Grief and Hope and Joy

I moved my firstborn into her college dorm this week.

I keep trying to write the sentence that comes after that. I keep trying to choose the sentence that comes after that. The right one. I keep typing and deleting.

There are so many sentences and I haven't found the one that fits, but if I wait to find the one that fits, I won't ever write this.

I keep thinking about taking her to her first day of kindergarten, which I wrote about at length in this space so many years ago. So many years in the blink of an eye. (It's wild, really -- I've been writing here for sixteen years, and I keep thinking I should start a Substack because that's where so many folks I'm reading are writing these days, and this space has been pretty quiet for me in the last couple of years but that's not because I don't have things to say, and it's not because I'm not writing; it's just that writing about parenting older children -- older teens and baby adults -- is very different territory. All that to say, I guess, is that I'm still writing, that I'll always be writing, and right now I guess this is still my little corner of the Internet to share a fraction of that.)

I felt all the feelings when we took our baby to kindergarten, and I wrote about that day like I'd invented parenthood -- forgive me, but it's so easy to put on our MomPants when our babies are small in an age where we share everything with an immediate audience in some way. The solidarity ("Hang in there, Mama!" and all those likes and heart-reacts) can get us through some tough moments, long days of drudgery, crushing self-doubt, and often help us laugh about it later. But as my kids grew older, I found myself drawing different boundaries around what I would share, imagining them reading it later, and I realized the importance of being transparent about my writing with them. It can be more complicated to write my story when it tangles with someone else's, whose stories are not for public consumption.

Lonelier, too. So, so much lonelier.

Kindergarten drop-off was hard -- is hard, I imagine, for so many parents -- because at its core is the realization that our babies will continue to grow up and grow away from us. That feels particularly cruel when our babies are five years old.

I wrote this back in 2011:

She hung up her new pink backpack. She already had a cubby, one she'd chosen the day before when she met her teacher. She gave us each a big hug, and then she walked over to the large rainbow carpet and joined all the other kids. Her cheeks were pink and I could tell she was nervous, but she was holding it together so well...she turned and waved at us, gave a little smile. We waved back, smiled as hard as we could, and left. And we sort of staggered across the playground, holding hands and leaning heavily into each other. I must have looked awfully shaky, because we attracted lots of sympathetic smiles from other parents milling around. I really thought I might throw up. And then, it was so ridiculous, Matt and I kissed each other good-bye and went off to our respective jobs. I was all, what? I have to go to school and teach classes? How?

I would like to tell you that dropping my child off at college was like that. It was, in some ways. But taking a child who hasn't been traumatized to kindergarten is a different kind of hard (for a mama who is equally and also senselessly privileged) than taking a child to college who has experienced trauma her mama couldn't protect her from. The spaces and silences in a journal can speak as loudly as words.

My child has her own story to tell, and it's a powerful one. I have my own story to tell, too, but I'm still trying to figure out where it fits, and how to tell it.

Here's what I can say: I am so proud of her. My heart is constantly seized by terror and love, but mostly love. Grief and hope and joy can coexist in a strange and beautiful space. I am lucky beyond measure. It's unthinkable, when they're five, to imagine them growing up and growing away from us. But it's also the point, isn't it? To raise them to be able to do exactly this: to find their way. 

Here's what I didn't understand about raising teenagers and young adults, when she was five:

That they need us more, not less.

That we have to figure out an entirely different way to parent them.

That when our babies are born we think we understand how much a heart can hold, and we haven't the faintest idea. We learn that quickly, but I'm still amazed and shattered by it as my baby becomes an adult.

That this is what it's for. We don't have babies to have babies forever, or preschoolers, or second graders. I may melt with nostalgia when Facebook and photo memories remind me of the delights, absurdities, and challenges of my children's childhoods, but what's really incredible to me is how these babies of mine have become humans I just really love getting to know. Learning who they actually are in the world, who they are becoming, and continuing to navigate a relationship with them both -- that is the greatest gift of my life.

But it's also just so hard. I'm still so scared. The last few years are still so raw, and there is no clear road map for navigating our way forward. I'm beyond grateful for the connections I have with friends who have traveled this road already, for the connections I've made in writing groups where we can share from our most vulnerable places, and for the privilege of access to support and resources.

Weeping as your baby goes to kindergarten is a thing. And for most of us, it's okay to share that as publicly as we want. And make no mistake: I believe in honoring and remembering those moments.

Weeping as you walk across a college campus, away from your baby, walking toward your car as she walks towards the dining hall -- it hits differently, and for me, at this moment, harder.

I know I'm not really alone, that I am experiencing a privileged grief shared by many, many other parents -- to be able to send my girl to a school that suits her, where, God willing, she will thrive. She will find her people and continue to discover and become the fabulous human she is. But I also have to grapple with this: I can't really protect her anymore, not like I used to. I can always provide a soft place to land, I can spread my whole soul out on the ground, but this really is her path.

Thirteen years ago, as my baby started kindergarten, I wrote this: All I really need is for her to be okay, and I'm okay.

There are layers in that sentence now. My okayness should never be her burden to carry, and she is not responsible for it, ever. I read those lines and thought, yes! That, exactly! But as I think about it, my okayness isn't the point. So I revert to the prayer I've prayed every first day of school for her whole life: Lord, let them love her like I do.

Just let her know she is loved beyond measure.

 

I want us to be better

Seven years ago, my four-year-old son went into sudden kidney failure. And by sudden, I mean sudden, following what seemed like a typical end-of-summer cold. Matt took Isaac to the doctor while I prepared to start another school year. His doctor thought it could be a virus, but he took one look at our son and ordered a urine catch and blood work. When the tests came back a few hours later, the doctor called and said the safest place for our son to be was the hospital. Immediately. So we found ourselves tossing toothbrushes, pajamas, and Isaac's stuffed beagle into a backpack and the soup that hadn't finished cooking into the sink. My brother and sister-in-law came over to stay with Suzannah and we drove to Mary Bridge Children's Hospital, where I spent the first few days of the new school year.

Instead of meeting my students, I met with a pediatric nephrologist. I held my sobbing son through an EKG, many blood draws, an IV, a failed attempt to get him to drink a huge cup of sludgy medicine to lower his potassium levels, and albuterol treatments. 

We spent that first night in the Emergency Room, waiting for a kidney ultrasound. Isaac fell asleep on the padded exam table behind a privacy curtain and we wrapped him in Matt's sweatshirt to keep him warm. I watched the clock discard the minutes, my eyes burning. By the time a bed was ready, it was five o'clock in the morning, and I was covered in my son's dried tears and the remnants of the medicine he had thrown up all over me. We tucked him in with his stuffed beagle, and Matt and I curled into each other on a small pull-out couch where we dozed for an hour or two.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, but all things considered, we were so lucky. We took him home a few days later, and several months after that, all his tests came back clear. 

Last week, I took him in for his well-child visit and middle school immunizations (the ones that are required for school, a mandate which people do not seem to be protesting, interestingly enough). I am grateful for every single one of those vaccines, and I am grateful for my son's health. He is a boisterous, active, healthy, hilarious, absolutely wonderful kid and I am grateful for him always, but particularly every September now, when I remember the moments in the hospital when Matt and I were brought face-to-face with everything we stood to lose. 

And the thing is that I never believed we would lose him, because such a loss is unsurvivable. Right? 

But here's the other memory that stays with me: the children we met that week on our floor who would not be sent home with their families after a few randomly frightening days. 

I still almost can't breathe typing this. 

I remember, for instance, sitting in one of the game rooms with my son and a child in a purple bathrobe, completely bald, smaller than my son, dragging an IV pole over to a table with coloring books and games. I still think about that child all the time. Where are they now? Are they okay? Are they also getting ready to go back to school? Fourth grade, maybe? Fifth? Sixth, like my son?

When I think about hospitals filling up with COVID patients these days, I think of that child. 

When folks who showed nothing but love and support for my son seven years ago post on social media now that we need to open up, get back to normal, and live -- I think of that child. I think of that child and I think of my son when those folks post, "If you're scared, you should stay home!" I am honestly too afraid to ask these people if they believe that our "right" to not feel uncomfortable in a mask is more important than a vulnerable child's right to an education. Or to a place in our society. Just stay home. Don't inconvenience us with your "underlying condition." Don't ask us to value your life as a necessary part of our community. Don't ask us to care about a person we don't know.

You cared about my son then. What if things had turned out differently? Would you say the same things?

We're starting another school year, together again. We need it so much, and I will do anything to return safely in person. I will wear the mask, even though I don't love teaching through a mask. Teaching through a mask beats teaching through a screen, and all of that beats spreading a virus to folks who cannot be vaccinated yet. To vulnerable folks. We are going to have to take some risks, yes. But we also have the tools to protect each other, and some of us just don't want to use them.

I think of my son and all the what-ifs. I think of that child in the purple bathrobe. I think of the parents holding their children in a hospital room, or waiting for one.

Today I looked at the pictures of my son in the emergency room, small and swollen and wrapped up in my husband's gray sweatshirt, and I cried and cried. I looked at the picture of my son curled up with his stuffed beagle in his hospital bed. I thought about how lucky we are, and how it could have been otherwise. I thought about the folks who love him, and about all the folks who don't know him, and about all the other children currently tucked into hospital beds, or waiting for them. I thought about how in a week ago in Dallas County, Texas, Judge Clay Jenkins said, "If your child's in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect...and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have Covid and need an ICU bed, we don't have one. Your child will wait for another child to die."

Don't fucking talk to me about percentages, because those are children. You are talking about someone's child. 

I thought about how terrifying it was to rush my son to the hospital seven years ago. I cannot fathom how terrifying it would be now.

Percentages don't mean a lot when you're a terrified mother holding your baby in a hospital. 

I think of the parents of that child with the purple bathrobe.

I'm so thankful -- so far beyond thankful -- that my state now requires vaccines for school staff and masks for everyone, regardless of vaccination status. Anything less is failing our kids. Period. But I see protests even in my city, because some people believe that individual comfort matters more than someone's life. And I see what's happening in other parts of the country. This is why my anger is spreading like a can of spilled red paint. This is why I cannot fully embrace the back-to-school joy I've missed so desperately. 

My son still sleeps with that stuffed beagle. I think mothers understand this: sometimes I tiptoe into his room after he's asleep, even now, even as I'm preparing to send him to middle school. I still need to see the steady rise and fall of his chest, to ground myself in the gift of his presence, to offer a desperate prayer of thanks that we still get to have him, and beg the universe to show mercy to our babies when the adults around them turn away. 

I want the world to be better. I want us to be better.

The Natural Order Of Things

School officially ended a week ago, but it still feels impossible to relax. For one thing, I still have to unpack in my new classroom after bidding farewell to the room I called home for so many years. For another thing, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest are predicted to top 100 -- up to 112 in my area, according to one forecast -- for three days. Every time I look at the weather reports, anxiety and dread sit heavily on my chest. For all the "it's just weather" climate change deniers, do you realize that not once in my lifetime has the temperature hit 100 degrees in June here? And I can count on one hand how many times we've hit 100 ever. I've lived here for my entire adult life, and when I moved here twenty years ago, "fire season" wasn't a thing. I didn't assume we'd start the school year choked with smoke. But by the time I was old enough to be a soccer mom, I knew that yellow, smoky skies meant canceled practices, closed windows, and hot, stuffy homes for weeks at the end of every summer. Last fall, one of my closest friends had to evacuate her home; she began the school year living in a hotel room as wildfires raged, blown in from eastern Washington.

This is not the natural order of things.

But then, some things are: like my daughter coming out as Queer.

I should mention here that I have her permission to share this; she's comfortable with herself, which is what I've always hoped. She should be. She is completely fantastic exactly as she is. She has always been so very much herself, and she has always been so loved. And even that moment was the most beautiful manifestation of her unique and beautiful self, and remembering it will always, always make me smile. I wish it could be that way for everyone, and until I take my last breathe, I hope, I'll find ways to work towards that. The world needs to be better. We need to be better for each other.

*

When I can't relax, like during the first week after school is out (every year), it helps to focus on the sweet early-summer moments, to notice them, to write them down. Time seems to slow just a bit that way. This week the kids and I went to the beach on a sunny morning, we ate lunch outside at the Des Moines Dog House, we bought everyone new shoes, we ate frozen yogurt, we spent a lot of time in the backyard (well, Isaac and I did, and he even dug out our slip 'n slide and spent many happy hours throwing his skinny body through the water on that surprisingly durable strip of plastic), I took Suzannah shopping, and she got her hair cut.

Oh, her hair. It's so fabulous.

She has had long, golden waves for her entire life. She had almost no hair until she was two, and then it came in fast, curling in fine blonde waves. I couldn't bring myself to cut it until she was four years old, when it reached her butt and it was a pain to shampoo and comb. I still have a lock from that first trim, tucked away. But she's really never cared about her hair. She's never wanted me to do anything with it; she only consented to ponytails for Tae Kwon Do and soccer. She has definitely never been excited about a haircut; the closest she came to excited over her hair was when she had the ends dyed blue last August.

So when she told me that she thought she wanted to cut it short -- "like, short" -- I thought, okay, yes. This is you.

So many folks have asked me how I feel about her cutting her long hair, and I completely understand that. But this is what I wrote yesterday: I loved Suzannah's hair, but SHE didn't, and she never let me play with it anyway and certainly didn't care herself. I figured a long time ago that the most important thing to me is for my kids to feel comfortable in their own hair, body, skin, and soul -- far more than fulfilling some vision of those things I have.

I took "before" pictures, because that's what a mother does. But I resisted the urge to peek during the actual cut, because I wanted the big reveal. I listened to my daughter chatting happily with her stylist, I listened to all the advice about how to play with it, how to comb it, how much product to use. I tried to read my book, but I couldn't concentrate. I just kept beaming. My kid. And when she walked over to me with her new hair, my heart just burst. It was so perfect. She was so happy. She was so her.

I've written so much about what it means to call a place home, and why I've chosen this particular place for mine. I could have landed anywhere after college. At a job fair in Minneapolis shortly before graduation, I interviewed with districts in Alaska, Colorado and Minnesota. Alaska offered me a job on the spot, but I knew it wasn't right. Colorado seemed promising. But there was a tug to the Pacific Northwest, and I followed that like a fishhook was caught in my heart. I've never once been sorry. I knew I wanted the mountains and the water, both. I was raised as a daughter of the prairie who felt the pull of ocean tides. But I couldn't know then, as a young adult leaving college behind, how lucky I would be to stumble into the community I found here. My students. My colleagues. My friends. Our neighbors. Our incredible affirming church. They've all challenged me to be better than I was before I met them, and I owe them all an impossible debt. They're also the folks who truly see and support my kids, which is this mother's most fervent prayer.

Please understand this: a mother notices. I know who is important in my kid's life, and I pay very close attention to how they respond, or don't. I see the folks who see my children, who love and celebrate them. Those folks are our community. To the rest? Your words or your silence, whatever it is, you can come through me first. I have a lot of love behind me to block it.

Float On (or, the strange juxtaposition of grief, gratitude, and joy)

I sit on the couch in the early morning dark, Christmas tree lights twinkling in the living room. A neighbor wearing a reflective vest walks his dog up the street. The quiet lasts just long enough for me to read for five minutes, and then I hear my son’s bedroom door open. He pads into the living room, wrapped in his fleece Batman blanket. When he sees that I’m up, he takes a flying leap and lands on the cushion next to me.

“Morning, Baby,” I say.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Reading the news. Looking at the neighbors’ Christmas lights.” Across the street, our neighbors, who are always up early, have turned on their Christmas tree lights as well. 

"Less than twenty-four hours until I’m eleven!” he whispers.

“How are you so old?” I ask him. I lean over to wrap him in a hug; he is tall and bony, but his cheek is still so soft when I kiss it. He wriggles out of my grasp and shoves his bare toes in my face.

“Smell,” he says, wiggling them.

“Ew. Get away,” I say, and he hops off the couch, cackling, then heads to the kitchen to toast himself a bagel.

His sister emerges a few minutes later, ear phones in, cords trailing to the phone tucked in the pocket of her robe.

“Morning,” I call to her. She pours herself a bowl of cereal and settles in at the dining room table across from her brother and eats, looking at her screen. I walk by her on my way to the shower and touch her shoulder. She takes out an earbud. 

“Sorry, what? I’m listening to a podcast.”

“Well, untangle yourself for two seconds,” I say, but I smile and kiss the top of her head.

*

Eight years ago, my son’s birthday fell on a Friday. He was three. I’d planned to pick up his sister from school, gather him from daycare, and drive north to meet my husband in West Seattle after work. We’d enjoy a cozy family dinner at our favorite family-friendly pub, and the next evening we were going to take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese and Build-a-Bear. But at lunchtime, a coworker started screaming from the copy room.

“He killed them! He killed all the kids!”

An entire first-grade class, murdered.

I couldn’t reach my own first-grader fast enough, all the way across town. The horror on the other side of the country gripped my throat until I saw my daughter safely at the door of her own classroom, standing in her purple coat next to her teacher. None of the parents lingered on the playground with their children that day.

I drove north on I-5 that evening, Sarah McLachlan’s mournful Wintersong in the CD player, my children buckled snugly into the backseat. And I wept.

*

One year ago, I wrote: My son will never again have a birthday where I do not remember this horror. My children's lives are forever linked with one of the darkest days, the day I realized that if our country could fail to respond to the slaughter of children then what hope is there? I still don't know if what I have can be called hope, because I'm mighty full of anger and, too often, despair. What I have is a crazy, incomprehensible mix of gratitude and grief.

Tomorrow morning, just after five o'clock, my boy will turn eleven, which is five more years than the children at Sandy Hook Elementary would ever see. 

My daughter started high school this year. I think of the twenty children who will never play the trumpet or clarinet on a school cafeteria stage, never get their first periods, will never get their braces off—they never had the chance to lose their baby teeth. They will never take algebra and cry over it. They will never get a driver’s license, or back into the mailbox with their parents' car.

Their mothers will never have the inexpressible, tender joy of having bony adolescent feet waved in their faces, those lanky limbs sticking out of fleece pajamas. They will never knock on their teenager’s bedroom door and say, “Come out of your cave. It’s lunchtime.” They will never open the door to an overpowering wave of too much Bath and Body Works Winter Candy Apple lotion, or the fug of unwashed socks when the room’s occupant has failed to empty his laundry basket into the washing machine. They will never threaten to remove those bedroom doors when their teenagers slam them.

*

Every year, I feel it: the gratitude and the grief. But more than that, I feel the crazy joy that my son has brought to our lives every single day of his existence. 

I write some version of his birth story every year, and often in this space. Tonight, near the end of 2020, which is universally acknowledged as a dumpster fire of a year, I think about joy. I think about how eleven years ago, Matt drove me to the birth center on Lake Tapps in the middle of the night while I howled through contractions and sang along with Modest Mouse at the top of my lungs, one of the songs he included on the mix CD he made for the moment. No soothing Enya for the hard work of birthing a baby, but something to keep me moving:

Alright don't worry even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on alright
Already we'll all float on

And less than four hours later, he was born into Matt's hands and delivered to my chest while I laughed. I laughed. And every day since then, every single day -- even on the darkest ones -- my son has made me laugh. 

(Mustache Day at school.)

Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up before he does, and I'll curl up on the living room couch in the glow of our Christmas lights. I'll remember the frosty darkness before the dawn of his birth. I'll fiercely miss sharing this season in person with his grandparents and auntie and uncle and cousin and feel grateful that we can gather over Zoom later in the evening to celebrate anyway. And I will give thanks for this sweet, ordinary life in an anything but ordinary year, because one of the unexpected blessings of 2020 -- while I'd never have wished it this way -- is this time with my family, and there's more than a little sweetness in that.

Gratitude in the anything-but-normal

Every now and then a mood strikes me and I spend an afternoon reading old journals. I've been filling journals my whole life, ever since my first diary with a teddy bear on the cover, given to me shortly before Christmas when I was six. At the tender age of fifteen, I burned them all, weeping. I swore I'd never do that again, and while I did shred all the pages of one old volume several years ago (and I have no regrets about that one), I still have a lot of them, even after burning nearly a decade's worth.

Today I thought about my own teenager, and about how one of the unexpectedly beautiful things about this year -- a year in which everything is absurdly horrible -- is this time with her. I never would have wished her high school years to begin this way, attending class through a screen, hunkered down alone in her room. I especially never would have wished this when we chose to choice her into my school when all of her friends headed off to a different one.

Then again, as terrifying as it still is to send my baby girl into a new school (I was beside myself with anxiety the entire summer before she started kindergarten, and I didn't sleep at all the night before she started middle school), this time I knew in advance that I was trusting her with the best of the best, that she would be in good hands. If anyone can make connections during a global pandemic, through a screen, it's the folks I work with. I know exactly how hard they're working, and I've always been proud to work alongside them, but now I see the results of their efforts in a brand-new and deeply personal way. My girl is doing well, feeling supported, even making her own connections in this strange new environment. And that's everything to me.

I was always sort of excited about having her at my school. I didn't harbor ideas that she'd want to spend her lunches eating with me in my classroom, but I loved the idea of having her close. And that's what I love now. I love that we sign off of our last period of the day and eat lunch together at our dining room table. I love that she'll walk by me sitting at the table, getting ready for my afternoon office hours just as she's getting ready to practice her trumpet or finish her homework, and lean in for a quick hug, for no reason. 

In many ways, I wish she could just have a normal ninth grade year. Of course I do. But I also know exactly what I'd be missing in a normal year as my teenager grows up and grows into her own independence.

So this is the journal entry that stayed with me today, written when Suzannah was about three months old:

I used to be a terrible insomniac. College was the worst, but I've always been a light sleeper, and when I go to bed I have a hard time turning off my mind, which is not always a good place to hang out in the middle of the night. If something is bothering me, even something relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, I toss and turn and ruminate and obsess to a ridiculous degree.

I used to, anyway. Now, when I snuggle into bed with Suzannah in my arms, all of that evaporates. I hold my baby and watch her sleep and smell her head and everything else is just gone. I may sleep lightly, but it's a peaceful sleep.

Sometimes she's not completely asleep when we lie down. Sometimes if she's not completely asleep, I get up and walk with her, or nurse her a little, and she conks right out. But sometimes we'll just lie there together, and our eyes will lock, and she stares at me for what seems like a long time. And then she smiles sleepily. It just doesn't get better than that.

People ask when we're going to move her into her crib. People say she needs to learn how to sleep alone. People say she'll grow up clingy. But one thing I am learning to do is trust my own instincts instead of a book, or someone else's experience, and nothing feels right about trying to get her to sleep away from me. These moments are too fleeting already.

After I birthed my babies, I decided that no matter what, I would try to write something every single day, even it it was only a sentence, even if that sentence was just "sometimes motherhood is really fucking hard and lonely" scrawled across the page. Because something in me knew that if I didn't capture those moments, they would pass too quickly and fade into a blur. I wanted to keep and hold the moments I could, even the mundane ones, even the hard ones. Now, looking back, I'm so desperately glad I did. I love all the pictures we took; of course I do. But the words tell a more complete story, and a more honest and tender one. Many of them I'll just hold close; they're not for social media, or even this blog. They remind me to extend myself a little grace when we're all out of sorts. To apologize readily. To hold my arms open, always. To stop and breathe when I need it. To love our children as the absolutely unique people they are, rather than some idealized version of ourselves. To experience all of our moments, feel it all, and resist the temptation to rewrite the narrative for public consumption. I've written this before -- that sometimes it's hard to see the big picture when we're stuck in the small one. Looking back over our stories, though, and when I look at our lives right now, it occurs to me that this is exactly what I've always wanted. This, right here. These people. This partner, this girl, this boy, this family.

I've written this before, too -- that we don't ever turn dreamily to our partners and say, "Let's get pregnant and have teenagers." But it occurs to me now that this is exactly what we wanted: to raise these babies into people we love to spend time with. Those early journal entries show so clearly that our children have always been so very much themselves, and it is not lost on me how lucky I am to have have so much time with them now. In a normal year I'd be greedy for it. In this anything-but-normal year, I'm grateful for it.

This fall, I stole an idea from one of my favorite colleagues and had all my students sign up for five-minute one-on-one check-ins during office hours. It's probably the best thing I did all quarter. We didn't talk about school at all, unless the kids wanted to; rather, they chose a question from a list and we talked about that. Who's one person you really admire? What's one thing that makes you really happy? What's something that annoys you? What's the best book you've ever had?

And this: What is your biggest dream in life?

One of my kiddos chose that question, but she struggled to answer it. "I guess my dream is just to make a lot of money somehow," she said. "I want to make my parents proud. They've worked so hard, so I feel like it's my responsibility to really make something of myself." She paused, and then said, "What's your dream, Ms. Winslow?"

"Hm. Wow. Honestly? What I've got," I said. "I knew in high school that I wanted to be an English teacher, although honestly, I couldn't even have dreamed then that I'd love it like I do now. Like, I couldn't have imagined what it would actually look like. And I always knew I wanted kids, and mine have brought me, just, so much joy. Anything else, I guess, is a bonus."

"That's really cool. Wow. I love that a lot," she said. 

What I didn't have time to say, but what I wanted her to know, is this: there are things I want, sure. There are things I wish for, hope for. But something I've realized as I've gotten older is that I don't need to get everything I want to be truly, deeply joyful. To be happy. To realize that if I never have more than what I have now, it will be more than I knew to dream for when I was seventeen. It will be more than I could have asked for. It's more than enough.

To Imagine the Future: A New Morning

My baby girl, my firstborn, my smart and impatient and funny and compassionate and silly and sweet daughter, turns fourteen years old tomorrow morning. Today, right on schedule, I find myself just staring at her, remembering the day before her birth. Have I told this story here before? Probably yes, probably a hundred times, probably everyone is tired of it; my daughter rolls her eyes because I tell her some version of it every year. I intend to do this for as long as I can speak.

Suzannah was born on the Sunday morning of Memorial Weekend, four weeks before her late June due date. I remained staunchly in denial that I was in labor, although in hindsight (and after birthing another baby since then), I now understand I'd been in labor for quite some time. I taught my classes on that Friday before Memorial weekend, sitting awkwardly on top of a student desk because I couldn't fit anywhere else, because it hurt to stand and it hurt to sink into the chair behind my desk. So I perched on top of one of those desks and coached my students through the opening act of Othello. I wasn't sure I would make it all the way until the end of the school year, but I was determined to get through the damn play before I gave birth, and I figured that if I needed a sub, they could show the movie.

One of my sophomore boys called over his shoulder on his way out of my classroom, "Bet your water breaks this weekend."

"Shut up," I said to his retreating back.

That afternoon I loaded my pug into the car and drove her to the vet. She'd been digging at her ears again and I was absolutely sure she had an ear infection. I wanted to sob at the thought of getting in the car, of having to bend over and lift all of her fifteen pounds onto the exam table. She did have an ear infection, and twenty-four hours later I would be very sorry I hadn't just left her there for the weekend. But Matt brought home pizza for dinner that night, and we settled in to watch a movie, and I actually slept pretty well -- better than I had in recent weeks.

This is an excerpt from my journal entry on Saturday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before she was born:

Today we're shopping for last-minute things we need. We are packing the hospital bag (which I meant to do over a week ago -- though we did get the carseat installed). And then we're going on a double-date at a pub, where the boys will drink pretentious microbrews and Ky and I will drink root beer.

In between shopping and dinner, I need two things. One: Bubble Tea. Two: To lie down on the couch for awhile.

I don't remember the bubble tea. I do remember walking very, very slowly around Target and pretending to look at things on the bottom shelf because it felt sort of good to squat.

Please just imagine the sight of a very pregnant woman squatting and breathing in the middle of Target and be appropriately horrified. My mother certainly was when I recounted our shopping trip later.

Kyanne and I didn't get our double-date with our husbands. I called her and asked if we could maybe go somewhere closer to my house, because the thought of sitting in the car any longer made me want to die.

"Or we could just...not go," Kyanne said.

I spent the afternoon and evening trying to doze on the couch. I demanded McDonald's chicken nuggets for dinner, which Matt bought and which I promptly threw up. By midnight, I couldn't walk to the bathroom without dropping to my knees and howling, at which point I agreed that maybe I was in labor. I called Kyanne to come and pick up our pug, and twenty minutes later she was standing above me in the hallway with her arms crossed.

"I am definitely never having kids," she said.

"It's not that bad," I panted. "Go look at the baby's room! We just finished it last weekend!" (Note: the joke was on us, since Zannah slept in our room for over a year. But I also have no regrets about that.)

“You’re crazy,” she muttered, as Matt helped me into the car.

“I can’t sit in front,” I said. “I have to stretch out.”

We sped south on I-5, the freeway nearly empty at two o’clock in the morning. I howled and panted in the backseat, refusing to put on my seatbelt.

The light inside the emergency room seemed too bright. I was being asked to do impossible things. To write my name. To wait. To sit.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening yet -- not for a month. But eight hours after we arrived at the emergency room and two-and-a-half after I started to push, our daughter was delivered to my chest. She was four weeks early, but healthy and pink.

“I know you,” I said. We laughed and cried. Our little family of three.

Someone brought in a tray of food: grilled cheese and a small bunch of purple grapes. The sandwich was lukewarm and too soft, but in that moment it was the finest grilled cheese I’d ever tasted. My swaddled baby was nestled into my arms while a nurse wheeled us to our new room on the fourteenth floor.

As soon as I could stand, I hobbled to the small oval-shaped window. The sky was heavy, overcast for late May. I gazed down at the city streets of Tacoma, under the gray sky: a new morning.

***

If birthing my daughter taught me anything, it's that sometimes we need to roll with things we didn't plan for. That's difficult for those of us who like to plan. Perhaps ironically, my daughter is one of those people; on the first weekend after schools closed, she wrote out a very detailed daily schedule. On the first day of "Spring Break" (in quotes for perhaps obvious reasons), when we learned that schools would be closed for the rest of the year, she balled it up and threw it in the trash and we both cried. But during the first week of official remote learning, she was back at it, and she brandished her new daily schedule at breakfast. And every single day she shows up to her class meetings, completes every activity her teachers post, practices her trumpet, and makes sure she spends time outside if it isn't raining.

The end of her eighth grade year wasn't supposed to look like this. She was supposed to have more concerts. She rehearsed with musicians from all over the district for the all-city Honor Band only two days before schools closed. She was supposed to go to Silverwood with the band. She was supposed to be able to celebrate the end of middle school before transitioning to a new high school. The fact that she'll be attending a different high school than her friends adds a layer of sadness we couldn't have anticipated a few months ago, when she thought she would still be able to say good-bye. And while I know how her new school welcomes freshmen, and I know the opportunities that await her (because I happen to teach there), I don't know what that will look like in September. She's lost the end of eighth grade, and the beginning of her high school career will look far different than either of us imagined. My heart hurts for her. But I also trust that neither one of us can grasp the bigger picture yet, not while we're stuck in the small one. What graces, what gifts will come from this? How will we remember these days? How will she tell her own story ten years from now?

Both of us mourn what we've lost. She misses her friends. I miss my students, my seniors. But I wonder if what we're mourning will translate into something worth celebrating. In our weekly Zooms, my students talk about taking care of each other and holding themselves accountable. They appreciate the chance to sleep and understand the importance of sticking to a schedule. We've talked about strategies for managing stress and anxiety and staying organized when there's no teacher there to yell at you. These are lessons it may serve them well to learn as they gain their independence in a world that changed, fast. They're sad, but resilient. And they can articulate this.

I've been trying to be positive about this while also holding space for whatever feelings Suzannah has. She is, after all, my daughter, so there are frequently some big feelings in this house. But while my heart hurts for my girl, while I hate that all of her grandparents and her aunt and uncle and cousin can't join us for grilling and ice cream cake tomorrow, while I hate that her birthday trip to Great Wolf Lodge has been canceled, I'm also taking my cues right from her. She has decided that tomorrow she should have the day "off" from school, considering she hasn't missed a beat, and I agree. We picked out an ice cream cake together, and the kids and I will frost brownies sent by her grandmother. Matt and I came up with a gift to surprise her that, hopefully, will lessen the sting of not sharing her day with more people -- at least not in person. We'll eat outside in the sunshine. I ordered special Quarantine Birthday decorations, which Zannah seems to enjoy. We'll appreciate the technology that allows us to see her grandparents until we can hug them in person. She's pretty good at enjoying the moment she's living in, and I think (I hope, I pray) she understands how much she is loved. The daughter of my heart.

***

Even as I miss our daily routines, I appreciate the routines I'm privileged (and I do understand it is a privilege) to create now: Waking early to walk through my neighborhood, watching the spring unfold and flower. Sipping coffee slowly. Playing Uno with my children, which started when Isaac and I were the only ones awake at dawn, but sometimes in the afternoons (because he never tires of it) Suzannah asks to join, even if it's not written into her schedule. Walking to the school playground, where I walk or jog and Isaac rides his bike. Letting Suzannah stay up a little late and then sleep a little late. Frequently I am ready for bed before she is, because I still like to rise long before everyone else in my house, and when I go to bed she slips in beside me for awhile to snuggle. Still, at fourteen! I loved snuggling my babies, so very much, but there is something profoundly special about my teenager nestling against me while we giggle and talk and sigh. May I never take this for granted. These are moments I will cherish and probably definitely miss when we resume whatever "normal" life will look like again and our rhythms change again. My deep hope is that we are creating connections now that will carry us through whatever comes next.

Motherhood is like this. Nothing could have prepared me for the enormity of the life change when my daughter was born and delivered straight to my arms. I could only imagine, and my imagination wasn't big enough. I think about that now. How can I expand my imagination to hold all that awaits?

These Ordinary Gifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

Let me never take such ordinary gifts for granted.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hi," she said.

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

This love, messy and beautiful

And somehow, just like that, it's already April. The end of it, even. This is the point in the year when all of us feel the approach of summer, but it's just beyond our grasp, just enough to be sort of soul-killing. My family and friends in Montana and Minnesota were still shoveling snow last weekend. Last Saturday I watched my girl play in her first soccer game of the spring season in the pouring rain on the muddiest field in King County, but honestly, it wasn't terribly cold and she played so well on that slippery, clumpy field, and at some point when you're drenched and covered in mud you might as well just relax and decide to have a ton of fun, and it seemed that the girls did just that. Yesterday they played on their home field, on smooth and beautiful turf, and I just...still love it all, so much. We haul our camping chairs out of the back of the car and carry them to the field, but mostly I can't even sit down, because I get too excited. Yesterday, my parents were here to watch -- they were in town to meet my tiny new nephew James, and they managed to set aside time for Isaac's track meet and Zannah's game -- and my mom made the same comment she made last March, at Suzannah's first spring soccer game: "It's fun to watch you, too." Because I never saw myself as a soccer mom, ever. But damn if I don't love watching my girl play.

Spring soccer is just beginning (the games, that is; practice started in early March, not long after our own snow day); the girls will play until June. Their last game is just a couple of days after I teach my last class of 2018 seniors. I'm trying not to think about that. I kind of feel like all I've done for the past two months is yell at them and clutch my hair and beg and cajole and threaten and beg some more. Every single class feels like I'm blurting some PG-13 version of "Goddammit, I love you, please get your shit together, I don't even sleep anymore because of you, I am fucking worried about some of you and I am proud of all of you and absolutely beyond blessed to have you in my life and you are all ruining my life and you make me furious and crazy and I am going to miss you more than you even know."

This is love, though. It's just love. Messy and hard and beautiful.

I've been a teacher for my entire adult life, and I was really barely an adult when I started. Now, seventeen years in, these kids really feel like my kids. I've loved so many students over the years, and I've had the deep privilege to stay connected to some of them, but this class is something new for me. I've taught all of them for at least two years, since I looped with them for junior and senior year -- a first. I taught a lot of them as sophomores, too, and a good handful of them as freshmen. All this to say: it's not that I love them more than I've loved students I've taught before, because I have had the deep privilege of loving a lot of kids, but I've never before felt so deeply attached and emotionally invested in an entire class. And it's probably not very healthy or balanced. I really have lost a lot of sleep over them this semester -- or maybe I've lost sleep wondering if I've been enough or done enough for them. I worry about that a lot, actually -- about how I could have taught them better, been better. (Teaching really does parallel parenting. So much, so much.) Mostly, though, I'm just going to miss them. This is the natural order of things; they need to move on, and more kids will come, and I will love them, too. But I think what I'm feeling is -- dare I say it -- grief.

And there's the bittersweetness of my own beautiful life, my own children. I love this stage of parenting so very much; I hardly even know what to say about it. I've loved all of it so far, truly. I loved my babies, and I loved my toddlers, my preschoolers. But to be the mother of school-aged children who make me laugh every day, who can get themselves up and dressed, who sprawl on their stomachs to read books but still curl up against me at night to read together, who run in track and hi-yah! in Tae Kwon Do and play hard on the soccer field -- I love everything about this. My kids make me crazy every day; they can't stay out of each other's faces, they hi-yah at each other all afternoon. Mom, Isaac's copying me. Mommy, Zannah kicked me. There's that. But mostly, I wish I could stop time, right here, at this year: this time with my children, when they are growing so much but still yell, "Tuck me in!" when they're finished brushing their teeth, and they tolerate me crawling into bed with them for snuggles for a few minutes. I can take a nap on Sunday afternoon and I don't have to worry about it lining up perfectly with a baby's nap, or a toddler's (although really Isaac was my only toddler who ever napped). I can send them outside to play while I work, and I don't have to think about it much; the reassuring sound of the basketball bouncing in the driveway or their shouts to the backyard neighbors are enough. They need me still. When they spill something, when they're scared, when they need help: they call for me. We talk about things. I pick them up from school and they are still both bursting to tell me about their day. But they can make their own beds and help me with laundry. They settle in to do their homework after school and they don't even need me to nag at them. (Teacher's kids? Luck?) I love living with these people, and wondering who they will be, how their joys and talents and passions will manifest themselves as they grow. They have always been themselves, but as they grow they continue to reveal more and more of who they are, and that is joy I could not have fully understood when Matt and I said to each other, yes, we want to be parents, let's have babies. What an unspeakably beautiful gift.

In the meantime: this April, as the cherry blossoms fall to soft pink carpets over the sidewalks, I am so acutely aware of time passing. This year, the cherry blossoms feel as achingly, beautifully sad as autumn leaves. I am in no hurry for summer; I just want to keep and hold each moment. I am not counting down the days until the end of this school year. I don't want to measure my days that way. I love summer, but this year, somehow, its approach breaks my heart a bit.

But probably that's always true. I love the turning of the seasons, but they come at a necessary cost. A loss.

We need a better word for this

On this cold and drizzly Friday afternoon, I'm sitting at my dining room table across from my son, who is coloring. He shed his socks like normal within five minutes of dropping his backpack on the family room floor, and now he's in his usual position, kneeling on the chair, bare feet tucked under his bum.

Let me back up a bit.

Last night, I attended a district-wide meeting on Gun Violence and School Safety. Twelve hours later, I'm still processing the intensity of it all. I sat across the room from teachers at my daughter's school. I sat across the room from my son's teacher, and I listened to her speak about how sometimes, she has to sacrifice the sacred math and reading time for more important things--the kids' social and emotional needs. ("Even if I get in trouble," she said.) I wanted to tell her then that as the mother of a child in her classroom, I appreciate every single second she spends on these kids' social and emotional needs. My son comes home from school talking about that. He doesn't come home from school eager to talk about what he's learning in math.

But I didn't have the chance last night, or at any rate, I lost the ability to speak.

We had some important conversations last night, and teachers raised important questions. We talked about what we need, as educators, from our district. I was grateful to be there with friends and colleagues who, as one of them said, could lead and listen and hold space. It was a difficult, necessary, and emotional night.

Gun violence and school safety weighs heavily on my heart as an educator every day now. And it weighs on me as a mother who understands that other teachers put their bodies on the line every day for my children. Last night, I was overwhelmed both as a teacher and as a mother, sitting in a room with my children's teachers and watching a video called "Surviving a School Shooting." I watched my son's teacher watch this video, and something in me broke. Tears began streaming down my face, and I couldn't stop them. I tried, but I just could not stop crying. Many teachers were visibly upset after this video, but during the debrief, all I could say to my table was this: "My son's teacher is here. I watched her watch this video." I couldn't articulate any more than that.

I cried all the way home. I wasn't sobbing; it just felt like something inside me had come loose, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to tighten it back up. I walked in the door after thirteen hours away from my family, exhausted and spent and trying to tighten whatever it was that had come loose. Unsuccessful, I just went to bed instead.

I woke up at four o'clock this morning, unable to go back to sleep. My eyes were sore and swollen enough that I soaked a cotton pad in witch hazel and pressed it against my eyelids for a few minutes. But I actually had a decent day; these days, going to school heals my heart even when my heart is so frequently broken there, because if there is hope to be found in this broken world, in this broken country, it's in our kids.

And then this happened: Twenty-five minutes before my son's school day ended, as I drove from my own school to pick him up, his school went into lockdown. Someone had set off illegal fireworks outside, near enough to my son's classroom that it sounded like gunfire. The adults heard it. The kids heard it.

Imagine what it feels like to be a teacher, emotionally drained after a night of intense discussion surrounding what steps our district will take to deal with the threat of gun violence. Imagine a night of intense discussion of our individual schools' safety needs, a night in which teachers see a simulation of an elementary school shooting and see their own students--see themselves--in that video. Then imagine the very next afternoon: a sound just outside the classroom door that sounds like gunfire, because an entire box of fireworks ignited at once is no joke, especially in March. Imagine the lockdown, imagine sheltering frightened second-graders behind overturned desks in the corner, away from the door.

I didn't have the whole story when I met my son at his door; the call from the district office referenced only "loud noises" and reassured us that students and staff were safe at all times. But I watched those nervous kids leave class today, and I saw the tears in their teacher's eyes, and all I could do was hug her and say Thank you. Thank you for being there for my son.

My son sits across from me, coloring.

We're talking about it, intermittently. I ask him how it made him feel.

"It was so scary," he said. He told me exactly what they heard and how they hid. His teacher is wonderful; she kept them calm, and they talked about it afterwards. Shared a group hug. She creates a safe space for these kids to process their feelings, which matters far more to me than math or reading. At home, Isaac and I talked about how teachers work to keep kids safe. We talked about how it was good to practice, so they know what to do.

Less than 24 hours ago, I watched my son's teacher watch that video, and this afternoon, my son sheltered behind an overturned desk after hearing what he thought was a shooter. My little boy was terrified in his own classroom. He has never felt anything but safe in schools. My boy has spent his entire life in schools. And today, that safety was stolen from him a little bit. I'd hoped it wouldn't happen so soon.

I'm well aware he was never in any real danger. Do you understand that our souls are shaken, though? Because we understand that we are not safe in our schools, and teachers understand that the rest of the country is placing that burden squarely on our shoulders. We have to learn to defend ourselves, to secure ourselves. In the meantime, our country doesn't seem to think it needs to make it any more difficult for those would do harm to have access to the weapons that would harm us. That would violate our "rights."

The insanity defies all words.

So I hold my son on my lap and kiss his cheek before he wriggles out of my grip. So I sit across from my little boy at the dining room table and talk to him about how he felt this afternoon when he thought a shooter was outside his classroom door. So I cry in the shower, cry in my car. So I talk to my students about where to run and how to hide, and I'm learning more about how to fight. So I say to a crying fifteen-year-old boy who is angry and scared, "It's okay not to be okay, because nothing about this is okay." So I scream at the news and nod with my children who already know the adults running the country have failed them. (But the teenagers speaking out may very well be what saves us.)

*

A couple of weeks ago I pondered how active this blog would be if I only posted after a school shooting. Had today "only" been about illegal fireworks and my son's fear, about the collective rage and heartbreak of teachers, I probably would have posted anyway. But as it turns out, two people were shot dead at Central Michigan University, which brings the total count to twelve school shootings so far in 2018.

Shortly after the shooting this morning, my dear friend Alicia posted this:

Shooting at CMU in Michigan. Where a colleague of mine now waits and worries on lockdown, his wife also on lockdown because she works on campus too. And his two daughters? They are on lockdown because of their school’s proximity to campus. It started from a domestic dispute. Never say to me we don’t need stricter gun laws.

It is too damn easy to shoot someone.

And tonight, again, I am making a donation to counter those who believe their right to their weapons weighs more than my child's right to attend school in safety. To live without this fear. To live.

I'm furious. I will never not be furious. We need a better word for this in our language: what word is enough for this fear, this rage, this heartbreak?

Our national disgrace

I've been quiet here since winter break, mostly because I've been working on a writing project that has pulled me in another direction. But it seems school shootings hit a nerve with me, since I'm a teacher and a mother and I guess I have just the tiniest issue with the idea that our disgraceful country wins at mass shootings and not much else.

Maybe I'll add this blog as another project of its own: what would I end up with at the end of the year if I only post when America experiences a school shooting? (Will I have more entries than I posted in 2017? I only posted 18, a record low for me.)

There is, of course, much debate on what "counts" as a school shooting. Everytown for Gun Safety classifies it as any event in which a live firearm is discharged in a school building or on school grounds; that happens a lot. But if we "only" count those incidents in which a firearm kills or wounds someone in a school or on school grounds, during school hours, it's still way, way too many for a country that likes to brag about itself the way we do. And it's way too many for this mama, this teacher.

And after the latest massacre this week, even mere reports of gunfire have everyone here on edge. This morning my school chose to hold a surprise lockdown drill (I'm withholding comment on that for now). During that drill, we learned that gunfire had been reported on the campus of a local community college, where many of our students attend classes for Running Start. My students, held in a lockdown drill in our school, were texting their friends (also many of our students), held in a real lockdown. At that point, it didn't matter whether or not there was an actual shooter with intent to cause harm.

We are not okay.

Let me tell you about my morning, about how it felt to smooth my daughter's soft blonde hair away from her face and kiss her forehead as she called, "Dad, are you ready yet?" and glared at her watch. (He drops her off on the way to catch his bus, and my girl likes to be early.) Let me tell you about taking my son to his school on the way to my own, about reaching into the back seat to find his warm little hand, because for years now that has been our last good-bye in the morning -- before they jump out of the car and run into the gym for Morning Assembly I reach back and squeeze their hands three times. I (squeeze) love (squeeze) you (squeeze). Let me tell you about how it feels to hold those sensory images in my heart: my daughter's soft hair, my son's warm and slightly dry palm. Let me tell you about calling good-bye to one child as her dad drove her to school, about calling good-bye to the other as he jumped out of the car and ran into the gym, his backpack bouncing over his little butt, and the way I could just barely see the top of his Batman underwear peeking over the waistband of his jeans.

Let me tell you about my conscious thought: What if these were the last images of my children, alive? What if these moments were our last living memories?

I cried all the way to school. I listened to NPR. They read the names of all the victims who died in Parkland on Wednesday.

She was a soccer player and a creative writer. He unlocked a door to allow students in to hide from the shooter. She loved the beach. He had had just earned an academic scholarship to the University of Indianapolis. She was 14 and a member of the school marching band's winter guard. He reportedly died from wounds he sustained while shielding students from bullets.

"I sent her to school yesterday, and she was supposed to be safe...My job is to protect my children, and I sent my kid to school."

This is what it means to be a parent in America now. To live with that fear. Every fucking day, really.

And this is what it means to be a teacher in America: To understand that my students are scared, and the ways in which they process that are as varied as the students themselves. To cry with my colleagues every time this happens. Every. time. Do you have the vaguest idea what "every time" means? What is the number that means "fucking enough already"? Because we've done this so many times. And today we broke, at least at my school. We came to school shattered, and we were met with an unannounced lockdown drill. And then we heard about the real lockdown just up the road. And we tried to be calm for our kids but some of us were better at that than others, and when one of my kids brought me cookies he'd baked for me before lunch I couldn't keep the tears out of my eyes, and he just hugged me. And then kids came to eat lunch in my room and one of them was really, really not okay, and his friends told him to chill out, and then he was even less okay, and I couldn't make it better. And then some of my kids really just wanted "normal" by noon, so I tried to give them that, too. I don't think I did any of it particularly well. I taught with tears in my eyes all day long. I cried hard during my planning and once at lunch and twice in the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face. I cried hard after school, twice, before I walked to my car to drive home, trying to calm myself before I wrapped my own children in my arms.

And make no mistake: I was not the only teacher in tears today. And that's just in my school, three thousand miles away from Parkland, Florida. Ours weren't the only hearts breaking (again, fucking again) this week. I wasn't the only mother grieving and afraid as she kissed her children good-bye this morning.

And this is what I posted on Facebook this morning, before school, before I kissed my children good-bye, before our unannounced lockdown drill, before the lockdown at the nearby community college:

On President's Day, I will be making a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety.

I will give a specific dollar amount for:

Every friend or friend of a friend who comments that America doesn't have a gun problem (or any equivalent, like "America has a HEART problem" or "Cain killed Abel with a rock", etc.)

Every friend or friend of a friend who comments that teachers of our children should be armed

The top recipients of N.R.A. funding in the House and Senate
who have the gall to express thoughts/prayers/condolences to the victims of gun violence in schools

I have more ideas, but I fear I will run out of money.

I will be donating for every school shooting in America in 2018. And I'm furious about it.

One year later

Yesterday afternoon, the kids and I drove to the Elliott Bay Book Company. I had two specific books in mind to buy, one of which I've been waiting on for months, and one of which I've been pondering for a long time. I had a mission. And I like to support independent bookstores.

Matt had planned to meet us there after work, but we drove up a bit early. The kids busied themselves in the children's section, where they can read for a good long time, and I browsed a bit before settling into a corner of the cafe to write for a few minutes. In fifteen minutes I'd poured out three pages' worth of ink.

I feel so much these days. So much love. So much anger. Hope. Fear.

But really still a lot of anger. I look at the predatory white supremacist rapist monster sitting in the oval office and I think about people who will vote for him again in a few years and I think about how I do not want any of those people anywhere near my life or my family or my students or my stories. What a mirror we held up to ourselves almost exactly one year ago, and what an ugly reflection. We have to do better. We have so much work to do.

Since the last time I posted here, just a month ago, twenty-six more people were murdered in church. Shot. Slaughtered. Just another day in this great country of ours. It's still not the right time to talk about guns though, right?

I'm so tired of writing the same fucking thing here. I'm not saying anything new. I'm so sick of it, so disheartened.

Since the last time I posted, someone I once respected used the term "witch hunt" to refer to women coming forward with stories of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or predatory behavior by men. Anyone holding that opinion, by the way, is cordially invited to show themselves out. I can't stop you from reading my blog, I know that, but please go away anyhow. Unfollow. Unfriend. You don't want to read anything I have to say.

I have stories, too, but I also don't owe them to anyone. Though I did spend an evening mentally writing a post about the time a man greeted me at a party by giving me hug and promptly sliding his arm down my back to firmly grab my ass and squeeze it. We were friendly, but we were by no means close friends. I'd laughed at his jokes before this moment. I'd hugged him before. I wasn't wearing a short skirt. I'm pretty sure I wasn't wearing a particularly tight sweater. Should it matter? What I was wearing? Should it matter that I'd hugged him before, in similar social settings? What should I have done differently? Why does it fall on me to ask these questions? Why did he think my ass was his for the grabbing, especially when we were only casually acquainted? Would he offer the same kind of bullshit non-apology we keep seeing from all these famous men? This was such a small moment for me, really. I'm not scarred for life, I could have chosen a much bigger moment to write about, etc. Right? Or at least I've been conditioned to think that way. But I can't shake the feeling that it also captures so perfectly the entitlement of men. For what it's worth, I never saw this man again, but I did look him up on Facebook, and the sight of his face and his smug smile makes me angry even now, years later.

I think it's so interesting that Franklin Graham is so obsessed with sexual purity and sexual morality, and really bizarrely fixated on homosexuality -- like that's THE SIN in America, and not, say, institutional racism or the dehumanization and marginalization of our most vulnerable citizens -- but if he's called out, say, Roy Moore, or, you know, our Commander-in-Chief, I've missed it. Probably I should stop reading anything with Franklin Graham's name attached to it. He's the one who said last year's dumpster fire of an election demonstrated "God showing up at at the polls." I've said many times that I am probably a terrible Christian but I am an earnest one; if I believed that the likes of either Franklin Graham or our president represented the love of Christ I can promise you I wouldn't even try to set foot in any church, ever. As it stands, I believe God loves them just as much as anyone else and, to paraphrase Anne Lamott, has the tools to help them clean up their messes. But my heart really struggles with that. Because I still think they're flaming dumpster fires, as far as human beings go.

I know. I'm far from Christlike myself.

Anyway.

I am married to a man I love and we are raising a boy, and we absolutely must raise a different sort of man than this America expects him to be. This doesn't happen by trusting that because we vote the right way, or because we love him enough, or because we go to church, or because he is a "good kid" raised with quality role models in his life he will somehow transcend the toxic masculinity embedded in the very fabric of our country.

I don't want anyone near my life who isn't willing to wrestle with that statement.

I'm terrified because I do not know how to do this work well enough, and I don't have the answers, but dammit, this shit needs to change.

Complacency terrifies me. It also makes me angry. I'm really angry these days.

***

So that's where my head is at.

I know I started this blog as a place to post cute stories about my toddler, to open up another little corner of the internet as a space to write.

I'm sorry if this is too political or too angry.

***

Or no I'm not. I'm not sorry about that.

***

But I also need to point out that my head is also here:

My children. My students. My life. The heartbeat, the everyday pulse underneath the greater heartbreak. I'm still a soccer mom, mourning the approaching end of the season. I love every single game, even in the rain, and last weekend, even in the snow. I especially love the night games under the lights. Tonight the referee was this fabulous grizzled old grandpa whose gravelly voice sounded like it was filtered through decades of cigarette smoke. He barked encouragement at both teams throughout the game: "Well done, yellow! Nice pass, blue!" And he turned to all the parents on the sidelines and said, "Girls this age, you don't get 'em under the lights like this very often. There's just nothing better!" One of the dads from the opposing team turned to me and said, "Have you guys ever had this ref before? He's a riot. Makes the games fun. We really enjoy him." And while we both shouted encouragement to our daughters, the night felt so friendly. Tonight my daughter's team took a loss on the field but my girl also scored a beautiful goal, and I was so proud of her, and when she climbed into the car the first words out of her mouth were, "I really love my team!"

My son takes Tae Kwon Do classes now, and watching him focus and breathe and kick and move and work so hard, so in the moment and so unselfconsciously himself, just makes me so proud. He bursts through his classroom door at the end of the day and tears across the playground, stopping just short of hugging me the way he used to in kindergarten. As we walk away, I hear kids call, "Bye, Isaac!" and one of his little buddies always chases after him shouting, "Hug attack!" and they run, backpacks thwacking against their little butts, shrieking with laughter.

My school district held conferences this past week, and that means what it has meant for several years now: my kids have to spend a lot of hours at school with me, but there's a part of me that loves how comfortable they are with that. I wind up absolutely physically and emotionally spent after meeting with my own students and their parents, but the truth is that these long days are also deeply important in terms of building relationships with these kids and their families. And now, as a mother of children in school, I appreciate them on a deeper level as well. It matters: to connect with the humans who teach my children. To look them in the eye and say thank you. To ask questions. To see them exchange handshakes and fist bumps and hugs with my kids. To see that my children are known and loved and seen.

Both of my kids are learning important lessons they cannot learn from me. That's a thing that seems to threaten some parents, but it just makes me so grateful for my village. It's the thing that makes me hopeful, I suppose, despite everything.

Sometimes I feel so hopeless, but I am also so deeply privileged to live a life that give me so many opportunities to hope anyway. And love always.