Gratitude and Grief

My son turned fifteen today. 

I've told his birth story so many times, even in this space. Today in the car, driving home from bowling, I reminded the kids that fifteen years ago I spent the day cuddling Isaac on the couch in our family room. I was blessed with an intense but mercifully quick and uncomplicated labor, and two hours after he was born we bundled him into his carseat and drove home from the birth center. The winter morning was frosty and still dark, but I felt nothing but buoyant joy.

I was also starving, so Matt bought me a breakfast burrito in the McDonald's drive-thru on the way home. Orange juice too, I think. Like the grilled cheese I devoured immediately after Suzannah's birth, it was the best thing I'd ever tasted.

We arrived home just after Suzannah's auntie Morgan had fed her waffles for breakfast. We'd planned to introduce her to her new brother but take her to daycare for a few hours to let us settle in and keep a normal routine for her for a little longer. She only had two more weeks of daycare before she'd be home full-time with me until the following September. But as luck would have it, Matt wound up taking her to the pediatrician around lunchtime; she'd spiked a fever and had a runny nose and cough. Today we laughed about Matt announcing to our pediatrician that oh, by the way, we'd also had a baby that morning.

I asked Matt to bring home a quarter pounder for lunch, so back to McDonald's he went. This might not be such a grand memory, except that it makes all of us laugh.

I was a more seasoned mama the second time around, and I had my own bed, my own couch. Isaac had no trouble nursing from birth, and my memories of that day are cozy despite the sleep deprivation. My doula called later that afternoon to gently encourage me to nap, but I couldn't take my eyes off my son. I didn't sleep until that night, with my baby nestled next to me in bed. It was a perfect day.

*

This morning Isaac and I walked the dog together in light drizzle, and then we all went to lunch at the Spar before heading to Tower Lanes. We didn't check the schedule ahead of time, so when we learned that bowling wouldn't open until 2:30 due to a tournament, we booked a reservation at a much smaller bowling alley in a neighborhood we love. The kids played in the arcade for awhile first, gleefully redeemed their tickets for handfuls of trash, and then we headed to our next destination. All four Winslows were on our game. I mean, by our third, we were on fire. Each one of us bowled strikes and spares like nobody's business. Listen, I broke 100. That doesn't happen a lot.

After bowling, we stopped for coffee -- well, a cortado for me and an espresso for Matt, and baked goods for the kids. Without any prompting, they both shared theirs with each other and then offered us bites as well. Back home, Matt diced an onion for me -- he likes to help with dinner prep -- and Isaac asked if I wanted to play Blokus, the game we played nearly every morning back in 2020 when schools shut down and which he almost always refuses to play with me now because apparently I "overdid it." (Please.)

Isaac takes after me in that he is a total homebody; he'd almost always rather stay home than go out. It made sense, then, that he requested a night in for his birthday rather than a favorite restaurant meal, even though Saturday night is our usual family dinner night out. He wanted tater tot casserole and homemade cake, and this little thing is so endearing to me. So Matt baked the cake and made the ganache frosting, and I made the tater tot casserole. (Not Tim Walz's recipe, though; I made that on election night and I can never eat it again. It was delicious in the moment, though very heavy -- he uses bratwursts instead of ground beef -- and when I understood how the night was going to go it was all I could do not to throw up. All night long, I regretted the Election Casserole. For Isaac, I chose a simpler version -- ground beef and green beans, plus the cheesy goodness of freshly shredded cheddar topped with tater tots. We served it with a green salad.) He opened his gifts after dinner but before cake, and he was sweetly appreciative of everything, as he always is.

*

Here is a thing that is always part of Isaac's birth story: His name means "He laughs." I couldn't have known then how much my second-born child would make me laugh every single day of his life, no matter how dark the day.

*

Here is a thing that is impossible to untangle from my son's birthday: on the day he turned three, my lunch break was interrupted by the sound of a colleague's screams.

"They killed all the kids," she cried.

On the day my son turned three, twenty first graders were slaughtered in their classroom in a public elementary school in the United States of America. On the day I was excited to celebrate my son, I swallowed back my terror and tears for my last class of the day, and as soon as the bell rang I rushed to pick up my own first grader from her classroom in a public elementary school in the United States of America.

I have written about this and written about this and written about this and it feels like screaming in a locked, empty room. Parkland: 17 dead in 2018.  Uvalde: 19 children killed in 2022. And all the others, too many for me to remember by name on demand, even though I've tried to write about them, tried to donate money every time another one happens. This is shameful, that there are too many to recall, to name. The fact that my country excels in mass shootings is a shame that should be named.

The year my son turned three, the year twenty children were slaughtered in their school, President Obama wept and Republicans openly mocked his tears. This year my son turns fifteen, and we have elected people into the highest offices who shrug their shoulders and say that school shootings are merely a "fact of life."

I think of those twenty children from Sandy Hook every year on this day. I think about how they should be home from their first quarter of college right now, or working at their first post high-school jobs. They should be hauling home laundry bags, sleeping in, catching up with high school friends.

Their parents should be able to hug them hard after missing them for months.

The blood of these babies coated the floor and it continues to coat our hands.

*

It's hard to have hope in this country, in a country that reelected an unapologetic racist, a misogynist, a rapist, a monster. In a country where folks think they deserve absolution if they didn't vote for him but voted for those in their cities and states who will uphold his monstrous agenda. We are a spectacle and a shame. But as Rebecca Solnit often reminds us, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Hope requires work, not complacency. Hope means we acknowledge that things are very, very bad and they will get worse. But Solnit also reminds us that we can build paradises and sanctuaries in hell. For that is where we are.

*

I write all of this from a place of relative safety and extreme privilege. I know this. And I write from a place of hope, because my children deserve this. My daughter deserves our protection and my son deserves our accountability. My son has been granted every privilege, and I know that raising him to understand this requires work beyond raising him to be "good." Because "good" white straight Christian men have caused immeasurable harm when they haven't been taught to interrogate that privilege. Even the progressive ones, even the kind ones. And we've devoted too much energy to their hurt feelings at the expense of people's lives.

*

I am aware, every day, of the darkness. But do not underestimate my capacity to embrace joy.

It has been a dark, hard year. Personally, professionally, locally, globally.

I am aware, every day, of my privilege. This year has knocked my sideways in ways experienced by lots of folks with fewer supports and resources. What I know I need to do is channel that privilege into action, with the energy I am privileged to have because I've had supports and resources. It's the most important work we can do, and I'm still learning it. I believe this is our collective responsibility. To interrogate this privilege and act on it. And to listen. To listen.

My children's birthdays make me contemplative, I guess. The personal becomes political. 

*

We can build paradises and sanctuaries in hell.

*

I wrote this five years ago: 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.

Five Days Later

"We have arrived in hell. You can build paradises and sanctuaries there too." - Rebecca Solnit

On Friday afternoon, I decided that after three straight days of anxiety and grief I needed to get out of my house and breathe and be in the world without having to talk to people. I'd been talking to people nonstop; on the first morning we woke up in hell, I had to go to school and teach, and then I had to drag my chair and my laptop down to the Commons and have conferences with students and their parents for five hours. I hadn't slept more than a couple of hours since Sunday. To say I was exhausted is an understatement, but I knew I wouldn't do anything as sensible as take a nap if I stayed home. I couldn't yet.

So I hopped on the light rail, intending to take myself to lunch, walk around a bit, and head to my favorite bookstore where I'd drink coffee and then a glass of wine, and write. I just wanted to be an anonymous person out in the world for awhile, with the space to eat and read and write without having to manage my emotions or needs for anyone else. I wanted space to breathe.

But when you're in a city and you pay attention, when you're on public transit or sitting in a cafe or coffee shop, you can hear a lot. And all day, I heard snippets. Two men and a woman wearing football jerseys and making crass jokes about Kamala on the light rail. Two women hunched over their salads at lunch, voicing their fears. Two baristas reliving election night, how nerves gave way to dread, and here we fucking are. Again.

I wrote this eight years ago:

It's been one week. One week ago, I spent the entire day in a state of horror, pasting on a smile when I had to interact with kids and their parents, dissolving in tears in the bathroom (where I encountered other teachers doing the same) or in my car. Since then, I've been despondent, and I've been angry, and I've tried to take care of myself and my family and ground myself in the beautiful present. And then I wake up and say, "Nope, I'm still angry." Last night I could not fall asleep, which is becoming my new normal, unless I take Tylenol PM. I swung between fury and terror. I've had horrible dreams about keeping my children safe. And my children will be among the "safe"; they are white, raised by two white, straight, "Christian" parents. (Is it any wonder that I put "Christian" in quotes? I'm really struggling with that one.) No one has threatened to come after them, although I absolutely worry about raising a daughter in a world in which our Commander-in-Chief objectifies women ("Not a 10!") and normalizes tearing them down and assaulting them. Again, this isn't new, and women know this, but when a man can scream about a woman's pussy as she's out for a jog or taking her kids through a drive-thru and happens to have an "I'm With Her" bumper sticker on her car, he's not just being vulgar; he's quoting our elected leader.

What's wild is that all the things that should have been deal-breakers in 2016 seem almost laughably mild now. Eight years after "You can grab them by the pussy," he won the popular vote after threatening vengeance against anyone he considers an enemy, after openly fantasizing about shooting Liz Cheney, after going on and on about Arnold Palmer's penis size, after simulating oral sex onstage, after swaying nonsensically to music instead of speaking for like forty minutes at a rally, after repeating bizarre and grotesque lies about immigrants (lies our future VP admits were lies but like, if you have to lie to get what you want, whatever). Now it's "Your body, my choice." I could go on, but clearly, I don't need to. Because it doesn't matter. There is no bottom.

But. You do not get to vote for him or for his supporters in your local elections (looking at you, Montana, 'cause you broke my heart, even though I saw it coming) and claim your love for individuals this will harm, individuals who will be less safe. Those individuals include my daughter (who I am so, so thankful to raise in Washington) and all of my students. Of course it includes far more, but I am so tired of folks thinking that they can love specific people, congratulate themselves for that, pray for them in church, and then vote for what will harm them.

Please, tell me I'm "too angry."

At the bookstore, I ordered a pumpkin spice cold brew and later a glass of wine from those baristas and I appreciated that they didn't try to make small talk. They didn't say, "How's your day going? Any fun plans for the weekend?" When I bought an Americano on my way to work on Thursday, the barista said, "How's it going today?" Totally chipper, no meaningful tone. And I replied automatically, "Oh, I'm good."

How absurd. The day wasn't "good." I wasn't "good." It's just that automatic, that we're so conditioned to prioritize comfort over truth. It's wild to me that some folks are so comfortable just moving on, posting chatty little updates without ever acknowledging what has happened. Again. And sure, sometimes we need flashes of normalcy and self-care, but as a friend of mine said, it's pretty clear who was never all that stressed out by this. I guess that's the wild part. 

It's wild to me that folks can talk about "respect" and "agreeing to disagree" and say, "Of course, there should be no place for bullying in schools!" And some of them are the same folks who helped elect the biggest bully we've seen in office in our lifetime. And to those who would say we shouldn't have to share who we voted for, that it's a private decision -- sure. And I don't actually care who you voted for or even if you voted, frankly, as long as you didn't vote FOR Trump or FOR people and policies who will elevate the hateful MAGA agenda. I care a great deal about whether or not your beliefs align with what's coming for my own family and my students and anyone who can't just go merrily about their day and not consider the harm to folks who are not white, or straight, or Christian, or men. If you're one of these folks and you're still reading, please consider this: if you can largely go about your day, business as usual, if you can happily carry on in your life without having to think about misogyny and racism and sexism and its direct impact on real people, then this is our mess to clean up. Watching the mental gymnastics some Christian folks are doing to convince themselves otherwise is exhausting.

I've lost some friends in the last few years. Some Facebook friends, some high school friends, and two formerly close friends whose loss I genuinely mourn. I write their names privately, on paper, and I grieve. But when I was tempted to reconnect after three years of silence, I went to their social media profiles and realize that I cannot open the door for those relationships again, because while they "loved" me, that love is hollow. If your vote will harm my child, or my students, that door is closed. I want to know who I need to protect my loved ones from, and this is not hyperbole. Sometimes this realization breaks my heart, but also, I don't have time to sit around in my feelings about that. America is the same country it was last week; we've just shown ourselves so much more clearly. And while my heart might be broken, it's still beating, and so I'm not quite ready to surrender yet.

The Complicated Love of Home

We visited Suzannah for Fall Family Weekend, and it was wonderful. It's only been a month, but I have missed her so much. I'm still not used to walking past her empty (and strangely tidy) room. I'm not used to not hugging her every day, or before bed. Hugging her again -- she gives great hugs -- was my favorite part of the weekend.

"You're doing great," I whispered as I hugged her good-bye last Sunday. 

"I'm doing okay," she replied.

And I told her that one month into her first year of college, especially considering everything she's fought through to arrive at this place, okay is more than enough. When I think about the last couple of years, those terrible post-Covid years layered with additional trauma -- some of which I recognized and some of which I didn't at the time -- my gratitude for what we have now brings me to my knees. We did the best we could with what we knew at the time, and some of it was good enough and some of it wasn't but it brought us to this moment, where my firstborn baby adult wants to spend time with us, where she checks in every day, where she misses our hugs and can't wait to come home.

I'll take that. Every time.

*

I've written about home a lot, both in this space and in many others. It's a loaded word for me. I was born into senseless privilege, really; my childhood bedroom still exists in pretty much the same state I left it an entire adulthood ago. I have always loved the way my parents' house in Bozeman smells when I walk through the door, even decades after I left. I love everything about it: the sound of the creek through the open window in my old bedroom (where my children now sleep when we visit), the light over the kitchen sink at night, the sound of the water singing through the pipes when the shower starts, the way I still know where to reach for cereal or crackers or peanut butter. The deer that strut across the lawn at twilight. The shadows that spill over the Hyalite foothills.

I didn't interrogate this privilege for a long time. I've always had a home base: somewhere to return to. And I took it entirely for granted.

*

How many homes can a person have?

I have never once regretted moving to Washington. I've lived here for my entire adult life; we've chosen to raise our family here, and I can't imagine choosing to leave. I have the water and the mountains, and a short drive to the plains I still love as well. I have creative autonomy in my professional life that I absolutely do not take for granted these days. And I live in a state where basic human rights still -- mostly, for now -- remain protected. As a woman and as a mother of a fabulously queer kid and as a human being, this matters.

I love my home state and I always will; it's in my blood. But I also understand that I'm an outsider now. I understood that the day someone from my hometown posted a picture of a car with an out-of-state license place just...driving down Main Street. The message was clear: You're not wanted.

It was a running joke when I lived there in the 90s: No Californians! 

The license plate was from a state in the Midwest, though, not California. And I understand that this isn't a joke.

I have an out-of-state license plate and I have since 2001. 

Is this a silly thing to pick on? Maybe. But this person happened to post this picture the same summer Ijeoma Oluo -- a writer I think we should all be reading -- faced an intense wave of racist vitriol (death threats, rape threats, vile names I will not type here) when she dared to make the comment "Will they let my Black ass walk out of here?" after visiting a Cracker Barrel in Montana during a road trip with her children. (I've never eaten at a Cracker Barrel, but I do know they had to pay...a lot, for racially discriminatory practices.)

Which brings me to the conversation I had with a student last week.

*

My juniors were working through one of James Baldwin's essays, and I was walking around the room begging them to please just fall in love with the texture and cadence of his perfectly brilliant sentences. They were doing their best to derail my teaching, as teenagers do. But sometimes the derailing leads to conversations that take us where we need to go anyway.

"Winslow, what's your favorite place in the world to visit?" 

I was tempted to ask this child what in the world that had to do with the work she wasn't doing, but it was Friday, and I like her a lot, and I didn't really feel like working either. 

"Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park," I said. "This has been true for my whole life. If I could only ever go one place again, it would be the shore of that lake. Or swimming in it."

"Where is that exactly?"

"That's in Montana, where I grew up. I love some places in Washington just as much now, so this isn't a fair question, but that's always my first answer."

"I'm not about to set foot in Montana," she said. And she explained in no uncertain terms why.

*

The first time someone I worked with told me about the time they were met with unabashed racism at a restaurant while traveling through my home state, my first response was something along the lines of, "I'm so sorry that happened! That's not Montana!" As a white person in America, I was taught to believe that racism was a reflection of horrible individuals. Horrible individuals are everywhere! An unfortunate reality that doesn't ask anything of us. Because we are not like that.

It's exactly the response I saw from well-meaning Montanans in response to Ijeoma Oluo's experience. How desperately we want to prove we're not like that. 

I responded in more or less the same way the second time a friend told me a similar story. A different town, a different circumstance -- but the same story I didn't really want to hear. I wanted to believe in the friendliness and hospitality of my home state. And I do believe in the friendliness, hospitality, and goodwill of individuals in my home state. But it took me some time (the time I had the privilege of taking) to understand that my response -- I'm sorry you encountered terrible people, but that was a reflection of individuals, not a systemic issue -- is exactly how white supremacy sustains itself, how it grows and flourishes, even in our homes, even in our well-meaning hearts.

I remember the first time a student asked me, "Are there any Black people in Montana?" and it led to a conversation similar to the one I had with my student last week. She understood the call towards home; she felt it too, towards a home she hadn't visited in a long time. But she also wondered, rightly so, how I could love a place that wouldn't welcome her too.

I don't love Montana any less than I did the day I left at eighteen, and the day I left for good when I moved to Washington twenty-three years ago. Sometimes I think that the grand sum of my writing, all of it, has always been a love letter to home, whatever that means. It means it's complicated, like any love. It means I think a great deal about home. How privileged I am to have been raised where I was, to love it freely and to feel welcome while I lived there. How privileged I still am to be able to return when I want, to hope my children understand that while they are Washingtonians through and through, Montana and Minnesota pulse through them as well; their roots are deep in all those places. How privileged I am to claim these roots, and to be able to return.

*

Suzannah was always fairly certain she wanted to attend college in-state, though she considered a few Oregon schools; she was quite firm on this from the beginning. She never wanted to go to a red state, for what (I would hope) are obvious reasons. But also, she doesn't want to be too cold or too hot, so no weeks of subzero or intensely hot weather. 

"The Pacific Northwest it is, then," I said happily. Because what parent wants her kid to go far away? She had plenty of excellent options and I trusted her to choose what was right for her. But when we visited Western the summer before her senior year, I had a feeling.

Mostly, I want her to know our home will always be home, regardless of where she chooses to put down other roots. I hope it always feels like it.

*

My kid voted in her first election last weekend. Her ballot was delivered to our address, and we took it to her for Family Weekend. After we'd had lunch and made our Target run, we hunkered down in a cafe I've grown to love over the past year. Rain streamed down the windows; Mazzy Star played inside while Suzannah and I sipped coffees in a cozy booth. I wrote in my journal and she spent a long time with her ballot. I've drilled into my children to an irritating degree that local elections matter a great deal; if I've done my job, neither of them will ever say, "I'm not political" or "I'm not into politics," which is, of course, a political statement in itself. 

*

I can't see myself living in Montana again; I don't think there's a place for me or my family there anymore. But Montana runs through me, and I still love it fiercely. I love my family there with my whole heart. It's complicated, and it's not. 

I've donated to Jon Tester's senate campaign more than once because I still have this wild hope that that a dirt farmer who works the same farm in north-central Montana near my family's farm in north-central Montana (who still uses the same meat grinder that took three of his fingers in an accident when he was only nine) can hang on to the senate seat he's held for so many years in a deep red state, even though he is a Democrat, which is something of a miracle. I've donated because even though Washington is my home now, my heart still claims Montana too, even if it won't claim me back. Because even though Tester and I part ways on some issues, he represents more wild hope that there might still be space for people like me and my family in the place that raised me, even if it's not actually me and my family. Because he works the same land his grandfather homesteaded, because he was a teacher, because he has a gay son, because if I want to ever believe that there is a place for my family in any capacity then I have to believe that some folks in unlikely places will still fight for basic safety and dignity for everyone. Because his opponent is absolutely repugnant and you don't need the news to tell you that; you can hear it straight from the candidate's own mouth. I've donated because people contain multitudes and even though Tester has never been on the ballot with Trump before, which will do him no favors this time, I have to believe it is possible that safety and dignity and decency and empathy can win, even against the odds.

I'm not sure donating to a senate campaign in a state I don't live and can't vote in counts as local politics, but it feels personal.

*

In the meantime, here we are. We're a mess. But also, even when we're a mess, our daily lives are still so full of beauty and love and I hope to never take a second of that for granted, even as I sit with the understanding that I have, in this beautiful life of mine, taken so much for granted.

In the meantime, here I sit, thinking of home. Of the people I love in every home I've ever known. Of all the ways a human heart can break and mend. Of my daughter's hugs and how I miss them, of how lucky I am to know she misses them too. Of the way my son can make me laugh on the darkest days of the year. Of my students and everything they've taught me. Of the friends I've lost and the friends I count as family. Of everything we stand to lose. Of privilege and shortcomings and shortsightedness, of trying to be better, of giving grace, of accountability. Of not knowing where to start, but clumsily trying.

Enchiladas and Gratitude and the Absurd State of Things

Black bean and sweet potato enchiladas sounded good tonight. 

It's hot, and we don't love using the oven when it's hot, but I was out of other ideas. Black bean and sweet potato enchiladas come together so easily, and while I thought for a moment about making this delicious and giant summer salad that involves noodles and colorful sliced peppers and cabbage and cucumbers and this divine sesame dressing, making that beautiful and cool salad actually takes a lot more work than putting together these enchiladas. Even when I make the enchilada sauce myself. So enchiladas it was, because it was supposed to just be a chill Friday evening in July. I'm a big fan of "whatever we have, man" for dinner. I'm a big fan of boredom. I have actually never in my life been bored, but I believe heartily that kids should learn to cope with it and so we have wonderful "I don't care what you do, let me read" days in my household.

If I look back over everything I've written during the summers, especially since I had kids (so like 18 years), if I read all my journals and all my social media posts, a theme emerges: gratitude for the moment. I don't need -- or want -- more than I have. Slowness, stillness. My backyard patio. The freedom to read, to delight in simple things like swimming lessons (I read many books in the bleachers at my kids' lessons over the years, to the background of shouts and the slap of wet feet on concrete), or music lessons (this summer Isaac is taking lessons in both flute and saxophone, one for wind ensemble and one for jazz, and the smell of the music store takes me back to the summer of 1994 when I was trying out different trumpets before settling on the Bach Stradivarius, the same one my daughter plays now. There is something about the scent of valve oil and cork grease or the distant sound of a horn in a practice room that tugs at a deep nostalgia for me). These moments every summer are grounding, lovely, and necessary.

And I am grateful for exactly what I had today: hours to read in the backyard, my skin glistening with sunscreen because I am trying to prove Matt wrong -- he believes I will always sail into summer with a terrible sunburn because I missed a spot, and so far, this summer, I haven't. Endless glasses of iced green tea from Trader Joe's. A dog who loves to sunbathe on the crispy grass next to me. My quiet neighborhood. The view of Puget Sound, shimmering in the morning sunlight when Isaac and I walk that lazy dog. My daughter, home with us, puffy and sore from the removal of her wisdom teeth two days ago but home. With us. Recovering and resting and returned to us after five weeks in the hospital at the end of her senior year.

I've written a lot about gratitude, really. And I believe in this as a practice. But also, sometimes things are terrible and I think it's okay to just let that be real. 

Sometimes the terrible things are really minor: say, my enchilada sauce forgotten and boiled over on a burner. It spilled across the stovetop and made a huge mess. The spill sizzled and burned, the rag useless, the bottle of olive oil and jars of cumin and chili powder coated and sticky.

Often -- every day, it seems -- the terrible things are major: say, the state of the country? The folks who literally want to erase the existence of human beings? I saw the signs held high by all these smiling white folks at the RNC: MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW. They were probably all in church last week and they'll probably be there again on Sunday. 

I keep thinking of my first (but not my last) student to be deported after Trump took office in 2017. I've written about this kiddo more than once, but possibly not where everyone will see it. And deportations happen under ever president, but there's a monster gunning for the White House (again, WTF) whose followers hold up these signs and smile about it. Women's rights are also on the chopping block; Trump literally strolled out to "It's a Man's World." Obviously, LGBTQ protections are, too. This IS the Republican party now; none of this "I'll vote for the right individual for this particular job after careful consideration." 

Marlon James posted today: If you think Trump was the scariest part of that Convention you weren't paying attention. Make no mistake, this is the youth who will burn crosses, tell date raped undergrads that they asked for it, send women back to the alley with a clothes hanger and erase every single protection gay marriage had brought, and they will outlive you. You might be scared about what's happening to America. But you might be scared at the wrong thing. I once took some relief in the idea that at least Trumpism wouldn't survive Trump. I've never been so wrong in my entire life.

So I was in a funk about all that today, to put it mildly.

I checked all my gratitude boxes: time spent reading in my backyard. My daughter, home with us. My son, walking the dog with me. My husband, dicing the sweet potatoes for me because he likes to help with dinner. The sunlight shimmering over Puget Sound. I will never not be grateful for the moments that make up my life. 

But dammit, don't condescend. Don't give me platitudes. Don't REMIND me of what I already know, which is that I am lucky beyond measure.

I'm grateful, and I'm pissed. I'm grateful, and I'm baffled. I'm grateful, and I'm terrified. We can contain multitudes. My normally neat kitchen is a mess, and so is my heart. I'm seriously, stupidly cranky about the spilled enchilada sauce. I'm furiously heartbroken for the folks who feel rightfully terrified by what lies ahead. I'm grateful for my own senseless, stupid privilege, but I'm in a demographic that has caused a great deal of harm and I have to interrogate that. I'm also the proud mother of a fabulously queer kiddo, and fuck every single person who will vote for a monster who seeks to harm or erase any of us. I am a public school teacher in a state that hasn't yet outlawed my curriculum. I have to interrogate that, too -- how can I use what I love while I can?

It's all a lot for a hot July afternoon when I should just be relaxing with my book, but life intervenes, and the enchilada sauce might boil over and my kids might fight with each other over who gets what end of the couch for their viewing of Deadpool and I recognize that this ordinary fight is everything I actually missed and hoped for again two months ago, precisely because of its ordinariness. I'm so grateful for all of it. I'm so angry and so terrified pretty much all the time. But the world happens to all of us. We can have good days with terrible moments. We can have terrible days without trying too hard to find some superficial good in them. We can contain multitudes.

"Now is when the real work begins."

When I'm feeling things, my feelings tend to come out of my eyes. It's just how it is. I've been crying a lot since yesterday. My friend Peggy commented last night, "I didn't realize how bereft of optimism I'd become." And that's exactly it, I think. So many of us have been sick at the thought of eight years of this, and now we can actually imagine a more hopeful future.

Watching Kamala Harris and Joe Biden speak -- watching with my husband and children (especially my children) -- was exactly what I hoped for. I cried over what we've been missing, but I also wept because I feel hopeful. 

For three? Four? mornings in a row I rose long before dawn, raised the blinds in the living room, and waited for daylight. Isaac was the first to join me, every day.

"Did Biden win yet?"

And I said, "Not yet, but I really believe he will."

The official call came just before 8:30, just before the hair appointment I made weeks ago -- to go back to blonde. When I made the appointment, I hoped it would be celebratory, rather than an attempt to cope with anger and fear and loss. As it turned out, I got to tell my stylist that Biden won -- she hadn't heard yet. 

"Oh, thank God," she said. "Every night this week I've gone to bed wondering if we'll still have a democracy in the morning."

When Van Jones teared up on CNN, he spoke to so many of us: "It's easier to be a parent this morning. It's easier to be a dad. It's easier to tell your kids that character matters...Telling the truth matters. Being a good person matters." 

Four years ago, I sobbed in Matt's arms: We're raising a daughter. For that matter, we're raising a son.

So this matters. We need better than what we've had from the leader of our country.

*

But I'm still afraid of complacency. Trump didn't create the racists, misogynists, and xenophobes; they've been here all along. He merely gave them a voice, and they're still here, and we all know them. Naive, optimistic little me learned this week that I overestimated the number of conservative friends and family I believed would never vote for Trump, and while I'm heartsick I shouldn't be surprised. I just hoped that some things would be dealbreakers, at least for folks in my life: Unapologetic racism, white supremacy, white nationalism. Misogyny. Mocking the disabled. Anti-semitism. The incessant name-calling. The bullying. The narcissism. But they weren't dealbreakers, and that's a heartbreak for me.

Don't you dare speak about your pro-life motivations if you've never cared about children in cages, forced family separations, children sexually assaulted in custody at the border. Don't tell me that your goal is saving babies if you care more about punishing women than supporting their health. (Don't you dare claim to be "not political.") Abortion rates drop during pro-choice presidencies, but if that were ever the goal, instead of control, this wouldn't be the reason someone is a single-issue voter. Don't ever, ever claim to respect women. I just call bullshit, no matter how much I love you, no matter how much I always hoped you loved me, too.

But do dare to tell me. Truly. Tell me. Look at me, and make me understand: what made you choose a monster because you've convinced yourself it supports some greater good? (What is that greater good? Does it reflect only what you see in the mirror, and shut out anyone who doesn't look like you?)

Or let your silence speak for you. It speaks more loudly than your words.

Yes, yours.

*

So this is what it feels like, in 2020. To have the tentative hope of the next four years. To feel a little broken because four years of Trump held up a mirror to what we should have seen already. But also, to feel hopeful. I'm a teacher who sees the fire in our kids. I'm a mother who strives to raise children with fierce empathy, who understand their privilege and use it to make a better world. I'm a woman with a partner who shares these values. We know we have a lot to learn. We know we have work to do.

The Day After

I was awake at five o'clock this morning again, but not in despair. Just restless.

I walked for an hour as soon as it was light enough, and I walked for another hour at dusk, as wind sent the leaves skittering across the streets. Streetlights came on. I could see inside people's living rooms and kitchens as they watched TV or stood at the kitchen sink, little glimpses of ordinary lives hidden in the daylight.

On one particular part of my route I noticed several Biden/Harris signs and Black Lives Matter signs that weren't there two days ago (and haven't been, this entire election season). I wondered if they were worried about someone taking the signs, or worse. Nearby is the only blatantly Trump house I've noticed. It's hard to miss. The yard is full of clutter, and a Trump banner covers half the shabby siding. The light-up Budweiser signs in the window add a nice touch.

*

I walked seven miles today. The day was almost balmy, really strangely warm, but cloudy. Quiet. I needed the head-clearing quiet.

I think we know, now, how this will go. Now, my fear is complacency. I woke up in the same deeply racist country that existed yesterday and last year and since our country was born and built on the backs of Black people whose descendants have always known what I had the privilege not to see, not really. I shouldn't have been shocked four years ago, and today we should all know that what was really on the ballot was whiteness.

*

None of my conservative-leaning friends are posting angrily about voter fraud. Maybe they're hiding those posts from me, or I've blocked them already. But I have this really terrible habit of reading posts by friends of my friends, and some of my friends have some gems on their lists. I follow a few of them sort of regularly out of this weird masochistic curiosity and I KNOW, I SHOULD STOP THIS. It's ridiculous. But they really do believe, apparently, that Biden cannot win, and if he does, it's a total fraud. Whatever "news" sources they read have told them that Trump was slated to win by a landslide, and I can tell you which sources they're citing, all the while they rant about the "fake news media." And my word, these people needed more school, or teachers who could teach them how to assess the reliability and validity of their sources. Did they not learn this? (These particular folks, mind you, are big fans of "doing your own research.")

Trump is following his own playbook to the letter. He was always going to cheat, because he knew he couldn't win any other way. He was always going to declare voter fraud if he lost. There will be no gracious concession. What's horrifying (although no longer shocking) is how many people believe him. How do you explain, calmly, using small words, that counting all of the mail-in ballots is not voter fraud? Mail-in ballots favor Democrats. It is not a great conspiracy that as those come in, Biden gains votes. This seems very simple to me. These are not even the protestors in Michigan trying to shove their way into downtown Detroit's TCF Center; these are people who live among us and are probably perfectly sweet when they're shopping at Jo-Ann's Fabrics. See my post from last night about being nice.

(Friends, if your friends are posting this garbage -- and they totally are, because I'm following some of them in some weird streak of masochism -- please address it. I know it's uncomfortable, but it's also important. I'm happy to engage with anyone on my actual friends list if I see it, but I'm not going to get into it with my friends' friends. After the 2008 election I told someone that no, Obama wasn't going to take away all this person's guns and 2008 wasn't the last hunting season he'd ever have, and for my troubles I received a message calling me a libtard. I have precisely zero shits to give about what someone thinks about me on the internet, but I do think we need to do work with the people in our lives. And I fully admit I have to figure out how to do this more effectively.)

Do all of the folks who are sure this is massive voter fraud think Trump should sue ALL the states who vote blue? Maybe he should just sue all the voters?

And if we were that good at conspiracies, and fraud, then...wouldn't COVID also be gone today? Instead of hitting our record number of new cases? Asking for a friend.

*

I've been texting or messaging with a couple of former students in the last couple of days. They give me hope and I love them so much and they remind me exactly why I do the work that I do. Plus, one of the great gifts of teaching is keeping relationships with some really fantastic humans I grew rather attached to over our time together.

And they're voting. 

Election Night, Part 2

I could just keep adding to my last post, but part of me wants to write more posts than I did in 2019, so here we are.

An hour after I last wrote I'm breathing a little easier. Early results indicate that Inslee is safe as governor in Washington, and Reykdal holds a comfortable lead for the Superintendent of Public Instruction. These are important.

First results also look promising for two folks I was excited to support in our local elections -- Jamila Taylor and Jesse Johnson. Local elections matter.

My home state is more depressing, but I can't vote in Montana anymore, and Montana wouldn't welcome me home anyway. Montanans don't take kindly to outsiders (ask me how I know), and as someone who has put down deep roots somewhere else for her entire adult life, I think that's what I am now. I've written more about that than I can process here tonight. But I have to say, tonight when I was trying to distract myself I read a post that was one of those, "You know you might be from Washington when..." things, and I related to literally all of them. I didn't hate that. It made me smile. I chose my home well. And believe me, in this country, staying where I am feels like a matter of survival. Anyway, no one in Washington has ever suggested that I don't belong here just because I'm not a sixth-generation Washingtonian, and this is the state my children can claim as their birthplace. They'll have roots in other homes as well, because Matt and I love other landscapes and that runs in our blood, but tonight -- tonight especially -- I am clinging to the home I've chosen.

But toxic individualism is alive and well across landscapes that I love, I think, and it still saddens me. Maybe that's why my home state is likely to elect as governor the man who assaulted a reporter a few years ago. And I watched on national news as a former Montana neighbor, one who fed me peanut butter sandwiches as a child, on whose pullout couch I slept more than once, proclaimed that it just made her love him more.

Cool cool cool cool cool.

The "pro-life" party that celebrates and incites violence. (Trump obviously loved Gianforte for that moment.)

*

And Trump takes Florida.

*

I voted in my first presidential election twenty years ago. We didn't have the results that night, but I remember creeping out to the living room in the little apartment I shared with Carmen, turning on the tiny TV, and hissing, "Are you kidding me?"

I wasn't particularly excited to vote for Al Gore, but I did. And I was very excited to vote.

*

2000. 2004. 2008. 2012. 

As a white straight woman raised in a traditional Christian family, I didn't stand to lose a lot in any of these elections, obviously. I grew, I think. I learned. I hope. (I hope I learned to listen. I'm still learning how to put that into action.) I wept when Obama delivered his speech in 2008. And I breathed a sigh of relief in 2012, but I also had some great conversations with friends who voted for Romney.

Those friends didn't vote for Trump in 2016. Things are different now. If you still think it's just a matter of opinion and not folks's literal lives, I don't know how to talk to you, and I probably wouldn't have had a great conversation with you in 2012.

I'm so anxious. I'm not without hope (which is not the same thing as optimism) but I'm anxious all the same. Please, don't let this happen again. I fear the breaks that cannot be repaired.

Election Night, 2020

Sick with anxiety. That's how I feel.

I share a particular trauma with my colleagues; on the night of the election in 2016 we were hosting student-led conferences, and they brought in big screens so we could watch everything unfold while we talked about kids' grades in English.

I cried all the way home that night, rage-cleaned my bathrooms in the middle of the night, and wrote and cried and wrote and cried through the next week, and I surrounded myself with folks who were not silent in the face of the horror. 

The rage has not diminished.

I'm reading my posts from four years ago, and I find it difficult to breathe.

Please, spare me your religious platitudes about how "God is in control." It's not helpful. It's not comforting. It's patronizing. Tell that to someone who fears for the rights so many of us take for granted. If I felt whimsical enough to turn the fight for democracy into a BINGO game, or a drinking game, "God is in control" would be on there for sure.

I'm reading my posts from four years ago, and it really has turned out to be that awful. And people voted for him again, and I'm afraid of who those people are. If you voted for him again, please know I don't believe you value me, or my daughter, or my students, or any of our rights, no matter how much you might love me or tell me how much you love my stories. I parted ways with a long-time friend who spouted nothing but Christian platitudes, claimed to love my stories, and blithely supported the ones who would harm the students who made those stories possible. The ones who encourage literal violence against them. A vote for Trump is an act of violence.

If you voted for him, don't come near me for a good long while.

I just feel sick. 

*

Edited at 7:15 p.m: Okay, seriously, Trumpers. Stop telling us to be "nice" when you're voting for a person who literally incites, champions, and cheers his supporters on to violence.

Fascists can be perfectly pleasant in line at the grocery store, as I just commented to my friend who was admonished for her "hate" on her own Facebook page. I am so deeply uninterested in "nice." Nice keeps you comfortable, and comfortable is part of what got us into this mess, now isn't it?

It reminded me of a conversation on another friend's page after the debate in which Trump refused to condemn white supremacy. This is what I said, word for word, to a person (NOT my friend, by the way) who thought people weren't being "nice" to her for supporting Trump, and of course she wasn't racist: 

There is no such thing as "not racist." As a daughter of a conservative family in a red state, I used to believe...we were all equal without engaging in anti-racist work. Because I wasn't racist.

But now I believe there are racists and there are anti-racists. I have a LOT of baggage to unpack and it's work I still have to do. I strive every day to do anti-racist work, and I have to confront my complicity in racist systems every day. That's uncomfortable, sure. But I have benefited every single day of my life from systemic racism, and I have to do better. It's not enough to say I love and respect black people...we have real work to do.

The person to whom I was responding told me my "speech was conducted angrily."

Go hug a Nazi, I guess? Because be nice.

*

Still feel like I'm going to throw up.

*

8:26: Why is this even close? The second time? What is wrong with people?

(I'm asking that like I don't know the answer.)

What matters most

Trump is a loathsome monster of a human being, but he is still a human being, and I don't want COVID to kill him.

Some of my friends have some outspoken Trumpers on their friends lists, and those I haven't blocked I sometimes watch with real curiosity. Some claim they're unfriending reams of folks, apparently, for rejoicing over Trump's diagnosis and wishing his dead and this is what's wrong with the hateful left.

None of my more conservative friends are posting this, thank goodness (or if they are, they're filtering me out of it, which I appreciate. Please keep doing that if it applies to you). I also call BS on the ones who are. It's not that I don't believe these posts exist somewhere; I just don't believe the folks who are all, "Time for some FRIENDS LIST CLEANUP because I don't need that kind of hate in my life!" First of all, I could show you just as many random internet posts "rejoicing" at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg if I spent three seconds hunting for them, and second of all, four days ago your leader attempted to bully his opponent over his dead son, mocked his last living son, refused to denounce white supremacy and told the Proud Boys to stand by, and then he exposed how many people to this virus while he went on to attend events after knowing he'd been exposed (and likely after he tested positive)? The virus he called the "China Plague" on Tuesday night? Tell me more about loving people and being a good human. I'll wait.

For the record, I haven't seen a single person on my own friends list who has "celebrated" Trump's diagnosis. Not one.

It doesn't mean we're wringing our hands, though. It doesn't mean we're wearing our "Oh no, I'm shocked!" faces.

I don't wish him ill. But Trump has access to the best care in the world, and my concern still lies with the folks who have fallen ill and don't have access to those resources and state-of-the-art care, who have lost their lives, who have battled with long-lasting effects of this disease. Who fell victim to his negligence and his lies and his utterly disgusting lack of empathy. Some of these folks are my students and their families. 

I wish the president could feel the effects of this virus enough to empathize with the folks who've suffered far more than he likely will, but I simply don't believe that's possible. He mocked Biden for wearing a mask; four days later he's making a video about "fighting for" all the millions of people who have been infected. I couldn't finish watching after that. Trump has only ever been about one person on this planet.

(Edited to add: See also the bizarre joyride he took today, forcing folks to share a hermetically sealed Covidmobile in what looks like a Weekend at Bernie's moment.)

I don't want him dead. I want him out of the White House.

***

And now for something completely different.

It's October, and we're nearly halfway through our first quarter. I spent nearly the entirety of the last two weekends and all of my weeknights until bedtime planning and uploading and planning and uploading every moment I wasn't actively teaching. This week I felt something shift; it is possible to breathe. Literally breathe.

Every day after school, the kids and I go outside. Often I convince Isaac to head over to the school playground, where he rides his bike and I jog around the track for awhile. Sometimes Suzannah joins us. Often Matt takes a quick work break to walk over as well. Sometimes the kids play basketball or ride the scooter around our house and I walk several miles alone through our neighborhood streets, because I appreciate the burn in my legs and love the sweeping views of Puget Sound. The afternoons have been sunny and warm. The leaves are turning gold against a brilliant sky. Every single day I go outside, just to notice it. To see everything I can, to breathe it in. This, I believe, is what living fully means. It's not about whether or not I can do whatever I want. It's about staying fully present in the moment I'm in.

***

I can complain all day long about how I miss teaching in my classroom. Well, I can teach in my classroom, but I can't be with kids in my classroom. That's unlikely to change any time soon, and as much as I want to be back I also understand that in a Pandemic, what we want is less important than lives, and that is actually what is at stake here. So I choose this instead: to become a better teacher. Even now, especially now.

Remote learning isn't "best" for most of us, but it is what we have, and it is necessary. And it doesn't mean that we give up and grow complacent, because our purpose isn't tied to a place; it is all about the folks we serve, in any context. It is critically important to be intentional in what I teach, and how. It is critically important to think about what matters.

Connecting with kids matters the most, full stop. In a remote setting, this takes intention and work but it is is not impossible.

Helping kids connect their learning with the bigger picture -- the "why" -- matters too. This is why I'm grateful to teach in an IB school, because this is the heart of good IB teaching (well, really good teaching anywhere, period; IB didn't invent that, but the IB mission statement acknowledges that our work is to create a better world, not just to get into a better college, and it's made my teaching more intentional in that way). Concepts over content. Inquiry. Curiosity. Empathy. This week one of my students sent me an e-mail in which she explained that she was worried her responses to an assignment weren't as concise or as clear as she'd hoped, but that she felt incredibly passionate about the topics we've been studying and discussing and she hoped that would come through in her writing.

Yes, I need to teach them how to write well. But first -- first -- I need to tap into their passion, if I can. I need to consider what they care about beyond the walls of our "classroom." I tell them I didn't become an English teacher because my passion is perfect thesis statements or grading essays. I'm an English teacher for the same reason I'm a writer and a reader: to connect. To feel that incredibly solidarity of "Me, too." To share a human experience with someone whose context is different from my own. To feel something enough to act on it. And to share, simply, what I love. This is the essence of what I do, and why.

And doing this over a screen is significantly harder for me. I don't really know how to work a faceless audience, when I'm mostly looking at my own face staring back at me. At least that's how I feel in my low moments, when I'm exhausted and overwhelmed. But I can't drop anchor at exhausted and overwhelmed, because the needs of my kids don't change based on my daily mood or energy level. So I try to remember this: I have an opportunity to try to be better, and I'd best take it. So what I care about this quarter isn't so much whether my students can practice enough for an IB assessment they don't even understand yet; what I care about is making connections with them and guiding their thinking, so they can make their own connections between what we read and the world in which they live. If they can do that now, the rest will follow. And it means they send me these little notes attached to their assignments. Sorry if this isn't clear, I just really get worked up and I'm trying to express that in sentences that make sense.

And that resonates with this teacher. 

***

During the winter of 2019, I met with my friend and colleague Shonda at Starbucks. We were armed with colored index cards and sharpies, the new IB subject guide, and plenty of energy. We decided to keep The Handmaid's Tale because we love that novel (and we had our picture taken with Margaret Atwood herself back in 2013 when she appeared at Seattle Town Hall after the publication of Maddaddam, and you are jealous). We also decided to add James Baldwin. We've gone back and forth over other others to include in other parts of the course, but Baldwin was at the top of the list, and we never considered cutting him. And so when I was faced with the daunting task of choosing what mattered most in a two-year curriculum I love deeply, it was a difficult choice--but then again, not so much. I taught The Handmaid's Tale in the fall of 2016, and it couldn't have been more relevant In the fall of 2020, it feels even essential. I'm teaching a quarter of Revolution and Resistance: James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood. There's no way I'm teaching it well enough, but I'm teaching it with everything I have, all the same. And maybe, maybe, the fact that I can't afford to be careless--I don't have a single moment to spare, really--means I can see this as an opportunity to do better and be better, in any year. 

To Really Live

Friday nights are so full when you're a teacher. When the day ends, my lungs expand to accommodate the biggest breath I've taken all week. Inhale. I can breathe. Exhale. Relief. Inhale. Hope. Exhale. Gratitude.

Relief. Breathing space.

Hope. Things are starting to click with these kids. They might be starting to trust me.

Gratitude. In any setting, remote or otherwise, I haven't lost sight of my purpose, because on most days I remember it isn't tied to a place, to a building. It's embodied in the kids I serve every day, exactly where they are, where we all are.

Friday nights are everything right now. And sure. I ended my work day in my own house today. I walked into the bedroom, changed my shirt, and went out into the breezy, damp afternoon -- just an hour after the rain stopped -- to go for a walk. I needed, desperately, to clear my head.

Clear my head of the comments on literally every single news article about schools and whether they're reopening or not. The comments demanding I get back to work.

Do my job.

Earn my paycheck.

Clear my head of the comments from some of my own friends and family on social media. (Friends, maybe you don't know that when you comment on news articles, it shows up on my feed. If you wonder whether I'm talking about you, rest assured, I absolutely am.)

I'm so tired. I do not know how to explain to people in my life who are not teachers how much harder this is than it has ever been before. I have enough experience in this career -- in this calling -- to make this claim, and to be believed.

This week I drove to a close friend's house to drink wine and snack on appetizers from Trader Joe's in her backyard, on her covered porch. Four of us met there, four of us who have been friends for nearly two decades now. We sat outside wrapped in blankets and hoodies and shared stories and solidarity in the evening breeze. 

We're all teachers, in four different schools, in four different districts. And still, they're my safe space to land. I don't trust many other spaces anymore.

Despite the fact that the four of us are probably as careful as anyone we know, we're still not really doing indoor gatherings. According to some of you, that means we're not really living. But the four of us also believe that 200,000 dead matters, that it's unacceptable, that it shouldn't have to be anywhere near 200,000 dead before we declare it unacceptable, and so we're okay with "sacrificing" a bit of what we're used to. Sharing appetizers on an outdoor porch, even after a storm, is a blessing and a joy, not a hardship. I love eating out on Saturday nights with my family! Love! And we've enjoyed outdoor patio seating many times over the summer. But eating takeout from our favorite places around our own table, while not "the same," is not a hardship. Losing someone you love to a virus that could be controlled so much better if people could prioritize human life over going to the gym or to the bar? That's a hardship. (I feel like pro-lifers should agree with me, but I also think most of us should understand that the pro-life platform is not about valuing human life, and I wish we'd start calling it something else.)

To my non-teacher friends who have extended your kindness and empathy, please believe me, it has not gone unnoticed. Please extend that to the teachers of your own children--they need it, no matter what their current context looks like. Face-to-face seems impossible. (If schools reopening is so crucial, where's our bailout? Do you think I've ever had sanitizing wipes provided for me? Let alone enough pencils, highlighters, paper, notebooks, markers? Nope, I buy those myself. And I would love to know if you can buy enough for your own family right now, let alone a full class load of students, and for a full-time high school teacher in my district that's 180 kids. Can we hire enough teachers to safely teach so many kids?) Hybrid seems so much worse. Prepare for face-to-face and remote learning? Where your in-person kids can't interact safely in student-centered ways that truly support best practices in education? When you still have to do all the work for remote learning, because you can't see all your kids at once? Because your classes have 35 kids or more, and your classroom space allows for sixteen at the absolute most, if you're maintaining anything resembling a safe distance? My kids are going to be able to do a lot more collaborative work, have more productive discussions, and form better connections with each other in breakout rooms online than they are in a classroom right now and that is the heartbreaking truth. This is a pandemic. There is no going safely back to normal, and normal is what we're asking teachers to provide. I'm so sorry. I truly am. I want that, too. But that's not possible in our current context.

To my non-teacher friends who are quick to point out that this is hard for everyone, believe me, we know. Many of us are parents ourselves. I am extraordinarily lucky in that my kids are old enough to manage quite well without needing me to be very hands-on during our school hours, but many of my colleagues have very young children at home, and teaching a class while you have a baby or a preschooler or a restless third-grader or a child with special needs who attends school in a different district that is also currently remote feels, quite simply, impossible. We get it. This is a Pandemic. It's not something that is happening unfairly to you because teachers are sitting around collecting an easy paycheck at your expense.

And to my non-teacher friends who are quick to point out the challenges they face in their own jobs while they're complaining about teachers (we're all allowed to freak out; I just think we should avoid doing the whole "Well, I have to______ so why shouldn't you______" when we don't have anything approaching an understanding for the person we're pointing our finger at), I would like to point out that I cannot open a single news article online -- from any source -- about education or the return to schools that does not include absolute vitriol directed at teachers in its comments. And make no mistake, public school teachers are pretty used to this, but usually I just ignore FOX news, where teachers are used to being screamed at. Now, though, it is incredibly demoralizing and personal in a way I've never experienced, largely because folks who have claimed to support us in the past are chiming in with their disgust now, now, as we're working harder than we ever have. Maybe we're an easy target, a faceless entity to absorb people's real need to vent (I understand so much of folks' frustration, I do). But we're not a faceless entity. Stop pretending you support the teachers in your life while ranting about us online. We see you.

On that note, if anyone wants to challenge me on this and send me an article about this very charged topic of schools reopening that doesn't include reams of comments explaining to me what a piece of shit I am, I'd love to see it. I don't think it exists. I'd love to be proven wrong.

***

I started writing this on Friday night; it's Sunday evening now.

This weekend, I finished reading one novel and started another. I played so many games of UNO and Blokus with my family. I walked thirteen miles around my neighborhood, winding through my favorite streets with the stunning views of Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains. I waved at my neighbors, the ones who have waved to me all summer while I walked in the morning hours. I haven't seen much of them this month because of the smoke and because I'm adjusting to a new schedule, and yesterday when a friendly grandpa who hikes around the same streets I do waved jauntily from a distance and said, "Haven't see you in a little while!" I grinned and grinned, because walking daily through this streets in the morning hours, meeting neighbors I've never known, has been an unexpected and beautiful blessing in quarantine.

Walking this same route every day over the past six months means I've noticed the seasons in an entirely new and intimate way. Spring. Summer. Fall. The way things bloom. The scents of different trees in different seasons. I've learned to name some of them. I've walked through the seasons of baby rabbits scurrying over the streets at dawn, and I've shared that with my kids. Now the squirrels are out in full force, as well as the neighborhood cats, hunting them. Yesterday I watched a black-and-white cat stalk a squirrel across a driveway, through a yard, and into the woods. I stopped and watched, just because I could. Just because I've become accustomed to noticing these small, ordinary moments that used to pass me by.

Maybe this is what it means to "really live" even while "sheltering in place." (I'm still curious about those folks who think they can't do that, to be honest, now that pretty much everything is open in some capacity. I asked that question last week and was answered with having the question deleted.)

Matt drove down to McMenamins and picked up takeout. We've enjoyed eating outdoors there, but the weather has been too tempestuous for the past two weeks (wildfires, rain) to open up patio seating this weekend. My burger was still delicious.

We had family movie night (The Art of Racing in the Rain, which checks all of the boxes for Dog Movies and it meant I cried a lot). Matt and I watched a few more episodes of Cobra Kai.

I had some face-to-face time with one of my best friends who teaches on the other side of the country, and we laughed and shared stories and flailed onscreen because everything is ridiculous and absurd. Becca and I haven't taught together in way too many years but every time we talk it's like we transport ourselves back to the same space, the space where we're planning a unit on The Great Gatsby or Purple Hibiscus together during a roundtable session for MYP and the world can be what it is but how amazing is it that we get to do this work?

I believe it's possible--and critically necessary--to stay present in the moment we're in, to notice the seasons, to care about each other, to practice self-care, and that's what "really living" means.

I miss people, desperately. Even people who disagree with me.

I miss the things I loved about our "normal" life. Desperately.

I miss teaching in the way I know how. I miss what I'm losing when I can't see my kids face-to-face.

But I also understand that we can't have normal. I believe that maybe, if we stop and listen, if we can try to be present, we can live deeply and fully and tap into our empathy for each other, that maybe we can be grateful for what we've learned and what we've gained, and maybe--maybe--that can make us better.

Anyway, it's the work of my life to try.

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

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.

This tired old rage

I've been trying to write here for a week. Two weeks. I carry a journal with me everywhere and keep scrawling bits and pieces. Last week I wanted to write about fear, and anger, and grief. And then I didn't post, and then another mass shooting happened, and then it just all seemed pointless. Here we go again.

I just keep writing the same things, over and over again. I'm so tired. I'm so angry. I'm so tired of being angry.

Last week during warm-ups before Suzannah's soccer game, I walked around and around the track at the middle school where they were playing. The fine drizzle hadn't yet settled into the steady rain that would drench us by the end of the game, and I needed to move. Otherwise I would have scrolled restlessly and angrily through my phone, unable to pick up the novel I had tucked inside my purse. The world just feels so terrible. I wanted to be hopeful before election week, but in 2016 Donald Trump was elected president and since then --

I keep trying but I don't even know how to finish that sentence.

I went to church last week, on All Saints Sunday where we honor our dead. In faith, I will settle for nothing less than life. My pastor's own mother died last week, and she delivered a sermon on All Saints Sunday, and I can't imagine having to speak about that with the weight of such grief. We grieve and we honor the lives of those we love. We also grieve and struggle with the mass shootings that have become incredibly ordinary. In our America, a student shot and killed another student and classes resumed later that day. A man shot a couple in a Kroger after a failed attempt to enter a church. A man killed two women in a yoga studio. Another man killed eleven people and wounded several more in the Tree of Life Synagogue. Another week in our America, where toxic white men -- the most dangerous kind in America -- terrorize, and our administration fuels their rage.

I tried to write about all of that and then another man opened fire in a bar and killed a dozen people and wounded several more. One of those killed survived the shooting in Las Vegas, and does anyone find it sort of insane that these shootings are beginning to overlap? But within half a day it was halfway down the page on the news. When Columbine happened, the country seemed to stop; now we barely blink. All those people dead, not even two weeks after the mass shooting at Tree of Life, and how many mass shootings have we seen this year? Remember when I was going to blog only after they happened? I'm way behind. I'd have a couple hundred entries right now. I try to make up for it in some small way by donating money, but I'm finding it pretty tough to write (who will read this tired old rage anymore?) and even more difficult to pray.

My faith is pretty shaky these days.

These were thoughts on my mind as I drove to church last week while my son chattered in the backseat and my daughter sulked because apparently we did not explicitly tell her about Daylight Savings Time and therefore we deprived her of an extra hour of sleep, which I do not even understand because this child wakes on her own at some absurd hour every morning. (I'm not kidding. Never once in her entire life have I had to wake her up. Not when we had to rise at four in the morning for an early flight to Omaha. Not once to get ready for school, which for her starts at 7:00 because she is in jazz band.) The big picture was weighing on my heart quite a bit, all wrapped up in the small one, the picture of my senselessly privileged life that I happen to love quite a lot. It has been a difficult month, a difficult fall. I'm still recovering from one of the most intense experiences I've had as an educator -- our MYP 5-year Evaluation was brutal in ways I didn't anticipate, and it feels deeply personal. I understand it's not really personal, because it's so much bigger than me and it's also not about me, but it feels that way at times, since I've poured so much of my energy into this program that I love and believe in, and now I have to sit and wait for weeks (or more) for the team's findings, upon which everything that happens next depends, and our Matters to Be Addressed do feel like things I should have been able to better prepare for, even when they're matters out of my control. And it's still not the big picture, or the most important thing, but right now everything feels tangled together: passion and love and grief and anger and fear. I've felt all of those things, every day, for two months. Really ever since the morning my grandmother died, the same morning I stood in front of the staffs from three schools, three hours after I learned of my grandmother's death, to try to prepare for this visit, this thing I've told them all is not by any means a final exam but which, I confess, still feels like one to me.

The personal and the political, the public and the private, and the weight of it all. The lines between them blur.

*

On All Saints Sunday at my church, the names of the dead are read aloud, and a bell sounds for each one. I experienced this for the first time ten years ago, two months after my grandpa died. I submitted his name but wasn't prepared for the absolutely shattering love and grief I felt when I heard someone else speak his name. Charlie Griffith. It was beautiful, and sad. Six years ago I listened to the bell sound for my niece, Bailey Rae, the name of someone who was born and should have lived but didn't. Last week, I listened for three names: Jay Hoger, Matt's uncle and my children's great-uncle. Sean Mach, the husband of one of my oldest friends. Esther Griffith, great-grandmother of my children. My grandmother. The one who called me her "precious" for my whole entire life, right up until the last time I hugged her in July, the month before she died.

Jay and Sean both died from cancer and it absolutely disrupted the natural order of the universe. These men should still be here to raise their children and love their grandchildren.

My grandmother made no secret of her readiness to die, even before my grandfather did ten years ago. I don't know how to make sense of any of this.

My feelings towards my grandmother were complicated. She loved me fiercely and unconditionally. I have also felt, since I was in college, since the days that I called her in my loneliness at the 800-number she and my grandpa bought just so I could call them whenever I wanted, that I would have disappointed them as much as I made them proud. At my grandpa's funeral ten years ago, one of his friends told me just how much he'd talked about me, and I cried about that for a long time. I know he loved me. And I know my grandmother loved me. But I'd also known since I was in college that I believed very different things than they did.

"You really think that?" my grandma asked me, when I told her about a paper I was writing. "You really, really do?"

I really, really did. And I still do. The "what" doesn't matter, really, does it? But that's the moment when I wondered, for the first time, whether love really was unconditional.

And all these years later, I'm still trying to reconcile that.

I've spent the past nineteen years preparing for both of my grandparents' deaths, in a sense, ever since my grandfather smoked his last cigarette. I was also utterly unprepared for the ways in which their losses would drive me to my knees. Their fingerprints are all over my life and my heart. I know they loved me. I loved them. And I have no idea how we would navigate this world together if they were still here.

*

We've had nearly as many mass shootings as there are days in 2018. That is not the natural order of things, but we treat it as such, and that makes me absolutely sick with rage. Last Sunday I wondered how long it would take to ring a bell for the names of those who have died from gun violence in our country. Opinions differ on what counts as a mass shooting, but the fact is that thousands of people have died when they should not have died. How long would it take to read 12,000 names?

*

It has been six years since Sandy Hook -- the span of the life of all those murdered first graders. My own daughter was in first grade that year, and I still cannot read a complete account of that day. I cannot. All those children should be in middle school, carrying instrument cases and telling terrible jokes and breaking out for the first time and using deodorant and slamming their bedroom doors and rolling their eyes at everything their parents say while still crawling onto the couch with them for a surprising snuggle at the end of a tough day. But they were murdered in their own classroom, and we did absolutely nothing. Now my children practice active shooter drills in their schools because we consider shootings as inevitable as anything else. I am not the first nor the last person to lose all hope because of that: when twenty first-graders can be murdered before they live to learn multiplication, when we prove that we love guns more than children, there is just not much hope to be had. And it just keeps happening, because our country only pretends to value life.

The same thing. I keep writing the same thing. And I am trying to write about too many things.

The same tired rage. Here we fucking go again.

The personal and the political. The public and the private. The blurred boundaries between them.