Cherry Blossoms and Brokenness

Life is just so weird right now. So lifey.

Part of it is that it's May. Finally! Finally it's May! We're all just limping pitifully along towards the end of the school year, the way we do every year. I don't like to generalize or speak for all teachers but I feel like this is the one generalization that is safe to make. The last six weeks are just so hard. Here's what May looks like for me at the moment: I'm impatient. I'm frustrated because in my mind I haven't seen the magic growth in my freshmen I feel I was promised when, back in August, I said, "So I'm scared to teach freshmen! I don't really know how to do that!" Those freshmen ruin my life every other day, even though I truly love those kids. I really do. But they ruin my life. Then again, I also fully acknowledge that I am all out of perspective, like it's just totally gone, every last drop drained, and that makes me a little sensitive.

There is something about this time of year that I love, even when it's hard, even when I say (and mean) that May is the worst month to be a teacher, so far from the romance of September. Everyone is so done. But also, the promise of summer, of long, languid afternoons spent sprawled on the patio with a book and a glass of iced tea while the kids run through the sprinkler -- it's still just around the corner, far enough away that I'm not yet afraid of it slipping through my fingers. The anticipation is delicious, and it's just close enough.

At the same time, we are tired and sad and we have lost too many people. My school community is one I love so much, and there is nowhere I would rather be in the midst of this strange season of grief, but

but

I am unmoored

in so many ways.

So unmoored that I found myself crying in my classroom at 2:30 this afternoon, crying and feeling stupid for not learning a lesson I feel I should have learned by this point in my adult life, which is this: sometimes the things (or people) in which we invest our emotional energy are not worth the rent-free space we allow them in our minds and hearts. I think my dad was the first person to put it that way, a long time ago, when I was struggling with whether or not to maintain an unhealthy friendship. I am a grown-ass woman, but sometimes I still struggle with sensing when I'm investing too much emotional energy in the wrong places. The return just isn't worth that investment.

Be kind, always. Consider everyone's story. But set boundaries when they need to be set. There are some things on which we cannot agree to disagree.

It wasn't just this one day; it was the culmination of weeks, of months, even. Some of my relationships have shifted irrevocably since the election. I have become dehydrated crying over some of them; others simply leave an ache. Sometimes people's silences say more than their words. And sometimes people's careless words can't be shrugged or explained away with "Oh, you're just taking that the wrong way."

Words are what I have and all I know how to use; for me, silence is complacency, and words matter.

I wondered, today, what the right word is, the word that captures both deep loneliness and deep anger.

I wondered this as I slammed furiously and tearfully around my empty classroom, as I drove across town to pick up my kids, as I exercised in the late afternoon, as I soaked in the bath and tried to distract myself with a book that ended up being not so much a distraction as a validation and a beautifully written balm for my soul, because I believe the right books have a funny way of finding their way into our hands at the right time.

I still wonder as I write this tonight. But I'm also okay, despite my sadness and loneliness and anger. Because I'm a grown-ass adult, I guess. Sometimes I take too long to establish healthy boundaries, but I get around to it eventually, and then I'm pretty peaceful about things. And I know that what I have weighs more than what I've lost, when it comes to that. I'm lonely in this moment, but I'm not alone. I walked back to my classroom and felt safe in crying to a friend. I texted back and forth with another close friend this evening. Matt came home with Thai food and a hug, and I am home in those arms. These moments of authentic human connection are the reason I can sit here tonight, curled up on the couch with my husband while we watch a movie, and breathe. And try to recover some of my lost perspective. And feel gratitude, despite everything else: Brokenness and loss and mansplaining and misogyny and yesterday's utterly shameful vote on healthcare and the utterly depressing state of the country. (God forgive us for our complacency. God forgive me.)

I managed to squeeze in a quick evening jog the other day, on a day I didn't think I'd have time. I hurried from school to a meeting to gymnastics and I had a brief window of time before another evening meeting. I decided in that moment to go for a run, just a quick one, more to clear my head than to really work out. I ran through the streets near my home in the soft evening light, the warmest day we've had yet this spring. There's a stretch of sidewalk in my neighborhood that's full of cherry blossoms, a late scatter over the ground. They've mostly fallen free from the branches, and they coat the sidewalk like a silky carpet. The air on this street smells like heaven. A sudden gust of wind swirled them up, off the sidewalk and into the streets, and they landed in my hair as I ran past.

I don't know why these small moments make everything okay. Everything isn't really okay. But for the rest of the evening I felt so aware of the sweet evening air, the way my feet feel in sandals, the way my children kiss me goodnight and shriek their protests when I suggest I just crawl into their beds and sleep with them all night long. I thought about how things are hard right now, and about how I have felt lonely, but. I am not alone.

My heart hurts and I am angry tonight, but there are cherry blossoms on the sidewalk and my children safe in their beds. My friends hold my hands, literally and figuratively. My husband's knees bend into the backs of mine as I drift to sleep. I am part of something so much bigger than myself: this wide, pulsing, beautiful, broken world.