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.