These Ordinary Gifts

Ten years ago tonight, Matt and I curled around our newborn son in the middle of our own bed. I traced my fingers over his pink warm skin. Kept kissing him, breathing in his newborn scent. He smelled like heaven. To take him home from my midwife's house only a few hours after his birth, to spend our first day together in the comfortable quiet of our own home, was a great gift.

Every year I tell my children their birth stories -- whatever version, whatever piece seems appropriate for them at the time. Isaac's story always includes this beginning: You were born in the dark of a frosty December morning. Sometimes I tell him that I sang in the car all the way to the birth center at two o'clock in the morning because it helped with the contractions. I don't tell him that I dilated from four centimeters to pushing him out in thirty minutes while I soaked in my midwife's huge tub, how I howled him right out of my body in two pushes, believing I would break in half. Last year I told him I made his dad drive through McDonald's for a breakfast burrito on the way home.

This morning I called him over to the couch to look a photograph, one of the first my doula took of us together after he was safely earthside, just moments after his birth. His skin is so pink. His little feet are pressed against me, his head cradled in my hands, his arms flung out wide, unaccustomed to the sudden space around him. I kept touching my nose to his. A moment of falling in love.

Isaac glanced at the picture and shrieked, "Ew! Yucky!" And then he bounced away to the breakfast table, where he inhaled miniature pancakes from Trader Joe's and irritated his sister until she screamed, "Isaac! Go away!" But she also gave him a birthday hug, without any prompting from me.

I walked up behind him at the table and wrapped my arms around him, pressed my cheek against his. It's still so soft. For a moment, he let me.

"Happy Birthday, Buddy," I said. And because he is still little enough to be sweet to his mama, he hugged me back, kissed me on the cheek. His lips were sticky, and his breath smelled like pancakes and oatmeal and the last piece of a Top Pot donut his dad brought home yesterday. And I still think it's heaven.

*

The kids had their Tae Kwon Do belt test this morning: two-and-a-half hours of hard work. Two years ago I didn't know I wanted to be a Tae Kwon Do mom, just like I didn't know I wanted to be a soccer mom, and as it turns out, both of these things bring me immeasurable joy. (Really, I didn't have kids to sit at home while they watch TV.) Anyway, it seems to me that there are worse ways to spend a few hours on one's birthday than testing for junior black belt.

Sometimes, during ordinary Tae Kwon Do class, I drop them off and run errands. Or I stay, but sometimes I watch and sometimes I read, or I grade papers. Testing is different. I can't take my eyes off of them. It just all comes together, all their hard work, and I see the very best of them: their concentration, their drive, all the results of practicing and, this month, as many extra classes as we could cram in to make up for classes they missed when Suzannah twisted her ankle or I was away for training and we couldn't juggle everything.

This is a thing they decided they wanted to try, two years ago, and once they started I have never once doubted they would become black belts. It's not that, though -- while I'm proud of them, what I love is just being present for these moments of watching them do their thing. They are so present in their bodies, so fully immersed in what they're doing. Sometimes they'll glance over and make eye contact, and I'll smile, and I'll see them try not to smile back because they are trying to focus, but mostly, they're just wholly and unselfconsciously themselves. They are not thinking about themselves, they are being themselves, and when I am allowed into these moments as a witness, I am utterly overcome with love for these two people who completely remade my heart when they entered the world.

*

My son is ten. An entire decade of my life filled with this crazy joy. Today, when I look at him, all of it, all of it, washes over me. The wrapping paper strewn on the floor next to the Christmas tree. The way he scooped up his baby cousin this evening to carry him away from the hot oven before dinner and made him giggle instead of cry. The way he runs away from me when I drop him off at school early for Safety Patrol, not even glancing back as he races to join his friends and don his orange vest (but he will still give my hand three quick squeezes before he leaps out of the back seat). The way his hair sticks up in the mornings when he shuffles out of his bedroom before dawn, and if he's not quite awake, the way he'll let me hug him just a beat longer than usual before he pours himself a bowl of cereal. The way he pours himself a giant bowl of cereal as soon as he gets home from school because suddenly he is always, always hungry. The way he decides to put himself to bed just past eight o'clock every night and screams dramatically, "Tucketh me ins!" And superimposed over all of the moments in our life now are all of the moments we have ever shared. The way he wraps his arms around at least one but probably more like four stuffed animals every night. The way his wispy hair fell over his forehead before his first haircut. The way his round tummy bulged over his FuzziBunz diapers, the way he used to wrap his arms around my neck and let me rock him in the dark before bed. The way he used to let out these piercing screams as an infant, not because he was unhappy or uncomfortable but because he was letting us know that hey! He was there! He was a baby and it was awesome to be a baby! The way he was so brave the night we drove to Mary Bridge Children's Hospital when his doctor told us he had gone into kidney failure, the way I sat in a wheelchair with my four-year-old son in my lap as a nurse wheeled us to his kidney ultrasound at three-thirty in the morning, just so he could sit in my lap instead of sitting alone, the way he grabbed both of my arms and wrapped them around his body. The way he still remembers playing Zombie Cats during that hospital stay even if he doesn't remember bursting into tears at the sight of yet another plate of plain noodles and grapes because his diet was so restricted. The way he used to play at the splash park when we first discovered it, how instead of running through the water he would trot doggedly around the perimeter, again and again, lap after lap, his swim diaper drooping and his little sandals slapping the wet concrete. The first day I took him to kindergarten camp but knew he would be just fine because he would have Suzannah's beloved kindergarten teacher. His little red-and-white striped polo shirt. The way his belly used to round over his swim trunks. The way he stretched as he grew one summer; suddenly, he had no chub to hold up those shorts and he was always showing just a hint of butt crack instead. His first class at The Little Gym. The way he played in the wet sand at Ocean Shores and screamed at the sight of a huge dead crap, leaping to safety in his daddy's arms. The way he threw up four times on a flight to Omaha but wept when we wouldn't get him a cheeseburger as soon as we stepped off the plane. The way he used to hurl himself on the floor in a tearful toddler rage. The way he used to hurl himself cheerfully into the dog bed, whether she was in it or not. The way he used to bring me his nursing pillow, the way he'd say "Boppy!" with a big smile, and I would pull him up on my lap to nurse. The way his nursing manners deteriorated as a toddler, the way he'd poke his fingers into my nose or stick his toes in my face, so when he was finally ready to be done I was too, but also, the way I look at my children now and thank God I never rushed to push my babies out of my bed or away from my breast. The way he used to crawl like a jolly little komodo dragon, barrel chested and bent on destruction, flinging books off the bottom shelf or upending the dog's water dish or tossing his toy cars in the toilet. The way he still brings me his fleece Batman blanket on Sunday afternoons when I lie down on the couch for a nap, the way he tucks it around me and gives me a kiss.

*

Sometimes the moments wash over me, all at once. I watch my son kihap as he breaks a board with his heel. He bows as Master hands him the halves, and he runs across the mat, bows again, hands me his broken boards. My eyes fill with tears, not so much because I am overcome with the sight of my son breaking boards again (which is one of my favorite parts of testing) but because today, in this moment, this lanky, sweaty boy is also my pink warm newborn, my big-bellied toddler, my sweet kindergartner. He is my son sleeping in the backseat, building Lego creations in the family room, curled up in the recliner with a book, zooming around the driveway on his scooter.

Let me never take such ordinary gifts for granted.

*

Seven years ago, the day my son turned three, twenty first-graders were murdered in their classroom. My daughter was a first-grader then. My son will never again have a birthday where I do not remember this horror. My children's lives are forever linked with one of the darkest days, the day I realized that if our country could fail to respond to the slaughter of children then what hope is there? I still don't know if what I have can be called hope, because I'm mighty full of anger and, too often, despair. What I have is a crazy, incomprehensible mix of gratitude and grief. I think of twenty children who should be eighth graders now, who should be planning their high school schedules. Instead, they never even lost their baby teeth, never learned how to play the trumpet or the clarinet, never looked into the audience at a middle school band concert to see their parents filming their beautiful squawking debut, never got their first periods, never got braces. It seems spectacularly unfair that some of us get to raise our children through these ordinary moments and some of us don't. I struggle with this often, but especially on this day.

Seven years ago I had a three-year-old and I had a six-year-old. Seven years later I am lucky enough to have them both, still. To celebrate their ordinary moments and extraordinary lives. They grow so quickly. It's bittersweet. Achingly so. And mostly sweet. Because they grow, and they will not let me drop anchor at despair.

Every year, and especially every December, the darkest month of the year, I look at my son, at both of my children, and remember the light.

So this is my prayer, every December: Let me never take such ordinary gifts for granted. Let me find a way to use my gratitude, and my grief. Let me not drop anchor at despair.

All we can do

I wish I would have written more in October -- well, written anything here. Lately, I've come to appreciate all the other October journals I've uncovered from all of my years of teaching. When my colleague asked me, "Is it always this terrible?" I went hunting. She and I have worked together for our entire adult lives, more or less. Could we be so lacking in perspective? Surely, we've had worse.

And we have, I guess, objectively speaking. We've both weathered tougher classes, survived tougher moments.

October is a rough month. During my first year of teaching, on the Friday before Halloween, I fumbled my way through my last class of the day in a dank, moldy room I shared with another teacher. I taught forty-two students that period - more than I've ever had in a class since then - and one of those students was a tightly-wound boy holding the weight of what I now recognize as many ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). He had anger issues, among other things, and when I learned about the way his father had thrown him against a wall and broken his arm when he was in the sixth grade, I understood a little better. And he was actually quite respectful to me, although easily frustrated when he didn't understand something immediately. But that afternoon, I guess you could say he lost his patience with kids in the class who had learned how to press his buttons just enough.

They weren't a bad group. I actually really liked that class, as much as a first year teacher can like a giant group of sophomores when she has very little idea of what in the hell to do with them for eighty minutes every day. But they were teenagers, and this boy was an easy target. And he snapped. He stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs:

"SHUT! The FUCK! UP!"

He lifted his backpack from the floor and hurled it at the brick wall, next to the window. It wasn't zipped, and his stuff went flying. He threw his CD player next. It broke against the brick.

I can still see him in that moment. The way the veins in his neck stood out. Maybe one of the other kids snickered nervously, but what I remember is the silence that followed. And now, all these years later, I remember shaking on my drive home, watching ads for Bartending Academy on the little 13-inch TV in the living room of my one-bedroom apartment that night, and asking Matt - who had just moved from Minnesota a couple of weeks earlier - why in the hell I hadn't done something else with my life. He took me out for Happy Hour at a fancy nearby bar and I sipped a fancy cocktail, a splurge for someone who had only earned one paycheck in her new job and someone who hadn't yet found a job in his new home state. The next day we found a new coffee house - we tried to spend our Saturdays exploring - and I sipped a latte and wrote furiously in my journal. I'll always be glad I wrote it all down.

(I could write so much here, too, about how sometimes I hardly recognize the teacher I was at 22, about how I can hardly believe anyone hired that child dressed up in teacher clothes, about how opinionated and self-righteous and indignant people in their twenties can be, and about how I don't for one moment wish myself back to those days.)

That was a hard moment in my first year. What I've learned is that hard moments don't discriminate; they can happen in year one or five or fifteen. I'm not convinced they get worse, and I have absolutely no patience for the "kids these days" bullshit fed to us by adults who don't actually work with or love teenagers, or who have forgotten that adults have always had the exact same narrative about "kids these days." Kids are kids and they always have been. Other things change, and other things can make all the difference to a teacher who feels all the way to her core that she is where she belongs, but is unsure of whether she has what it takes to stay there. Or whether she has the support.

For example: I hit very low points in October of 2011, 2014, and 2016 - moments when I truly wondered if I had what it takes to keep doing this. It was more than just a bad day. I don't really want to rehash those moments, but it does help, somewhat, to remember that this time of year can be brutal, that bad times happen, and that it is possible to fall back in love with the work. So far, I have. Every time.

The class I taught during the 2011-2012 school year nearly broke me; support from the right people saved me. And even though that class was particularly horrific, I met some of my favorite humans there, too, and I'll never forget weeping my way through the worst department meeting I've ever endured (another story for another time, perhaps) and saying, "I love those kids, and I would do it again." The fall of 2014 nearly broke me for different reasons. I filed a claim that made me feel angry and vulnerable, and I paid very close attention to the people who had my back and who didn't. I taught a really, really tough class and found myself loving a really, really tough kid, one who hated me at first sight and who kept me up at night for months worrying, up to and beyond the day she dropped out of school. Something about her caught like a fish hook in my heart. On the last day I saw her, she sneaked into my room for one last hug before running out, before a police officer intercepted her on campus. I was never, ever going to get her to pass English class, but I thought, at the very least, maybe she would remember that someone loved her. Talk about ACEs: She had more than enough for a lifetime before she reached the age of sixteen. Teaching was so much easier when she wasn't in my room, but she tore a piece of my heart when she left. A couple of years ago I taught a group of freshmen who exhausted me every day with their attitude and lack of impulse control, and while most of them have turned into pretty okay humans, I still remember the day one of my colleagues ran into my room and said, "I've been reading about lead poisoning on the internet, and I actually think that's the problem with ________." We laughed, because sometimes what else is there to do? And I said, "I just can't call her mother one more time. That woman works hard all day. She can't come home to another call about her kid being a shithead. She knows."

I've survived so many moments that felt unsurvivable, and the important thing to note here is that I survived because of my village. This is simply not a job we can do in isolation. I hate those inspirational teacher movies that showcase that one badass teacher who thrives and connects with her students (by the way, do any of y'all count the number of students in those fake movie classes? It's always, like, twelve) despite the fact that she's surrounded by bitter, apathetic colleagues. That's a load of bullshit. I survive because of my colleagues. We love these kids together. We cannot do this work alone. I love sharing stories of my students, and it's possible I do this more than most teachers because writing about my life is the way I move through the world, it's how I process, it's how I stay even a little sane, but also, it makes me nervous, because when well-meaning friends comment that they "wish there were more teachers like [me]" I really need them to understand that I am not a Hollywood teacher. I am simply one of many in the trenches, only I'm one who happens to have this irritating need to write about it all the goddamn time.

The truth is that teaching can be incredibly toxic. Teachers are expected to take the very abuse we train our children to fight, to reject. We're "coached" by "instructional leaders" who have far less teaching experience and far less student contact than we do. Those folks have their own pressures, to be sure, but it certainly doesn't translate to support of teachers or support of kids; often I think it comes down to marketing and optics instead of what actually serves our students and supports those of us who spend our lives - literally, our lives - with them.

I'm grateful for my old journals, because they give me perspective. Teaching has never been easy. I've been struggling this year, perhaps more than I expected. I'm teaching classes I usually love. I'm excited about developing curriculum and implementing new learning. Having the freedom to design a course, to teach the very things that set my soul on fire is truly an unspeakable privilege. I know better than to take for granted the fact that I'm trusted with this, and more or less left alone to do it. At the same time, there are trends in education, in administration, that truly frighten me. There's no other career I've ever wanted, ever, but I also can't say that I see myself retiring from this one. There have been very few times over the last two decades when I've been willing to say that aloud to another human being, and let me tell you right now, I can't even think those words without swallowing around tears. But there it is.

All I can do is take it as it comes, I suppose. All I can do is advocate, beg, tell the truth, cry into the night, pray, and show up for as long as I can. All I can do is write about it.

Where I Am

So here I am, on the third Friday evening of the new school year. The kids and I are home from Tae Kwon Do, and that little fact proves, I think, that I'm starting to find my footing a bit. We've been adjusting to our fall schedules, and finding our groove -- Tae Kwon Do for both kids twice a week, plus soccer and Confirmation for Suzannah. It's something every weeknight.

(I need to be clear about something: I say this not to be a martyr, not to brag about how busy I am because everyone is busy, and definitely not to elicit anyone's sympathy. I enjoy this stage of our lives so very much. I love the rhythm of our days, admittedly made easier by the kids' teachers not assigning excessive amounts of homework and the fact that my kids are bookish teacher pleasers who get their stuff done immediately after school. I love watching them do their things and just be so beautifully, unselfconsciously themselves, and I even really love driving here and there, because my kids are still willing to chat with me in the car, spilling the details of their days. I know -- oh, I know -- that this time in our lives is fleeting, that before I know it, they'll be grown and gone and I will crave what these days give me, which is just being as present as I can with my very favorite people. It is the greatest gift of the universe.)

(I'm also intentionally writing this on Friday evening instead of, say, Tuesday morning, when someone is yelling at one parent because she thinks she's late if she's only five minutes early for her zero hour jazz band practice and someone else is crying because he broke his umbrella by using it carelessly in ways for which it was not intended and the other parent did not immediately offer to buy him a new one. There are those moments, too.)

We've been squeezing in the second Tae Kwon Do class on Saturday morning -- when Matt offers to take them -- because for the last two weeks the thought of coming home after school on Friday afternoon and then leaving again, wearing pants, was just too much to ask. But today I managed to squeeze in both a workout and a bubble bath before taking the kids to class, and while they donned sparring gear I even graded some of my sophomores' papers. Tonight, my husband is making dinner and we're settling in for Family Movie Night, and I'm settling into the feeling that this is good. Kids, teaching, life, all of it.

I was ready to go back in August, because I always am, but it's been a strange start for me this year -- I've felt unmoored in ways I don't always. Objectively, everything is...fine? Good? Actually, objectively, things are better than good. This year has had me feeling more grateful than ever to work exactly where I am, with these fierce and wonderful kids, with these fierce and passionate educators, in this community I have loved for years. In some ways, I've never felt more grounded, more committed to doing this work here, in this place, with these people. Sometimes I allow myself to settle into sort of a bubble in which all I see is what's around me, and sometimes that's a comfort and sometimes it distorts my vision when things feel hard, but when I push past that, I realize exactly how very lucky I am to be exactly where I am. (Take that, toxic local Community Watch Page on social media.)

I'm not sure what I'm even really trying to say here. I'm processing some things. I've been struggling a bit this year, I guess, to reconcile what I know and believe with what I feel, which is complicated. Today, though, or maybe throughout this entire week, my feelings match what I know and believe, and that's a gift. It's also probably a normal part of September.

Or it's part of what I claim in this new decade of my life, one which the world tells me I'm supposed to dread and one in which I feel -- who knew? -- really, really good. Let me tell you something: I don't have time for what the world has to say about that.

I was reading through old journal entries today, and I ran across this, written in my twenties: [My grandma] believed that birthdays should be celebrated gladly, always...[it had] nothing to do with presents and everything to do, I think, with her gratitude to this life we're born in. Even if every breath hurts.

I am lucky to move through this world without every breath hurting. On my last birthday, I wrote this:

I don't mourn the passing of my childhood, or my twenties, or my thirties. I've learned a lot -- who I am and what I want. And I woke up on my birthday in the very life I realized I'd always wanted for myself. I have so much more work to do, so much more, and there are still things I want. Deeply. There are things I want that I won't ever have, and that's okay; part of the blessing of living forty years is the realization that we won't ever have everything we want, and that it is possible, still, to be happy. Part of the blessing of living forty years is that the pursuit of individual happiness isn't, perhaps, even the point. I am working towards the things I still want, but I'm not sure that my individual happiness is the point there, either. This is the work of a human life.

And I think about what that means today, what it's meant for the last half-year as I read posts on social media by my friends who either welcome or fear this concept of fully embracing all of the years we are lucky enough to live.

I can tell you this: on my last birthday, I made a few small changes, and those small changes have meant everything. I hadn't realized how much until this month -- this unsettling and unmooring month. I'm taking care of myself in a way I couldn't have in my twenties. I'm enjoying myself in a way I didn't know how to when I was younger. I don't come to work tired every day. I'm sleeping soundly and well -- far, far better than I did when I was younger. I have the energy to keep up with my kids and take care of myself. I couldn't run a mile to save my life twenty years ago, but I can jog (slowly but steadily) several of them now. I eat nutritious food that makes my body feel really good, and I take pleasure in its preparation, both because I love to eat it and because I love to feed my family. I have no interest in eating a meal which requires me to peel back a plastic cover (aside from my fondness for a few appetizers from Trader Joe's, because I do love those vegetable spring rolls when I'm cooking Thai peanut noodles or stir fry, and I love the samosas or vegetable "bird's nests" if I'm cooking something with chickpeas and curry). I have no desire to reject the foods I love because they're "naughty." I'm learning to tune into what I actually need -- exercise, whole foods, fresh air and movement, things that taste delicious, alone time to recharge -- and separate that from what has been careless habit in the past. I'm slipping into jeans I kept in the back of my closet and didn't wear for a long time because they felt too tight. I'm reading more books instead of scrolling through my phone. I'm trying very intentionally not to scroll through my phone, period. I'd fallen into a terrible habit of starting my day by picking up my phone and reading the news and social media and I don't do that anymore. You know what helps? Having your young son say, "Why do you always read your phone in the morning? That's too much." He's right. I'm in the process of Marie Kondo-ing my social media (see above comment about toxic Community Watch Pages...it also applies to toxic people). I've missed a lot, probably, but a lot of that is noise.

It's a hard balance to strike. I care, deeply, about a lot of things. I don't want to close myself off from the world. I do, however, need to shake off the noise, the excess, the obligations. When I turned forty I decided I wouldn't stay in a room I didn't want to be in, and I meant that both literally and figuratively. It's something I'm still practicing, but it's also maybe one of the best things I've ever done for myself.

Unmoored or not, that's not a bad place to be at the end of September.

What I want is what I've got, exactly where it is

This morning, on our last morning before the school year begins in earnest, I poured myself a cup of coffee and curled up on the couch with a book. I have to snatch these quiet moments when I can, because Winslows don't really sleep in. But Suzannah is also a teenager now, and this summer she has been "sleeping in" for the first time in her entire life -- which means she emerges from her bedroom, rumply and sleepy-eyed, sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning. (Once or twice she even slept in just past 8:00, at which point I wondered if I should check to make sure she was still breathing.)

She curled up on the recliner across from me, not quite awake. I didn't say anything right away, hesitant to disturb the quiet balance -- or, more accurately, hesitant to attract the attention of the youngest Winslow, who was already breakfasted and wide awake and ready to troll someone. But I watched her. She didn't even really seem aware of me right away. She arched her back and stretched her arms way over her head, exactly the way she did when she was an infant. Arching her back, sticking out her little bum in her tiny pink sleeper, stretching her arms out wide, pursing her sleepy lips.

I watched my daughter stretch and fold her long limbs back in. She turned toward me.

"Hi," she said.

I can't even put into words how I fall in love with my children all over again in these moments. Again and again.

I wanted to tell her how I was feeling, somehow. How in that moment of just watching her stretch I really saw her, the way she has always been exactly herself. I wanted to tell her about the way I used to open the door to her room after her nap, when she was old enough to pull herself up in her crib. The way she would already be standing up, beaming.

Instead I just held out my arms, and she crossed the living and crawled up on the couch with me, folding herself to fit so I could rest my chin on top of her head, and I breathed in her sleepy scent, warm skin and shampoo from last night's shower.

She has always been exactly herself. I have always been this lucky.

*

The quiet doesn't last, of course. Soon my son was bounding into the living room, shouting his good morning, shrieking his silliness, irritating his sister. And I thought, too, of the way he used to thump his fat little legs with joy when he was a baby, when I was changing him, or even just playing with him on the floor. He'd thump his legs and let out these ear-piercing shrieks, his eyes wide and shining, his grin open-mouthed with delight. As soon as he found his voice he used it to scream, and the message was clear: Hey, world! Here I am! I'm a baby! It's awesome to be a baby! He has always seemed so happy to just be. Every single day with him is a gift, a reminder not to take myself too seriously.

*

So here we are, the first weekend in September. School starts tomorrow. My daughter will be in eighth grade, her last year in middle school, a fact I cannot process without my chest seizing a bit for all the uncertainty and fear. Is this what it always feels like? I couldn't sleep the night before she started sixth grade; I crept out to the couch at two o'clock in the morning to read a book, trying to distract myself from the fears I was trying desperately not to project onto my daughter. I spent the entire summer before she started kindergarten in a state of anxiety and nausea. Last week I stopped by the school to drop off a check for Isaac's school supplies -- his school takes care of all of them for a small fee -- and I ran into the kids' kindergarten teacher, who remains one of my favorite humans on the planet. We hugged each other and caught up on summer, and when I told her my girl came back from camp taller than me and did she remember that first day of kindergarten, she said, "Oh, yes. I remember." (Bless all the kindergarten teachers, for caring for our babies and for handling their anxious, wrecked parents with patience and grace. If every child could experience the love and warmth and competence of my kids' kindergarten teacher, we'd solve a lot of the world's problems.)

She was fine. I think she'll be fine in high school, too. But I know that this will be my struggle this year -- knowing that in only a few months, it's something I'll have to think about. This was the comfort of seventh grade, knowing she would be okay at her school and knowing we still had a nice buffer before high school.

I was significantly more relaxed when I left my son on the first day of kindergarten, because I knew, loved, and trusted his kindergarten teacher. This week I will leave him with the teacher who also taught his sister for two years, and I couldn't be happier about that. But there are little reminders that he is growing so fast -- like the fact that he signed up for morning patrol last spring, and Friday afternoon was his "training." He'll help with the drop-off car line in the morning, and after he turns ten in December he can be a crossing guard. I keep thinking of the way he used to grab one of the bright orange flags out of the can taped to the pole at the intersection across from the Elliott Bay Brewery, the way he would clutch it in his chubby fist and wave it as we crossed California Avenue on our way to dinner. On Saturday, we drove to Madison Beach in Seattle to swim in Lake Washington one final time this summer, and as we always do, we stopped at Pagliacci Pizza before heading home. We parked across the street and walked to the crosswalk, and Isaac, always the ham, snatched one of the little orange flags tied to a stick and waved it dramatically, bouncing across the intersection while his sister rolled her eyes. Both of them perfectly and always themselves.

*

So here's where I am this weekend: still feeling unmoored the night before school starts, feeling anxious and unsettled in a way I always have. But I will not wake up tomorrow morning sick to my stomach with nerves, and that's not nothing. More importantly, I've spent the last couple of days soaking up the last days of summer with my family and feeling just leveled with gratitude that this is my life, that the people I spend my days with are the people I want to spend my days with.

My kids might really need to go back to school, yes, and they're driving me a little crazy (and they're driving each other straight to insanity, to the point where I'm sort of worried Isaac will revert to biting and Suzannah will punch him in the nose), but to everyone who rolls their eyes at me and says, "Ah, you have a teenager, lucky you," while looking sort of sorry for me? Don't. I loved having my babies when they were babies, but it's these humans I live with now who remind me exactly what matters, and who are the source of my deepest joy. I would never wish us backwards. I love the now, and I've learned to trust that I will loves what comes. Maybe I've learned to choose to love it.

*

Matt took the kids hiking yesterday so I could get some work done. We have been married nearly seventeen years, together for nearly twenty, and he understands the need for quiet and space the weekend before school starts. He packed lunches and sunscreen and took the kids to Denny Creek while I spread my notebooks and binders and laptop all over the dining room table and worked on my unit plans and curriculum maps. I also took a little time to read through journals from my first years of teaching, which has become another back-to-school ritual. It helps when I'm feeling anxious and overwhelmed, because it will never be harder than my first year of teaching, ever. But I don't only read about my first year; I read through the entries of my first few years. I started to feel like I knew what I was doing after that first year, but I was also always anxious. The year I was privileged to teach my first IB classes I spent my last week of summer with a severe case of Imposter Syndrome. (It is interesting to note that I felt the same way many years later, when I was given my first class of regular freshmen. I've taught "regular" sophomores of all stripes more years than not, but freshmen? They require skills.)

I wrote this, a week before my college graduation, when I was feeling more terrified than excited: Probably when I'm forty I will look wistfully back at this wonderful, exciting time in my 22-year-old life and wish I could be here again. I guess it's all about perspective.

Oh, Sweetheart. I would never, ever wish myself back to my twenties. God. I had so many opinions without the life experience to temper them. And other people's opinions mattered too much. I said yes when I should have said no. I stayed in rooms I didn't want to be in, literally and figuratively, and I don't do that anymore. I was not objectively unhappy, but I am so much happier in my own skin now. Hang in there, Kiddo. It gets so much better.

Could the world be about to turn?

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

"As Lutheran Christians, our focus on Jesus Christ affects how this church understands justice. Because we are freed in Christ for others, we are able to respond to God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. In society, neighbor love takes the form of neighbor justice."
--From the proposed social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action" (adopted with 97% of the vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, August 2019)

This is a familiar scene for me: sitting down to write after a long day of travel, after a week away from home, after returning from a summer trip and feeling like I should be writing about its moments. The lake in Minnesota, and the way the evening light settled across the sky, lighting the water as I swam after dinner until dark. The way my son dove in as soon as we arrived last Saturday evening and for the next four days could only be coaxed from the water for meals. I should be writing about the completely wonderful and utterly necessary getaway with my best friend, who picked me up and spirited me away to Fargo/Moorhead, where we spent a couple of nearly perfect days visiting our college town for the first time in years. It was deeply good for my soul.

And yet, last summer, the night we returned from our first trip of the summer, this is what I wrote:

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...

I could write exactly that and more tonight.

We had extra time at the airport yesterday after dropping off our rental car, and I finally had a few desperately needed moments to myself. I sat at a wine bar and ordered a turkey sandwich and a flight of white wine and wrote six pages in my journal. I was hardly even writing real sentences; I just poured the messy contents of my mind all over those pages. Migrant workers detained while their children were at school, children who waited in vain to be picked up, or children who went home to empty houses. Children who slept on a gymnasium floor. More shootings. Terrorism at the hands of toxic white men. Why don't we call it that? Why don't we say our country is under terrorist attack? Can we pause to imagine how differently this would play out -- the policy changes on the table -- if the dozens of people murdered in three different states had been murdered by someone other than a white man? How is it a fathomable thing that mass shooters invoke words used by the president literally hundreds of times?

So I slept terribly all week. But I slept terribly in safe, comfortable beds, simply because I happened to win the cosmic lottery of senseless privilege.

And then we have these absurd, obscene discussions. Thoughts and prayers. Mental health. I was stupid enough to read the comments on Steve Bullock's Facebook page. I like the governor of my home state quite a bit, but the trolling comments under literally every post on his page never fail to depress me: Tyranny of the government and "We have the right to access firearms with absolutely no restrictions!" And, of course, "But you don't care about the slaughter of innocent babies." That's about every third comment, including posts that show, for instance, a photograph of the governor eating corn on the cob at the state fair. At that point, I'm utterly reduced to for fuck's sake until I can rally enough to donate to immigration aid and gun control. Again.

The same story of America, in any season.

And then Toni Morrison died. And I just cannot. Cannot.

I've been trying to counter every horror I read about with a tribute to Toni Morrison. There is no shortage of either. All the great writers understand who was the greatest of the greats, the absolute brilliant best: Jesmyn Ward, Marlon James, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, John Irving, Angie Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Chigozie Obioma. And so very many others. I would bet all the money I have that if Pat Conroy were still alive he'd have written something gorgeous about her, too.

This is where I find hope this week. Or maybe not hope, because truth be told, most days I don't have a lot of hope that things will be much better than what they are in my lifetime. But something else, some unnameable feeling fueled by a fierce and consuming combination of rage and love. Who was it that said we are not obliged to finish the task, but neither may we abandon it? That's where I'm at. That's why I keep reading and writing and teaching. That simple human need to connect, only connect. To see something beautiful and true in the artistry of our daily lives, the beauty and truth captured by writers and artists, the thing I have to believe in to keep breathing in and out. The connectedness and not-aloneness, I suppose.

And then other things happened, while I tried to grapple with the juxtaposition of soul-nurturing vacation and the horror happening in my country. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted to become the first "sanctuary church body" in the country during the churchwide assembly. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this means yet, but it could look like providing shelter for undocumented immigrants, equipping folks to serve as first responders during raids, advocating for immigrants in deportation cases, fighting for the end of mass detentions and family separations, and "extended radical hospitality." My own understanding of Christianity means I sort of feel like WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, THEN towards churches that don't already do this, and certainly there are many churches outside the ELCA that engage in this work, service, and love of our neighbors, and who are expansive and inclusive in what it means to call someone a neighbor. Not all churches are silent or complacent in the face of the status quo. All the same, I'm grateful for the vote.

(It's not easy to believe in much, these days.)

Anyway, as I said, we arrived at the airport yesterday with time to spare. After the turkey sandwich, after the wine, after the journalling, the kids and I found seats near our gate while Matt walked around and enjoyed his last pint of Surly's before returning to the Pacific Northwest. I opened up Facebook and saw the posting from the ELCA: the churchwide assembly also voted to adopt the social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action." They included a video of the assembly singing "Canticle of the Turning." It is one of my absolute favorite hymns, and in that moment, listening to all those voices, it gave me chills -- and then it brought me to tears. Right there in the Humphrey Terminal in Minneapolis. I let my kids play on the iPad and I wept openly at the gate. Then I downloaded the statement itself -- all 48 pages -- and read it on the plane. This week I'm going to print out a hard copy. It gives me something close to hope.

I wasn't going to go to church this morning. We were exhausted last night, and the kids really needed some down time because after a week of the lake and grandparents and cousins and wild feral joyful freedom and about ten desserts a day, they weren't really ready to be normal humans in public. But then I remembered that it was my Sunday to help count the week's offering. I even considered just showing up after the service, but I woke up early -- still on Minnesota time -- and I really wanted to go. So I did. But I also felt all kinds of something, so I sat by myself, towards the back. I almost put on a skirt, but then I remembered that we had signed up to run concessions at the Blast Off Soccer Tournament this afternoon, and I didn't really feel like changing, either. So I dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, and I drove my weepy, tired self to church this morning, and I slipped in near the back. And the thing was that I knew it was okay. I knew I could show up in shorts and a t-shirt and be a little weird and people there would still love me, and I really did feel perfectly comfortable slipping into the back by myself. And I felt okay crying a little at times when it didn't really make a lot of sense for me to be crying.

Sometimes I have to laugh a bit when people talk about faith as a crutch, because it would be so much easier not to go to church. It would be easier not to believe in this totally crazy stuff I actually do believe. The church has caused so, so much harm, and it continues to cause harm, and on top of that, it asks us to believe in the impossible. So like, I get it. I get why people leave, and I understand why people don't walk through the door. But somehow, here I am. Maybe this is, again, a consequence of my birth -- I was born into a family who brought me into this messy church, and even though that family has drifted into different faith communities, communities into which I cannot follow and in which I don't really belong, I'm grateful for my roots.

I wasn't much older than my daughter when I read Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals; I think that was where she wrote about someone asking her whether she believed in God without any doubt, and she replied -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that she believed in God with all of her doubts.

Roots and doubts. That's what I have.

What I have might not be hope. But it's not nothing.

My heart shall sing
Of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn!
--Canticle of the Turning

Oh, my eyes, they are tired from rolling

I've been out of school for one week now, and I haven't written here for six. Everything seems strange, as it always does in late June when my body still wakes at the same hour but the entire trajectory of my day has shifted.

I started to write all about this first week of summer, but I'll write about our summer days later, as I always do. Today I need to address something I've written about before, but apparently, some of my friends and acquaintances need a reminder. So here you go: I respect your right to have whatever opinion you like about public schools and "kids these days" and whatever you think the problems are.

But. I am not the right person to use as a sounding board. I am not your target audience. And I do not appreciate what could have been a pleasant conversation about a book I'm reading that has nothing to do with school or teaching to spark whatever rant you need to have.

It's exactly like mansplaining, but it's not always men doing it. What's the word for that -- maybe edusplaining? Teachers, raise your hand if you know exactly what I'm talking about. Hi, I went to public school once, please let me tell you all my thoughts about it.

If there is some aspect of public education -- especially in your local community -- that you care about, or that you're concerned about, and you'd like to have an actual conversation about that, I am all in! Especially if you're willing to listen, and especially if you'd like to actively engage in improving education for all kids. And if you don't actually work in public education, then you do need to listen. It may not surprise you to learn that those of us who give our lives to this work have a pretty good sense of what kids need, what we need, and the urgency of it all. Our perspective on these things might surprise you (especially if you base your huge sweeping opinions on your own schooling or your kids' schooling), but that's where we can have a conversation.

But attending public school in the eighties or nineties doesn't make you an expert. Attending public school in a particular time and place doesn't make any of us an expert on public education. And cool, I'm glad your daughter graduated from a school in my district and that's why you say with great authority that it's "such a ghetto school." I'm super impressed that you marched right into the vice principal's office of your child's middle school -- because the principal was clearly intimidated by you -- and told him exactly what changes needed to happen. And please tell me yet again how you could see being a teacher yourself, but "not in public school, not with these kids."

Also, and this is important: I trust parents to make the best decisions for their children and families. We all walk different paths, as it should be. I do, however, get a tiny little bit irritated when parents demand excessive validation for those choices. If you talk about "those other kids" when you talk about why you don't want your kids in public school (or why you wouldn't want to teach, despite our blissfully easy schedules and lavish amounts of time off), please know that it absolutely will affect my opinion of you. (It does not help, not even one little bit, if you tell me you're sure my classes aren't like that. Oh, my lord. Please just stop right now.) You are probably one of the people I don't want reading my Facebook stories about my students. Today's edusplainer doesn't get to read them. I will not offer up my kids for entertainment to those who turn around and use kids to further their own biased narratives. But that's also a pity, really. Your kid probably could stand to learn from "those other kids." That's not always easy or comfortable, and I do understand wanting to keep things for our kids easy or comfortable. I truly do. But we're raising human beings, here, so I believe in opportunities for supported and guided discomfort. Because I also believe in empathy, and you don't learn empathy when you're comfortable.

If you just need yet another place to explain how you think the schools have gone downhill, or if you need me to listen to why you're so glad your kids aren't in school anymore or why you wouldn't send your kids blah blah blaahhhhh, then seriously, go away. I don't have time to listen to this with my Polite Face.

If you know me, if I let you in on my stories, I hope you already understand that when I'm exhausted and discouraged in May it's not that I don't love this work. It's the opposite, really. I've lasted this long and survived these cycles again and again, and I go back because I love it. I haven't written here in six weeks (I'm a little sad about that now; I've had so many great stories to tell), but what I want right now is to tell you that I ended this year as much in love with this work as I ever have been. I desperately, desperately need a break to catch my breath, to gain a little perspective, and to find my footing again, but I ended the year feeling the way I wish everyone could feel about their jobs. And I have yet to find an edusplainer who loved their work as much as I love mine.

Small Miracles and Soul Friends

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

It's May, and things are significantly terrible. I don't want to do this anymore.

I think I say or write or scream some version of those exact words every single May, as years of journals show. And I don't want to be the person who anticipates a month to be terrible every year, just because it's that month. There are teachers who find a way to hate every single month of the year for some reason -- the novelty of good behavior wears off in October, the holidays make everything crazy, January is a slog, February is a slog, March is a slog, April is close to the end but not close enough, and May is a flat-out horror.

But there are also reasons to love every month, and it occurs to me that each month I should really write them down. This year, a couple of my teacher friends made a point of sharing positive teaching stories throughout the month of March and I appreciated that so very much. We need more of that. Look, I don't begrudge any teacher the need to vent sometimes, but it's so easy to descend into negativity, especially when we work in a country that shows nothing but disdain for its public school teachers (not to mention its women, and I don't know if you've noticed, but America isn't a great place to be either of those). It's hard. But we also need each other, to remind ourselves why we chose this and why we love it. Why we choose to stay.

So I feel sure that there are reasons to love May, but Mama, I am struggling.

Last year, I spent May in a state of pure and intense grief; I just wasn't ready for the year to end. I was losing a class of seniors I deeply loved. A friendship that meant a great deal to me was changing irrevocably even as we both tried to pretend otherwise. I knew I would soon lose my grandmother. These things converged all at once, and I was utterly unmoored.

This year I'm struggling for different reasons. In some ways, I'm in a better place. Things feel, somehow, less fraught with such deep sadness, with the inevitability of loss. But perhaps the grief is replaced with anxiety and anger and exhaustion. Am I enough for this anymore? Was I ever? Does it mean anything, does it matter? On top of that, has anyone noticed that the United States of America is a terrifying place to live if you're not a white man? I'm scared and I'm angry, sometimes so angry I don't know how to keep breathing, much less summon enough hope and courage to walk into my classroom and give my students -- what, exactly? The big picture is unbearable. The smaller one, I remind myself, is survivable. (I think. For now.) Even so, I stumble through my days feeling totally inadequate. Two students I've loved for a long time have made no secret of the fact that they're totally done and opting for easier classes next year so this work no longer matters. And even after they lingered to apologize for being so flippant, to tell me that they respect me and it's not my class they're done with, it stings, and honestly, they're still kind of assy about it, which just serves to remind me how little it all matters to them. When I'm all out of perspective, it's hard not to take everything personally. I guess this is a side effect of loving this work, even when I Google jobs for burned-out English teachers.

And I must still believe it matters.

*

I started writing this the other night, not really sure where I was going with it -- perhaps just trusting that eventually, I'd write myself into some perspective and back into love. I guess that's one of the reasons I write here, other than that it keeps me breathing.

And then yesterday a small miracle happened. I went to work wondering why in the world I ever thought teaching would be, as Pat Conroy said, one of the finest ways to spend a human life. However, I absolutely did not have Pat Conroy on the brain when I stood in front of my junior class and tried to talk them through writing their IB Essays, something I just seriously do not actually think I'm good at right now. But! Then I saw it: one of my girls had The Prince of Tides RIGHT THERE on her desk. And my next sentence went something like this: "So remember, the rubric for the IB Essay is different from the rubric for the IB Commentary, and if you look at the example OH MY GOD THAT IS LITERALLY MY FAVORITE BOOK IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, ARE YOU READING IT?"

And she smiled at me and said, "Um, I just started it." And the class laughed, because there goes Winslow, all crazy again, but -- and I may be imagining this -- I think detected relief in their laughter, because I think they've sensed that I haven't been entirely okay lately.

I said, "MY HUSBAND WON'T EVEN READ THAT BOOK BECAUSE HE SAYS THERE'S TOO MUCH PRESSURE and he's worried about how it will affect our marriage if he doesn't love it enough. I literally cried REAL TEARS when Pat Conroy died three years ago. I wrote him a LOVE LETTER sitting in a coffee shop in Portland just weeks before he died, and I never got to send it to him."

The kids said, "What's your favorite quote?" Like some sort of test. Babies, please. I immediately rattled off three of them, including the first line of the book (which I fully intend to have tattooed on my body), and the one that always, always reminds me of the person in this world who is my truest soul-friend and fellow Conroy lover, and of course I had to tell him right away, and talking to him changed the entire tone of my week. To have someone catch the words I fling into the cosmos and respond with love and wisdom is a thing that matters.

(The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.)

I kept murmuring sentences from that book as I wandered around the room. I didn't really mean to do it out loud, but when I noticed some of the kids watching I said, "Look, I know this book more deeply than I know any book. That book went straight to my soul when I was your age, and the grip it has on my heart is fierce. So I'll share it with you, I'll give you that piece of my heart, but I can't ever teach this book."

For the rest of the period that beautiful group of kids passed that book around -- some of them even read sentences aloud -- until I was all, "Dammit, babies, you should probably work on your essay." But I think it might be a sign, right? That we can stumble on?

Where were you? (Or, Grief and Despair and Teacher Appreciation Week)

Every day, I write in a Gratitude Journal. It's not my regular journal, the notebook I carry with me at all times that catches whatever happens to fall out of my head and onto the paper; it's just a place for me to jot down something every single day. That's all this notebook holds. Because I believe deeply in the importance of practicing daily intentional gratitude, even when things are garbage. Maybe even especially then. It tethers me to hope, I guess, and it also reminds me to notice things, which is essential for a writer. The way the cherry blossoms fall to the sidewalk. The smell of the morning. The increasingly fleeting moments when my son slips his hand into mine, just for a second, when we're crossing a street together. Realizing that we have vegetable spring rolls from Trader Joe's in the freezer after all -- or, even better, that I mentioned offhandedly to my husband that I really wished we had those lava cakes from Trader Joe's, and two days later he slipped some into the freezer without saying anything. He's seriously awesome like that.

I haven't written anything today, even though I have plenty of gratitude welling inside me. But there's something else welling inside me: Fatigue. Heartbreak. Rage. Right now, as I write this, I feel exhausted with the effort of trying not to let it completely and totally consume me, because I'm afraid of what that looks like. If I were to pick up my Gratitude Journal right now, I might write that I'm grateful I got to bring home both of my babies from school today when other parents are waiting in the hospital because their babies were shot at school. And isn't that sick? Isn't that just ridiculous? Rage. Fatigue. I'm so tired of this.

Where were you when you learned about the eleventy billionth mass shooting of 2019, or the eleventy billionth school shooting since Columbine, since Sandy Hook, in the United States of America? I tried to search the actual numbers, but they vary a bit. Basically, it's more than one mass shooting per day, and how many days have there been in 2019 so far? I don't know, I'm too tired and angry to do all that mathing. It all adds up to this: Way Too Fucking Many.

Here's where I was:

I was sitting in my car, waiting for my kids after school. Feeling guilty because I didn't teach well today. Because I haven't parented particularly well today. I've been snappish and tired at all of my kids lately, the kids born of my body and the kids who also share my heart. They all piss me off because that's what happens in May and I am not always good at Rising Above.

I was reading another article about extinction and all the ways we are incinerating the planet. I was reading Mike Pompeo's actual words: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade." This is from our Secretary of State. Are we living a horrible dystopian novel? I think we are.

I was reading about the man in Ohio who raped and impregnated an eleven-year-old child, and because of Ohio's "Heartbeat Bill" (House Bill 493), that child will be forced to carry that pregnancy to term (or as long as her child's body can) unless her family has the resources to get her the hell out of there. A child that is younger than my child. If you think there is ANYTHING okay about that, if you think this is in any way "pro life," then you're a fucking monster. Exit stage left, good-bye, we're done here.

I was reading more posts about Rachel Held Evans. And grieving. Grieving. I would never have guessed that her death could have impacted me on such a visceral level, perhaps because I never could have imagined her death. Not now, not as a writer and wife and mother of two very young children, not as a person I've wished for years was one of my actual real-life friends. I'm just about to start reading her latest book. I'm looking at pictures of her with Nadia Bolz-Weber, and these two women -- this is not an exaggeration -- changed my life and gave me back faith I'd thought I'd lost, women whose words felt like a whisper in my ear when I wasn't sure there was any room left in church for me. Rachel's blog has been on the "Required Reading" list of this blog since I discovered it, way back whenever. (I've been trying to write about her for days. I think I still will.)

I was tired and angry and sad and defeated. It's May, which is the worst time of year to be a teacher. The worst. I don't want to do it anymore. I feel inadequate in every way, exasperated in every way, and utterly convinced I've come to the end of my time of being any good at it. I know this is just what happens in May; I have years of journals to back me up. This is part of the cycle, and I've learned to trust that. But still. Still. The feeling is hard. Add to that the feeling of pressure to just keep up with everything and be competent in other areas of my life, because hey! I'm not just a teacher, I'm a wife and a mother, and when I leave campus I have to enter into a totally different space. Most of the time, that is a deep blessing and I have the privilege of finding a beautiful balance in my life. I have a partner who is wholly involved. I have the privilege to choose to work "part-time." (Which comes with a whole lot of bullshit I've written about and will write about again, but never believe I don't understand the privilege in the choice -- to do the work I love and maximize my time with my family in a way that supports us all.) But today, I was tired of juggling track and Tae Kwon Do and soccer and band and confirmation. Matt and I are chaperoning four field trips in as many weeks. This month we have belt testing and two concerts and I forget how many games and track meets. (These are the things that make me realize that the sources of some of my stress and fatigue are also the things I write about in my Gratitude Journal. This is what it means to be a mother.)

This is the month in which our daughter turns thirteen, and it matters to me, and I am also exhausted already trying to make it matter and be the perfect hostess and make it special for her, because I'm her mother, and so far all I can manage to do is say to Matt, "So, we'll grill food outside over Memorial Weekend one night." What else? How do I do this well? How can I make it matter to my girl, my firstborn? One of the only things that tethers me to any sense of hope? And also, how can I look her in the eye, knowing what a horrible mess we adults are handing her?

That is where I was this afternoon, when I learned of the latest school shooting. How many times have I written about those here? Isn't that absurd? I was angry and tired and sad, sitting in my car, waiting for my children. Compartmentalizing, because I can't be dumping all that on kids who are nine and twelve when they jump in the car bursting with things to say: "Can you sign my field trip form?" and "Let me tell you what happened in Conditioning today." (Please, God, let me never forget the loveliness of these ordinary moments when my children tumble into the car, elbowing each other, arguing over whose backpacks are taking up too much space, one person heaving her trumpet case into the front seat, the other shoving a permission slip in my face and reminding me that Popcorn Day is tomorrow.)

That was four hours ago. Only four hours later, and the school shooting (two suspects in custody, UPDATED ONE STUDENT DEAD, eight others injured) is already way down on the news, underneath "Mueller fought Comey memo release" and "Tax documents show Trump businesses lost more than $1 billion in a decade."

This is where I am now: sitting at my table, after Tae Kwon Do, after soccer, dinner simmering on the stove, trying to write through tears in my eyes while my kids relax in front of the TV, which is a rare treat on a weeknight. I apologized for snapping at them earlier. And I told them: "There was a school shooting today."

And they said, "Another one?"

How does that response not shatter your heart? How can we have that conversation again? Again? But we did. And we will. Hey, America, maybe for Teacher Appreciation Week, instead of free notepads and pens or highlighters and cute little notes in our mailboxes, you can get us some fucking gun control.

So that's where I was, and that's where I am. I wish I lived in a country that cared about its children -- all of them. I expect better. Or maybe I just want better, long for better, dream for better, because to expect implies hope, and frankly, tonight, I'm fresh out of that. The place in my heart that holds hope has been taken over by Despair. And Rage. And Fatigue.

I still believe in practicing intentional gratitude, despite the grief and rage and despair. And maybe that's why I write anything here, too -- because words connect us in our grief and rage and despair, and maybe that's what hope is, the impossibility of holding hands in the darkness, swimming for the light.

I'm a worst-case-scenario kind of optimist

I cried at school today. Twice.

It's funny, kind of. Two days ago I started a Facebook post like this: "Sometimes teaching is hard because kids are hard. Hey, moms, you know how there are days when you want to just lock yourself in the bathroom and cry? Teachers have those moments too. Sometimes it's just incredibly defeating and demoralizing." But it wasn't the kids today, at all. Today it was the world in general, the absurdity of social media, the absurdity of adults on social media, and fucking ants.

I stepped into a bathroom stall at work today and permitted myself about thirty seconds of actual, honest-to-God, am-I-really-sobbing-in-a-bathroom-stall-at-work crying.

So, I mean, let's just jump right into it: this week my colleagues and I learned of threats of guns and shootings directed towards our school. My school, where I show up every day, where I've shown up just about every day for my entire adult life. This is my home. I don't take kindly to folks fucking with it. But look, I also do trust the police when they tell us they have investigated thoroughly and found no credible threat. They investigate far more threats than most of us ever hear about. So while I was pissed, I didn't go home and wring my hands about going to school. As my friend Kailey said, it literally never once occurred to me to not go to school today.

Which was perhaps why I was so furious when an elementary teacher at another school posted on social media last night that if she taught at my school, she'd for sure call in sick.

Well, isn't that nice for you.

And also: how dare you. You don't work there. You don't get to speculate about a situation you know nothing about. I floundered in my rage, which was all twisted up in my rage at the world in which we live, a world that includes this country where our students expect this anyway even though it doesn't have to be this way except for the fact that we refuse to even try to do anything about it.

Becky, one of my colleagues and dear friends, responded right away, far more eloquently than I could have in that moment: "The e-mail [to parents] says we have systems in place to keep school safe. I'm part of that system. Unless school's cancelled, my students will be safer and more comfortable with me, learning, than with a sub or with a stressed-out colleague covering my class during their planning." I chimed in then, to say that I'd be there too, of course. And then a bunch of our colleagues and friends followed in kind. Me too. I'm there. I'll be there.

My friend Shonda followed up with this: "Speculating about other people's work environments is not helpful. It's just like teenagers stirring up drama. We shouldn't be doing that to each other." At that point, the teacher from the other school deleted her post. Which, good. I was heartened by two things: that my co-workers instantly jumped in with a show of absolute love and solidarity, and that today my students called out the hysteria of adults in our community as precisely that: unhelpful and, frankly, ridiculous.

To be clear, I do not judge anyone who decided to keep their child home from school today. I received more than one e-mail from a parent who said, "I know it's probably a false alarm, but..." Six years ago, when Sandy Hook happened three thousand miles away, it took absolutely every ounce of human strength I had to not abandon my seventh period class and drive across town to pick up my own first grader. What I take issue with is inflammatory nonsense on social media, especially inflammatory nonsense spread by adults, inflammatory nonsense that fuels hysteria and spreads inaccuracies. This can cause real harm and it is not okay. I have no patience for the adults in my community who have jumped on social media to accuse our schools and the police department of not taking this seriously. What would "taking it seriously" look like? Canceling school for every threat? What? What information do you think you're entitled to, exactly?

Anyway, it literally never occurred to me (to many of us? Any of us?) to stay home. And Becky's response reminded me why. This is our job. Full stop.

And I wasn't scared to go to school today. I felt unsettled, but not out of fear -- more out of sadness. I felt overwhelmed by not only the reality that a great many of our students weren't coming to school because of threats of gun violence, but also by the backlash, and the feeling, once again, that somehow I've got to defend...something. Everything. Why I teach in public school, why I send my kids to public school. Things are pretty terrible sometimes, but also, teaching fills me with hope in a way that I'm not sure anything else could. Last week I read Pam Houston's beautiful new book, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, and I found myself writing notes in the margins everywhere, things like, "I love that she is both an optimist and given to worst-case scenarios. I love you, Pam Houston." (Note: she wasn't writing about public education, she was writing about fires and climate change, and I know I'll likely reach for that book again in August when I fully expect to spend yet another summer reading about my homestate burning and breathing toxic, smoky air here at home, too. Because I'll need the hope in a different context.)

And it was a quiet day. Even on normally low-attendance days, like, say, the day before Thanksgiving break when we have our emergency earthquake drill and classes are short and almost nobody comes to class so we make hand turkeys, kids are still skipping all over campus, and the disruption in schedule makes us all the more aware of kids and their energy, somehow. Today, the walkways were silent and empty in a way I've never seen them during a school day. Ever.

So there weren't too many folks around to witness the moment when I cried over the ants I found in a great seething mass in my classroom. There were so many ants in my recycling bin they could have carried it outside themselves. One of my kids informed me that they were all over the floor near his desk. The floor itself seemed to be moving. Kids have been absolutely trashing the computer lab with food and that doesn't help, but the ants had already infested the classrooms around me and I've been strict about food in my room. It wasn't enough. They attacked. My principal sent an e-mail to those of us teaching in those rooms letting us know that they'd be sprayed over the weekend, and also, she will be enforcing a ban on eating in those rooms for the next month or so.

I found ants crawling on my desk. I took absolutely everything off of it and wiped it down with Clorox. I almost didn't even have it in me to put everything back on my desk. I thought that possibly the only thing I would be able to do in that moment was say, "Ah, fuck it," and just go home after all. It didn't help that I'd just come from a meeting I'd had scheduled for weeks, one that reminded me that I don't think I'm very good at working with adults. I played a solitary round of "What other job would I even be good at?" which is a thing I do when I'm all out of perspective.

I didn't go home. I walked to the staff bathroom and cried pitifully in the stall. Then I washed my face and brushed my teeth and went back to class, because what else was there to do?

*

I'd planned a fairly quiet teaching day anyway. It's April, and my kids are stressed. I know they need some space to breathe. Most of my kids did that somewhere else today, but the kids who showed up in my room -- well, I was glad to see them. I asked them if they were okay and if they wanted to talk. For the most part, they did seem okay, and they also wanted to talk. They asked me what would happen if. If. If. This, friends, is a conversation I have with my kids every single year now -- a real, immediate, in-the-moment conversation. This is the country in which we live. Tonight I talked to my own daughter about it. (It. What a giant It.) Her school had received a similar threat, though she hadn't heard anything about and she said everyone at school seemed fine. But she has already shared that she's had these conversations in her classes with her teachers too, bless them.

Near the end of the day, one of my students asked me if I'd considered staying home, and I said, "Not for a single moment." (I'd stopped weeping about the ants and my meeting by then, and I didn't tell him I had considered fleeing for entirely different and stupid reasons.) He asked me if I was scared. And I said, "Today? No. But that's not really the point. If we have school, this is where I need to be." Then he asked if I'd keep my own kids home, and I said, "Well, my daughter is sitting in her own English class right now, because I trust the systems we have in place to do they best they can for her, too. And I know her teachers are having the same conversations." I did not tell him these conversations break our hearts and fill the cracks with pure rage. I did not tell him that I pray for my children's teachers in a way I never thought I'd need to before I understood that this country sees a mass shooting just about every day.

"That's why I trust you," he said. (By the way, show me a teacher who says, in my presence, "At least the parents of the honors kids care enough about them to keep them home today," and I will show you a teacher who will not ever teach one of my children. Nope, no thank you MA'AM.)

Sometimes teaching is hard. Sometimes it is disheartening and demoralizing. I really wish I didn't cry so easily, and I wish I had thicker skin. I'd be healthier, probably, if I wasn't given to worst-case scenarios. At the same time, I'm a stubborn optimist and dammit, teaching still gives me hope. Sometimes there are these moments that are hard, and they are the moments that remind me that I want to be exactly where I am.

The cherry blossoms, the air, the music

Less than two months ago, by this time on a Sunday afternoon, the sky would be well on its way to dark. Less than two months ago, I sat at the table where I write now, waiting for snow to fall. Since then, we've had the most snowfall I've seen in western Washington in my entire adult life. We missed five days of school. My daughter sprained her ankle during her first soccer practice of the spring season, which happened on a rather lovely afternoon during the first week of March; the next day the sky began to spit snow again while we waited for X-rays, and she learned how to navigate crutches through freezing slush. Ten days later, the temperatures soared into the seventies, hitting record highs. I love the feel of spring air on bare arms, and the sharp scent of freshly-mown grass, and everyone knows how much I love the first sign of cherry blossoms. But the sudden heat in the wrong season is so unsettling to me, as are the predictions that we're in for a hot and dry summer. That might sound appealing after so much snow, but I know we'll spend August breathing nothing but smoke. Again. And I can't believe there are actual people who continue to deny the effects of climate change.

But still, now, at the end of the slog that is the month of March, I believe in gratitude, in experiencing as much as I can with great joy.

This was my Friday evening: Suzannah ensconced in her room with a book, Matt and Isaac outside playing basketball. I sipped wine and read my own book as a pot of buffalo cauliflower soup simmered on the stove. Everything about that soup was wonderful, especially the fact that Matt prepped all the fresh cauliflower, carrots, onion, and garlic I put in it so it was really easy for me to throw together, and also my son happens to love it. Suzannah tolerates it, barely, and that's fine too. Matt brought home nice bread from Trader Joe's, and Friday is our Family Movie Night, so no one could be too grouchy.

I've felt like garbage for a couple of weeks now, battling the same cold as everyone else in Washington state. So many of my students have been out sick, and let me tell you how thrilled I was when one of them sneezed all over the keyboard of my laptop when they were using it to access a PowerPoint for a presentation. It reminded me of having toddlers and the times when they would sneeze directly into my eyeballs, and then we all had colds for four years with only brief breaks, like maybe a week in May and a week in July? Those weeks when nobody had runny noses were nice. Or maybe we'd just given up and resigned ourselves to enjoying spring afternoons and summer mornings despite the snot. Whatever. I'm recovering.

On Friday afternoon, I decided to go for a jog instead of heading straight to the couch, because the cherry trees are blossoming and the air is pleasantly warm and the streets of my neighborhood are so lovely, even on a slightly overcast spring afternoon. And on Friday night I went to bed early and slept deeply -- for the first time in weeks -- without a cough drop gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. On Saturday morning the kids let us stay in bed longer than they usually do, and then we all headed out for Suzannah's first soccer game. I do love the first soccer game of spring, that feeling of being back, of moving and playing (even if it's not me on the field; maybe I just mean the feeling of all of us waking up and wanting to be outside). Suzannah's doctor wanted her to wait until next week to return fully to normal activities, so she couldn't play yesterday, but she was there for her team, and the rest of us cheered for these girls we've been cheering for the past three years. The game happened to be at the muddiest field in King County; our first game was there last year, too, in the pouring rain, and Matt and I laughed at the memory of Isaac and the coach's son playing hard anyway until Isaac slipped and fell in the mud and there went our plans to head directly to IKEA afterwards, since he was drenched and angry and covered in wet, sloppy mud from his cheekbones to his toes. But yesterday we sat in the sunshine, in sunglasses and T-shirts. After the game we went out for lunch at 7 Seas, and I ate half of one of my very favorite sandwiches in the entire universe and drank a cold beer with it. We went shopping for my nephew's first birthday. We stopped at a coffee shop we love, and I ordered mine iced. The kids each took a sip and gagged dramatically. Back home, I had just enough time to go for another little jog in the sunshine that just calls me to move and be outside and take a bubble bath before eating a quick dinner (the other half of that fabulous sandwich) before heading to the high school for a Big Band showcase. Suzannah joined jazz band this year, and her band director is really, really good and I am constantly in awe of what he is able to draw from middle schoolers who have only been playing for a year or two. They joined the jazz bands at the high school for this showcase, which mostly featured Jazz I, but absolutely all of it was phenomenal. Full disclosure: I was not really looking forward to spending several hours of my Saturday night at the high school, but when I drove my happy daughter home afterwards, I had absolutely zero regrets. The musicianship was phenomenal, and as someone who had an excellent musical experience throughout high school and college, I have obnoxiously high standards. And I also just really loved watching my daughter enjoy the night with her friends, even if it meant she did not want to sit with me. Also, there was cake and an auction. Look, I don't even go to the auction for my own school, because those kinds of social events are seriously the absolute worst for an introvert like me, like who would I even be cool enough to sit with? But at this auction, all I had to do was sit at a table with my family, eat cake, and enjoy the music. I loved every moment of the performances. Music like that is my thing.

Matt and I figured our little guy would be tired and totally done before the night was actually done, and we weren't wrong, but he actually lasted much longer than we predicted. We kept glancing over to see him grooving. The and took a break near the end to auction off a bunch of things, and at that point, Matt and I looked at each other and said, yeah, our son needs to go to bed. What was funny is that neither one of us really wanted to leave, when I'd assumed that both of us would want to be the parent to head out early and tuck him into bed. In the end, Matt took Isaac home, and I sat alone at our table, just really loving it all -- these high school kids who've worked incredibly hard, their teachers who bring out the best they have to give. Watching my daughter with her friends. Cheering for her after their final combined number and catching a glimpse in that moment of the wonderful person she will become. Is becoming.

I write all this to remember, simply because it's a snapshot, a moment in time in an ordinary month, a long month, and it reminds me of everything I love. It reminds me to stay grateful in these long months. To notice the small things. The cherry blossoms and the really good sandwiches and the sweet moments with our children, who are growing and growing and growing. Spending these gorgeous spring days and these music-filled nights with my family is my thing. I suppose I lead a simple life, but it's mine. It's ours. I never want a single moment to pass without my noticing, because to live in these moments is everything, everything I ever wanted, even before I knew I wanted it.

On Turning 40

I understand why people hate February, deep into the slog of winter. I especially understand the weariness my friends and family in Montana and across the Midwest are feeling after so many (So. Many.) snow days. Admittedly, we were going a little crazy after five, plus a few late starts and early releases. I had to remind myself more than once that this wasn't a thing happening to my precious little self.

Anyway, I don't happen to hate February. First of all, it's my birthday month, and my birthday is at the end of February so I have all month to look forward to it -- and I was lucky enough to be born into a family who has always made me feel loved and celebrated on my birthday. And because I live in the Pacific Northwest, February is the month where spring starts to break through the surface of the mud. I'm also one of those people who enjoys Valentine's Day for purely silly reasons. I like chocolate. I love being a mom of children on Valentine's Day. I love buying cheap, fun Valentine's Day socks. I do not see it as a day for romance or expectation, necessarily, and neither Matt nor I spend much time worrying about what to give each other. Usually we pick up chocolate and share, and I think Matt has brought me flowers every year of our marriage. We exchange cards. Our first year of marriage, we went out to dinner -- along with every other couple declaring their public love for each other, which meant we waited way too long for a table at a mediocre restaurant. The following year, we stayed home and I wore fuzzy gray sweats and we cooked some pasta thing together in the kitchen of our still newish house, and it was so much better. Since then, I've never wanted anything else.

It doesn't hurt that our first Valentine's Day together was spectacular in its own way, though. Matt and I were a long-distance couple that first year; I was a senior in college and he was living in the Twin Cities, working in downtown Minneapolis. The band tour that year took us to places like Nashville and Memphis but we also played a concert in a suburb north of the Cities, and Matt drove an hour to meet the bus that night. He was waiting in front of the school (a high school, maybe? Or was it a church? I don't remember) when the bus pulled up, and our tour manager grudgingly let me vault off the bus and into his arms, and with everyone watching he handed me my Valentine's Day gift: a little bag full of things he knew I liked. A nice pen. A half-pound of good coffee beans. Bubble bath. A book of poetry. Writing all of that out, I would marry that man all over again in a heartbeat -- that and his pecan pie at Thanksgiving. (I also remember our friend Katie, who was his friend first, calling over my shoulder, "Wow. I used to get drunk with that dork.") (Also, Matt just now yelled at me, "You can't use that quote on your blog! My parents read your blog!" Sorry, honey. I love you. It's too cute and it still makes me smile.)

That was eighteen years ago.

I'm still happy to stay home and cook and curl up in sweats with him. And he still knows the little things I love.

I turned forty this week, and last night, curled up with my husband, I said, "I've officially known you for half my life." From now on, every year we're together I'll be able to say, "I've known you for longer than I haven't." And that is one of the great blessings of this life I was lucky enough to land in.

I turned forty this week, and I am nothing but grateful. Growing older, as I posted on Facebook this week, is privilege not all of us get. And I don't feel old, because what does that even mean? I feel like me, which is to say, to echo Madeleine L'Engle, that I am every age I have ever been. I remember reading this when I was fourteen, late at night in my bedroom long after the rest of my house was asleep -- from The Crosswicks Journals, I think? I did a quick Google search:

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

I don't mourn the passing of my childhood, or my twenties, or my thirties. I've learned a lot -- who I am and what I want. And I woke up on my birthday in the very life I realized I'd always wanted for myself. I have so much more work to do, so much more, and there are still things I want. Deeply. There are things I want that I won't ever have, and that's okay; part of the blessing of living forty years is the realization that we won't ever have everything we want, and that it is possible, still, to be happy. Part of the blessing of living forty years is that the pursuit of individual happiness isn't, perhaps, even the point. I am working towards the things I still want, but I'm not sure that my individual happiness is the point there, either. This is the work of a human life.

*

Last weekend I went out to celebrate with Jessica; of all the friends with whom I still keep in touch, I've probably known her the longest. (I still remember the time someone threw up on the back of her dress at our church Christmas program. I'm pretty sure her parents took her home to change and she was back for cookies afterwards.) We've known each other since we were seven. My family moved from Great Falls to Bozeman when I was in the eighth grade, but we still attended each other's confirmations. We went to the same college, had separate friend groups there, but went on the same trip to Europe. We roomed together for the entire month as we traveled through Ireland, England, Wales and France, and she was the one to witness my falling for a boy on that trip, the same one I married a couple of years later. She read at my wedding. I stood on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park for hers. I had the tremendous privilege of holding her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She had the fucking awful luck of being on the surviving end of "till death do us part" when her husband died of brain cancer last spring.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

She was determined to celebrate. Last week she reminded her friends of the importance of celebrating birthdays, "not with more fanfare, but just with more emphasis, more care. We each have one day a year to celebrate our existence." And it reminded me of the time I said to Matt, years ago, that maybe he should throw me a big party. For my thirtieth. Or my thirty-fifth. Or something.

"Do you...actually want that?" he asked.

He knew I didn't. Instead, five years ago, I started taking my birthday off without apology. I gave myself the gift of a day to do exactly what I would ever do with the gift of a day, an afternoon, free of obligation or responsibility. I took myself out for a really good birthday latte. I sat at a wide wooden table in a coffee shop and wrote. I read a book, and not one I was teaching or going to teach. I took myself out for lunch, where I read some more and sipped a glass of wine. I walked around the streets of a neighborhood I love with a gorgeous view of Puget Sound. I went for a run in the almost-spring air. I soaked in a bubble bath before picking up my kids and heading to Seattle to meet Matt, who entertained them while I shopped for new books, and then we all went to dinner together. It was my perfect day. It still is.

In warmer years, I might see the first buds of cherry blossoms as early as February 26th. Not this year. That's okay. They'll be bursting into bloom soon enough.

*

I was raised to celebrate birthdays. It wasn't that we always needed huge parties, but attention was paid. I remember birthday parties at my grandmother's house -- coffee and cookies for her, or her friends, and probably cake. It's where I learned to sneak sips of watery black coffee. For the first fifteen years of my life I shared a birthday with my great-grandmother. I remember her 100th birthday at her church, shared with my 15th. It's the last picture of us together.

I remember waking up on my 10th birthday to find a pink clock and a note from my mother -- she had received it as a birthday gift when she was a girl, and she was passing it on to me. I woke up early, as I always did. My room was still dark, and everything was in the wrong place. The door was to my left. The window was on the wall opposite my bed, instead of directly above my head. I sat up and remembered that yesterday my mother helped me rearrange my bedroom, something I was allowed to do a few times a year. My room was just large enough to accommodate a few different set-ups, and simply moving my bed to a different wall made me feel like I had an entirely new room. I am orderly by nature, but the momentary disorientation always made me smile. I had chosen this.

A line of light shone beneath my door. My mother was already up, moving around in the kitchen. And then I saw it -- the clock.

I recognized it right away -- the pink plastic rectangular clock with the dancing ballerina. For years it perched atop the headboard in my mother’s old bedroom at the farm, the room I slept in when we visited my grandmother. My parents slept in the bed, and I slept in my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the floor along the wall. Sometimes I took the clock down and wound it, fascinated by the delicate sound of the wheels inside, the mechanisms turning. When I released the little key, the ballerina turned to the sound of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” The clock was decades old, but it kept perfect time.

And on the morning of my tenth birthday, I found it on my nightstand. My mother left a note: Dear Shari, this clock was given to me by my grandmother on my eighth birthday, and now I am giving it to you. Happy Birthday to my beautiful girl.

My mother would have turned eight in 1960. Even at ten I possessed an uncanny memory for dates and a deep yearning to know my family’s stories. I remembered that my great-grandfather died the day after my mother’s eighth birthday. His wife -- her grandmother, my great-grandmother -- would have given this clock to her only the day before. I was born on my great-grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. She turned ninety-five on my tenth birthday, and two days later I joined her for our family birthday dinner. I’m not sure if this was the reason I felt the clock was weighted with more than my mother’s love for me, but I picked it up with nothing short of reverence.

*

I am every age I've ever been.

The following winter, I could have had a new clock radio. My church youth group was selling meat and cheese trays that year—maybe mixed nuts, too. Christmas-themed snacks. And I was tempted, because my best friend had a clock radio that played top-40 songs when it went off in the mornings. What I really wanted from that fundraiser, though, was the phone—it was just a simple white plastic touch-tone, but it would go in my bedroom. I wouldn’t get my own line—ever, my parents emphasized—but if I sold enough beef sticks and cheese balls, I would be allowed to keep it in my room. There would be limits, but I would be allowed to call Julia and speak in relative privacy, rather than in the middle of the kitchen. And anyway, I loved my little pink ballerina clock. It only played one song, but I loved the physical motion of winding it each day, loved the sound of those intricate little gears and the way I could set the time so the ballerina would begin to dance each morning. I loved the click, the momentary grinding before the plinking music began.

When my grandmother moved into the nursing home a year later, we still slept at the farm and my parents still slept in my mother’s old bedroom. I was the one who slept in my grandmother’s bed, alone on the main floor. I packed the little pink clock into my suitcase each time we visited.

My grandmother died -- too young -- from Scleroderma on a Tuesday morning in November. My mother was younger than I am now. My parents needed to make arrangements so I spent the night at Julia’s house, unrolling my sleeping bag against the wall of her basement bedroom. We went to school together the next morning as if everything was normal, and then my dad drove my brother and me north to the farm where we would stay for the rest of the week.

My friend’s bedroom was almost as familiar as my own, but that night I was as disoriented as I was when I rearranged my own furniture. None of it was my own choosing. She set the alarm on her clock radio a little early so we both had time to shower before school, but before I went to sleep I pulled out the pink ballerina clock and wound that, too.

I am every age I've ever been.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

*

I turned forty this week. My parents flew in for just a few hours, trying to return to their snowy home after a few days in Phoenix. Suzannah had a band concert, and my mother had a gift for me -- a mug I gave her when I was Suzannah's age, when she turned forty. Twenty-seven years ago. 40 is not the end of the world! But you can see it from there.

I laughed hard, and after sipping my morning coffee from that mug all week, I realize I love it at least as much as I love that pink ballerina clock. This is what it means to celebrate a birthday with care. This is a gift my mother gave me, and it transcends any thing on this earth.

I turned forty this week. I woke up in a life I love. I am lucky to love so many people.

It was a perfect day. I sipped coffee from my new twenty-seven-year-old mug. I jogged around my neighborhood in the bitingly cold and beautiful sunshine, the snow barely melted, Puget Sound a brilliant blue just down the hill from my house. I walked down to the edge of the water to catch my breath. I stood in a hot shower. I took myself to lunch. I read a book I'm loving, ate something that made me feel amazing, sipped a cold glass of white wine at noon. I lingered over a latte at a coffee shop I don't get to often. I came home and curled up on the couch for a nap, the sun streaming through the glass doors in the dining room. In the early evening, we all went to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and I picked up just a few things I may have missed at Powell's, and we went out for a cozy dinner. It is everything I could have wanted from this day, from any day. To feel the sun on my skin, to taste good coffee, to hug my children, to curl up in bed with the one who's known me, really known me, for my entire adult life.

I found this in a journal I kept a decade ago, from an entry I wrote late in February. It seems fitting to rediscover now:

The air is sweet with the first breath of spring. I never feel the need to crawl up, crawl out from winter's quiet depths until I smell it, that singing fresh scent under the mud, under the earth and the grass. It's almost painful, that first gasp of sharp sweet air, like a birth, like a death.

We find ourselves so fumblingly human together. My head meets your shoulder, your hand finds mine. We seek out that touch, your lips against my hair, my breath against your neck, my hip bumping yours, our hands across a table, our knees underneath. And all of these accidental collisions of skin, proof of life, proof that we are still alive, proof that we still are breathing and moving. My sigh against your chest, my tear against your hand, my hope against your life. Our eyes meet. We are not meant to go it alone.

We drove to Discovery Park this afternoon. We left it in late October, our feet treading upon the sweet damp mulch of fallen leaves. All that sweet rot. We returned today in the sunshine, cool air knifing my lungs. Wake up. I know this scent. It is buried deeper in the landscapes of my youth, under snowfall and dirt, deep, dark in the earth. It emerges earlier here, washing down the streets in the rain, rising to the surface of the earth in the sunlight, in the breeze.

We hiked to the bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. You are the rock against my wave; we are the rocks against each other's waves; we are the waves together, crashing against grief, against joy, the terrible swelling, the ebb and flow, the rise, the breaking.

I thought about grief, about joy, about all the ways we find and lose each other on ordinary days, on the breath of the first day of spring. About how it comes from the same place, about how the source of joy can be so dark and deep, how grief can be surprisingly light.