I have long believed that the Friday at the end of the first week back after winter break is more important, more restorative, than the Friday that begins winter break. So here I am, wearing pajama pants and sipping wine and typing away here after spending an hour on the couch with a book. The kids are watching whatever silly thing they're watching. I'm baking some appetizers from Trader Joe's before I start roasting sweet potatoes and wilting spinach for our easy yet satisfying and nourishing dinner. It might snow on Sunday night.
Everything feels cozy, and I'm doing okay.
But as much as I had a truly wonderful winter break, and as much as I understood that to prolong it would only result in anxiety (two weeks is the perfect amount of time for me to have "off" before I get edgy and need a bit more structure), I have really struggled this week. I've cried too much during my lunches and planning periods. I felt so demoralized on my first day back; my school is under construction, and there isn't even enough parking for staff, let alone students. I have the privilege of a "part-time" schedule that allows me to take a deduction in pay in exchange for a sweet schedule in which I can take my children to school in the morning before I go to work, but that also means that by the time I show up in the auxiliary parking lot 45 minutes after the first bell, suddenly, there are no spots left for me, even though I didn't have this issue before break, ever. I parked illegally for an hour until someone else left (I went down to check the lot during my planning period) and I could move my car.
"If I show up tomorrow and have nowhere to park," I said tearfully to a colleague, "I'm going right back home." I meant it.
My seniors left me upset and frustrated before break, and things didn't feel any better on Monday. I'd caught a rotten cold, and I was chugging water and sucking frantically on cough drops that made me queasy just to get through a class. My head was pounding before lunch. And because I'm a logical person, I decided that was a good time to examine the inherent value of my job -- both in the teaching (am I even doing anything worthwhile for these kids? Is there even any point?) and in the program I coordinate, which, right now, feels incredibly lonely and futile, and like, if I'm the only one who cares, what is the actual point? These were my thoughts as I bought a Pepsi from the vending machine. I hate Pepsi so much, and I don't think I've plugged coins into that machine since I was pregnant and needed white cheddar popcorn in 2006, but my head hurt so much and I needed something.
Tuesday was slightly better. I snagged an actual parking spot. My sophomores, who've been sort of a tough bunch this year, were engaged and sort of charming and I had a good time with them. Matt had chopped all of the vegetables for supper the night before, so it took very little effort for me to cook a soup three of us enjoy and one of us tolerates and then I managed to get everyone to Tae Kwon Do on time. On Wednesday, I wasn't coughing so much, and I cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed the house. Yesterday, I woke up after the best sleep I'd had in a week (no cough drops gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth all night!) and decided there was a small chance I might still love my job after all.
And then the package came, delivered to my door in the rain on a cold and damp January afternoon.
***
Matt and I were married seventeen years ago, on a December night in my hometown in Montana. Seventeen years ago, we didn't feel the need to see each moment unfold through the cameras on our phones (because seventeen years ago, phones didn't work like that). We experienced everything as it happened, unfiltered. Seventeen years later, we have, simply, an actual album of photographs, an album of photos taken from the disposable cameras left on the tables at the reception, my journal entries, a CD and a video, and our memories. It was one of the best, most perfect days of my life, and the days that followed, hunkered down at our little cabin along a snowy river in the mountains, are forever memorialized as perfectly, wonderfully cozy as well.
But marriage isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect.
Perfect is, for instance, the dinnerware set we registered for seventeen years ago, when we headed to Macy's on a summer evening. We were so young, barely into adulthood; everything we had in our little apartment had come from my family's farm or IKEA, so I felt a certain weight to this task of choosing plates and bowls our children, God willing, would eat from. We aimed that little gun at sheets and towels, at kitchen gadgets. But the pots and pans, the plates and bowls and saucers and coffee cups -- those mattered the most to me. Sheets would be replaced, and gadgets were gadgets, but the plates meant something more.
It's not that they were fancy -- the opposite, in fact. They were the things that would bear our use every single day. Our cereal, our coffee, our dinners. Seventeen years ago, we ate Tuna Helper and four-cheese macaroni from WinCo off those plates; today I serve up food cooked from fresh vegetables, straight from the Moosewood cookbook or my favorite recipes from whatever food blog I've decided to follow. Appetizers from Trader Joe's baked on a Friday afternoon. Cookies baked from a child's fundraiser. I never needed or particularly desired fancy china, but I put more thought into this dinnerware than any other thing we registered for. These would be a part of our life, every single day.
Matt, unsurprisingly, was less opinionated on the matter, so he was agreeable to my choice: a set of dishes patterned in green and blue, in swirls of vines and leaves against a white background. My favorite colors. They also reminded me a bit of the dishes from my own childhood, a blue-and-white Scandinavian pattern. I simply loved them.
But dishes used daily are dishes subject to daily life, and that includes some fumbles, some cracks. A wineglass shattered before we moved from our apartment into our house. A plate broken. A bowl dropped. And then another. And another. I realized recently that our bowls -- used for cereal, for rice, for stir-fry, for soup -- have suffered the heaviest use and the most casualties. As the bowls broke, we replaced them hastily. We have a handful of functional, perfectly serviceable and reasonably attractive bowls from IKEA. They're blue; they don't terribly clash with my dishes. But I've noted the absence of the bowls I chose out of love. Love for the pattern, love for the new life I was beginning. And I mourned a bit. Oh, it was silly, I thought. They're just bowls. We're a family of human beings who drop things sometimes. We are blessed beyond measure, and we want for nothing. But I saw our stack of those beautiful bowls shrink, replaced with the perfectly plain, functional IKEA bowls. And I mourned. I did.
***
Matt and I have everything we need, really. He is notoriously difficult to shop for. If there's something I want but don't need, I send him a link, which is why I have some beautiful journals embossed with my initials, with the particular paper and thickness I like. At Christmas we like to donate to organizations we care about instead of using that money for gifts (though we both still find little things to give each other, which is why I always have a lovely box from LUSH, for instance, because Matt knows how much I love bubble baths).
I am grateful for everything I receive from people who love me, but I truly want for nothing.
And yet, the box that arrived this week brought me to tears.
***
Matt looked up the pattern for our dishes -- now long discontinued -- and ordered another set of the bowls we've eaten from, loved, abused, dropped, cracked, and shattered. I sliced open that box with my children looking on.
"What is it?"
"Ohhhh."
"There's no scuff marks!"
A set of perfect bowls, in our perfect pattern, the one we chose for the family we didn't yet have more than seventeen years ago. They were pristine, unmarked by the scrapes of spoons. But that wasn't even the point. The point was that they were there, that my husband had thought of them, that what had been broken and cracked had arrived whole again. I didn't care about the scuff marks. I cared about their ability to hold a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats or the soup my son likes.
Last night was Leftover Night. It was Scrounge For Your Food night. We had Sunday's chicken soup, Monday's white bean gratin, Tuesday's buffalo cauliflower Soup, Wednesday's Thai peanut noodles with broccoli. We had various unopened packages from Trader Joe's: fish sticks, chicken drumellas. The kids dug around in the freezer for vegetables.
"Can I use this bowl?" asked my daughter, lifting one of the new bowls in her fingertips.
"Of course," I said. "Be careful." I couldn't resist adding that last part, but I almost bit my tongue. I want them to be careful in the way that I want them to take care always. Not because any one thing they touch is sacred, but because we try to move through the world with care, with attention.
I want my children to use those bowls. Those bowls are precious to me, but I don't want anyone to be afraid of using them. I don't want anyone to fear scuff marks.
***
Matt lost his wedding ring at the pumpkin patch a few years ago. It slipped off his finger in the hay pit on a cold October day while he romped with our kids. He searched for it in vain, but finding a ring in a hay pit is the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.
We could replace the ring. Because, in the end, the ring is the symbol, and not the thing itself.
"I miss the scuff marks," Matt said, when he slid his new ring onto his finger. A Christmas gift. "I miss the scratches." I understood.
Because nothing is perfect, really. It's life. It's ours. I'm grateful for every moment that reminds me of this, scuff marks and all.
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