a book I’m not teaching. Tomorrow morning Matt will brew coffee and we’ll have waffles or pancakes and I might go for a run in the damp January air, and then I will take Suzannah to gymnastics. We’ll go to church together on Sunday, and probably at some point I’ll eat pho and read a story or two in The Sun and maybe, just maybe, squeeze in a nap.
But I also know that I’ll be back in the trenches on Monday, just like my girl returning from her suspension, and I’ll be waiting with my arms and my heart wide open. I feel I’m ready for that, too.
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