“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Today I left the house before eight o'clock, stepping into the humid Minnesota morning, propelled up the street by Shirley Manson's voice -- the only music that could get me moving. But movement was the thing I needed after a night of broken sleep. The heat rises to the second floor where I sleep at my in-laws' house, and the fan could only do so much; more than that, though, I couldn't quiet my brain. So I tossed and turned, and then I ran.
The morning was quiet, even as I jogged along a busy road before turning onto a quieter, shadier street. The thick, muggy air seemed to muffle even the traffic. Insects whirred in the grass. A sprinkler shuddered to a stop just before I could reach it and cool off; I suppose it had been on a timer to run in the cooler dawn.
I ran to quiet my own thoughts for awhile. It mostly worked. By the time I reached the spot where I usually turn around, I was so drenched in sweat that I nearly just sat down on the sidewalk. But I had to finish packing, and we had a rental car to return and a flight to catch. So I panted my way back to the house and vowed not to check the news until I'd folded the rest of last night's laundry into the kids' suitcases, showered, and had some coffee.
It has been a terrible week.
I mean, it has and it hasn't. I've just returned from a lovely family trip to Minnesota. We spent a few days in Duluth, a city I haven't visited since college. We stayed in a beautiful old mansion with Matt's parents and his brother and family. Carmen drove over and we spent a day together, and it was wonderful and necessary -- we haven't seen each other in nearly four years, which is the longest we've ever gone without seeing each other since we were eighteen years old. Suzannah and Isaac loved spending time with their cousins. We shared meals with relatives we don't see often, both near Duluth and back in the Twin Cities. I read a few books and carved out a little time to write. Matt even made sure we stopped by Birchbark Books -- a favorite stop of mine in Minneapolis -- so I could finally use a gift card from my mother-in-law.
So all of that should have made for a lovely start to the summer, except that underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame. We have no regard for human life if it isn't white, "Christian," and born on American soil (or unborn on American soil. We seem to stop caring once babies are earthside). We now rank in the top ten countries where it's worst to be a woman. As a public school teacher I'm no stranger to anti-union rhetoric, but now, suddenly, I'm actually receiving e-mails on my relatively public school account encouraging me not to pay union dues. And on, and on, and on. Seattle, a city with appalling rates of homelessness, now has an app to make it easier to eject folks from camps. Where, where is our humanity? Tell me that, Christians. Tell me. Talk to me about what it means to be pro-life. Talk to me about family values. And also, what piece of your soul did you sell, Judge Kennedy?
And then today, after my run, after my shower, after our trip to the airport, after I settled in with a white wine flight and my journal and the novel I'm reading while Matt took the kids to work out their wiggles before our trip home, I read the news again: another shooting, five journalists killed.
(When you read that the suspect is in custody, you know right away that it's another angry white man -- the kind most likely to commit mass shootings, and the kind most likely to be taken alive.)
(Nothing about this is surprising, considering the president's constant and vicious attacks on the media and some of his most ardent and vocal supporters actively encouraging assaults on them. This is our country. This is America.)
It would be pretty easy for Matt and me to say we don't like to be political, because honestly, we'll probably be fine, and being political means getting uncomfortable. We don't have to do that. We're white. We're "Christian." We were born into fucking senseless privilege. No one is coming for our children. But because we are white, because we are "Christian," because we are fine, this is our work to do and it is our mess to clean up and it is our debt to pay. It just is. And we're not doing it nearly damn well enough, which is one of the things I'm struggling with tonight. I know this. (Another thing I'm struggling with: people who still say they're "not political." Isn't that great for you? Sleep tight, I guess?)
After our kids were showered and bathed and tucked into bed tonight, Matt and I caught up on this week's episode of The Handmaid's Tale. I first read the novel when I was nineteen, huddled under a blanket in my freezing crew quarters at the fishing lodge in Alaska where I would spend my first summer in college. Now, twenty years later, I teach it in IB literature as part of the junior curriculum. It has always both moved and terrified me, but now that terror is an entirely different beast because it feels real and immediate. The terrifying brilliance of Margaret Atwood is that all of her writing feels real, but this has moved several solid steps away from "speculative" fiction since she wrote it three decades ago.
I don't really even know how to end this. It's nearly midnight, and my family is sleeping. Matt kissed me a bit ago and said, "Don't stay up too late." I want so badly to just go to sleep, to turn off my brain. He calls it the hamster wheel inside my head. I'm exhausted, but what is my exhaustion? It's nothing, really.
Tonight maybe I just end with this, with Rebecca Solnit's words instead of my own: You can't know, won't know how and why it matters, and when the results will appear, but that didn't stop the abolitionists or the suffragists or the civil rights heroes or the environmental champions or the Dreamers. Ask yourself what would Harvey Milk do? What would Harriet Tubman do? What would Ella Baker do? What would Emma Goldman do? Maybe you can't do all they did, but you can do something, and that matters, and doing it is a much better way to survive this regime than doing nothing, for your soul as well as your nation.
It's not just that we can; it's that we have to. I think I still believe that.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Love and Gratitude, Grief and Loss
It's a Sunday evening in June. Matt is mowing the lawn and the kids are sprawled in the family room watching a movie. It's cool outside, not even sixty degrees. Raindrops spatter the sidewalks. The wood floors feel cold underneath my bare feet, and the light is subdued. Right now, today, I am entirely okay with this. It's nearly summer, but I'm feeling quiet tonight. Tonight, I'm okay with feeding the kids fish sticks from Trader Joe's instead of grilling salmon in the backyard, carrying glasses of iced tea or chilled white wine out to the patio, calling the kids home from the neighbors' house. I need this moment to just be still.
We've been moving nonstop. Something scheduled every day. Suzannah's band concert, Isaac's choir concert. Soccer practices and Tae Kwon Do. Family Engagement/Multicultural Night. On Friday, all the sixth grade music students traveled to Leavenworth for the day and Matt graciously agreed to chaperone; I suspected he would be the parent better able to roll with the chaos of middle schoolers in June, and I think I was right -- he had a good day, whereas I was beginning to feel the effects of the week: I "taught" my last senior class on Wednesday, which really just meant that I sent them outside with sidewalk chalk to scrawl literary quotes around campus (a beloved tradition in senior IB Literature) and then cried while I tried to tell them how much I've loved teaching them. I'm still processing that. I've been teaching for quite awhile now, and it's definitely not the first time I've shed a tear saying goodbye to my seniors, but I've never looped with an entire class for two years (and in this case, I've had some of them for three or four), and somehow I was lucky enough to loop with a class of really phenomenal kids, and it was the first time I cried like that while addressing an entire class because while I am a pretty emotional person I really do try not to cry at school, at least in front of students, but I sort of feel like about seventy of my own children are leaving home at the same time and it's just. I don't know. It's a lot.
Yesterday morning we were up as early as though it were a school day. Suzannah's last soccer game of the spring season was scheduled for nine, which meant that warm-ups started at eight-thirty, which meant that we needed to have the car packed up by eight-fifteen. (It also meant we needed to have the kitchen cleaned and counters wiped down, because I cannot deal with coming home to dirty dishes or crumbs on the counter.) After Zannah had called end-of-season goodbyes to her teammates, most of whom she'll be joining in eight weeks for practice once again, we headed down to Great Wolf Lodge for her belated birthday celebration. We had a beautiful time. This has become sort of a birthday tradition for the past couple of years, and Matt and I enjoy it as much as the kids do because we have never outgrown our love for playing in the water. So we put in a good four hours in the water park before drying off for dinner, and because this isn't our first rodeo, we've learned that instead of staying onsite for dinner (with every other exhausted family) we can drive ten minutes to McMenamins Olympic Club in Centralia, which has fancy beer samplers for my beer snob of a husband and pinball machines and root beer for my kiddos, which means that I get to relax in a lovely old wood booth with a glass of wine and read a book for awhile. It's one of my favorite parts of the weekend. I fell asleep before the kids last night, before the lights were off, and slept harder than I have in weeks. (Here's the thing about Great Wolf Lodge. It's a giant resort full of families with kids, which means there's chaos literally everywhere, but all of those families want their babies to sleep, so it's a pretty quiet place after a certain hour -- I never worry about people running through the halls and yelling and pissing me off when I'm exhausted. We were even on the ground floor this time, close to everything, and the hallways were pretty quiet by nine o'clock.) This morning the kids were up at dawn because they always are, and we were back in the water park as soon as it opened. We played hard for another few hours before heading home. Rain spattered the windshield and the smell of chlorine filled the car, even though we all showered before we left. Isaac passed out in the back seat, clutching his new stuffed wolf. Suzannah and I read our books.
It really was a lovely weekend. I'm spent, and I haven't even looked at the to-do list I absolutely know I wrote on Friday afternoon, but Friday was hard in ways I don't get to write about here.
In a lot of ways, I love this time of year so much. Everyone is so ready for summer, and sort of burned out, but something about June is so sweet -- infinitely sweeter than May, when everyone is already so done but we're really not, because we still have weeks to go, and none of September's freshly-sharpened pencils still have their erasers, and everyone is out of paper, not to mention patience. But June! We're there. Summer is blooming just barely out of reach, but we can see it. June is often cloudy and cool in the Pacific Northwest, so I've never been sorry to stay in school until we get the truly beautiful days (I'd far rather teach in the coolness of June than the heat of late August), and nothing is so angst-ridden in June than I can't cope with it. In theory, nothing keeps me up at night. And I love this feeling of almost. Because once summer is actually here, every teacher understands that we're immediately aware of its inevitable end.
This year, June is hard. This year has been hard. But when I say that, what I really mean is this: the ways in which it has been hard are just a testament to how lucky I am, because what hurts right now is letting go. This year has been hard, but it has also been as wonderful as it has been hard. Tremendously so. This is not always true, but it is true this year: I have never, not once, wished for time to hurry this year to its inevitable conclusion. The very fact that I am feeling this tidal wave of everything means that I have been extraordinarily lucky. And lucky isn't the right word. What is? I don't know.
But it's not just the natural order of things. That always brings with it a bittersweetness, bound to ache a bit. There are things -- losses -- that are anything but natural. For instance: last Monday, the day my daughter turned twelve, my oldest friend lost her husband to a glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. What kind of bullshit is that? She and I grew up together. A few weeks ago, I posted this on Facebook: I've known Jess my whole life. She and I grew up together in Great Falls and both wound up at Concordia College. She was my roommate for the entire month of May in Europe eighteen years ago, the first witness to Matt and me falling in love. We were at each other's weddings, and three years ago I held her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She is a deeply wonderful human, and it is unsurprising that she and Sean have handled everything thrown at them with more grit and grace than I can imagine, all the while raising two beautiful kids. They need help I wish they didn't have to ask for. Next month they would have celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. Next month I'll be camping in Glacier National Park with my family, remembering their wedding near West Glacier, remembering that weekend as the first time we took our family of four camping in our new tent, and thinking that absolutely nothing about losing your partner after five years of marriage and two babies fits within the natural order of things.
I didn't go to the funeral on Friday. All weekend, I've wondered whether I should have tried harder to make it. But Matt and Suzannah were out of town, and I'd have had to take Isaac out of school, and Friday was difficult in other ways I don't get to write about, and so I didn't. I told myself that she didn't really need me there, that so many people love her and would show up that day. And I hope I can actually help her out when she might need more hands on deck, even if it's just to help clean her bathrooms or help organize her office or take out the recycling or send my kids into the playroom with hers (my kids spent an afternoon with hers a few weeks ago while I sent Matt out for groceries and tried to help her mom a bit while she was at the hospital, and since then both Suzannah and Isaac have talked about how much fun they had and would like to play with them again) while she takes a few minutes to breathe.
This isn't remotely about me; I have nothing to complain about. But grief doesn't respect boundaries, and even though Jess and I haven't seen a lot of each other in adulthood, I told her this winter that our friendship is practically woven into my DNA. So I'm grieving with and for her.
And so this is the state of things. Love and gratitude, grief and loss. The boundaries between them blur.
A week or two ago, an hour before I had to teach a class, one of my best friends walked into my classroom to find me crying at my desk and just wrapped me up in a long hug. I tried to explain it, but I couldn't. This person understood anyway; it's just everything. Love and gratitude and grief and loss. I have nothing to complain about and sometimes my heart breaks anyway.
We've been moving nonstop. Something scheduled every day. Suzannah's band concert, Isaac's choir concert. Soccer practices and Tae Kwon Do. Family Engagement/Multicultural Night. On Friday, all the sixth grade music students traveled to Leavenworth for the day and Matt graciously agreed to chaperone; I suspected he would be the parent better able to roll with the chaos of middle schoolers in June, and I think I was right -- he had a good day, whereas I was beginning to feel the effects of the week: I "taught" my last senior class on Wednesday, which really just meant that I sent them outside with sidewalk chalk to scrawl literary quotes around campus (a beloved tradition in senior IB Literature) and then cried while I tried to tell them how much I've loved teaching them. I'm still processing that. I've been teaching for quite awhile now, and it's definitely not the first time I've shed a tear saying goodbye to my seniors, but I've never looped with an entire class for two years (and in this case, I've had some of them for three or four), and somehow I was lucky enough to loop with a class of really phenomenal kids, and it was the first time I cried like that while addressing an entire class because while I am a pretty emotional person I really do try not to cry at school, at least in front of students, but I sort of feel like about seventy of my own children are leaving home at the same time and it's just. I don't know. It's a lot.
Yesterday morning we were up as early as though it were a school day. Suzannah's last soccer game of the spring season was scheduled for nine, which meant that warm-ups started at eight-thirty, which meant that we needed to have the car packed up by eight-fifteen. (It also meant we needed to have the kitchen cleaned and counters wiped down, because I cannot deal with coming home to dirty dishes or crumbs on the counter.) After Zannah had called end-of-season goodbyes to her teammates, most of whom she'll be joining in eight weeks for practice once again, we headed down to Great Wolf Lodge for her belated birthday celebration. We had a beautiful time. This has become sort of a birthday tradition for the past couple of years, and Matt and I enjoy it as much as the kids do because we have never outgrown our love for playing in the water. So we put in a good four hours in the water park before drying off for dinner, and because this isn't our first rodeo, we've learned that instead of staying onsite for dinner (with every other exhausted family) we can drive ten minutes to McMenamins Olympic Club in Centralia, which has fancy beer samplers for my beer snob of a husband and pinball machines and root beer for my kiddos, which means that I get to relax in a lovely old wood booth with a glass of wine and read a book for awhile. It's one of my favorite parts of the weekend. I fell asleep before the kids last night, before the lights were off, and slept harder than I have in weeks. (Here's the thing about Great Wolf Lodge. It's a giant resort full of families with kids, which means there's chaos literally everywhere, but all of those families want their babies to sleep, so it's a pretty quiet place after a certain hour -- I never worry about people running through the halls and yelling and pissing me off when I'm exhausted. We were even on the ground floor this time, close to everything, and the hallways were pretty quiet by nine o'clock.) This morning the kids were up at dawn because they always are, and we were back in the water park as soon as it opened. We played hard for another few hours before heading home. Rain spattered the windshield and the smell of chlorine filled the car, even though we all showered before we left. Isaac passed out in the back seat, clutching his new stuffed wolf. Suzannah and I read our books.
It really was a lovely weekend. I'm spent, and I haven't even looked at the to-do list I absolutely know I wrote on Friday afternoon, but Friday was hard in ways I don't get to write about here.
In a lot of ways, I love this time of year so much. Everyone is so ready for summer, and sort of burned out, but something about June is so sweet -- infinitely sweeter than May, when everyone is already so done but we're really not, because we still have weeks to go, and none of September's freshly-sharpened pencils still have their erasers, and everyone is out of paper, not to mention patience. But June! We're there. Summer is blooming just barely out of reach, but we can see it. June is often cloudy and cool in the Pacific Northwest, so I've never been sorry to stay in school until we get the truly beautiful days (I'd far rather teach in the coolness of June than the heat of late August), and nothing is so angst-ridden in June than I can't cope with it. In theory, nothing keeps me up at night. And I love this feeling of almost. Because once summer is actually here, every teacher understands that we're immediately aware of its inevitable end.
This year, June is hard. This year has been hard. But when I say that, what I really mean is this: the ways in which it has been hard are just a testament to how lucky I am, because what hurts right now is letting go. This year has been hard, but it has also been as wonderful as it has been hard. Tremendously so. This is not always true, but it is true this year: I have never, not once, wished for time to hurry this year to its inevitable conclusion. The very fact that I am feeling this tidal wave of everything means that I have been extraordinarily lucky. And lucky isn't the right word. What is? I don't know.
But it's not just the natural order of things. That always brings with it a bittersweetness, bound to ache a bit. There are things -- losses -- that are anything but natural. For instance: last Monday, the day my daughter turned twelve, my oldest friend lost her husband to a glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. What kind of bullshit is that? She and I grew up together. A few weeks ago, I posted this on Facebook: I've known Jess my whole life. She and I grew up together in Great Falls and both wound up at Concordia College. She was my roommate for the entire month of May in Europe eighteen years ago, the first witness to Matt and me falling in love. We were at each other's weddings, and three years ago I held her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She is a deeply wonderful human, and it is unsurprising that she and Sean have handled everything thrown at them with more grit and grace than I can imagine, all the while raising two beautiful kids. They need help I wish they didn't have to ask for. Next month they would have celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. Next month I'll be camping in Glacier National Park with my family, remembering their wedding near West Glacier, remembering that weekend as the first time we took our family of four camping in our new tent, and thinking that absolutely nothing about losing your partner after five years of marriage and two babies fits within the natural order of things.
I didn't go to the funeral on Friday. All weekend, I've wondered whether I should have tried harder to make it. But Matt and Suzannah were out of town, and I'd have had to take Isaac out of school, and Friday was difficult in other ways I don't get to write about, and so I didn't. I told myself that she didn't really need me there, that so many people love her and would show up that day. And I hope I can actually help her out when she might need more hands on deck, even if it's just to help clean her bathrooms or help organize her office or take out the recycling or send my kids into the playroom with hers (my kids spent an afternoon with hers a few weeks ago while I sent Matt out for groceries and tried to help her mom a bit while she was at the hospital, and since then both Suzannah and Isaac have talked about how much fun they had and would like to play with them again) while she takes a few minutes to breathe.
This isn't remotely about me; I have nothing to complain about. But grief doesn't respect boundaries, and even though Jess and I haven't seen a lot of each other in adulthood, I told her this winter that our friendship is practically woven into my DNA. So I'm grieving with and for her.
And so this is the state of things. Love and gratitude, grief and loss. The boundaries between them blur.
A week or two ago, an hour before I had to teach a class, one of my best friends walked into my classroom to find me crying at my desk and just wrapped me up in a long hug. I tried to explain it, but I couldn't. This person understood anyway; it's just everything. Love and gratitude and grief and loss. I have nothing to complain about and sometimes my heart breaks anyway.
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