Breathe in, breathe out

On this lovely, sunny Friday afternoon, I stayed after school with my Writing Club, a completely delightful group of kids. I mean, really, it’s their club; I’m merely the advisor, and often when they meet I leave them to hang out in my room and do their thing while I run around campus and take care of last-minute-before-the-weekend business. Today, though, I stuck around, and I made a tiny promise to myself that I will try to do this every time they meet. By Friday afternoon I don’t really want to talk to adults anyway. In fact, today I stuck to my own classroom as much as possible, a plan I formulated last night in the midst of a bout of defeated and exhausted tears. Sometimes other adults are just too much -- if I’m driven out of teaching, it likely won’t be because of the kids. But anyway, I told myself last night that today I would earnestly just try to hunker down in my classroom and see how I felt at the end of the day, even on a Friday, even though teaching on a Friday -- on an early spring Friday when the breeze is soft and the earth is waking up, pushing out of its own dampness and into the sweet, sweet air -- is rough.

Maybe I had low expectations, but I had a pretty good day, even in my roughest class. A kid who has become increasingly belligerent lately cooperated with me today; I could even joke with him a bit, and he asked me some sincere questions about his work. (His work. That’s right. He wrote some sentences today.) In fact, overall I found myself largely unruffled by the kind of teenagery absurdity that sometimes leaves me wondering what difference it makes whether I show up or not. But then I thought, maybe it’s not the kids who make me wonder. Sometimes on tough days it’s tempting to seek out other adults to vent, to commiserate -- but I also wonder if sometimes it becomes a little too easy for adults to feed off of each other’s negativity when we’re tired.

This week two adults I like and respect a great deal suggested that it doesn’t actually matter what I do in my classroom. After all, I’m not teaching a bunch of future English majors. Not only that, I can’t save people who don’t want to be saved. Not only that, but my job isn’t to make them fall in love with books! No one falls in love with books! Most people don’t read! Teach them skills! One suggested that I’m actually wasting my time and the money I spent on my own college education -- and then laughed at me. And he meant well. I know he did. In his mind, this was probably gentle teasing. But I took it to heart, because who likes to be told, even with a fond chuckle, that her passion is wasted? I mumbled something about my belief that education is about teaching kids to become engaged and empathetic citizens who participate in a democratic society, and one of the ways we can “teach” empathy is through reading stories, and yes, I still believe that matters even if my students don’t skip out of my classroom excited to write literary analysis. It’s not just about churning out people who can be little worker bees. And it’s not about whether they will become English majors, or use chemistry or algebra in whatever job they wind up with.

In the end, I didn’t say much. “I guess I can see myself doing a lot of different jobs, even jobs I might be objectively good at. Unfortunately,” I offered lamely, “this seems to be my calling.”

This morning I drove through green quiet streets to take my children to school. Breathe in. Notice the sidewalks, the bursts of cherry blossoms, the budding trees. Breathe out. Everything seems clean and new. Lawns here have been mowed once or twice already this spring, even as so many others are shoveling out from under the snow. The afternoon sunlight makes me want to rush home after class and squeeze in a quick jog so that I’m sweaty and spent when I meet my daughter at the door of her classroom.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

This week we went to Writing Night at my daughter’s school, where the kids showcased what they’ve been working on. I read my daughter’s eleven-page fairy tale with its complicated cast of characters, her opinion piece on scammers (I wasn’t aware she had an opinion on scammers, but I did so love the righteousness in her writing), her responses to the books she’s been reading. She and her classmates displayed their work on their “Genius Hour” projects, the result of independent research. They complimented each other. They were supportive of each other. They are playful and curious. They are everything that is right with the world. They are the very best of what can happen in a school.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

My son unloads puzzles on the family room floor and completes them all. Quickly. Precisely. If I ask him about the letters in his caterpillar alphabet puzzle he waves his hand impatiently: “Whatever.” I back off, but I watch, beaming. Not because I care about whether he can string together all the right letters, although he can now, but because nothing brings me more joy than observing my children absorbed in concentration, just being so beautifully and fiercely themselves: bent over the satisfying snap of their puzzle pieces. Lying stomach-down, ankles crossed, book in hand. Hollering in the bathtub. Mommy, I put soap in my own hair! Wrestling matches on the family room floor, that moment when the laughter turns to tears because someone’s elbow found someone else’s lip, and while I dutifully hand a crying child an ice cube wrapped in a wash cloth I hear myself saying such irritating things as, “This is why I warned you...” and then I tell them no more wrestling this weekend and they say, Okay, Mommy. One sullen, one contrite.

When I am teaching, when I am with kids, whether it’s going well or not, I’m there. It calls me away from my angst over what next year might look like, calls me out of the funk I’ve fallen into this month. I call my freshmen to their feet, lead them around the room with the prologue to Romeo and Juliet in their hands. Walk and read. Stomp at the stop, for emphasis, to feel the rhythm of the poetry. Turn on the next word. Breathe in, breathe out. I fight with my sophomores, every day. Sometimes I bully them into silence and sometimes I allow them to play. They make me so tired. They require the most of me for the least return. Am I wasting my time? Am I wasting my passion? It occurs to me that these questions don’t matter. I’m there. I show up. I do this work in the only way I know how. Because maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe it really doesn’t, but it sure as hell is not going to work if I show up and give them less than myself, if I pretend that I don’t love the absolute shit out of this book they probably don’t care about. I would probably be much happier and less mentally ill if I could figure out a way to tamp down my own give-a-damn, right? If I could just accept the fact that they won’t care as much as I do? But that’s the thing. I don’t believe that anymore. I used to say they had to care more than I do but sometimes they don’t. They don’t know how, or they don’t know why it matters, and they’ve never been taught that it does, and why should they? I don’t have a compelling or convincing answer to their questions but I certainly can’t make myself care less.

Breathe in. Drive home in the sunshine. Meet my daughter at her classroom door. Watch her run to the mailbox. She can sort the mail herself now; she knows what can go straight to recycling and what should go to my desk, what should go to Matt’s. “Mom, this is a great day! You got The Sun!” she says. She knows I read that at the dining room table on Sunday afternoons, after we pick up pho on the way home from church.

Breathe out. Run the laundry. Cook the curried cauliflower and chickpea soup. Read the bedtime stories. Floss the children’s teeth. Suzannah says, “Okay, who wants to tuck me into bed tonight?” And I crawl in beside her, remembering so many other versions of this moment: curling around her in my hugely pregnant state when she insisted I sleep with her even though I could hardly fit in that little toddler bed. Dozing off next to her when she finally moved to a twin. Lying next to her and giggling, giggling, giggling. Playing the “I’m stuck on you!” game. Now she wipes off my kisses -- wipes them off. “It’s not like I drool on you,” I say, and she replies, “I know, but you don’t need to kiss me so much.” She sees the way my face falls, and she says, “But I’ll make you feel better with a nice hug. How about that?” She gives the best hugs. The best. And tonight, when I said that I was sad about not being able to just kiss her face right off, she stroked my hair and said, “Oh, poor Mommy.”

When I go to tuck in my son, he says in his devious little purple minion voice, “I’m just going to look at your tummy,” and we tumble into the absurdly silly routine in which I say, “I don’t have a tummy! Stop it!” and he shrieks, “I’m just going to CHECK!” and he lifts my shirt and zerberts me with such enthusiasm that Matt can hear the flatulent-like sounds from the living room. There are no quiet bedtime snuggles with him, only these wild and shrieky bursts of kissing and zerberting, unsanitary and disorderly and something I will deeply miss someday. Later, after he has fallen asleep with his chosen stuffed animal hugged tightly to his chest, I will bend over him and kiss is cheek, still baby-soft. Sometimes I press my ear against his chest to hear his heartbeat thump steadily against me, to feel his sleepy sighs.

Breathe in. Breathe out. These two. These moments. This life. I’m living it the only way I know how. I show up and bear witness and I love it with a messy and imperfect love. On this lovely Friday evening at home with my family all I can do it let it wash over me, all of it. I can’t even begin to put the pieces together -- what will matter? What will stick? What/why/how? I try to guard my heart and keep it open, all at the same time. The glorious work of my life, really.