The burden is real, and it's difficult to breathe

Teaching, like motherhood, is lonely.

And I'm lucky, because I teach alongside the best of the best. All of the best friends in my life are either teachers themselves or they are related to teachers or they work with kids in schools, and so when they know teachers are grieving, frightened, angry, and damn near paralyzed by love for this terrible job, they are there. Teaching is one of my callings, but I am here to tell you we cannot do it without the support of those in the trenches with us.

The last week has been particularly hard. It's been hard for every teacher I know, because we are all grappling with the implications of yet another school shooting, and our schools and our districts are grappling alongside us, albeit some with more effectiveness or empathy or action than others. At my school, we went into an unannounced lockdown drill on Friday, and by the end of the day, one in which a neighboring community college had also gone into a real lockdown, we were so on-edge it felt surreal. We were just an absolute mess. We were messy with each other. We were a mess in front of our kids, who seemed to find some measure of comfort in that. We were a collective mess all over social media. We are not trying to hide this. It is becoming critically important that we not.

Teachers are not quietly enduring these days. And I think that's why it feels so lonely; it reminds me of what it felt like sometimes to be a new mother, especially -- isolated and criticized and wishing the folks who didn't share my experience could try to empathize and reach out anyway when I was obviously exhausted and desperately lonely. (I think it's probably no coincidence that the best friends who managed to do this without fail even though they didn't have their own children were teachers, because teaching is an awful lot like parenting.)

I've been thinking about this for a few days now. On Friday, I cried intermittently throughout much of the day. I wept all the way home from school. I couldn't hide this from my own kids, nor did I think I should try; I don't want to frighten them, but they are savvy teacher's kids with questions and I owe them honesty in age-appropriate answers. And they had questions. Like: why are guns so easy to get? And why would someone want to shoot kids? And why won't our president and government even try to stop them? (God, a few teenagers eat laundry detergent and now they're trying to legislate that, even though some idiots will always manage to get Tide Pods if they really want them, right? Because TRYING TO MAKE IT HARDER FOR PEOPLE TO CAUSE HARM EVEN IF IT DOESN'T WORK EVERY SINGLE TIME seems like the obvious thing to do, and my children understand this.)

On Friday, I pledged to donate a specific dollar amount to fight this fuckery based on a number of things: comments regarding arming teachers in the classroom, comments about how "It's not a gun problem" or some such nonsense, as well as an amount for the top recipients of N.R.A. money. I had to stop reading social media. I actually blocked one friend-of-a-friend (who has all kinds of opinions about what teachers should do and what we should be fired for), because I don't have that much money in my bank account.

So it's been a rough few days, but I've already made that point. I sat down to write this: I am so grateful for the teachers willing to have the hard conversations, who are willing to be raw and real. Not only the teachers I work with, but the teachers I'm friends with from Seattle to New York City (hi, Becca) and everywhere in between. We've held each other in this heartbreak before, and we are doing it now, but we are angry, and it would be nice if we knew that the rest of the world had our backs as well. Every other week we're talking about what it means to be a teacher who understands that part of the job is putting our bodies on the line for our kids. The silence from those who claim to love us is deafening at times.

But while I drove home with tears in my eyes, and while I cried into my husband's shirt on Friday night and said, "I'm sorry, I don't know how to stop my feelings from pouring out my face, I'm okay and I'm hungry and can we just make some Trader Joe's appetizers?", I texted back and forth with colleagues feeling the same things. Mostly we just loved on each other. I chatted with and e-mailed teacher friends all over the country, and I thought, we're in this together.

Tomorrow I go back to school after a long weekend, and I'm going back feeling grateful for the folks who are going back with me. We've had four days off with our babies, with our families. I ate good food in Portland, played with my kids, laughed with my husband, and bought all the books at Powells. Last night I had dinner with one of my best friends, who is obviously a teacher. This afternoon I curled up on my couch and my daughter covered me with her favorite fleece blanket. I chatted with a couple of my best friends, who are obviously teachers. We're a mess, but we're a mess together. Also: we're not a mess. We're strong, angry, driven by fierce and unrelenting love, and ready to roll up our sleeves and organize. We're powered by a generation of fierce and passionate kids we are privileged to teach (and more importantly, to learn from).

If you love a teacher, surely you know that teacher is heartbroken and angry and damn near paralyzed by love.

But not quite paralyzed. We're not going to stop what we're doing. We're not going to stop having the conversations about what it means to place our bodies between bullets and our kids. Do you think the teachers in Parkland hadn't had those conversations already? I one hundred percent promise you they had, because that is what it means to be a teacher in America in 2018. More of us will have to do this, and it really could be any of us. Our kids are scared. On the west coast, thousands of miles from Parkland, my kids were not okay last week. Our kids are also angry, and they're ready to move, they're ready to act, and we're with them.

And if you love a teacher, it would actually help a great deal if you stood with us, because the burden is real and it is crushing. Say something. Anything.