Recovering

The first weekend of second semester is one of my favorite weekends of the school year. I don’t have any grading hanging over my head yet, and aside from a small handful of new students who transferred into my classes this week, I know my kids well. This is the time of year when sophomores start to really get it, when things start to click. They trust me enough to take some risks. On rougher days I remind myself of the student last year who spent first semester generally behaving like an ass and doing exactly no work; of course it’s safer to pretend like you don’t care or are bored by it all than to admit that it’s hard or you need help. But second semester, something made this kid try, and he wound up passing. Not by much, but he passed, all on his own, and he was proud. I was proud. These are the things that keep my stubborn little flame of optimism alive, even through the winter slog of January and February.

(Except it’s not a winter slog, not here in Washington. I am a girl who loves winter. I love the snow, even though we rarely have it here, or perhaps because we rarely have it here. And I love the rain, too. I really, really do. But the rain in February is nothing like the rain in November; it’s sweet already with the scent of spring. Things begin to bud in early February. Just over a month from now, the cherry blossoms will be bursting all over the city. I love it, I love all the weather here. Every single season. I am generally not one to complain about the weather.)

All that to say: I have felt pretty beat-up this week. I have felt tired and defeated and sad.

I’ve been trying to shake a cold for nearly two weeks now. I feel pretty good tonight, really almost back to normal, but I haven’t slept well in days. I alternated between the bed and the couch this week, not wanting to keep Matt awake with my relentless coughing. I’ve gone through two bags of honey-lemon-mint cough drops. I am tired of waking each morning with a honey-lemon-mint cough drop glued to the roof of my mouth. I’ve been grumpier than I probably needed to be.

“I really hope you get better sleep tonight,” Matt said the other morning, undoubtedly because I picked a completely unnecessary fight with him before school.

I’m probably more sensitive when I haven’t slept and don’t feel well, too, but it’s been one of those weeks in which I feel like I’ve had to hear too many people’s opinions on teaching and teachers and schools and I just want to scream, “Give us a damn break.” Yesterday I had this totally embarrassing moment in which I burst into tears at school -- not in front of students, this was after-hours -- and wound up both laughing and crying and the same time, sounding just totally unhinged, I’m sure. I was sort of hoping that no one noticed except the person I happened to be with at the time, but today three different people who work in the main office just casually happened to ask if I was all right because they might have seen me sort of going to pieces in the hallway.

There were things this week that were not all right. I’ve been worried and heartsick because of kids who are Not All Right, two in particular and many more in general. And understandable as it may be, I didn’t do my best teaching this week. I think it was okay, but I definitely planned with my own stamina in mind more than what I actually wanted the kids to learn. (Probably one of my sophomores went home and complained to his mom about his cranky teacher, and now that mom can make a Facebook post about the state of education, and her Mompants friends will “like” it a hundred times and someone else will post an article from some parenting magazine about Common Core, and someone else will say, “This is exactly why I plan to homeschool!” See what I’ve started? I probably should have just called in a sub on Tuesday.) Last week I wrote to Becca, "I feel like it makes me a much better teacher to keep my finger on the pulse of the real school, with real kids. Okay, not that IB kids aren’t real, but you know what I mean. They keep me on my game. I can’t be lazy with them. I can’t afford to be. I fail A LOT. I feel like I fail far more with the regular kids. But then I think, would I really know it if I were failing the IB kids?”

I haven’t slept well this week. Last night I cried myself to sleep in this strange state of bewilderment, because so many things are going really well. Because I love my job. Because I come home to the exact life I dreamed for myself when I was my daughter’s age, really, one full of my own children and a husband who loves me even when I’m totally bitchy, a life full of plenty of blank notebooks and pens, a house of full of books, a life in which I can walk out my front door and stand at the shore of Puget Sound a few minutes later, a life in which there is no shortage of trees and fresh air and water and laughter and love. But I cried anyway, because sometimes the other parts get under my skin. Earlier today I thought I would write about all of that: the reasons for the tears and the grumpiness and the defeat. The things that make me feel angry. A little afraid, even. Or maybe just sad.

But tonight I find that I don’t really want to do that. I’m not trying to be vague or mysterious. I just want to inhabit a different headspace this weekend. Because:

First and foremost -- and I should have led with this, actually -- I’m the proud auntie of a beautiful new nephew! Matt’s brother and his wife had their baby boy early this morning, and the pictures indicate that he is just too kissable for words. I met Suzannah at her classroom door this afternoon and said, “Guess what! You have a new cousin!” and she jumped up and down with glee, immediately calculated how old he will be when we get to finally meet him this summer (too far away for our liking), and said, “I hope I get to hold him.”

My daughter carries her new dictionary with her everywhere these days. She brought it along to dinner in West Seattle tonight, asking us to give her words to look up as we waited for our food. She read it by flashlight in the car. She bursts out of her classroom every day with a smile, full of chatter -- and what I love, so much, is that she is equally animated in explaining the rules of pickleball and flag football and soccer as she is in talking about how they use interactive notebooks in class. I love this age. She loves to talk to me about the parts of speech, about strategies she uses to solve math problems, about the games she plays at recess. Her days pour out of her in an endless stream of stories.

My son speaks with equal enthusiasm about the new Power Rangers he and his buddy LJ play with. He reminds me daily of the Valentine’s Day party coming up, and can we please go pick out his Valentines soon? (He’s pretty sure he wants Ninja Turtle valentines.) At bedtime he is ridiculous. He comes running to find me after he finishes brushing teeth and says, “Mommy, I just want to look at your tummy.” And I say, “What? I don’t have a tummy!” And he says, “I just want to check!” And then he lifts my shirt and zerberts my stomach with real gusto, so it sounds like flatulence echoing through the house. Or he says, “I’m going to kiss you right off your face!” And Matt says, “Hmm, I wonder where he gets this,” and then Isaac and I are tussling on the floor in this crazy and rather spitty kissing war. Lately he’s also into all things gross, he loves to talk about butts and poop and stinky feet, and I fear this is not going to improve with age because every now and then when I glance at my husband and expect some solidarity I see him doubled over with laughter. Then again, it is impossible not to laugh when I go to tuck my sweet little boy into bed and he says, “Hey, Mommy! Want me to stink my armpit on you?”

I’m about to start a new poetry workshop, and as soon as that finishes I’ll be starting another writing workshop that will carry me right through the end of the school year. It will be lots of work that has nothing to do with teaching but is absolutely essential for me.

And really, even with this cold, even with the end-of-the-semester grading pileup, the first five weeks of the year have been filled with so much goodness: reading good books (Mink River by Brian Doyle has joined the ranks of my very favorite books of all time, and I know, I love a lot of books, but this is definitely in the Top 5), drinking good coffee, going on little outings with my family, spending a weekend in snowy Leavenworth with Aaron and Morgan. Taking my daughter out for lunch and book shopping on our day off from school last Friday, cuddling on the couch and reading “Bread and Jam for Frances” with my son. My son, standing on a chair in the kitchen and stirring pancake batter or using his new kid-friendly knife set to chop vegetables for dinner. My daughter, curled in the living room recliner or sitting cross-legged on her bed, her nose in a book.

Weeks like this -- or, at least, sitting down to write about them -- just remind me how all of life exists together, messily. How I can cry and laugh in the same afternoon, equally, earnestly. How the joy of parenting my children is mixed right in with the drudgery, the laundry and the picking up and the whining for snacks and the bickering. How teaching mirrors parenting: the highs. The lows. Feeling both joyful and broken, triumphant and totally inadequate, often on the same day. And somewhere in the midst of all of that there are always papers to grade and meetings to attend and hoops to jump through. It’s a lot. It’s life. And I guess that even when I’m writing here to process or complain or vent, I’m still really just trying to write a fumbling love letter to it all.

The Super Bowl, and a bit of unlikely nostalgia

I’m sitting here in my family room, still sniffling and coughing and the end of a long cold. I was the final Winslow to be taken down by this bug, and it seems to have hit me the hardest, and yes, I am feeling a little sorry for myself tonight. I slept a lot this weekend, figuring that the extra day between semesters would give me enough down-time to kick this thing (perhaps my staying up way too late last week so I could have all my grades done wasn’t the best for my body or my immune system, but it felt good not to have them hanging over my head). But here I am, getting ready to chug a little Nyquil and pray for a long(ish) night of restful sleep before the new semester begins tomorrow.

It also doesn’t help that the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl. I am actually sad about this, although I still think it’s pretty amazing that they were back this year.

Side note: The other day a friend launched into a rant about “fans” like me, so this blog entry was originally going to be about that. Because I fully admit I’m -- what are they calling us -- bandwagon fans? Not fair weather fans, because I am one hundred percent sure I’m not going to care about any other football team if the Seahawks start losing all the time. But yes, the reason I’m into the Seahawks is not so much about football but because it’s pretty cool to see an entire region united and excited over the same thing. Also, I really love Richard Sherman -- like, a lot. And I make no apologies for that; I loved him when he started handing out school supplies and talking about the importance of education to kids in my school district. Also, he is really nice to look at. Also, I look good in blue. I’m shallow like that, I guess.

But in the last two seasons I have watched a very tiny handful of games (including two Super Bowls in a row!) all the way through, and enough parts of others to learn something. I can more or less follow what’s going on, and when I can’t, I rely on my friend Matt (from church, not to be confused with my husband Matt, who cares less than I do about football) or my brother to do a little yelling, and their tone clues me in to what kind of sportsing is going on and whether I should feel triumphant or downtrodden but determined. Sort of like the chorus in a Greek drama? Maybe?

I spent the last five minutes of today’s game feeling anxious, and then I just felt ridiculous because I am not a person who paces nervously during a football game. And then I felt depressed, because we lost. And on top of that, I have a cold, and I had to stop by the grocery store on the way home because Matt was making us soup but forgot a couple of key ingredients, and I suddenly remembered it’s the Sunday night before a new semester and I feel not quite prepared. I gave into a few minutes of grumpiness and self-pity.

But those moments pass. Because Matt was taking care of dinner and he’s promised to vacuum the family room and study later this evening, the two rooms in our house that could use it. Because my children love the Seahawks (my daughter understands football better than I do, and she loves Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson and Marshawn Lynch) and they were a little bummed but mostly cheerful because they had fun with their friend Sam and drank way too much butterscotch root beer. Because even though I’m anxious about tomorrow, I’ve also done this before, many times, and in the morning I will remember to trust myself and go with the flow and it will all be fine even if I’m not feeling great. (I still remember starting my second trimester during my first year of teaching with a terrible sinus infection. I had an entirely new bunch of kids -- at least tomorrow I’ll only have a very few new faces due to a very few schedule changes -- and I was still figuring out how to teach, period. I had no earthly idea what I was doing. It was like the first day of school all over again, only with a head full of mucous. No matter how tomorrow goes, it won’t feel anything like that.)

Back at home tonight, I stuck Suzannah in the shower and Isaac in the bath, popped a couple of ibuprofen, and settled myself on the couch for awhile with a book. Matt brought me a glass of wine, and moments later my headache had more or less abated. I ate a little soup even though I was full of Super Bowl snacks, because I couldn’t let the last thing I ate today be guacamole or tiny puff pastries filled with feta cheese and caramelized onion. Matt had prepared this simple but crazy tasty soup from the Moosewood cookbook that we used to eat all the time, so I ate a little of that and felt better.

“Hey,” I said to Matt over steaming bowls of soup, “do you remember where we were the night of the Super Bowl in 2008?”

He frowned, not really remembering. I can’t hold this against him, since I remember virtually nothing about any Super Bowl in which the Seahawks weren’t playing. (And I will fully admit that when they made it to the Superbowl in 2006, I still just mostly remember the fact that no one expected them to win, and I remember the snacks. To be fair, I was significantly pregnant at the time.)

“I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “Do you remember where we had to go?”

“Ahhh,” he said. “That was the night we had that issue with our plumbing...”

Sunday, February 3, 2008. Yes, an issue with our plumbing. Matt had to turn the water off at the main because we couldn’t get it to stop gushing in the bathtub or something, and it cost a lot less (both in money and in hassle) to just go to a hotel a few miles away than to try to get a plumber out to our house on a Sunday night. Super Bowl Sunday. Suzannah was just 21 months old. We threw a few things into a duffel bag and headed out to enjoy dinner at a local restaurant before hunkering down in our hotel room. It might have even been relaxing except for the tiny fact that Suzannah was going through a phase in which she utterly refused to sleep. Journal entries remind me that she’d been up for most of the night the day before, and I remembered the mind-numbing despair I felt that winter as I walked the hallways with my wakeful child at night, trying to nurse her, trying to soothe her, and feeling completely insane. It was like having a twenty-eight pound newborn, so, you know, rather a strain on the arms and the back. And I was expected to show up at school in the morning, dressed and behaving like a competent professional.

That night in early February, seven years ago, I wrote: Matt wound up driving around with Suzannah at three-thirty in the morning -- we've never had to resort to that before -- and I tried to fall asleep, but by then I was so worked up that all I could do was lie in bed, exhausted tears soaking the pillow as the red and blue glow from the signs outside filtered in through the parted drapes. This was the second night of almost no sleep, and I was beginning to lose my mind at the prospect of going to work in the morning and functioning like a human being.

It’s completely crazy that I feel sort of fondly nostalgic, reading that. But I also feel deeply grateful that we’re out of those weeds. I deeply loved my children’s babyhoods and I loved their toddler years and sometimes I hurt with missing those moments. But the mind-numbing fatigue, the drudgery! That was hard. Feeling completely insane as I got ready for work, seriously borderline hysterical because I hadn’t slept -- I can afford to look back on my younger self, rocking her babies with tears leaking out of her eyes, and say, “Oh, Mama. You don’t have to miss this part.” And my seven-years-older self can also say, “But I do, a little bit.” Because when life is reduced to those middle-of-the-night moments, when it’s about soothing a child’s tears, about nursing her exhaustedly on the couch in the dark, about walking and walking and walking, my seven-years-older self can appreciate the simplicity of that: the times when physical touch, whispering, walking can soothe a child’s needs. I knew what to do, and I did it. I felt my sanity drain from me on those nights, sometimes, and I felt a little less than myself in the morning. It wasn’t sustainable. But children don’t stay sleepless toddlers forever, and now when my little girl wakes too early I can say, “Go read in your room for awhile.” It breaks my heart and fills it at the same time.

Mostly fills it. My heart is full.

I was going to write about losing a football game tonight, but it occurs to me that I haven’t lost a thing.