Full disclosure: Suzannah scored very well, if I’m reading it correctly (and I’m pretty sure I am). Well above the school, district, and state average. She also kind of enjoyed taking the test itself, which I love -- not at all because I care how she does on a standardized test, but because I feel it means we have been at least moderately successful in our endeavors to encourage her to try her best on whatever she’s doing but also have conveyed to her that no single test will tell us how smart, kind, capable, funny, or creative she is. She seems to enjoy tests as a fun challenge but doesn’t seem to worry about them much. She worries much more about whether or not Isaac has messed up her desk, or how the markers and paper are organized on our art supply table. (No, she did not get this from her father. She got lots of other cool things from him. The neurotic traits are all mine, I KNOW.)
Anyway, when the scores came she wanted to know how she did. I told her. She said, “Cool. That’s actually better than I thought I did.” But we didn’t make a big deal about it, because I didn’t make a big deal about when she took the test. And because I really, honestly, truly, could not care less. Here’s what I care about. Here’s what I want to celebrate. Adults who work at my children’s school have told me about seeing both of them stand up for other kids who were being picked on. Different adults, at different times. One teacher (not even Suzannah’s teacher) told me about how she walked up to a much bigger kid when he took something from a much smaller kid and demanded that he give it back. Isaac apparently stood up for one of his little buddies when another kid shoved him on the playground. That’s what I want to celebrate, that’s what I actually do care about, because that is not often the popular or easy choice, and I know that it won’t be the last time they’re faced with it. When I think about what I want to teach my children, what I desperately pray they learn from me, and from other good people in their lives, doesn’t have much to do with what goes on a test.
The world isn’t kind enough. It’s not an easy thing to each them. It’s not an easy thing to model. And frankly, when I take a good, hard look at myself, I find myself too often falling short. I lack patience and I yell too much and I am angry and I find it really difficult to extend grace to people who annoy or upset me. Not much of a model, am I?
It’s been a week like any other, really -- I had a really terrible day which left me wanting to stalk through the parking lot punching holes in everyone’s tires. I had a really sad day that left me crying at school (albeit briefly, and not in front of students). I had a really stressful, exhausting day that turned into a pretty satisfying day when I managed not to make a total ass of myself (or so my boss said) at a parent function I had to lead. I had a sad morning that turned into a surprisingly excellent day when a friend immediately cheered me up at school and my classes were absolutely fantastic. I had lovely late dinners with three different friends in one week, which is an unspeakable luxury. And now here we are on Friday, which is my time to sit and collapse with it all, collapse cozily, collapse gratefully, collapse in grief/anger/joy/fear/anxiety/relief. This is my time just to sit with it. To rage inwardly at all the “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” bullshit posts that spring up after every damn shooting we experience, which will continue to spring up because we don’t do anything to stop it. To feel paralyzed with anger and grief and total helplessness, to listen to the President in his own exhausted grief and anger, to wonder when it will hit even closer because it will, because my God, twenty school children can be murdered in their classroom and one of my friends actually says she’s annoyed that people are “making this about guns,” that very same day and that was the day I stopped reading her Facebook in order to preserve any possible relationship with her but there are so many more, there was another this week, and one of my former students was right there in the middle of it, and there will be more and more and more and we know this and we don’t. Do. Anything. To stop it. There’s no reason it won’t be us next time because it could happen at my school or it could happen at my church, and oh, wait, five years ago it did, or it could happen at the damn mall, or it could happen in a movie theater, and there are people who actually believe a solution is to send me into my own goddamned classroom with a gun, and that is where I just have to stop typing all of this and walk away from the computer and breathe. We are broken. We are broken and this is so crazy I can’t even process it. It’s crazy and I am angry and I do not know how to see past that tonight. I’m all out of understanding for people who say intolerable things right now, which, I realize, isn’t what I want to model or teach my children. But tonight that’s where I’m firmly stuck.
The world isn’t kind enough. But kindness, frankly, isn’t enough. Nor, as Obama said, are thoughts and prayers. I don’t think think that’s what we’re short on.
I didn’t know I was going to write all that when I sat down; I rarely know what’s going to happen when I curl up to write these Friday night musings. Here, Internet -- you get my messiness. I keep my desk organized so I can hurl my thoughts at the keyboard and watch them splatter.
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