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.

 

October, finally

Two weeks ago I sat at my dining room table, writing to the sound of rain. This is the sound I wait for, every September. The rain was fleeting, but it soothed the edges of my frazzled nerves.

I went for a run after school today. I'm oddly energetic on Friday afternoons, especially on Fridays when I end with a class that never fails to fill my cup. I was in a strange headspace; this week has been particularly hard. But I left school feeling good and wanting to move in the cool sunshine.

It cools off at night now; we still sleep with a fan, but I don't kick away the covers. One night this week I was cold enough to wear socks to bed -- what a lovely feeling. Sunny days aren't oppressive, the way they feel in late August, with our matted lawn, crisp and colorless. The leaves have begun to turn, and they are beautiful. I love the bursts of color on sunny Saturdays in October; this year, I know they'll make me miss our weekend soccer games. 

I missed them last year, too, but I missed a lot of things last year. 

*

These days, our morning routines go like this: Suzannah and I are up early, before the boys. She starts the coffee maker, which Matt has set up the night before, and she drinks one cup with her breakfast. Milk, two teaspoons of sugar. I'm never hungry at that hour, and I don't like to drink coffee quickly, so I simply shower and dress, and the two of us are out the door before dawn. I drive through my favorite espresso stand before we get to school; I discovered them twenty years ago, when I used my lunch break to rush back to my apartment and take my new pug puppy out to potty on the scrap of lawn next to the stairs. In those days, I ordered a black and white mocha and drank it on my way back to school. Now, I stick to Americanos, sometimes black, sometimes with a splash of cream.

On the days when I take Suzannah to school, we park in the teacher lot and walk in together. She gives me a quick hug and heads off towards the Commons area or to hang out with her friends in a patient colleague's classroom, and I walk up the stairs to my new office, where I have extra morning planning time. I've been on a part-time contract since she was born, so I'm not required to be here at this hour -- but Matt and I decided to choice Suzannah into my school, so we share the responsibility of transportation. The extra time feels lovely right now. I'm a morning person by nature, and those extra hours in a quiet space mean it's easier for me to leave my laptop at my docking station at the end of the day. Last year, I never really succeeded at establishing a boundary between work and home, because I taught my classes through that screen at the center of my house.

On the days when I take Isaac to school -- the privilege of a position that is still technically part-time -- we can all sleep just a little longer, or at least we're not as rushed. Matt doesn't need to make himself presentable before he rolls out of bed to drive her to school, and he doesn't need to worry about snagging a spot in the teacher lot -- my school is still under construction, and parking is at a premium. When I go in later, I park behind the football field, nowhere near the entrance that is closest to my classroom. Or any entrance, really. I walk along the track, then up a long paved path to the back entrance next to the health clinic, and then I cross the Commons area and make my way to the stairs that lead to the second floor, where I share an IB office and a classroom.

But it's okay. A year ago, we didn't go anywhere. We drank our coffee and ate our breakfast and logged onto our computers in different rooms of our house. As much as I loved wearing my favorite gray sweats underneath whatever reasonably professional look I managed to put together on top, those gray sweats weren't worth it. As much as I loved having some really sweet time with my family, knowing that it was an unexpected gift -- after all, my kids are not at ages when I would expect to see so much of them, and I really loved it -- it wasn't the natural order of things, and I know how much they need to be with their peers (and please, no one needs to lecture any teachers about this). But I won't write about that here tonight. I tried to write about it a year ago, when I was still trying to justify my paycheck to friends and family who didn't seem to think I deserved it.

I haven't found my sweet spot yet, not at all. I counted it as a victory that I found my teacher mailbox in the main office all by myself for the first time last Friday, without Kailey holding my hand (though she did cheer me on, and I choose to believe it was not entirely mocking). I can make copies now. But I haven't found my groove, that place where I'm actually ready to greet students at my door because everything they need is printed and ready to pick up (and they know the routines to do that) or displayed on a screen (which is now a fancy new Smart Board). Kids haven't had to ask permission to pee in a very long time, so I haven't been consistent with hall passes. We have a system now, but everything, all of these really basic things, are an evolving process. I have to remind kids all day long to wear their masks correctly, which is the only issue I haven't encountered before, and it's the one I care about most right now. Usually, all it takes is eye contact and tapping my own. But it's unmooring, to say the least. All of it. Learning to be human together again. To read each other's signals. To constantly evaluate risk, and maintain that essential connection at the same time. It all matters so much.

This is what it means to be back in a classroom full-time. It's too crowded, of course. I'm no stranger to over-crowded classrooms; my first of teaching, I had 42 students in my first period class. But during a pandemic, when we have to provide seating charts for contact tracing, full classrooms bring a different level of anxiety. The first time I stood in front of a full class, I found it difficult to breathe, and it wasn't because of my mask.

Speaking of which: teaching through a mask isn't my favorite, but it's infinitely better than teaching through a screen. I'm watching schools in other parts of the country -- and, this week, a private school in my own state -- close because Covid is tearing through their classrooms, and my anxiety rises. My anxiety rises, and so does my anger. My whole body thrums with it. I am so grateful to live in a state with a mask mandate, because it is the best chance we have of keeping kids in school without putting them at even more risk. I'm furious at folks who think that doing this tiny thing is giving into "fear." I'm furious at folks who think that protecting vulnerable members of our community is an imposition on their personal freedom, that we should expect them to "stay home if they're scared." As if we should render them invisible. As if we haven't already. 

Right now, I just want my son vaccinated. Sometimes I think it will be a miracle if he can avoid quarantine until then. I found myself murmuring in the car two weeks ago, Please let him just get to run in his first cross-country meet. And please just let him not get sick. Sure, he'd probably be fine, right? But look, this mama has already experienced what it's like to have a healthy child suddenly hospitalized at Mary Bridge Children's, with a pediatric nephrology team taking care of him. 

Is that what it means to "live in fear"? 

We were lucky. We were so lucky. And on a normal weekday, we waited for hours in the ER for a bed. I would be so terrified to need any sort of hospital care now, when we can't assume a bed will be available at all. Washington is taking on transfers from Idaho. My home state is rationing medical care. My best friend who works for a clinic in Minnesota reports that they're struggling to find open beds for non-COVID patients.

Most healthy children don't suddenly go into kidney failure, but some of them do. Don't come at me with your statistics, especially if you're too precious to wear a mask for twenty minutes inside a grocery store. I think a measure of our humanity might just be our willingness to wear that stupid mask to protect someone else's child. That's the only sort of world I want to live in. So I'm pretty depressed these days.

*

Anyway, my son managed to escape quarantine before his first cross-country meet last week. And my greatest fear was not, honestly, that he would get sick -- because he is incredibly conscientious about wearing a mask and because we are lucky enough to live in a district that requires them. I just know that he needs these experiences, these connections, and I want him to have them.

He ran hard, with absolute determination, and he took third overall and first for his school. Yesterday he shaved something like forty-five seconds off his time; he threw himself against the fence, panting and red-faced but clearly pleased after he crossed the finish line. He did not get any of this from me. I require a tremendous amount of validation from for huffing around my neighborhood for awhile. I was highly allergic to P.E. and running the mile until P.E. classes were no longer required. Listen, I was the kid vomiting at the side of the track because I really wanted that stupid A on my report card. (I'm told P.E. doesn't work like that anymore and I am so glad.) 

Cross-country is a perfect pandemic sport, and perfect for my high-energy son who is very active but has zero interest in "organized" sports. I watched him run, and then I watched him bounce up and down and cheer for every single teammate until they crossed the finish line. This is what it means to be part of a community. Toxic individualism tells us that our "personal freedom" is what we should fight for, instead of the greater whole. But we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

*

I've tried to write here so many times in the last two weeks, since the afternoon when I sat at my table, listening to the rain. I don't know how to tell all the stories that matter right now.

I know how to breathe in the water

When your child challenges you to a water balloon fight on a hot afternoon in late July, I believe in saying yes. Always. Even if you're not wearing a swimsuit. Maybe especially if you're not wearing a swimsuit, because there is something about getting soaked in shorts and a tank top that feels whimsical and freeing. Although I do have to say that fifteen years into motherhood, I still frequently put on a swimsuit for an afternoon of Serious Water Play in the backyard, because that signals commitment, and I am a mother who pities the parents who do not find joy in this, at any age.

I've written about this before, but my perfect summer happens in my backyard.

We didn't make it to Bozeman last summer, or almost anywhere else. Our story isn't unique. We're in a Pandemic (yes, still). Matt changed jobs. The IB Global Conference was cancelled. By this time last year, we had just learned that we would begin the school year remotely, which was both a relief and a source of anxiety and dread. Last year at this time, we were about to leave for a quick trip to Glacier National Park, where we met my parents, my brother and his family, and Matt's parents. It was the only time all summer that felt something like normal, the only time all summer where I could just breathe. And I did, mostly by swimming in Lake McDonald. Put me in the water, and I am home. 

I know how to breathe in the water.

*

We did make it to Bozeman this summer, and I was so grateful. I missed the smell of my parents' house. It's a smell they probably don't notice, but to me, it smells exactly like home the moment I walk in the door, the smell I've known for most of my life. I love it so much, in exactly the way I love the smell of my own house after we've been away for a week; it's a very specific smell I never notice any other time except after days away. 

(How many homes is a person allowed to have? I have asked myself this question for years. My best high school teacher told me one night before I left for college that I would put down deep roots wherever I went. And it's true, I think. I can still smell, in my memory, the apartment I shared with Carmen in Moorhead, Minnesota. Or the smell of the heavy, late summer air there. Home is the way the air smells.)

We also spent a few nights in Glacier. We didn't camp this time, like we have since my son was in diapers. I've missed it, those nights spent breathing the sweet pine-scented air under the stars, settled into the quiet of a tent, with everything that matters held in that space. COVID changed things, yes. But pandemics do eventually end, and at some point in the last few years I have learned how to set boundaries for myself and for my family. We'll share communal spaces again, but until then, we'll gratefully accept my mother's gift of a cabin and days at the lake. Paddle boards, kayaks, the sun setting over the water. The cool water of Lake McDonald against my body, which I prefer over any kayak or paddle board. It's a strange thing: to so fully enjoy the water, to acknowledge that this lake is warm enough to swim in all afternoon, which it shouldn't be. Growing up, it wasn't. We are incinerating the planet, and this is obvious in a heartbreaking way when I visit this place where the glaciers are shrinking into snow fields.

Pam Houston writes in Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country: 

For now, I want to sit vigil with the earth...I want to write unironic odes to her beauty, which is still potent, if not completely intact. The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it until and even after it is gone no matter how much it hurts. If we don't, we are left with only a hollow chuckle, and our big brains who made this mess, our big brains that stopped believing a long time ago in beauty, in everything, in anything.

Montana is burning. It's too hot, too early. Again. I returned to my home state hoping to breathe the sweetest air in the world, but smoke filled my lungs instead. Weeks later, friends there post pictures of a red sun in a yellow sky.

Montana might never truly welcome me home; I'm an Outsider now. And yet. And yet. My soul still knows how to breathe in the water there, and the Montana prairie is not so different from the ocean tides. I'll always love it.

*

I moved to the Pacific Northwest twenty years ago. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else: my entire adult life. I was born in a prairie town, grown and nourished near the mountains, returned to the Midwestern plains, and given my wings to wind up exactly where I am now. All of it, all of it, courses through my blood. My heart beats to the rhythm of the ocean tides and prairie winds. I cherish my trips home. But home is also here now: in the Pacific Northwest, in the mountains, at the coast, and quite literally in my backyard.

*

Matt and I were extraordinarily lucky to stumble into our little house, in this neighborhood, just six weeks after we were married. Before we had kids, I spent August afternoons reading in the shade of our enormous tree, or reading in the sunshine on our deck (I won't tell you which books led to my most painful sunburns, but I remember them clearly). After Suzannah was born, I spent countless afternoons in the backyard with her, taking pictures while she splashed in the little plastic wading pool we bought at Target or Toys R Us. I remember sitting on the edge of the deck trying to read while she ran through the sprinkler. One of the books I was supposed to teach for IB Literature still bears her scribbles; she grabbed my blue ballpoint pen after she tired of the water, and I didn't really care for the book anyway -- it was a complete chore to read (and I no longer teach it). Temperatures hit 100 the summer I was pregnant with Isaac, and I sat in that plastic wading pool while Zannah poured water over my belly. The next summer, Isaac kicked his fat legs on a blanket on the grass. And after that...well, the yard was his, too. The sprinkler, the lawn, the deck. The concrete patio that replaced the old, rotting deck. The swing set and sandbox, built by my husband and father-in-law before my son's first birthday.

I'm supposed to want more. More square footage? More house, less yard? Newer? Bigger? I wasn't thinking about "forever" when we bought our house, only about how we loved it then. All these years later, I still do, and even more in Quarantine, when my daily walks introduced me to so many neighbors I'd never known and showcased spectacular views of Puget Sound, only a few streets away. I've learned that what I need is not the same thing as what we're conditioned to want.

*

I love our summer travels. I do. Our trips have mostly always been to Montana and Minnesota, because our families are there, and I have no regrets about that (Montana and Minnesota are wonderful places to be, in any season). I've had some wonderful trips around the country for the IB Global Conference each summer, and once Matt and I went to Vegas on his company's dime (I'll go anywhere and enjoy it when I don't have to pay for it, but I'd be okay not going back). I have a list of places I want to go and things I want to see and experience in the next few years. But I've also learned that the summers I love best are the summers that give me the most time at home here in the Pacific Northwest. We keep discovering places that fill and feed my soul near my home here. At the coast, in the mountains, on the trails to the Sound near my own house.

(I almost wrote, "in my home state." Is this my home state now? I think of the privilege inherent in claiming a state this way in the first place. In having a childhood bedroom that still exists somewhere else. Surely, claiming a home shouldn't be limited to those of us who still have a bed in a place we lived in decades ago.)

*

I spent some time this weekend reading through old journals, which is a thing I tend to do in late summer, before I dig into preparing for the next school year. The year after I moved here, after I chose this place to begin my adulthood, my "real life," I wrote about returning to a place of wet and green Januaries after Christmas in Montana, about how I felt like I was going home. And yet, for years after I left Montana, I still wrote about weeping as I drove east or west out of Bozeman -- to Moorhead, Minnesota or to Washington. Bozeman is a hard place to leave. But those tears meant that a heart can expand to hold these other places, too, and to call them home.

*

I've lived here, in this state, in this little house, longer than I've lived anywhere else. 

My dream house is this one, I think. Maybe a few streets closer to the water, so I could drink my coffee with a view of Puget Sound instead of having to walk to that view in the mornings (all summer) or the afternoons (when I'm teaching). What I have is close enough. My perfect summer day happens right here, when I pour myself a glass of iced green tea ("Enjoy your alien pee," my son says) and read in the backyard until it's time to cook dinner, which we also frequently eat in the backyard. My perfect summer day happens when my children fill water balloons with our backyard hose and throw them at each other, and at me. My perfect summer day happens when all we need is a backyard hose, a sprinkler, a grill, a fire pit. A comfortable lounge chair, or one of the Adirondack chairs I bought in May, along with a side table -- perfect for that glass of tea, a can of lemon-flavored La Croix, or a Pinot Grigio in the late afternoon.

I'll never say no to the water. 

*

School starts again a month from now. I'll be teaching full classes in person again for the first time in a year-and-a-half. My daughter will be a sophomore. My son will be a middle-schooler, which is harder for me to process, since the last time he attended in-person school he was only in the fourth grade. But the world happens to all of us. We'll figure it out.

In the meantime, we'll run through the sprinkler, we'll have water balloon fights, we'll spend afternoons at the beaches in the state parks near our home (two of them are ten minutes from our house, in two different directions, with sandy beaches and swimming and trails), and we'll make one last drive to a National Park and a beautiful lake in the mountains near the sea. This is what feeds my soul.

But even if I don't want to drive those ten minutes on a hot afternoon in late July or August, I can bask in summer days exactly where I am. I've never needed more than our back yard, a slip 'n slide or sprinkler, a camp chair under a towering tree that shades our home. I've added better chairs, I suppose. We have that fire pit. A patio umbrella. A grill, for when we don't want to heat the kitchen. But the magic that happens here is simple: an arc of water from a garden hose, catching the sunlight like diamonds. A book. A glass of iced tea. Dinner on the patio, maybe. The cool night descending over the water, the breeze that pairs with our bedroom fan to ruffle our bedroom curtains.

And always, the water. In whatever form my children want. Because isn't this it? The moments we miss later?

(Maybe it's the Pisces in me, but I'll take the water in any moment, on any day. I want the hose, the sprinkler, the slip 'n slide, the spray park, the pool as much as my children do.)

So I say yes to the water balloon fights, the water gun fights. I suggest the spray park, or the beach when my son whines that he's bored. I don't care what we do there, whether we splash in the water or dig in the sand or buy hot dogs or hike the trails near the water. I love it all. It's a life I couldn't know I was choosing all those years ago. It's a life I wouldn't trade.

So much can change in an hour

Sometimes it's hard to know how to dress for a walk at this time of year. Late April in the Pacific Northwest is often gorgeous, with bright blue skies and soft breezes, but it's been a cold and dry spring; sometimes sunny days hide a biting wind. Last week I thought the afternoon was warm enough for a thin, long-sleeved shirt and I shivered through the first two miles. A few days later I wore a t-shirt and a hoodie and wound up with sweat trickling down my back before tying the hoodie around my waist and arriving back home with a sunburn.

This morning, I taught through a drizzle that turned to rain. My classroom door was propped open, because it always is; the district has provided air purifiers to classrooms, but my broken window is still broken and my unventilated building is still full of mold. I'd likely have left my door open, COVID or no COVID, because I like fresh air and I love the smell of spring. 

(I've missed the sound of a steady spring rain outside my classroom door, singing across the tops of the covered walkways. I won't miss the broken concrete sidewalks when we move into our new building in the fall, but I will miss the sound of rain.)

The rain tapered off throughout the morning. When Suzannah I arrived at home before lunch it had stopped completely, and by the time I'd signed out of afternoon office hours the sun was peeking through the clouds. My son went outside to blow bubbles; Suzannah bounced a basketball in the driveway. I shut down my laptop, put it away, changed my clothes and pulled my hair into a ponytail, and headed outside to walk the streets of my neighborhood like I've done almost every single day since March of 2020.

And I was cold at first. Five minutes into my walk I have the choice to walk down the hill to the edge of the water or up the hill for more panoramic views that take me through the streets overlooking Puget Sound. Both are lovely, but I chose to walk uphill, away from the wind, and soon I found myself sweating as the clouds dissipated. The water was a brilliant blue, and everything was blooming. I wished I'd brought sunglasses.

I turned on to a shaded side street, and this time I relished the cool breeze.

So much can change in an hour. In a month. In a year.

*

This is what our mornings look like now: 

I wake up early, like I always do, but instead of reading on the couch in the pre-dawn light before my family rises, I shower and dress right away. I put on jeans instead of lounge pants underneath my shirt. I do not drink coffee at the dining room table while I prep for the day; I don't drink coffee at all, actually, unless I pull through my favorite coffee stand on the way home before lunch. Which I do. Partly because I love coffee, even if I have to wait until after ten o'clock in the morning to drink it, and partly because I miss the familiarity of that routine. This week I pulled up to the window and the barista cried, "You're back!" And she still knows my order, even after all this time.

My daughter is also an early riser, so there are no morning battles. She gets herself up, dressed, and fed, and the two of us are ready to leave the house an hour before she can check in for her daily health attestation. This is the life of a teacher's kid. We drive to school together and she hangs out in my classroom with me until it's time for her to check in, pick up her laptop for the day, and head to class.

I didn't expect that we'd be back in the building this year, because COVID continues to spread, school districts continue to be less than transparent about reporting, and we continue to learn. But here we are. We have two classes on campus in the morning, followed by an hour break for lunch and travel time, and two classes in the afternoon. On Thursdays and Fridays, we switch. Each class meets on campus twice a week, for those students who have chosen the hybrid model. Teachers manage both at the same time. Or we try. Two weeks in, and I'm still spinning. How can I make everyone feel included? How can I teach in-person from behind a desk, six feet away? How can I teach sitting down, through a screen? How can I do both, at once, and let them all know they matter? I have never been a teacher who sits while she teaches. Teaching energizes me; it calls me outside of myself. Forcing that energy through a screen, or through a mask from a distance, feels impossible.

But it also brings me life, even now. Because the alternative is -- what? Not teaching?

*

We made it three whole days into Hybrid before we had to quarantine a few classes due to a positive COVID case on campus. And I know perfectly well how many "friends" on social media think that quarantining, at this point, is an overreaction, and masks are merely "virtue signaling." I wonder how many of those folks have sat with a student (even virtually) who lost a grandparent -- or a parent -- to COVID. (For the record, I can't think of anyone even semi-close to me who has died from the flu, and certainly not multiple people. Just saying. For those of you who keep saying it's no worse, no different than the flu.) I wonder how many of those folks have lost a friend, or worried about a child. I wonder how many of those folks actually care about anyone other than themselves and their -- rights? Is that really the word we're using? Is this toxic individualism, or is it ignorance? Does it matter?

My son is still fully remote and will be through the end of the year. He isn't "muzzled" (and if you've used that word to describe children wearing masks, you're an asshole). He's thriving with his absolutely wonderful teacher and his classmates, and he -- as an eleven-year-old -- understands that sometimes we make sacrifices to keep other people safe. I wish more adults did.

My son also went into sudden and total kidney failure when he was little and we spent some time at Mary Bridge Children's Hospital. He has a clean bill of health now, but since we're seeing a lot of "oh, well, they had an underlying condition" comments regarding kids and COVID, you'd best believe I am not fucking around with that. You'd also best believe that if you're one of the folks who says, "If you're scared, YOU stay home!" then I think you're the very worst of humanity. (If we're friends on social media, I literally have no idea why. I keep saying this, and folks keep not believing me.)

As a teacher called back to the classroom -- a place I belong -- I understand exactly why our kids need to be back in school. I do not understand folks who are outraged about sending their kids to school in masks. Look, none of us love them (though they are nice when it's freezing outside, or when one has a zit on one's chin), but decent human beings understand that being uncomfortable sometimes is the very smallest price to pay for someone's life, or even for someone's well-being. Unless you're an asshole.

*

Years of journals reveal that I always think that May is the worst month to be a teacher. This is from 2017:

There is something about this time of year that I love, even when it's hard, even when I say (and mean) that May is the worst month to be a teacher, so far from the romance of September. Everyone is so done. But also, the promise of summer, of long, languid afternoons spent sprawled on the patio with a book and a glass of iced tea while the kids run through the sprinkler -- it's still just around the corner, far enough away that I'm not yet afraid of it slipping through my fingers. The anticipation is delicious, and it's just close enough.

Even in a Pandemic Year. There is something about this time of year that is awfully sweet, despite everything. And in this Pandemic Year, something about being back on campus after a full year away is more than that. Maybe it's everything. And for six weeks, I can do anything. 

And it is not lost on me that I am lucky to teach exactly where I am. That I am lucky enough to raise my kids in this community.

*

Teaching, right now, feels a bit like going on long walks in late spring, in a strange year. I never really know what to wear. I'm freezing, and then I'm dripping sweat down my back. I pass a lot of friendly neighbors, folks I feel I've gotten to know over the past year. I know who walks their dog early in the morning, who jogs, who takes ambling afternoon walks, who mows their lawn on Wednesdays instead of Saturdays. And then there's the glaring man in the house that, until a few weeks after the storming of the Capitol, displayed a huge "NO MORE BULLSHIT, TRUMP 2020" flag that covered half his siding. In February, he replaced the flag with what looks like a tiny Trump bumper sticker in his window, but he still stands in his yard, smoking a cigar and glaring.

A year ago, I couldn't have imagined this. A year ago, I couldn't process the possibility that we wouldn't be back in school September. I couldn't imagine my fourth grade son not setting foot inside a classroom before middle school; I mourned my little girl's lost freshman year. 

I roll with it, as well as I can. If the last year has taught me anything, it is that the world happens to all of us, and all things considered, we are senselessly privileged. I can't control the anti-mask assholes; I can't control much of anything, really. But I can try my damndest to advocate for and protect my family. I can try my damndest to serve my students, knowing full well that I can't give them enough of what they need.

I have no idea how to effectively use multiple screens, cameras, or any other tricks to engage both in-person and remote learners at the same time and make them realize that they are a class and a community, together. I can only hope that the energy I try to project shows them that they matter. 

We have six weeks left. In a Pandemic Year, that's enough for teachers to admit that they're exhausted and done, and the same is true for our kids. But the pandemic isn't their fault, either, and they still deserve our best.

And to be clear: that doesn't mean our best teaching, because that isn't possible in this context. But maybe we can give something else. Maybe we can extend grace to our kids, and to each other. Maybe we can hang on to the reasons we're here to begin with. Maybe we can take what we've learned from this year and make ourselves better. I need to believe that all is not lost.

*

I walked and walked after school today, trying to clear my head through sunshine and clouds, spatters of rain and fresh breezes. I was chilled, and then I was too hot. I waved at friendly faces and ignored the one who wasn't. 

The air smelled like heaven.

Hope, or something like it

The other night I was clearing out my medicine cabinet, getting rid of long-expired cold medicine, separated nail polish I haven't worn in a decade, things like that. A small container of muscle relaxers caught my eye. They expire tomorrow, a year after they were prescribed.

Isaac and I were driving home from his dentist appointment on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon last March when an older woman slammed into us from behind. We were completely stopped behind another car at a red light; she didn't even slow down. When she rear-ended us, our car slammed into the car in front of us.

Isaac didn't see it coming, and while he was terrified by the crash, the sickening metal crunch -- we both screamed -- he was perfectly fine afterwards, both immediately and in the days that followed. Our CR-V was only three years old, well designed to protect its occupants in a crash even when the car itself was a total loss, and his limber young body was relaxed when the car hit; he didn't see it coming.

I did see it coming, unlike everything else that would unfold over the coming days, weeks, months. I saw her speeding toward us in my rearview mirror, saw her not slowing. I couldn't do anything to avoid what I suddenly understood would happen, and my entire body braced for the impact. The next day I left school early with a terrible headache and a stiff neck and took myself to the doctor for X-rays. They came back okay, but the doctor recommended an appointment with a physical therapist.

I remember sitting in the waiting room with exactly one other patient, a flushed and lethargic woman who kept coughing weakly, her head dropping. She sat near the door; I sat as far away from her as I physically could. In early March, we weren't wearing masks yet.

*

That night I swallowed one of those muscle-relaxers before drifting into an uneasy sleep. 

I knew things were changing, but forty-eight hours earlier I was only beginning to adjust to the idea of holding student-led conferences by phone instead of flooding the school with families for three days. The next day, we learned that schools would be closed for six weeks. We had twenty-four hours to process this, and one day to gather up what we could and say good-bye to our students.

It's been nearly a year since I hugged one of my kids in D-7.

That last Friday, I expected our classes to be empty, but almost all of my students showed up.

“What about our assignments that are due this month?” 

“What about IB testing? Does that still start at the same time?"

“Are we really closed for six weeks? What about graduation?”

I couldn’t require my students to work during the break, or assign anything for grading. An issue of access and equity, we were told. I thought of my students who would be caring for younger siblings, who only had internet access at the public library—which, I was sure, would close as well. I thought about my students who would work extra shifts now, to earn money or to escape or both.

“None of us are going through this alone, even though it’s going to be hard to be apart," I said. "We’ll still figure it out together. I’m not really going anywhere. I’m going to check my e-mail at least once a day, and I promise I’ll respond to you. I’ll post ways to practice for the exams and we can have online discussions. It’s totally optional, so if you can’t do it don’t worry about it.”

They nodded.

“Try to get outside if you can,” I said. “Don’t stare at your phones all day. Clean your backpacks. Clean your rooms. Read! Read something that’s not for my class! Borrow one of my books!” I pointed at the bookshelf along the wall.

“Wait, we can borrow those?” asked one of my kids.

“What do you mean, can you borrow those? Why do you think I have them here? They’re not decorations, Babies. If you don’t borrow them, they’re just going to sit there.”

“I’ve borrowed tons of Winslow’s books!” said another. “I think I still have a couple, actually.”

“What do you think I’d like? Can you recommend something?”

I walked towards the bookshelf and they jumped up to follow me like little ducklings. When I pulled On the Come Up by Angie Thomas from the shelf and tried to hand it to one of them, her friend grabbed it before I had a chance.

“I’ve been waiting for this! Mine! I get this one!”

“Bro, what the hell."

“You can have it when I’m done. I’ll probably finish it, like, by Sunday."

“I beg and beg and beg you all to read,” I muttered. “And you do not read. And now look.” But I didn’t hide my smile.

At the end of class, I said, “You all drive me crazy. But you have no idea how much I’m going to miss you.” As I said that, I felt a sudden rush of tears to my eyes. 

I calculated quickly: if we returned in six weeks, I’d have two or three classes before they began their IB testing in May. My time with them as I had known it for the past two years had come to a sudden end, no matter what lay ahead.

They lingered after the bell, leaving slowly. Most of them stood in my doorway, waving.

“You have to go to French,” I said. “You have to go to history.”

(I didn't let the tears fall; I try to reserve that for my last day with my seniors, if it comes to that, because kids are burdened by enough without having to deal with a teacher's tears, and it felt like an important time not to fall apart. But I didn't know it was, in fact, my last day with my seniors.)

One of them turned back suddenly and threw her arms around me. By then, we weren't supposed to touch each other. But in the end, I couldn’t turn away from these kids, not with so much looming unknown. A year later, knowing what I know now, I'm so desperately glad for that last hug.

*

There are few folks I want to talk to these days who aren't my students or other teachers, frankly. I'm tired of the headlines pitting parents against teachers (what about those of us who are both?). I'm tired of the vitriol from folks who claim teachers are making excuses not to return to work.

Another teacher friend expressed a familiar sadness: friends she had always thought of as like-minded kindreds suddenly had plenty of things to say about teachers and returning to schools. Once, I tried to argue back -- yes, some schools can do it safely. But I hope my last post made it clear that not all of us can, and not before we're vaccinated. 

If you think I wouldn't give anything to be back in the classroom with the kids I know and love, already accepting the reality that I would take a bullet for them, then you don't think much of me as a teacher. Please don't consume the stories of my students for your entertainment, or to feel good. Please don't imply that I am looking for an excuse not to be with them (as our oblivious, dismissive, and tone-deaf governor has), or that I think you don't work hard too. Otherwise we know why you want us back and it has little to do with the kids.

(That said, I am so thankful for my friends who have reached out with kindness and solidarity. Please believe it matters. This has been one of the most demoralizing years I've experienced in a twenty-year career.)

Still, there are moments of magic. There are moments of joy, every week. I deeply appreciate my community, I love my students and my colleagues, and the work is worth it. I won't leave the work because it is hard right now; this isn't my time to go. I almost left teaching once, and I'm not in that place now. (But damn, have I struggled this year. I'm also a seasoned teacher who has had enough therapy and experience to understand that the world happens to all of us and still believe that I am where I'm supposed to be. I have the support and access to resources to take care of myself. Even in this struggle, I am senselessly privileged.)

*

I received my first dose of the COVID vaccine on Sunday morning. Because I write about everything all the time, I know that date fell exactly one year after the last time we dined inside a restaurant, which is? was? something we enjoy and miss. I'm looking forward to sliding into one of the cozy wood booths at the Elliott Bay Brewery with my family again. In the meantime, ordering takeout is not a burden, and I'm glad to support our favorite restaurants each week.

On Sunday I drove across the tide flats in the early morning light, parked on a quiet street, and walked into a building next to Tacoma General. I took a seat, answered some questions, accepted some papers. Vaccine information. Call this number if.

I scanned the room: lots of teachers. A few older couples who had come in together. I listened in on everyone's conversations, because I'm always curious. Teachers were there from so many districts. What do you teach? Oh, that's my son's grade! He's doing okay, but he misses his friends so much. It's just hard, you know?

We know.

The nurse who handed me my Vaccine Fact Sheet was beaming.

"I'm so, so happy we're getting so many teachers!" she said. "Our kids need to be back in school, but not until it's safe for everyone."

I nodded. "We know."

*

I drove home, the morning still quiet, the sky still lovely.

I felt something like jet lag before lunch. I thought I'd curl up for a nap in the quiet afternoon, but the fatigue wore off before then. I napped for an hour anyway. I felt fairly energetic for the rest of the day. By dinnertime, my arm was sore and I slept restlessly on Sunday night, but after a hot shower the next morning, I felt perfectly normal.

I took a long walk on Saturday morning, and I saw the first buds of spring on a tree along a quiet street. 

It is cherry blossom season again. 

Yesterday, I saw more of them. Soon, the cherry blossoms will flutter over the sidewalk and land in my hair. I'll reach up to touch them when I walk underneath their fluffy canopy. I've written about cherry blossoms in this space every year, I think, and who can blame me? I love the language of trees in any season, but cherry blossoms are about waking up. Last year, even as the world shut down, the cherry blossoms in the spring air were a reminder to stay awake and present in the only life I have.

I'm grateful to be here.

Because this is too much for a Facebook post

It's Monday evening, and my house is blessedly quiet. Suzannah is hunkered down in her room (because teenager), Isaac is in the family room with the iPad and his giant Lego organization project, and Matt is at Trader Joe's buying everything we might need for the dinners I have not planned yet for this week because that part of my brain stopped working sometime last Friday. I finished up my fourth day of remote professional development, promptly headed outside with Isaac for some biking (him) and jogging (me), came home and soaked in a bubble bath for a bit, and now...here I am. Just breathing. Just being.

To say I'm overwhelmed is just the most hilarious understatement of all time, but I am also grateful. I am also okay right now.

Friday was hard, and I stumbled into the weekend feeling exhausted and disheartened, my brain on a hamster wheel I couldn't quiet. There are so many unknowns. It's hard for me to begin a year feeling so unmoored, so unsure of what I'm doing. Back-to-school planning in August is something that usually fills me with so much joy, because I love this stuff! So much! I'm lucky to have the trust and relative freedom to teach my passion. I'm lucky to have a classroom space that feels like another home, falling-down moldy old building and all. One of the heartbreaking things about this pandemic is wondering if I taught my last class in my room back in March. Our new school is slated to open one year from now, and I'm sure it will be beautiful, but my classroom has held so much of my heart, and so many others' hearts. Hearts have been broken and put back together there and I feel it every time I walk inside. One of my favorite things about August is the quiet afternoons spent planning there, just sitting in that space. I'm still spending some time in that space this month, planning and writing and thinking, but it's different. The quiet isn't as cozy; somehow it's just a little nervous all the time.

I know what I need to teach, and the context doesn't diminish my passion for it. It's the "how" I'm still trying to wrap my brain around. But I keep reminding myself that we're all in this together, that we're all figuring out the how. And I really sat down here to write about that, I guess. I opened up this blog and found a draft of an entry I started a week or two ago, but what I started to write that evening isn't want I want to write tonight.

Tonight I'm not writing to convince my non-teacher friends that I deserve my paycheck. I'm not writing to my friends who think their children will fall behind (behind what, exactly?) in a remote public school setting, or who are frustrated because we can't give them what they think they need, which, I'm sorry to say, isn't possible in a pandemic. Those folks can just stop reading here and have a nice evening.

Tonight I'm writing to and for my colleagues. I'm writing to say: Thank you. Thank you for reminding me why I love where I work, that I'm not in this alone, that we take care of each other. Thank you for reminding me that the what and the why matters more than ever, and we will figure out the how together.

Thank you for reminding me that building authentic connections is not only possible but essential. We can still do that, and I truly believe that we will be creative and intentional in new and amazing ways this year.

 Thank you for your willingness to be vulnerable, for your fierce love of our kids and your fierce support of each other. 

Thank you for reassuring my terrified mama heart. My daughter is starting ninth grade in a new school while her friends head to a different one, and the thought of her trying to make connections with other kids over a computer screen breaks my heart a bit but not completely, because I am trusting her with the best of the best. I truly believe that she'll gain as much--if not more--than she'll lose. Thank you in advance for loving my girl. It has been my prayer, every single September of her school-aged life, that her teachers will love her like I do. Today we all posted little videos to introduce ourselves to our students, and when I mentioned this to my daughter, she was so excited to see her teachers. I watched some of the videos myself, and it reinforced my deeply-held belief that I work with the most phenomenal folks. It is no small thing to trust a school with your children, and when parents get a little crazy at me sometimes it helps to remember that. Thank you to my friends, my colleagues, for making that an easy choice for this mama, and apologies in advance if I ever get a little crazy. I'm lucky you already know me enough, probably, to anticipate that anyway (and please don't hold it against my girl, who is probably far more level-headed than her mother. She's a good girl).

While Friday found me disheartened, anxious, and exhausted, Monday afternoon left me literally weeping with gratitude, right there on the Zoom screen. I don't think that's ever happened at PD, but there you go, and I wasn't alone. I'm still so overwhelmed, and it's easy to start to panic if I look beyond the exact moment I'm in. To feel like I'm floundering after so many years of trusting that this is what I was born to do is a scary place to sit, but somewhere in all of this there are life rafts that not only pull me to safety but offer me a blanket, a glass of wine, a shared knowing glance, some real belly laughs, and the belief that even in this strange context, I am deeply privileged to be exactly where I am.

Just Enough Light

Mornings are like this, now: I wake early, like I always have. I tell people I haven’t needed an alarm since my daughter was born nearly fourteen years ago, and this is true, but these days my children can pour their own cereal in the mornings and I lie in bed until my alarm goes off.

Or I did. There’s no need for an alarm anymore--not until September. I wake up just before the first light, and I curl my toes and stretch my calves under the bedsheet, having thrown off the heavier cover in the night. My husband dozes beside me. He’ll rise soon and go to work, but that looks different these days. Instead of rushing through brewing the coffee while he showers, he starts the coffee and shuffles into the study, where he begins his workday. He’ll brush his teeth later, after we’ve both drained the pot.

I slip out of bed before anyone else is up. In the living room, I raise the blinds on the large window facing the front yard. I curl up on the couch and just look out the window for awhile, gazing out at the quiet street or up through the branches of our huge tree as the sky lightens. Soon I hear my son’s bedroom door open, and he pads across the hardwood floor in bare feet, his hair wild, his eyes still sleepy. He allows me to wrap him in a hug and he kisses my cheek, a reflex I know he’ll lose soon enough, so I savor even his morning breath as I press my face against his. He pours himself a bowl of cereal or toasts a bagel, slathering the warm halves with butter. He eats at the dining room table while I allow myself to read the news for ten minutes or so before I slip back into the bedroom to change.

In April, even at this early hour, there is enough light to read by.

***

The news we were all expecting came on the Monday afternoon of what was supposed to be our Spring Break, just as I was swimming up from the depths of a depressed nap. Governor Inslee announced in a special press conference that schools would be closed through the end of the academic school year.

Three weeks earlier, on the Friday night of the first closure--the one that had us out for six weeks--one of my friends posted on Facebook: My teacher friends think it’ll be for the rest of the year. I couldn’t even begin to process the possibility. That day I believed I would still be able to meet my friends for lunch after we had practiced appropriate physical distancing for two weeks. I couldn’t have just said good-bye to my seniors. I couldn’t have walked to my car on that chilly Friday afternoon, thin snowflakes falling over the budding cherry blossoms, believing that was our last day.

***

I recognize situational depression for what it is, and I understand that this is different from trying to talk myself out of depression when my life, as it stands, is exactly the one I want. All the same, I find myself sliding into a strange and anxious inertia, which is how depression has always manifested for me. During the second or third week---I’ve lost track---I curled up on the couch after lunch for “just a quick power nap.” I asked my son to wake me after an hour if I wasn’t up already. The third or fourth time he hovered over me at the one-hour mark, I thought I detected a hint of worry behind his impish grin; Mama naps on Sunday afternoons, but rarely any other time. The next afternoon he asked, “Are you going to take a nap today?” And I said, “Nope, not today. Let’s take bikes over to the school.” He really just wanted to play Brawl Stars on the iPad, but more than that, he wanted me up and awake.

I need to be outside as much as possible, though even this becomes a source of guilt: I wouldn’t be walking all these miles under the cherry blossoms, under the trees bursting into bloom, if I were in my classroom. I feel guilty for savoring this gift. At the same time, I have begun to understand that maybe it’s gift and also a necessity, both. For a long time now I’ve managed my unsettled brain more or less quietly and on my own, and I’ve learned what I need in order to do that. And mostly it works.

It’s mostly working now, I suppose. I do try to extend myself that small grace.

***

Many of my colleagues began hosting Zoom class meetings immediately and are finding creative ways to engage with both their students and our staff, our colleagues and friends, and it both fills me with such pride--to work with, to learn from these incredibly dedicated folks--and a deep, unnameable grief. I miss my students so much, and I feel in no way adequate to engage with them in ways that matter. I certainly don’t feel like my efforts are worth posting on on social media. (I know--I do know--that social media is no way to measure self-worth, or competence, or anything at all that matters. Social media lies like depression does.)

I feel strangely detached from my teacher-self, the one that feels at home in a classroom. I don’t know how to navigate this territory as a teacher, or as a professional colleague. There is no feedback, no authentic human interaction that comes from just sharing space. Even meeting someone’s eyes in the hallway when you greet them in passing carries a significance I didn’t grasp until now, when everything happens through a screen.

I am lonelier than I would have imagined, so I should jump at chances to socialize online like a normal person, even though I’m no good at that either, online or in real life, even though I keep telling myself that this is the week I will try. The more days that pass in this way, the harder it becomes. I say that not to evoke pity--I am an introvert, and most of the time I am desperate to escape social gatherings so I can stay home and read my book, unless it’s a small group of friends who don’t need small talk, and who don’t make me feel like I need to measure anything on social media. These days I communicate with these friends mostly via texting or Facetime or Marco Polo, the app that allows you to send short videos back and forth. Like texting, but with a face. But I’m still lonely. I don’t know how to fix this. How to fix myself.

***

On our very first evening home after schools closed, my daughter made herself a detailed to-do list and a weekly running log.

“This is my homework for Conditioning,” she explained, as she used a ruler to section her paper into symmetrical boxes, complete with a space for a parent’s signature. “We’re supposed to run three times a week.”

We have our routines. Every day the kids read for an hour or more, though not usually all at once. They’re used to time set aside both at school and at home, and this is a thing I haven’t had to fight. I don’t know what they’re reading; I don’t keep track, and I don’t care at all whether they are reading books that are at their appropriate level. I don’t have them log their minutes or write anything down. We all just read. If my son wants to curl up on the recliner and reread Calvin & Hobbes, I don’t care. If my daughter wants to swing between comfort-reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid and a novel she slides off my shelf, I’m entirely fine with that.

I entered this period of quarantine with the idea that I would read everything on my list, everything I bought at Powell’s and the Elliott Bay Book Company for my birthday in February. I would write every single day.

And I do. I write, and I read, because it is the only way I know how to be in the in world. The only way I know how to connect, or to understand what I feel. But it is not the voracious, hungry reading I do when I feel the pulsing rhythm of my life and the necessity of reading to make sense of it all. Reading, for me, is not entertainment or escape; it is a way of understanding, of being. Only now I feel adrift, purposeless, unmoored. I want my reading to ground me, and I can barely focus. I think about what I said to my students on our last day together, my cheerful “You’ve got nothing but time!” What did I know?

I haven’t done a great deal to manage my children’s “distance learning.” Or whatever it is we’re calling it. They take turns at my old laptop, the one I’ve set aside for this very purpose. They practice typing. They work on math. My daughter reads the e-mails her teachers sends; she watches the videos and she she dutifully works on the packet the district sent home the second week, to tide us over until we can figure out which students need access to technology.

“The packet is boring, though,” she says. I don’t contradict her. This isn’t what education is supposed to look like. My daughter can “demonstrate mastery” of a standard or skill to satisfy a requirement, and it means absolutely nothing without human connection. I didn’t become a teacher to help my students check off standards and skills from a list of things that will eventually lead them to a diploma; I have to believe it means more than that. I have to believe that the purpose of education still includes engaging people in their world, so they can participate in changing it for the better. So how do I respond to the e-mails from my students who ask, “If this isn’t graded, do I have to do it?”

I was going to wait to tell my kids. I had to think about it first. My daughter is in eighth grade, and next year she won’t be following most of her friends to our feeder high school; she’ll be attending the school where I teach. That means this is it. There will be no more band concerts with the director who brought her out of herself to be a force on a trumpet. No more field trips, music contests, or lunchtime banter.

But my daughter walked into the kitchen while I wiped tears from my eyes.

“What is it?”

So I had to tell her. She wrapped her arms around my waist and tucked her head underneath my chin. She has to bend down slightly to do that now.

Later she threw a fistful of crumpled papers into the recycle bin.

“What’s that, Bug?”

“My conditioning log and my reading log. It’s not like it matters anymore.”

***

In the meantime, I have become someone who walks, every day. Every morning, I slip out of the house before my husband and daughter are awake. I walk the cool, quiet streets, zipping my hoodie against the chill, and I feel a strange and overwhelming gratitude: for these views of Puget Sound, the mountains rising beyond the water. For the scent of spring. The budding trees, and the very last of the cherry blossoms drifting in the morning breeze and collecting in soft pink piles at my feet. I think this walking is what will save me. This is what keeps me moving and breathing and grateful to witness the world coming to life around me, bursting into bloom.

Never believe I don’t understand how senselessly privileged I am.

***

Last Tuesday night, April’s full moon--a pink supermoon, the first full moon of spring--rose above our city. I woke in the middle of the night and parted the blinds to gaze across our backyard. I wondered who else might be awake at that hour. The silence in our neighborhood at that hour is deep; some leave porch lights on all night, but I couldn’t hear even a passing car in the distance. Still, I suspected that the silent sky covers other restless sleepers, kept awake by their own churning anxieties. All the same, even this pre-dawn glow offers a different glimpse of a world I’m still learning, and that, too, seems like a gift. The kids’ swingset cast a shadow across the grass, and it seemed like almost enough light to read by.

Where I Am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Turning 40

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

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

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

That was eighteen years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Let none of us complain about growing older.

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

I am every age I've ever been.

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

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

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

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

I am every age I've ever been.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything a heart can hold

I think this is the longest I've ever gone without writing here in over a decade. I've written my stories in other places this summer...

...but I'm back now. It feels like time: the first real weekend I've had since school started. Has it only been two weeks? Was it only two weeks ago that we took the light rail to Seattle and the ferry to Bainbridge Island on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend? Was it only two weeks ago that we swam in Colman Pool at the edge of Puget Sound in West Seattle? That seems like another season already. We always say summer passes too quickly, but as a teacher, I'm always ready to go back to school, ready for the structure, for the natural rhythm of the seasons.

Our summer travels seem like they happened so long ago. Less than a week after we returned home from Minnesota, we drove to Montana to spend a few days in Bozeman and then headed for Glacier National Park. For the past several summers, this has been essential: I don't care what else we do as long as my heart can return to its roots and I can breathe the air south of Bozeman, or at a campsite in Apgar. These are the places that feed my soul and bring it home.

I wrote in my journal all summer, trying to capture the "hard kernels of memory" one of my best college professors spoke about on our May Seminar in Europe the summer I fell in love with Matt. I have a journal full of those. These are my hard kernels of memory from Montana:

5 p.m. Back at Zocalo, post swim. Kids with my mom, Matt at a brewery he wanted to check out. The sky darkened while we swam but only now decided to release spatters of rain. These sudden summer storms never show up in the weather forecast, it seems, but I love them. Thunder and lightning are muted in the Pacific Northwest--the thunder doesn't shake, lightning doesn't split the sky.

I bought Tin Man, Poems Across the Big Sky II, and Lowell Jaeger's latest collection: Earth-Blood and Starshine.

Now the rain pounds the streets. It's the sweetest music. The door to the coffee shop is open, the air steamy.

*

We visited my grandmother yesterday. She is significantly more frail than she was last time I saw her, but when she hugged me good-bye she gripped me tight. She had a plate of half-eaten pizza next to her chair and accepted one of my mother's cookies. Drank two cups of coffee. When one of her young caregivers stopped by to check on her she beamed, even though when he asked her how she was feeling she said, "Lousy, like always." But this is not a woman who will slip away this week, even though I know she has just wanted to go and be with Jesus since I don't know how long ago. Feels like half my life or more.

But I still don't think I'll see her again in this life.

"You'll always be my precious," she said into my ear -- she's said these words to me for my entire life. "I love you so much."

*

Leaving Bozeman is easier when we're heading to Glacier. Cold Smoke coffee on the way out of town. Lunch at MacKenzie River Pizza in Missoula, a stop at Rosauer's in Kalispell. Pulling into the park past 6:30. Run down to the lake. Breathe deeply. I miss the air as much as anything. Dinner at Eddie's: Huckleberry Reisling and trout almondine. Back to the KOA for the night -- tucked the kids into bunks and sat out under the porch light, drinking beer with my husband and reading A Gentleman in Moscow. Thursday: Up early to secure a campsite. I walked into Apgar while Matt set up camp, ordered a coffee and a hot water for the fancy instant oatmeal with turmeric and coconut. I scooped the steaming spoonfuls at a table just outside the Cedar Tree.

We made sandwiches at the campsite, skipped the long line for the shuttle to Logan Pass, and drove the Going-to-the-Sun road. Hot sun over snow on the trail to the Hidden Lake overlook -- Matt and Zannah went all the way, but Isaac and I turned back, slipping over the slush on the way down, sliding snowballs down the backs of each other's shirts, shrieking and laughing.

Spotted: moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats. No bears this time. (My dad found bear scat in their yard not long ago. I said, "I want to see a bear this trip." He said, "Well, then, slather yourself with honey and wait.")

Lake McDonald was colder this year after such massive snow-melt, but I swam anyway. Until I was too numb to keep swimming. Dinner at the campsite: hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, S'mores, Huckleberry Honey Ale. And then my sleeping pad deflated in the night. I don't know if that woke me or if my stomach did. I was violently sick in the camp bathroom, hoping I didn't wake anyone even as I could hear a man snoring raucously somewhere out in the darkness. I couldn't sleep after that, feeling every rock on the ground, but I felt better in the morning. I ate one of Matt's pancakes and sipped coffee, slowly. After hiking John's Lake Loop we played in the lake all afternoon, renting kayaks and a paddle board. I tried to nap in our tent after my night of fractured sleep, but the trapped afternoon heat turned it into a sauna. I found refuge in the lake instead, and slept much more peacefully the second night.

The rest of the summer was exactly what I wanted: afternoons spent in my backyard while my kids rode bikes or played with the hose or the Slip 'n Slide. I read books on the patio and sipped iced tea. We slathered ourselves with sunscreen and spent hours at the splash park. We grilled salmon and sweet corn and ate outside. I've never craved travel during the summer months; unless we're driving to Montana, I want to stay exactly where we are. I love the way time slows down. I love the languid afternoons. I love noticing the way the water catches the light as the sprinkler rises over the lawn and my son kicks through the arc of water as he pumps his legs on our backyard swingset. My children whine about being bored and I say, "This is a privilege of childhood. Figure it out. No, you may not play on the iPad." They play board games until they're screaming at each other. They bike to the elementary school playground. They play in the water. (When I am cranky, it almost always works to put me in water.) My children grow tall and tan.

*

I went back to school early this year. When I discovered that my carpets had been shampooed the first week in August, I couldn't resist the urge to spend a sweaty afternoon setting up and cleaning several weeks before my students returned. I scrubbed desks and touched up walls I wasn't technically allowed to paint in the first place, but since our old, moldy school that's literally sinking into its foundations will be torn down and rebuilt in the next three years no one has bothered to scold me. And despite the mold, and the relentless ant problem, and the uneven sidewalks and the old carpets that never really get clean no matter how many times they're shampooed, I love my classroom so much. It's home, too. The kids spent hours with me there in August, as they do every year. They expect this; they are Teacher's Kids. They know their way around my high school in summer. They know the dark hallways and damp carpets. They see the chaos of registration when they hunker down in the corner of the cafeteria with their books and movies and games.

I do better when I can reclaim my space and spend some quiet hours planning there before the frenetic last week of August. Especially this year. My heart was thoroughly battered last June for reasons I can't even write about here, and on top of that the class of 2018 had the nerve to up and graduate and leave me after I taught them all for at least two years. I said to Carol, the IB Diploma Program coordinator/person who actually keeps our school running and who is essentially my mom at school, "I'm quitting this stupid job. I'm going to apply at COSTCO this summer. I need a job that I don't have to emotionally invest in. Teaching just ruins my life." I probably stomped my foot, too. She didn't even look up from what she was doing; she just flapped her hand at me and said, "You'd make a job at Costco emotionally demanding too, so you might as well just stay here."

So I'm back. And it's home.

*

My grandmother died the week before school started, early in the morning on a day I was helping to lead professional development for our school and our two feeder middle schools. I learned about it as I was getting ready to head out the door. I was expecting it; even so, I went back into the bathroom and cried quietly, so I didn't wake my sleeping family. Within the hour I was standing in front of a crowd of teachers with a microphone, trying to compartmentalize and, I think, mostly succeeding. I took a few breaks to walk around campus alone, blinking back tears. I couldn't even articulate what I was feeling. Families are complicated, and I have a lot of complicated feelings. But in the end, love transcends that.

My grandpa died ten years ago; four years before that, I heard his voice for the last time before his vocal chords were removed, the result of throat cancer. Your fingerprints are all over my life, I wrote to him. It occurs to me that this is true for my grandmother as well.

The parallels are eerie; my grandfather died over Labor Day weekend. My grandmother died almost exactly ten years later, within two days. Both times, I taught my first classes of the year for three days before hopping a late-night flight to Great Falls, in time to make a Saturday morning funeral. One week ago, I drove home from school, threw clothes into a suitcase, and went for a jog to clear my head. Soaked in a lavender-scented bath. Went out for dinner with my family. They dropped me off at the airport and somehow I'd checked my luggage and made it through security in ten minutes. I spent an hour sipping a glass of wine and reading a novel before boarding a late-night flight to Montana, where I slept for four hours in a hotel near the airport. In the morning, my brother and sister and nephew and mother piled into one car, and I drove with my dad through quiet morning on a road I've known since birth. We saw antelope in the fields along the Chester road. I wrote this when Suzannah was just over a year old, when we drove north to visit my grandparents:

There really is no sky like the Montana sky, even in other wide-open states. I can't explain it. The drive between Fort Benton and Chester is like breathing deeply for the first time -- your lungs expand and fill with air you didn't know you could hold.

"Wow," Matt kept saying. "This is just...huge." But it's really a struggle to find a word to attach to it. The evening sun lit the fields against the distant Highwood Mountains. We braked for pheasants, for a new spotted fawn. I lost track of time, my age, of what car I was even driving. I just kept breathing, clinging to the thought that at least some things never really change.

My grandmother was buried next to my grandfather. I'd last seen my grandfather alive in August that year, kissed his bruised arms and scrawled notes on the little pad he kept with him before driving west on highway 2 into the late summer heat. By the time I returned for his funeral a few weeks later, the weather had turned; clouds gathered over the Bears Paw mountains and rain spattered the roads. The sky at the gravesite last weekend was hazy, the air hot and slightly smoky. All of August, we've choked on smoke from wildfires as we continue to incinerate our planet.

But when I stepped out of the car with my dad at the church in Gildford, the first thing I did was take a breath: I could still smell the scent of harvest on the hi-line. And that smell, woven into my very DNA, is home.

And now I'm back in Washington, doing what I do, taking my kids to school and Tae Kwon Do and soccer. Zannah is in jazz band. She's almost as tall as I am. The kids compete in their first Tae Kwon Do tournament next month. Life rolls on. My 2018 seniors visit; I get to have lunch with them, or they burst into my classroom before they head to college. And my heart bursts in some way basically all day long, every day. This is life. This is the life I am senselessly privileged to have.

Tonight I'm home with my family. We let the kids stay up too late on Fridays, but Friday is Family Movie Night on normal school weeks. We put on pajamas as soon as we can, and we eat fun things (either takeout or whatever looks good and easy at Trader Joe's), and we watch something, who even cares what, and everyone is silly, and we fall asleep knowing that tomorrow we have a soccer game but we do not have to set an alarm, and we'll have time to make pancakes and Matt and I will sip extra cups of coffee, hoping to read on the couch but knowing the kids will fill up the house with their noise.

Here's a thing I think I am sort of good at, at this point in my life: noticing and appreciating moments that fill me with peace, even if they are not peaceful moments. Like the sound of my kids practicing their Tae Kwon Do on an ordinary afternoon. Like my daughter's trumpet practice, or the sight of my son reading in his room, the way he still tucks his feet under his bum while he hunches over his book. Like the view of the mountains in Montana, the familiar dip in a road I haven't traveled in years. The way the landscape changes as I see it from the airplane, even though I am an anxious flyer: from the sheared golden stubble in the square fields that give way to wilder landscapes, the rivers that wind through the prairies and then the mountains. Last weekend I was somehow bumped into first class for the short flight between Great Falls and Seattle, and I sipped wine from a real glass and started a new book. I looked out the window at the landscape of my life, at the prairie, the rivers, the mountains. And I could breathe.