2014 in Books

The last few weeks have been full, just full to bursting. I can’t even begin to write about it well tonight. Things are good. Tonight, the last night of 2014, we are hunkered down at home in our pajamas: safe, comfortable, together, happy. My cup is full. Tomorrow my little girl is going on a movie date with her aunt and I am taking my son to the bookstore to choose new books with a gift card. I might go for a run. We’ll all have coffee and croissants in the morning.

I have grading to do. I’m not particularly excited about that, but I actually feel remarkably okay about going back to school on Monday. I’ve been thinking about my students a lot, worrying about some of them, even missing them. It is a good place to be. Please someone remind me of this when everyone behaves horribly next week and I hate everything. January can be rough.

What I can post tonight is this: thoughts on what I read in 2014. This year I read like my life depended on it; sometimes I think it really does.

Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward
READ THIS. NOW. Salvage the Bones was one of the best books I read in 2012, and I had a sense then that this writer has so many more stories to tell. This book contains some of them, and they are important. Ward writes about the loss of five young men -- one of them her brother -- within a short period of time, intertwining their narrative with her own and setting it all against a larger cultural context. She writes from such a different place than I’ve ever experienced, but instead of feeling distanced by this, the humanity in her storytelling resonates on a cellular level.

This book must have been excruciatingly painful to write, but somehow she manages to make it beautiful. I’m in awe of her writing. Read this. Immediately.

Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh
I’m giving this four stars because I have loved Allie Brosh for years. If I were reading her for the first time, I’d probably give it three.

Some people seem bothered that some of the stories -- maybe half? -- are “recycled” from the blog. That didn’t particularly bother me, because I love the blog (or did when I discovered it and had the pleasure of binging on it for awhile; it was also updated much more regularly). What disappointed me was that my favorite stories aren’t there! No Alot? No scary spiders or pain scale? No “How a fish almost destroyed my childhood”? The new (?) material was entertaining, but it didn’t quite live up to my favorites.

Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell
I liked this very much -- better than I even expected to. But the book wasn’t what I expected at all. It’s touted as a romance, which it is, obviously, but I thought the romance was the weakest part of the story. The story had to have it, I get that -- I guess. And I love Eleanor and Park together; it’s just that I thought the real story here was Eleanor’s, and I found myself really just wanting to read more about her.

I also didn’t expect my heart to be in pieces throughout the entire novel, and I wasn’t prepared for how Rainbow Rowell would accomplish that. I know exactly which of my students is Eleanor, and it broke my heart. I wish she had a Park.

The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
First of all, I think Richard Ford is a truly great writer. He reminds everyone of John Updike, and I respond to Frank Bascombe much like I respond to Rabbit Angstrom -- that is to say, I’m not someone who needs to love the protagonist in order to love a novel. But I fall hard for books like this -- contemplative and often melancholy reflections of one’s inner life. I love stories that capture the utterly ordinary, and do it in pitch-perfect sentences. In many ways, this reminds me as much of Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood as it reminds me of Updike's Rabbit novels, especially at the end. The beginning and the end of this novel might, in fact, ultimately bump up my rating to 5 stars -- maybe I’ll wait and see how I feel about the other Bascombe novels.

Saint Maybe, by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler writes about the stories that connect us on a cellular human level, the small things, the lives of ordinary people. Saint Maybe was more or less exactly what I expected -- sad, funny, warm, and a bit predictable. I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than a day or two to read any of her books, because they’re the type that make me want to curl up with a blanket and a mug of tea until I’m finished.

Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein
This is more of Elizabeth Wein doing what she does best -- writing wonderful characters. The plot is much more linear, and readers won’t find themselves gasping at the surprises in the plot, but the characterization is truly wonderful. (Although I admit I found Rose’s character the least developed, even though she’s telling the story. The women she meets in the concentration camp just shine, though, and Rose functions as a perfect vehicle for their stories--which is kind of the point.) The book is as gut-wrenching as you would expect a novel set in a concentration camp to be, so unlike Code Name Verity it doesn’t make me want to pick it up immediately and reread it -- I’m a bit too wrung-out for that. It did, however, make me want to pick up Code Name Verity and read it again. (An important character in Rose Under Fire made her first appearance in Code Name Verity, for instance, but my memory is a little fuzzy -- I can’t remember if I responded to her in the same way, and things like that are so interesting to me!)

In One Person, by John Irving
At times I thought this would be a three-star book because it took a couple of tries for me to get into it. In the end, though, I thought it was great. One of the things I love about Irving is that he’s so unsubtle about his Irvingisms, like he’s sharing a wink with his reader -- of course there’s a younger man’s love affair with an older woman (though in this case she’s a transgendered older woman). Of course there’s wrestling, a New England prep school, a writer, etc. This time Irving’s main character quotes a couple of passages from his novels which also happen to be passages from John Irving’s novels (Until I Find You, A Prayer for Owen Meany, etc).

But what I love most about John Irving is his ability to humanize the “other”, the outsiders. And he does that beautifully in this book. I also agree that this is possibly his most political book, although I wasn’t thinking of it that way while I was wrapped up in the storytelling. His characters, as always, will stay with me for a long time.

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett
Totally cozy reading experience -- took me about two days. I appreciated the range of essays and generally adore Ann Patchett’s nonfiction (although obviously I enjoy her novels as well). Truth and Beauty remains my favorite of her books, but this is solid, and some of the essays are so good. Worth the hardcover, since I can see this becoming one of my comfort reads.

The End of Eve, by Ariel Gore
I could not put this down. Ariel Gore captures so beautifully the rawness and complexity of human connection -- between mothers and daughters, between lovers. It’s not a pretty story she’s telling, but her writing is gorgeous, both poetic and often darkly hilarious. This is a book I’ll read again.

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki
The premise of this book intrigued me the first time I saw it -- a woman discovers a young girl’s diary that washes ashore in a remote area of the Pacific Northwest. She suspects it might be among the debris from the 2011 tsunami, and as she reads it we are drawn into both her story and the girl’s. This book is part mystery (with some fantastic bits of magical realism) and part meditation on time and the interconnectedness of our lives. Ruth Ozeki is a wonderful storyteller, and this book was hard for me to put down.

The Princes in the Tower, by Alison Weir
I loved reading Richard III for my Shakespeare class in college, and I remember enjoying Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time years ago, which offers a very different perspective of this “misunderstood” king. However, Tey is a novelist and Alison Weir is an historian, albeit one who makes her bias clear immediately. (For the record, despite my enjoyment of Tey’s novel, I believe Richard III is guilty of his nephews’ murders, too.) This was a fascinating read.

The Impossible Knife of Memory, by Laurie Halse Anderson
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this, but it fell flat for me from the very beginning. It seemed too much like Laurie Halse Anderson is writing everyone’s generic idea of what teenagers and high schools and teachers and traumatized veterans should be like, rather than what they are; there just wasn’t much room for the characters to step outside their obvious roles. I wasn’t surprised by one single thing in this book, and -- despite the fact that I very much wanted to be -- I wasn’t particularly moved, either.

Tenth of December, by George Saunders
It can be difficult to rate short story collections; inevitably, some of them soar, and then others not so much. This book was astonishing, start to finish. I thought this might be something I’d pick up in between reading other things, read a bit here and there, but once I started the first story I could barely be bothered to even eat lunch until I’d read the entire collection. It’s that good. It’s that powerful.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra
This is one of the most beautiful, perfectly-crafted novels I have ever read. Anthony Marra has managed to write a story that left me utterly devastated, but never depressed, and quite literally breathless. I couldn’t speak at the end.

Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver
I enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as some of her work. I can’t quite put my finger on why, because I loved the story; it just seemed like a bit of a slog in parts. Sometimes her characters were perfect, and sometimes I couldn’t forget that they were characters in a novel and I couldn’t quite believe in them. But there are some gorgeous parts, and Kingsolver at three stars is still Kingsolver worth reading.

Home, by Marilynne Robinson
I loved Gilead so much that I just assumed this one wouldn’t live up to it, but in the end, I think it surpassed it. Both books stand alone on their own merits, but to go back and see the same scene written from a different perspective, and written so well that it stands on its own, made me appreciate Gilead even more. The characters are so finely drawn and every word rings absolutely true. I love books in which supporting characters from another story have their own stories fully told, and it just works so beautifully here. This book broke my heart more completely than Gilead, but I relished every sentence. (I absolutely cannot wait to read Lila, which is already on my shelf. That might be a lovely Lenten read this year.)

Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, by Donald Hall
Some of the parts about Oxford were less interesting, but the last few chapters about grief and aging made this worth reading. (I also learned that The Best Day The Worst Day, his memoir about Jane Kenyon’s illness and death, was originally supposed to be part of this manuscript before it became its own book. This explains why she doesn’t get much space in this one, but the other stands alone so well that I think it was the right choice.)

The Blackwater Lightship, by Colm Tóibín
When I read Tóibín’s The Master a few years ago, it instantly became one of my favorite novels -- so it’s difficult for me to give anything he writes less than five stars. I’m a bit worried that nothing else will live up to The Master for me.

The Blackwater Lightship took me awhile to read, but not because it’s difficult (The Master required much more effort, but every sentence was worth it). It just didn’t quite grab me. It’s the story of a young man named Declan, who is dying of AIDS, and the women in his life -- his sister, mother, and grandmother -- who come together to care for him after years of estrangement. In theory, it’s exactly the kind of story I love to read, one about family dynamics and dysfunction and the layers of our past that shape the people we become. But it lacked something -- the depth I expected, perhaps, or the gorgeous layered prose that characterized The Master.

But this is still a good book, and Tóibín is a wonderful writer, so I still recommend him. I’m just not sure I’d recommend starting with this book if one is new to his work.

The Blazing Word, by Siri Hustvedt
This is the story of Harriet (“Harry”) Burden, an artist overlooked in the art world. Her response is to conduct an experiment in which she presents her art using three different male “masks.” Her work is well received, but when she reveals herself as the artist, she is met with skepticism and even scorn. The story is revealed through multiple perspectives -- a compilation of Harriet’s diaries, interviews conducted with friends and acquaintances, written statements from past friends and lovers and family -- after her death. Each piece reveals a different perspective of who Harriet Burden was and offers clues as to what actually happened between Harriet and Rune, the last and most dangerous “mask.”

I thought that this would be a book I would appreciate, but I didn’t think I would love it as much as I did. I thought it would require significant effort to read (it is full of references to philosophy and art, and footnotes abound!) and it did, but I also couldn’t put it down. I loved the concept, but even more, I loved the storytelling and Hustvedt’s ability to blend this esoteric art world with so much raw human feeling. The different voices are also pitch-perfect. An intellectual page-turner, for sure.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
I think this is a case of “it’s not you, it’s me.” I really wanted to love this book; I just found it so hard to engage with it (evidenced by the fact that it took me nearly a month to get through when I expected it to be more like a two-day read; I had no problem putting it down, though, and I rarely felt like picking it back up). It’s objectively well done, and I thought all the connections to Virginia Woolf would draw me in if nothing else did, but I found all the parts about psychoanalysis really tedious. And I realized that even if they’re conveyed well in drawings, other people’s dreams still aren’t that interesting to me.

I still may give Fun Home a try. Probably I should have started with that one.

For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey, by Richard Blanco
This is a behind-the-scenes look at Richard Blanco’s process of writing three poems to present to the White House, one of which became the Inaugural poem “One Today.” The message that sings through his story is that poetry matters and continues to matter in our contemporary world, and it transcends our differences to unite us.

This could easily be read in a sitting and I enjoyed it, but I found myself wanting either a little more or a little less. It could have been a nice meaty NPR interview, for instance, and at times I grew slightly weary of the litany of names -- and then I met Joe Biden’s brother, and then I met Beyoncé... But actually, what I think I would have really loved is his full life story. I think Richard Blanco should really write his memoir. He has many stories to tell, and I can only hope he’s just beginning.

Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
This book is arguably one of the most important books written during the last century in America, and it has also joined the ranks of my favorite books. I can’t think of a single word to write that can even do it justice.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor
This book has been on my to-read list for such a long time, thanks to a recommendation from a friend. (Thank you, Rachel, forever. I am so glad you put this book on my radar.) Now that I’ve read it I can’t believe it took me so long -- but then again, I believe the right books find us at the right time, and this was without question the right time for me to read this. Once I started I found it almost physically impossible to stop reading. This book is beautiful. How do I even write about it without sounding trite or repeating everything that’s already been said? Yes, it is sheer poetry in prose form. And yes, it does capture the human condition more perfectly than almost anything I’ve ever read. I went into this not really knowing anything about it, and this is one of those books that works best that way.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed
I would not have picked up this book on my own -- advice columns aren’t my thing. I find them condescending or obvious or boring. But a good friend pushed it into my hands and insisted I read it, and flipping through it, I figured, “Well, this won’t take long, and I can just read a bit here and there.” And then I wound up enjoying it quite a bit; her advice is not condescending, and sometimes it is surprising. It’s definitely never boring. Strayed says a lot of good, true, wise things in a voice I liked enough to want to read her memoir.

Astray, by Emma Donoghue
I was hooked after reading the first story (which, though I’m not absolutely sure is my favorite, might actually be the best). The book is divided into three sections: Departures, In Transit, and Arrivals and Aftermaths. Each story focuses on some aspect of a journey -- mostly the emigrant’s journey, though she manages to explore the universal human aspects of what it means to be “astray” in various ways. The book spans a few centuries and two continents, and each story is also based at least loosely on real historical events and people who actually existed (Donoghue includes brief historical notes at the end of each story, tracing the source of her inspiration). I love the way she humanizes so many different kinds of people, and her ability to write convincingly from so many different voices is brilliant (an aspect of Donoghue’s writing we see in Room as well).

The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
I love Maggie Tulliver and I love George Eliot. Five stars.

The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagahara
This is an incredibly difficult book to rate. The narrator is so unreliable and so repugnant from the very beginning that I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep reading; on the other hand, the story was so compelling I couldn’t stop reading, and I must admit I was fascinated by the author’s craft in writing this book. Because while Dr. Norton Perina never became a sympathetic character for me -- and I don’t think he’s meant to (hello, Humbert Humbert anyone?) -- this book was a fascinating glimpse into so many things. I think Carmela Ciuraru gets it exactly right in her NYT review:

The novel examines issues of moral relativism, Western hubris, colonization and ecological disruption in the name of science as it charts the disappearance of the wondrous flora and fauna and the grievous harm done to the indigenous people. Pharmaceutical companies pillage the island, creating turtle breeding farms in their quest to bottle the secret to longevity. But Perina is unrepentant about his role. “I did what any scientist would have done,” he insists.

Provocative and bleak, “The People in the Trees” might leave readers conflicted. It is exhaustingly inventive and almost defiant in its refusal to offer redemption or solace — but that is arguably one of its virtues. This is perhaps less a novel to love than to admire for its sheer audacity.

This is a book to be discussed, for sure; I began it on a road trip, and fifty pages in I told my husband to check it out whenever I took the wheel. We passed it back and forth for a few days, and I’m so glad to have someone to process it with.

The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith
This was a fun mystery, which is exactly what I was in the mood for. It delivered all the usual things fun mysteries do.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed
After enjoying Dear Sugar so much, I thought I’d like this a lot more than I actually did. I think that ultimately I liked the idea of the book more than I liked the book itself.

Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins Celeste Ng’s debut novel, which is so smoothly written that I read it in just a few sittings. In one sense, it’s a mystery novel, but more than that, it’s a story of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. It’s about outsiders, about both fitting in and setting ourselves apart. I’m giving this three stars out of five because while I do love this sort of breathless reading experience that swallows up a day, I actually think there’s more than enough story here for a much longer and more developed novel. Ng is a writer to watch, though, and I still recommend this one.

The Lover’s Dictionary, by David Levithan
I suppose this is technically a YA novel, but it read like poetry. Lovely. True.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
This book is without question the most violent novel I’ve ever read. It’s exhausting. It is also magnificent. A century from now we’ll still be reading Cormac McCarthy right alongside William Faulkner, and this is the novel he’ll be remembered for. I was glad to finish this; reading it took something out of me, and it was real work. But it was absolutely worthy of the effort. One reviewer wrote something about wanting to wallpaper her house in his sentences, and I understand what she means.

(I think this is a book that I’ll come back to. Someday. At the same time, if they wind up making a movie out of it, I think I’ll give it a pass.)

Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, by Rachel Calof
This was a fascinating first-person narrative of a Jewish homesteader who traveled from Russia to North Dakota for an arranged marriage in 1894. This is Rachel Bella Calof’s story in her own words, and I read it in a day. Little House on the Prairie this is not; there is nothing romanticized here. Calof writes in a clear, matter-of-fact voice of hardships I can’t imagine living through year after year: arriving to a roofless shack crowded with people she didn’t yet know, being forced to share a bed (wooden planks with chickens underneath, basically) with her future mother-in-law, scraping together bits of dough to cook over a fire stoked with cow dung and grinding barley to substitute for coffee, and ultimately bearing nine children, most of them right there in the shack. She was forced to figure just about everything out for herself, with virtually no support from her new family. The severe isolation of the prairie coupled with the absolute lack of any privacy is unrelenting. And then, of course, there are blizzards and hailstorms, difficult births, and conflicts with her mother-in-law.

But it’s never a depressing book; I think it’s a testament to Calof’s strength and a story of what humans can endure. (I almost laughed when their entire crop was wiped out by a hailstorm and Calof seemed almost cheerful about it. Like, well, we’re all safe! And we were so close this year! Maybe next year we’ll be successful!) It certainly puts things in perspective for me when I feel like complaining about, say, the fact that I haven’t found time to paint my bathroom or whatever. Or anything else.

The epilogue (written by Calof’s youngest son) and two afterwords expanding on the history and context of Calof’s narrative were interesting as well. (My college roommate sent it to me with this note: “I never knew there was a prominent Jewish settlement near Devil’s Lake!” I didn’t either.)

Random, by Tom Leveen
Two stars because once I started reading I found it impossible to stop (I read this in under two hours), and because I’d happily stick this on my classroom shelves. But I think the best YA fiction transcends age, and this reminded me exactly of those R.L. Stine novels I used to read in middle school.

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Cushner
I loved every single sentence of this book. Rachel Kushner is crazy brilliant.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
This belongs on the “Every human should read this” shelf, right alongside The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward. Admittedly, this one took me much longer to read -- it lacked the lyrical prose of the other two -- and it’s pretty relentless in its message. Which, quite frankly, is a devastating one, but it is also, absolutely, a necessary one. We have work to do.

Dangerous Girls, by Abigail Haas
This book was admittedly pretty fun to read in a day and took virtually no effort. But one of the problems is that so many people raved about this book and its surprise ending that even though I didn’t read any spoilers, I was so poised for the HUGE SURPRISE at the end that it wasn’t very surprising at all. The other problem is that I just didn’t think it was a good book. It kind of felt like “Insert generic YA novel here.” It also felt like it was trying too hard to be a fictionalized account of both the Amanda Knox and Natalee Holloway stories in one book.

The Secret Place, by Tana French
4.5 stars for this one, I think. I read most of it in a day, which didn’t make me the most attentive wife or mother, I’m afraid.

Anyway, this is good. I still think Broken Harbor might be my favorite of Tana French’s novels, but The Secret Place is perhaps her most intricately written. I love the same things I’ve loved about all her novels -- the great characterization, the twisty plots, but also just the quality of her prose, her sentences. I do love good sentences. I have zero regrets about buying this is in a nice, shiny hardcover (I was on the waiting list at the library, but I am far, far too impatient) because I think this is one I might well reread.

And all I can think tonight is that I was so lucky to be able to read her first three novels within the same year, and then I only had to wait one more year for Broken Harbor...waiting two years between her fourth and fifth books was tough. My first thought upon reading the last page of this one was “Please, please already have the sixth one written.”

Hate List, by Jennifer Brown
The aftermath of a school shooting, narrated by the shooter’s girlfriend -- who was also shot, and who technically stopped the shooting, even though she started the infamous “Hate List” -- should have been more interesting than it was, but I found the characters flat and the writing bland. A disappointment.

Landline, by Rainbow Rowell
Not earth-shaking, but solidly enjoyable, and pretty much what I expected/hoped for. I’ve been disappointed by the last handful of YA novels I’ve read, so this return to Rainbow Rowell’s voice was lovely. (And I know that this is technically not YA fiction, but her voice was still very much her own.)

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
Books by Sarah Waters are best approached without reading much about them beforehand, I think. This was certainly true of Fingersmith (I didn’t know anything about that one before I read it, and I am so glad!) and I think it’s true of this one as well. All you need to know is this: she is an exquisite writer. She manages to write books that are both cozy and thrilling, and she is a master of character and setting. Her sentences delight me. I loved this.

The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
I think David Mitchell is brilliant, and I absolutely loved this. I started it six weeks ago, although I read over half of its hefty 600+ pages in a single weekend on two flights -- which is exactly how I read Cloud Atlas for the first time nine years ago. And yes, reading this felt a lot like reading Cloud Atlas in that Mitchell’s latest novel is also comprised of six distinct but interconnected parts or novellas. In this case the protagonist, Holly Sykes, is the dominant thread, and the stories move in chronological order from her teenage years until her 70’s (as opposed to the forward-and-back-again structure of Cloud Atlas), but it’s still a thrilling ride. I was absorbed enough to forget that I hate flying for six hours one weekend, and back home I read carefully and slowly enough to underline, annotate, chuckle, and cry a bit. This book gave me everything I love in a reading experience.

Two years ago I reread Cloud Atlas and found that it absolutely rewarded rereading. I’m certain I’ll feel the same when I return to The Bone Clocks -- I almost want to begin again tonight.

The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith
I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as The Cuckoo’s Calling; I thought the writing was a bit lazy at times, with too many descriptions of Strike’s hair and his leather couch. And I found the Strike/Robin dynamic less interesting. Then again, I read this because I wanted to read a fun mystery, knowing full well it wouldn’t be Tana French. And it was a fun mystery. I’ll keep reading these, I’m sure.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman
A graphic novel about depicting Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. I’m currently teaching this to a thoughtful, bright group of freshmen and hoping they understand that this isn’t just a story.

Excavation: A Memoir, by Wendy Ortiz
A powerfully -- even beautifully -- written memoir. Wendy Ortiz tells the raw, painful story of abuse at the hands of her junior high English teacher, a sexual “affair” that continued for years until she herself broke it off. It’s about power, but it’s also about the power of stories and the importance of telling the brave truth about our own lives.

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenburg
This was a fun and rather random library find. Ashenburg explores Western culture’s history with hygiene and cleanliness. Her lighthearted tone kept the subject entertaining, even when the information was a bit cringeworthy for our modern ultra-hiegenic sensibilities. A quick, interesting read.

Belzhar, by Meg Wolitzer
I’m a sucker for so many things in this book: boarding school stories, Sylvia Plath, English classes, antique leather journals, and the power of words. I also really like Meg Wolitzer. However, I think I prefer her adult fiction. I like the message in this book, but the ending seemed a bit too easy and the character development isn't as strong as it is in The Interestings.

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, by Anne Lamott
At first I was a tiny bit disappointed that this wasn’t a collection of entirely new essays, but the first one I knew I’d read before is one of my all-time favorites and the “selected” essays are well chosen. The new ones are pretty wonderful as well.

Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, by Chris Grabenstein
My daughter enjoyed reading this and I thought I would love it; everyone kept saying it was like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but with books! Which it tries to be, but while it is whimsical and fun, it lacks something. I think the very best children’s books have to be more than whimsy and light; they need to make us a little unsettled and uncomfortable, too. We need to wrestle with a little darkness. That’s missing here, and so it doesn’t go much deeper than entertainment for me, and I read for more than that -- and I would have expected a book like this to get that.

Still, it’s fun. It just didn’t quite live up to the high hopes I had for it.

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
This book is absolutely spectacular. I loved how such an epic story could form from Doerr’s short, lyrical chapters. I loved the way the different story lines fit together. Most of all, I was completely swept away by Doerr’s prose--his sentences left me awestruck.

My reading list for 2015 is already spectacular. I’m starting with Redeployment by Phil Klay and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, but I’m also looking forward to Brian Doyle’s Mink River and Niall William’s History of the Rain. For starters. It’s a pity I have to do things like go to work, but then again, one of my tiny assets as a high school teacher might be my crazy passionate believe that reading books about other people and other lives makes me a better human inside my own.

Friday Night Math

I’m exhausted, but tonight I decided I couldn’t go another day without writing here. I’ve been writing -- against all logic it becomes even more necessary for me when life is crazy busy -- but I’ve been doing it in workshops. (Workshops that have absolutely nothing to do with teaching, by the way. Just writing. Just my writing. People always seem really curious about this, and to that I say -- because this keeps me slightly less mentally ill than I might otherwise be. Because I’m never going to get any better at it if I don’t get honest, clear feedback, and because I’ve learned so much from the opportunity to give honest, clear feedback to other people who want to become better writers themselves.) I miss this space, though, and tonight I’m granting myself permission to be a little less polished.

It’s been such a full month, in the best of ways. I hopped a flight to Minnesota, where my college roommate picked me up at the airport and immediately drove me four hours into the woods, where we spent a perfect weekend at her cozy home. More than ten years after college and I still haven’t seen her “new” hometown -- it was time, and I met her sweet two-year-old as well. Thanksgiving was perfect. Matt and I ran the Turkey Trot together (okay, no, not together, he ran it in like thirteen seconds and I finished sometime the next day, but basically, you know, it’s a thing we do “together”) and spent the rest of the day at Aaron and Morgan’s house with my parents and uncle and cousins, and I sort of watched football and definitely drank wine and ate a lot of food. Suzannah and I had a lot of “girls’ time” with my mom and Morgan -- lunch and a bit of shopping on Friday, and The Nutcracker on Saturday. I was so glad to go, because it’s the last year the Pacific Northwest Ballet is staging Maurice Sendak’s version, and Suzannah is at the perfect age to be completely enthralled. We pre-ordered concessions, and at intermission we had Trophy cupcakes, hot chocolate, and Pinot Grigio (well, that was mine) waiting for us.

And then I spend my days with teenagers. I fully expected the day after Thanksgiving to be terrible, because it always, always is. Last year I wrote in my journal, I am kind of stressed out and miserable right now, and yesterday I felt quite sure that I made a terrible choice when I decided to be a teacher, but then Kyanne suggested I document that feeling so I can go back in later years and notice that actually, this is what happens pretty much every year during the days immediately following Thanksgiving break. So maybe I should just try to chill out and wait for Christmas. I read that on Sunday night. On the Monday morning after Thanksgiving I bounded into school, deciding not to take anything personally, hoping I was strong enough to actually remember that some of our kids have a really rough time when they’re home for four days and therefore they behave like total beasts when they come back. And they weren’t bad. Or maybe they were, but I found a way to love them anyway.

The following Monday they were all definitely terrible and everyone was cranky and I called a student Mr. Liar McTruant Pants to his face, which was definitely not my finest hour. But today he only shrugged and grinned and said, “Eh, fine,” when I swiped his phone off his desk and dropped it into my pocket. In fact, then he asked me how many times I’d wanted to punch him, and when I said, “Honestly, pretty much daily,” he grinned again.

(I keep loving them anyway.)

This afternoon I left school at the usual time to pick up Suzannah. We stopped at the house to let the dog out, and then we headed straight for another elementary school in our district for Math Bonanza. My daughter’s first math competition. It was tough for her -- there were lots of things she didn’t know, because the contest was geared towards fourth and fifth graders. But she loves math, and her teacher thought it would be a good experience for her. We spent the week telling her it was okay if she didn’t know how to do all the problems, that it was about learning and having fun, and despite the fact that my daughter is a bit of a perfectionist and a very thorough processor, she seemed pretty relaxed about everything. And I was so proud of her tonight. First, just to watch her in deep concentration as she worked through the first couple of tasks -- how did my baby girl, my tiny blonde wisp, grow into this thoughtful girl-child tapping her pencil on the table, frowning at her paper? Just to watch the beautiful transformation of her face: furrowed brow to satisfied smile. And then, even better, to watch her cheer wildly for her friends, to watch her face light up in genuine happiness as her friend took home a trophy. That. That made my heart burst for my own beautiful girl.

All told, we were there for nearly four hours, which is something for a Friday night. All these kiddos, excited about math! All these parents and teachers and supporters willing to give up Christmas parties or an early night with pajama pants and Netflix! (Okay, that might be me.) At some point my dad and I ran to pick up Isaac and gas up the car, but my mom and Morgan stood in for us. Back at the school, Isaac played his Leapster and munched on popcorn and bounced around. During the awards ceremony I picked him up and held him on my hip, even though he’ll be five on Sunday; he wrapped his arms around my neck and covered my cheek with sloppy kisses. Suzannah posed for pictures with her team and beaming teacher. I was tired and I really wanted to just go to Red Robin with my family and drink a Long Island Iced Tea and eat a bunch of french fries, but also, the coziness of the moment wasn’t lost on me. Yes, cozy, despite the echoing shrieks of elementary school students who've had too much pizza and soda. Because I know that years from now, I’ll return to this memory, this night. My daughter, clutching her pencil and beaming and high-fiving. My son, grabbing fistfuls of popcorn and bouncing his stuffed puppy on the back of his chair and wrapping his legs around my waist when I lift him to see the awards. These two children and all of their infinite possibility. Who will they become? Where will their passions lie? How will they serve? Right now, they love everything. Math, reading, writing, art, science, gymnastics, soccer. They love to play. They are deeply engaged in their world. I love all of this, but I don’t need to know, right now, that they will major in math or English or biology or do whatever sport in middle school or high school. (Suzannah has wanted to be a teacher for quite some time, though she’s not sure which grade. Isaac wants to be a ninja.) Right now, all I need is this: their faces, alive and open. The world, theirs for the taking. This bursting moment, and the small stillness within, when my children will still slip their hands into mine and squeeze.

I write these things down to remember

I’ve been trying to write here for over a week now, about so many things: my children in their Halloween costumes. My relief that Halloween was finally over juxtaposed with my half-crazy desperation to keep that moment as long as I could, my third-grader in her Luke Skywalker costume and my almost-five-year-old in his ninja costume, both dressed up as someone else and yet so unselfconsciously themselves. All these thoughts about motherhood, about time passing. About gratitude. Grief. Anxiety. The way it feels to be the parent on the other side of the table at conferences, bursting with pride when my little girl gets out her portfolio and reads us her goals, when her teacher tells us how well she reads and how beautifully she writes and how she loves math and how curious she is about everything and how she’s a perfect fit for this “highly capable” class even though I really struggle with the idea of “gifted” education in elementary school, knowing perfectly well that most kids labeled as “gifted” are simply kids from privileged homes, with literate parents, who can play the conventional school game well. Even believing that “gifted” programs seem to be more about the egos of parents who know how to get their kids into those classes. I have zero concerns about my children’s intellectual development. I care that they are empathetic and compassionate and curious; I care about the relationships they develop with their teachers and with learning. And I mostly trust that they’ll be just fine. But still, of course I love hearing that my daughter is doing well and seems happy. Of course I exist in this perpetual state of amazement -- this is my baby girl? This child flung across my bed, lying on her stomach, ankles crossed, reading a library book? This is my girl, flipping through a book of science experiments she picked out at the book fair, asking me whether we have enough vegetable oil or sand or construction paper to do a particular project? And this, this is my son, my baby boy? This child who punctuates our evenings with cries of “Hi-yah!” while he flies at us in his ninja costume but who can sit for as long as his sister at the dining room table, coloring and printing his name in painstaking crayon letters? Is the world big enough to hold all of my joy and fear and hopes for these children?

I was going to write about teaching, in that vague way I write about teaching here. Last week? Two weeks ago? I broke. I really think I did. I left school one day with a brick on my chest, tears in my eyes by the time I made it to my car. They were spilling down my cheeks before I turned out of the parking lot. I managed to put on a movie for the kids and hide until Matt came home, crying the entire time. I said something about a headache, or feeling very tired. I cried until my eyes were swollen nearly shut, and no amount of tea bags soaked in unicorn milk could have prevented me from looking like I’d been beat up. I can’t even begin to explain it here. I can’t tell you about one particular thing. I just lost all perspective, really lost it, and believed wholeheartedly that I couldn’t do it anymore, that it didn’t matter whether I showed up to teach or not. The IB kids don't need me because they’ll be fine no matter who teaches them, and the struggling kids -- well, I don’t have what they need, and I can’t help, and they don’t want the help I can’t give anyway. It hurt in a big, scary way.

I took the next day off and went with my boys to Remlinger Farms, our last daycare trip to the pumpkin patch. Matt had already made arrangements to go, but I could not go to school the next day. I felt too crazy. But somewhere in the midst of all that craziness I had a very sane thought: this would be our last daycare trip, because Isaac will be in kindergarten next year. Nothing was worth more than this day. Eight years! Eight years we have been making this trip! Driving out of the city, into the mountains. The trees bursting with red and gold against the sky. Eric Ode in the farm theater. The other moms teasing me about my dorky crush on him. Riding the train, watching my son and my husband play in the hay pit, walking through the barns, riding the rides. Taking my son on the roller coaster (small, but big enough), listening to him shriek with delight and then say, “Mommy, I want to do that again, but I want to ride with LJ,” and off he goes again while I wave from the sidelines. Drinking coffee, drinking hot chocolate, loading our muddy pumpkins into the back of the car, shaking hay out of our shoes, our pockets.

It was a perfect day, and it gifted me with a bit of breathing space, I suppose, if not necessarily the perspective I’d so messily lost. It helped, though. Other things that helped: the messages from friends and colleagues and former students in the twenty-four hours I was gone. They glued me back together. And that night, I wrote. I wrote about the kids I love, about the kids who slip and call me Mom, about how they seem to feel safe and welcome in my room during lunch, about how they pop in after school. I wrote about the kids who make me laugh every single day. I wrote about the kids who’ve graduated and still keep in touch.

I write these things down because I have felt like this before. Moments pass.

I write these things down, because I forget.

Or I don’t forget exactly, but sometimes, when things feel as bad as they can feel, I don’t see it. I don’t see that it matters, or that I’ve come through this feeling before. On Monday, I really, truly didn’t believe that anything I did mattered. But unfortunately, I do not want another job. I want this one. Or even: it’s not about wanting. It’s about this is part of who I am. Not all of who I am, mind you, but the idea that I could put it down and pick up something else, just to -- what? Bring in some money at something I’m objectively decent at but don’t feel called to do? -- isn’t a thing I can even wrap my brain around. Which is precisely why looking for other jobs English majors can do makes me even more crazy. Because they’re not the right ones. This one is. Against all odds, this one is.

A certain necessary grief

I left school yesterday angry, exhausted, and sad. How many school shootings have there been just in 2014? Reports differ, but the obviously correct answer is too goddamn many. And a good part of my anger and exhaustion is lodged firmly in the fact that they are not going to stop anytime soon. We are not doing anything to stop it.

I did small things to keep myself from sinking. I picked up my daughter; we held hands and scampered through the rain to the car. I took her along to my hair appointment where she sat and read, totally absorbed in her book, which the stylist clicked her tongue at the news and I closed my eyes against it, trying to focus on the scent of the shampoo and the heat from the hair dryer. We picked up Isaac and came home. We had planned to meet Matt for dinner and a few errands, but he heard the fatigue in my voice over the phone.

“Do you want to just stay in tonight?” he said. “I can bring home Thai food and we can run errands tomorrow.”

Yes, I did want to stay in. I wanted to put on flannel pajama pants and curl up with the last sixty pages of The Paying Guests and drink wine while the kids watched Clone Wars. I wanted nothing more than to hunker down in my little house in our quiet little neighborhood, the lights from our kitchen and living room windows shining into the rainy dark streets.

I signed on to Facebook and immediately read someone’s sanctimonious comment about how this is just one more reason she’s glad she doesn’t send her kids to public school. I typed a furious paragraph. Deleted it. Typed it again. Deleted it again. Then I just blocked her. Someone who is that self-righteously out of touch, someone who is that devoid of compassion or sensitivity, someone who would use this terrible day in such a tasteless attempt to pat her own back -- well, we don’t really need to be internet friends. And maybe I should have stayed off Facebook altogether; probably that would have been wiser. It’s just that for all the superficial noise that goes along with social media, sometimes I crave that human connection underneath it all. I want to type something I’m thinking, or I want to type something that maybe feels a little bit vulnerable, and I want to know that someone, someone, will read it.

Maybe that’s why we’re all here. Maybe we should all be a little gentler with each other.

I also read a lot of this: Hug your children. Appreciate every moment with them. Tell your loved ones that you love them. We all say that, when terrible things happen, and it’s good advice, if a bit trite. I would like to think I try, truly and earnestly, to do this. It’s one of the reasons I write all the time -- it’s this near-desperation to hold each moment of their babyhoods and toddlerhoods and childhoods. I go back and read pages of the journals I use to write letters to the kids, and I might say to Matt, “Remember when Suzannah insisted on sleeping in her little pink sweater every night when she was not even two?” or “Remember the funny way she used to pronounce elephant?” or “Remember when Isaac used to go and get the boppy and haul it over to me with this big grin on his face when he wanted to nurse, even if I happened to be in the shower?” and his face goes soft, and our hearts just break a bit with love and nostalgia and this sort of grief -- I don’t know what else to call it -- over time passing, over the impossible bridge between then and now. It is a blessing, because watching our children grow is our deepest joy, but there is a certain necessary grief in letting go. I’m not good at it.

And can I also confess something? That sometimes when I should be basking in gratitude, when I should come home and simply sink to the floor with my babies and delight in every aspect of their existence because I am so very aware that tomorrow is promised to none of us -- so aware I could scream with sheer pain for those who have already lost tomorrow -- instead I am short-tempered, I am impatient, I snap at the kids to pick up their toys right this second or nobody is going to get to pick a movie, I tell them that they are just going to have to go ahead and be hungry for five minutes because the dog needs to go out and the dog needs to be fed and the groceries are still in the car and Mommy doesn’t have five arms and can’t I just have one single minute of people not needing things?

I say some of these things out loud, I think the rest, and then I put on a DVD and carry the laundry into the bedroom, where I dump it on the bed and fold it and cry quietly, hoping the crackers and cheese and apple slices and Clone Wars will be enough to keep them from noticing that I am not within an arm’s reach for the moment.

But the moment passes, because it has to. Our evening settles into normalcy. I cannot stay inside my bedroom and cry all night. So I come out and start dinner, and help my son into his Ninja costume, and I read the pages my daughter fills at the dining room table. She has won a couple of little alien toys from her school fundraiser, and she has decided that they are going to have a wedding, and she is busily scrawling ambitious honeymoon plans all over sheets of printer paper in her neat third-grade handwriting -- what they will wear at each destination, what they will do, games they will play. It is essentially three solid pages of creative writing, and tonight I am so delighted with it -- the imaginative spontaneity of it all, the thoughtfulness and the playfulness -- that I grab her in a fierce hug and kiss her face and tell her how amazing she is.

“Mom, you are kissing me a lot this weekend,” Suzannah says, pleased but exasperated. “It’s a bit much.”

What I think, but what I don’t say, is tough shit, Kid. But she has forgiven me, it seems, for my bewildering earlier snappishness.

And what she doesn’t know now but might understand someday is that even though she is eight years old and her brother is nearly five, I still can’t go to sleep at night until I have tip-toed into their rooms one last time. To brush my lips against their cheeks, to smooth their hair away from their foreheads. And, yes, to make sure they’re still breathing, and to pray that morning continues to come.

A life I love enough to break my heart

The sunshine was so unexpected this afternoon. The forecast called for rain, but when Suzannah and I walked out of gymnastics the sun had turned everything golden. Back at home Matt mowed the lawn and the kids kicked a soccer ball around the yard, managing, for the most part, not to fight over it. When we left for Seattle I found myself reaching for my sunglasses, the light bright in my eyes as we drove along Puget Sound. Some moments are so perfect, for no reason at all. What, exactly, is so special about an ordinary Saturday in our little corner of the world? What could be beautiful about driving past the little strip malls with the random teriyaki joints, nail salons, tattoo parlors, furniture stores? The Pole Fitness place, the “For Lease” sign in the window of the pizza place we never got around to trying before it closed? Simply this: The expanse of Puget Sound on the other side of the highway, the mountains rising behind it. The fact that this, every day, is my view on my way to work. The fact that this, nearly every Saturday, is where we drive on our way to Seattle. To the Pacific Science Center, to the aquarium, to Discovery Park, to the Elliott Bay Book Company. We leave the winding tree-lined road that leads from our house to Pacific Highway, and sometime between Pacific Highway and I-5 my son nods off in the back seat. At age four, Suzannah had long since abandoned even the pretense of taking a nap, but Isaac -- though not required to take one on Saturdays -- will reliably conk right out at three o’clock in the afternoon. (Sometimes I wonder if that’s why we plan these afternoon trips to Seattle, just to give him that little space to fall asleep when he would resist so hard at home.)

And there is this: Every morning, on the way back to Suzannah’s school after dropping off her brother, we stop at the top of a hill at a particular stop light. It’s just that: a moment at a stoplight, on an ordinary street, in our ordinary little suburb. But in the fall, the trees along this street burst with gold and red leaves, and for a moment I am blessed with the sight of the leaves falling on the sidewalk, lit by the morning sun or golden against a cloudy sky, as far as I can see.

The light changes. We drive on. But that one still, golden moment fills my heart. It hurts a bit, in the way only autumn can.

It has been a rough few weeks. I’ve dealt with one of the most upsetting situations of my career, but a.) I can’t really write about it here and b.) it’s been more or less resolved. I’ve had a couple of students break my heart. I made three kids I love cry within a single, terrible hour. I hatched a hopeful and idealistic and possibly really stupid plan to help a teenager who completely and utterly exhausts me. (In essence, I volunteered to spend twice as much time with her, and yet I relax when she skips my class. What am I thinking?) I’ve felt tired, and sad, and lonely. I’ve felt that I cannot possibly be enough as a teacher. I’ve felt that I cannot possibly be enough as a mother. That tired old pull.

But, as always, the cracks let in the light: a perfectly-timed e-mail from a friend who knows the words I need to read. A dinner and long conversation with another friend who knows my heart more than just about anyone else I’ve known in my adult life. A hug from someone I work with. Talks with my parents, because even at thirty-five, I still need them. The reminders that I am not nearly as alone as I sometimes feel. The unexpected sunshine.

This, I suppose, is October. It’s the beginning of my favorite season in the Pacific Northwest: the rain, the storms, the darkness. The golden leaves falling over the sidewalks. It is also when I feel unmoored, stressed, and prone to fits of doubt and sadness. The crazy thing, though, is that I also feel deeply happy with so many aspects of my life. My children are blessedly healthy. My daughter sits cross-legged on her bed, wrapped in her Star Wars blanket, and reads my old Nancy Drew books. My son stands on a chair in the kitchen and helps me make dinner. My husband comes home from work and kisses me until our daughter protests. Our old dog is blind and deaf but she is in relatively good shape; I sit with her awhile before bed, to calm her anxiety. She snores against my thigh in our big recliner in the living room while I read.

These small moments are the ones that sustain me. The bigger things I can’t control -- the kids whose lives I can’t fix -- well, they’re the reasons I come home and need a run, or need a hug, or need my husband to pick up a pizza because I can’t do anything except sit on the family room floor and watch cartoons with the kids while we play with their puzzles or play brownie mixes or ice cream sets. They’re also the reason I care so damn much. They break my heart.

I wouldn’t trade any of it. I know this on a cellular level, even when I imagine all the alternate lives I could be leading. A life I love enough to break my heart is the life I want.

Saturday

I woke to our son bouncing his stuffed beagle on the bed this morning, asking for breakfast. Naturally, this was at least a good forty minutes before he wakes up on a school morning.

Matt slipped out of bed, poured Isaac some cereal. I think. He collapsed back on the bed with me for a little while before he rose for good, taking the dog outside. I dozed alone, not really sleeping, but deeply appreciating my husband for the way he gets up with the kids after he can’t sleep any longer, closing the bedroom door behind him.

When I pried myself out of bed after a night of strange dreams and a week of sleeping restlessly, I went for a jog in the cool morning air. I planned on a short run, but when I reached the point at which I would have turned back, I kept going. Ran four miles. Burst through the back door, sweating but feeling good. Showered while Matt made me a banana-walnut waffle. Played board games in the living room with Isaac. Took Suzannah to gymnastics. Matt had a grilled swiss-and-tomato sandwich waiting for me when we arrived home. I ate it quickly, and the four of us headed for Seattle, to the Pacific Science Center for the IMAX showing of the Great White Shark movie. The kids seemed enthralled, but walking through Seattle Center afterwards in the waning afternoon light, Isaac said, “I don’t want to see that movie ever again.” I asked him why not, and he said, “Because the shark SURPRISED me.” He doesn’t like scary things. Matt and I smiled at each other, remembering the way he tossed his popcorn in the air and hid his face at our first IMAX movie about the monarch butterflies. Those alarming six-story insect faces.

We walked by the fountain at Seattle Center afterwards.

“Look, a rainbow,” both kids said, noting the early-evening sunlight filtering through the spray of water. The day was warm enough that people still splash in the water, even in late September. Soon enough, these golden evenings will be replaced by clouds and rain. I’m ready for it, but still, the honeyed evening air was so perfect I didn’t want to leave it, even to climb into the car.

We made a drive-by stop at the Elliott Bay Book Company. Really, a drive-by -- I vaulted out of the car, ran inside to buy The Secret Place by Tana French and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, two books I’ve been awaiting for months. I originally thought I could wait for The Secret Place at the library, but there are still 70 people ahead of me in line, and I love everything else she’s written. I can’t wait for seventy people. I’m not that patient.

Dinner at the Elliott Bay Brewery. We haven’t been there in what seems like forever. They gave us fries without salt to share with Isaac. He’s such a good sport about his low-sodium diet; when we said he could have just a tiny bit of ketchup on his plain burger, he said, “But does it have salt? Actually, I don’t want any.” It made me want to cry, a bit.

Suzannah fell asleep in the car on the way home, a Kleenex clutched in her fist. She has a cold, or allergies; typical beginning of the school year. She’s so stoic about her runny noses. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just sniffly. It’s fine, Mom.” But of course, we are jumpy, since the only symptoms Isaac displayed in the weeks before we wound up in the hospital were a runny nose and a general crabbiness. Nephritic syndrome isn’t contagious, but our anxiety lingers.

The kids went right to bed when we made it home. Skipped flossing and stories, let us tuck them in without argument or drama. Matt and I collapsed on the couch with drinks and Netflix and I said, “There is laundry in the dryer, and I am not even going to fold it tonight.” He nodded solemnly.

I could not possibly be more in love or more grateful for all of this.

This is what life is

“There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

When you have a child in the hospital, they recommend that parents alternate spending the night. It makes a lot of sense, especially if you have other children at home. The little pull-out chair beds are small and not terribly comfortable for one person, let alone two, especially when one of the two is as tall as my husband. And it’s probably good for both parents not to be totally wrecked, sleepwise.

At the same time, when you have a child in the hospital, especially when your journey to the hospital was frantic, last-minute, and unexpected, sometimes what you need is the comfort of squishing together with your husband on that tiny pull-out chair bed. You want that safety. You want to curl up against the most familiar body in the world while you try to sleep for an hour or two, when you can’t quite close your eyes because you can’t take them off your small son tucked into bed, because you can’t stop watching his chest rise and fall, because you can’t take your eyes off the IV fluids dripping into his arm. Your hips ache, and you’re cold so you zip your hoodie over the shirt you didn’t change before you threw a toothbrush and your son’s stuffed puppy into a backpack hours ago. Your husband has stolen most of the thin green hospital blanket, but tonight you don’t have the heart to tug it back the way you would at home. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. You’re not really going to sleep. You doze here and there, waking to the nurses bending over your son, taking his blood pressure, checking the bag of fluids. After more than eight hours in the emergency room, your little son is so exhausted that nothing will wake him. For that small grace, you are thankful.

It’s funny how quickly everything fades into the background when you’re holding your son in the emergency room.

I was so worried about school over Labor Day weekend, so stressed about whether or not Isaac would be over whatever bug he seemed to have. I really can’t miss school this week, I said again and again. We took Isaac to the off-hours clinic in Tacoma on Labor Day. He’d had a fever for a few days, his face was uncharacteristically puffy, and he was a little sniffly. Ordinarily, I’d have waited to see his regular pediatrician, but I was beginning to panic -- I wondered if he had an ear or sinus infection, and if he did, I wanted to treat it more quickly than usual, simply and selfishly because this was my first week of teaching. I couldn’t afford to leave school at ten o’clock in the morning because I received a text saying he my son was sick. It’s the one week I basically cannot miss unless I am hospitalized or dead. Anyway, the on-call doctor peered at his ears, observed a little fluid, and diagnosed him with a sinus infection within about five minutes. Away we went with antibiotics.

But by Wednesday, while his fever had broken, the puffiness hadn’t gone down. I took him to daycare anyway, but right away they noticed his swollen face. I knew it wasn’t a reaction to the medicine because I’d specifically mentioned it to the doctor. She said, “Well, his sinuses are small, and he’s congested.” Then again, she did not know my son.

I left him at daycare. Reluctantly. By the time I arrived back home, I knew in my mama heart that things weren’t right.

Matt hadn’t left yet, since we were planning to take Suzannah to her first day of third grade together, so I walked in the door, walked into our bathroom where he was brushing his teeth, and burst into tears. In the middle of huge, gulping sobs, I explained that I thought Isaac really needed to see his pediatrician, but that it was the first day of school -- freshmen orientation -- and I could not stay home. I lost it. Freaked out with a capital F. I sat on the bed and cried and cried, totally unable to stop, totally unable to articulate why I was so upset. I really went out of my head for a moment until Suzannah poked her head into the bedroom and said, “Mommy, why are you crying? Can you stop?” in a small voice. I took a deep, shuddery breath and said, “Yeah, Baby. I’m sorry. I’m okay. Um. Are you about ready to go?”

(What shreds my heart a bit when I remember this is the way she called me Mommy, which she rarely does anymore, and the way she reappeared a moment later with a Kleenex.)

Matt wasn’t happy, because he’d stayed home with Isaac the previous day, but he reassured me that it’d be all right.

We took Suzannah to her first day of school. I went to freshmen orientation. Matt and Isaac went to the doctor.

Our doctor took one look at Isaac and ordered a urine catch and blood work. The earliest verdict was kidney issues (unrelated, they felt, to the kidney infection he had three years ago, which cleared up quickly with antibiotics, and the subsequent ultrasound was normal). Matt made an appointment for Thursday at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma, where they have an excellent team of pediatric kidney specialists. I was nervous, of course, but basically okay -- and then they called us halfway through cooking a huge pot of soup for dinner and said that based on the last round of lab results, they felt that the safest place for Isaac to be was in the hospital. They asked us to be there within the hour, which gave us less than thirty minutes to leave the house. Within those thirty minutes, I:

-Called my brother and sister-in-law and asked if they could come and stay with Suzannah. Aaron was at my house within ten minutes.
-Called my friend who happens to be the assistant principal at my school, heard his voice, and burst into a fresh set of tears when I told him I needed to take my son to the hospital, and I was very sorry but I would miss the next day of school, something that is just Not Done the first week. He cut me off, told me to be with my son and not to think one more thought about school.
-Threw a set of Isaac’s jammies, an extra shirt, and a couple of toothbrushes into a backpack.
-Stopped cooking our huge pot of soup and threw the whole mess of dishes into the sink.
-Bundled Isaac into the car and headed for Mary Bridge Children’s in Tacoma.

I remember how lovely the evening light was as we drove across the tide flats and into the city. How soft the sky looked as the sun set.

I did a lot of crying on Wednesday, but once I knew we were going to the hospital, I was pretty calm. Part of it might have been relief that Isaac would be directly cared for by a team of experts, and in my worry, that helped -- but the bigger part of it is that while I know I’m emotional and prone to freakouts, I am actually pretty calm in a direct crisis. The falling apart comes later. I didn’t have time for that in the moment, and it was much more important to be present for my son, to provide as much safety for him as I could in the moments that were frightening for him.

I spent a few hours on Friday trying to record everything in my paper journal -- just scribbling down everything that was happening, everything the doctors told us, everything Isaac had to go through, everything about the hospital. I thought that one week later I’d be able to write coherently about it, but on Monday I was thrown back in the bustle of high school, a world that certainly didn’t stop turning while I stepped out of it for a bit, and tonight I’m exhausted and foggy.

The stream-of-consciousness version: Spending hours in our little ER room, visited by a steady stream of doctors, at least one nephrologist, a cardiologist, and nurses. Isaac had an EKG -- high levels of potassium can be hard on the heart. Another urine catch. I wasn't quick enough with the cup at first, and we both wound up splashed with urine, which upset Isaac. I soothed him with the promise of changing into fresh pajamas soon, not realizing it would be hours and hours before we would be admitted into our room. Albuterol treatment for the potassium, which made him panic and sob for the ten minutes he had to keep the mask on. I held him, breathing with him, brushing away tears the entire time. Another medicine to lower his potassium, delivered in a huge cup. Salty-looking sludge. I knew he wouldn’t drink it, couldn’t drink it. The nurse said he had to take it before he went upstairs, and I couldn’t find the words to ask her if she also wanted him to fly to our room because that was about as likely. I tried to get him to take one sip. He gagged, spit it out all over us both. Cried. The only other option was to give it rectally, which I thought they should have done first -- traumatic, yes, but inevitable, so they could have spared him the sludge. I wrapped him in a bear hug. It was horrible, but fast. (And hours later it resulted in explosive diarrhea, which confused him -- he’s never had that. “Mommy, my pants are wet,” he said, sitting up in his bed. I managed to get him on the toilet, but he climbed down too soon, splashing both me and the floor.) Blood draws. IV fluids. We had a little TV in our ER room, so we distracted him with cartoons until he passed out. When, I don’t know. 2:00, maybe. Hospital worlds turn slowly. Matt curled up on the little bench in there and snored softly and I sat there between my boys, my eyes burning with fatigue, watching Roseanne in the semidarkness. 3:00. 3:30. They kept telling us our room was almost ready. At 3:45 a nurse came to take us to an ultrasound. Isaac wouldn’t allow himself to be transported on a bed, so I sat in a wheelchair and he sat on my lap. When I tried to scratch my nose he grabbed my arm and wrapped it tightly around himself. I held him as the nurse pushed us through the darkened corridors, empty except for a man vacuuming. Hey, Peter, the nurse said as we rode blearily past. Finally in our room at 5:00. Isaac allowed himself to be tucked immediately into bed and he was out. Matt and I accepted a pitcher of ice water and I drank several cups -- I hadn’t had anything in hours. The nurse pulled out the chair bed, and the two of us collapsed on it. Fifteen minutes later I sat up to the lights blazing on, monitors beeping -- a generator test. They apologized, quieted our room. We dozed, fitfully, for two hours.

Thursday: Isaac woke up vomiting. I rubbed his back as he heaved over a pink plastic receptacle, peeled his sticky shirt from his body. After the nurse gave him Zofran for the nausea, he wanted breakfast. An incredibly restrictive renal diet meant he couldn't have much of anything, but he could have French toast, and he ate that happily. I told Matt, “I want all the breakfasts.” Realized I hadn’t eaten anything since my little vegetable wraps at noon the previous day. (At my desk. At school. In my classroom. A life that seemed so distant from that moment.) He brought coffee, which I sipped but soon forgot about in the bustle of morning rounds. The day was both slow and not. So much waiting. But when we weren’t waiting, there were nurses, doctors. Our youth pastor and friend arrived around ten. He stayed with us through some of Isaac’s meltdowns and remained unfazed; he has a son, too. He held my hand a bit, prayed with me, hugged me. More blood draws, more IV fluids. Isaac perked up in the afternoon in between fits of crankiness (he was hungry, but the food was boring). The floor had a wonderful play area -- lots of toys and crafts, including paints, and a family room with a wall-mounted computer game he couldn’t get enough of. He spent several happy hours there over the course of two days. Taught me how to play Zombie Cats, which delighted him. I ran home at noon. Didn’t eat, but I showered – a bigger priority, as I felt grungy with a filmy layer of tears, urine, diarrhea, vomit, sweat, and medicine. Packed clean clothes and a few more books and toys. Cleaned the kitchen. Drove back to the hospital, sipping an iced chai and trying to stay awake. Kyanne arrived in the afternoon, bringing a grilled cheese and salad. Stayed while Matt ran home for a shower. Matt was there to hug Suzannah -- I missed my girl so much. So much. She did so well with her auntie, though, and was very relaxed about everything. Kyanne and I went out for an hour before bedtime. I ordered a glass of wine, she ordered flatbread and shared with me. A bit of stolen normalcy. By the time I crashed onto the pullout bed on Thursday night I was so desperate to sleep I’d have slept propped against a wall.

Friday: More waiting. More of the same. The doctors seemed pleased with his numbers and overall progress. He is not a sickly child -- but the fact was that his kidneys were not working right, and we didn't know exactly why. We still don’t. We were allowed to go home, finally, because his blood pressure stayed under the danger zone without meds all day. But we were still there at dinnertime, and I watched my poor boy burst into tears at the sight of his plain pasta and side of grapes and say, “But Mommy, it doesn’t taste good."

Matt took him back on Monday for more labs and a meeting with the nephrologist. They were pleased with his labs and with his overall appearance; his swelling has all but disappeared, and he seems healthy, happy, ready to just be back in his four-year-old life, free of needles and probing and prodding and blood pressure cuffs and medicine and an endless flow of unfamiliar people all up in his business. I wish I could write something more definitive here, something about the what and the why of it all, but the fact is that my son hasn't presented “classically” for any one definite thing. It's not this or that or the other thing; it seems like a tricky combination of more than one. There are overlaps. There are no clear answers. We know he didn't have a strep infection, which would have been a simple explanation, although a mild infection could have triggered this. Right now we're operating under the assumption that it's nephritic syndrome. He's on a low sodium diet for the time being, although potassium and phosphorus restrictions have been lifted, and we will recheck in a few weeks.

The paperwork from the hospital reads that our reason for admittance was “acute kidney failure.” I didn't read that until later. I'm glad.

Our pediatric nephrologist said, “You know, not every kid who comes into the hospital fits so neatly in a box.”

(I know my children do not fit neatly into boxes, of course. Most people don't. And most of the time I'm just proud of them, completely tickled by these interesting people I will spend my entire life loving. But my goodness, if there's just one time I wouldn't mind the neat little box.)

I had a bit of recovery time last weekend before I returned to school, feeling totally unmoored. I didn't look at anything school-related for four days, not a lesson plan, not an e-mail. That just wasn't the headspace I could inhabit. But on Monday, I was back, doing my thing, meeting lots of new people, and trying to recover from missing the first two days with them. The students seemed relieved that their “real” teacher was back, because they want and need a little security, too. And it's been a pretty decent week, all things considered, although now, on Friday night, I am utterly exhausted.

There is no better perspective, though, than a few days in a Children's hospital. We are home, and we have our son. He is okay tonight. He and his sister fought over toys today. He helped me cook dinner. Yesterday I picked him up from daycare and took him to get a haircut; afterwards we went to Target together. He still fits in the seat of the shopping cart, and he was content just to ride along while I picked up cleaning supplies and a few new school shirts for Suzannah. We chatted, we giggled. I let him pick out a Halloween t-shirt, which he could not wait to show his daddy. He helped me choose one for his sister. I stocked up on snacks for my classroom and he asked me, so conversationally, “Are these for your students, Mommy?”

And my heart just burst with these little moments and the gift of these ordinary afternoons. A few days in a Children's hospital will show you exactly that—the gift of the ordinary. Because there are children still there, children who sat in the playroom with my son and painted, children who will not be going home with their mothers and shopping at Target this week. I watched a tiny boy with a smooth, bald head shuffle into the play room wearing fuzzy slippers and pulling his IV pole along behind him. A few times our nurses checked their pagers and dashed from our room, calling apologies over their shoulder—someone else needed them more than we did.

So while I'm tired tonight, I'm okay. I'm good. I'm doing what I can at school. It's not enough, because it never is, and I will be the first to admit that I'm just not on my game yet. But I have classes I think I will love, and eventually, I'll find my groove again. I just cannot find it in me to get angsty, or angry, or stressed at things that might normally inspire a rant or two. We're all busy, sure, but right now, this week, all I can think is that if my big problem in life is that I'm feeling overwhelmed and busy in a job I love, well—that's an awfully privileged problem to have. I know I've written that before, but this week I've thought about that in a whole new way. I was so worried and so stressed ten days ago about what? The thought that my son might have a bad cold and Matt and I would have to play the “Whose job wins” game? I promise that none of that mattered when we squeezed together in that little pull-out bed in our son’s room and tried to catch a few minutes of rest.

I’m human, and I have a lot of messy feelings. I know I’ll lose perspective again and again and again, that I’ll stress over things that, in the scheme of things, aren’t worth it. That I’ll lose temporary sight of what matters most. I’ll be hysterical, and crabby, and irritable. I’ll be a martyr. At the same time, I hope that something about this experience has worked its way into my heart to make it a little bigger, a little softer -- to extend a little grace not only to myself but to other people as well. We’ve been shown so much goodness, so much love. I keep thinking about a post my cousin Kathryn made a few years ago, about giving thanks in all things--not necessarily for all things but in all things--and I think this is exactly what that means. We’ve been surrounded with prayers and love and real concrete offers of help, and all of that has grounded me so solidly in this deep awareness of what matters. The thing I wrote in my last post feels so true right now--that while I hated how sick and scared my son was in the hospital, while Matt and I were exhausted and terrified ourselves, and while I hope never to repeat this experience, there is a deep, unutterable joy in the gift of being present. To climb into my son’s hospital bed for awhile and curl around him while he slept. To clean up the urine and the diarrhea and the vomit and the tears. To hold him and breathe with him and try to calm him, to reassure him that while this is yes, really fucking shitty, he will not have to be alone for even one moment. To feel the warmth of my husband’s hand over mine, to listen to the steadiness of his breathing while I stared at the ceiling, my eyes burning.

This is what life is. We show up for each other. We hold each other’s hands. We sit right down in the shit with each other and say, I’m here. I’m here.

Labor Day Weekend, Then and Now

The last day in August. Labor Day weekend. Thirteen years ago at this time, I’d already spent three days in front of my very own class, for the very first time. I spent the weekend curled up with my new puppy in my new apartment, trying to process this crazy, brand-new life I was living. I distinctly remember the relief I felt at having those three days to do exactly that and nothing else.

We start after Labor Day now, although our teacher in-service days began last week. I’ve been back at school for two weeks now. Not every day, but quite a few days. I’ve cleaned my classroom and made photocopies and lesson plans and have more still to do, although sometimes when I feel anxious because I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with one of my new preps two weeks from now I need to remind myself that during my first year, despite trying to get ahead each weekend, I still found myself planning Thursday’s lessons on Wednesday night. Now, planning units is much easier, and much more fun, and I know it will all just happen. I love reading and rereading things I’m going to teach. I love the creative process of planning how I’m going to do that -- for the first time in some cases, or how I’m going to rework something I’ve done before. It’s exciting. (I believe, again and again, that poetry will save us in the end, and that literature matters. I believe in connections. I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in these kids.)

This year, I’m still thinking of all of these things. Thirteen years in, I still get butterflies. But I still feel that this is where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and so I’ve shaken off the Sunday afternoonishness of mid-August and am planning to hunker down tomorrow and do some real work. I’m going to sail into next week excited to meet these kids I’ll be spending the year with.

Some things change, though. This year, I’m not wandering restlessly around my apartment or reveling in sleeping in one more time. Today, I spent my day smoothing my son’s hair off his sweaty forehead while he napped. I sent my daughter into the backyard to kick around her soccer ball. I made them lunch; my daughter ate hers quickly, while my son had to be coaxed. I tried to keep them separated as much as possible, because the last thing my daughter needs is to start the third grade with her brother’s cold. I napped restlessly myself, listening for my son. He woke me in the middle of the night last night, asking for water. He was cold, and then he was hot. I helped him out of the long-sleeved pajama top he’d insisted on sleeping in, tucked him in loosely. I took his temperature. Touched his cheek.

It is terrible timing, to have a sick child the weekend before school starts. The simple fact is that I must show up next week. Maybe by then I’ll have caught whatever my son is fighting; Lord knows I’ve caught plenty of bugs from my children over the past eight years. I can separate my children from each other, but I cannot separate myself, nor do I want to. They are entitled to my hands brushing their hair out of their sweaty faces, to my kisses after they drift off in a restless sleep. It’s part of the territory, even when it’s inconvenient.

“I’m stressing,” I said to Matt tonight, after both of our children were tucked into bed. “I seriously can’t miss anything this week. If he’s not better by Tuesday...I mean, I really think he will be, I think his fever will probably break tonight, but if it doesn’t, can you--“

He was already nodding. Yes, he can stay home if he needs to. I tried to breathe. We are so lucky. We can make it work. I can go to school. Even if I wind up feeling terrible, which I always assume will happen because I am a worst-case scenario kind of girl, I can go. I will survive, and we will survive. Of course will; I know this. And so I can reduce this moment to its simplest: my little son is sick, the only thing that matters. Not terribly sick, of course--he has a fever, and a bit of a cough. He is tired, wrung-out, cranky. This is not 2011, when he had a kidney infection, when he wouldn’t eat, when I stayed up with him at three in the morning, showering blearily in the middle of the night after he threw up all over me, when I e-mailed my principal to tell her I wouldn’t be able to make a mandatory staff meeting after coming home from the hospital, waiting for the results of a blood test. This is a cold, or allergies maybe. This is a common fever, this is restless sleep. This is childhood, and this is motherhood. And still. Still. My heart is anxious and my hands are restless. I know to let the fever run its course. I know the rest of us might get sick, or we might not. (Usually, we don’t. But there has been enough germ-sharing in our family that I always figure it’s safer to assume that will be the case, and then I can be pleasantly surprised.)

There are so many aspects of parenthood that aren’t fun -- who enjoys vaulting out of a warm bed in the middle of the night because a young child is crying, or throwing up, or needs to go to the bathroom, or needs a drink of water? I remember reading (years ago, when I was pregnant with Isaac, I think), some article on whether having children makes you “happier.” Honestly, I don’t think it does, at least on a day-to-day basis, because there is just so much bickering and whining and snot and poop and sticky fingers and drudgery. It’s not that I don’t think of myself as happy; it’s that I don’t think happiness is the point. I think of happiness as something superficial, I guess, and fleeting. What parenthood has done, though, is increase my deep, deep joy. How can I explain this? How can I explain that while of course I would prefer to sleep peacefully all night long, there is something I love about being the one to guide my son’s arms through his pajama top when he’s fussing at three o’clock in the morning? That it is a privilege to hold his head when he is feverish or ill? That simply being present for these people I love so much is a gift beyond anything I could ever find the words for which to ask?

Tomorrow morning, the last morning before it all starts again in earnest, I will rise early and take my son’s temperature before I eat my own breakfast and pray for it to be lower. I will drink coffee, whatever the thermometer tells me. I will have some time to myself in the afternoon to wrap my head around the week; Matt will take the kids while I write lesson plans, and read, and think. For the past couple of years, Labor Day has meant that he takes the kids to the zoo while I sit at a nearby sandwich shop and drink lattes or lemonade and work, but tomorrow maybe he’ll stay home with the kids and I’ll just go to Starbucks. Which is fine. Suzannah and I will pack her backpack and get ready for her Open House on Tuesday. Matt and I will cook dinner with the last of our fresh veggies for the week -- we’ll make a salad, find some way to use the last of our kohlrabi and beets before next week’s veggie box comes. Even if Matt has to stay home on Tuesday, we will be okay. This is the season of life we are in.

I’m excited for the school year, and soon I’ll be carried along on the momentum of it all. But in the meantime, this weekend has served not so much as a vacation, as a break, but as a reminder that life also happens within these small moments, glimpsed in between my grand ideas and my to-do lists: in tucking my son into bed and peeking anxiously through the door while he naps. In watching my daughter kick a soccer ball across the backyard. In hearing her giggle over some book she’s reading, tucked away in her room while her brother and I nap fitfully. It doesn’t make the bigger picture less important, but the smaller moments are the moments in which I live, and breathe, and love.

Cycles

I’m sure there are teachers out there who don’t feel the crippling Sunday-afternoonish anxiety of August, who don’t have back-to-school nightmares, but I don’t know them.

It’s not that the anxiety or the nightmares means we don’t love our jobs. These aren’t visions; they are simply part of the cycle. I’ve written about this before, and one thing Becca and I talked about before she flew back to China this summer was how we (mostly) deeply love the cyclical nature of teaching. We must go through this: the end-of-the-year exhaustion, the burnout, the desperation. The giddiness of early summer, the languid July days stretching before us, the early-August unsettling, and finally this: the panic, the fevered dreams. Mine usually involve a class full of every mean student I’ve ever had, the really awful ones. It’s a class full of only those students, to be clear, and in my dreams they become larger than life, terrifying in their insolence. I can’t get control of the class. They don’t hear me. It’s like that first horrible teaching scene in Dangerous Minds or any other dumb movie about teaching. As if the nightmares aren’t enough, during my waking hours I imagine all kinds of worst-case scenarios that have absolutely no basis in reality, but I dwell on them anyway, and soon I’m convinced that even if they’re not actually happening there’s a perfectly good chance that they might. I have hypothetical arguments in my head with people who have no idea they’re involved, and then I feel hostile towards them in real life. (Fortunately, this usually dissipates once I’ve actually seen the person involved, and usually I have the good sense not to mention it.)

There are a couple of ways to get off what my husband calls the hamster wheel in my brain. First, I reread journal entries from the August before my very first year of teaching. I’d just moved into my new apartment overlooking Puget Sound, where I lived alone for the very first time. I had a new pug puppy who ate half a drawer in my new kitchen the week I brought her home. My aunt and uncle lived nearby, but otherwise, I didn’t know a soul, having left my best friends back in Minnesota and Montana. Matt wouldn’t join me for a few more months. I was excited, overwhelmed, terrified, and lonely. I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing. Thirteen years later, I wish I could go back and give that girl a hug and tell her it’s never going to be this hard again. Which is mostly true, although I wasn’t miserable during my first year of teaching. I didn’t have time to be.

The second thing I do is watch episodes of The West Wing. No matter how anxious and stressed I am, ever, it will never be as terrible as being the President. I have comforted myself in this small way ever since Becca gave me a few seasons on DVD after Isaac was born. (I watched the first few seasons at two in the morning, nursing my son in the dark.)

“That,” I say to Matt, “is a stressful job.” He agrees.

And finally, at some point in August, on a day in which I feel I’m clinging to the last moments of our summer, I just have to go to school. I can’t wait until the week before school actually starts, even though I can do most of my planning at home. I have to go in with no real agenda other than spending some time reclaiming my space, remembering that my classroom is, in many ways, another home for me.

But it doesn’t look like home when I return each August. I clean it up before I leave in June: I clear the tables, get rid of all the extra projects students never bothered to take home save for the handful I want to keep, recycle the papers that were never picked up. The photographs of my children, my extra pens, my hole punch and stapler all go into a desk drawer, where they’ll remain safe over the summer. I have the students stack the desks in the back, and then I flip off the lights and lock the door.

The campus was quiet when I returned today. Registration won’t start for another week, although I could hear the marching band practicing down on the field. I opened the door to the computer lab of the English building and smelled the familiar musty scent of carpets drying from their late-summer shampoos. The inner room was piled with boxes and furniture; some teachers are shifting classrooms and are halfway through the moving process. My podium, I noticed, had been dragged in there, too. When I entered my own classroom, I was prepared for the chaos. The carpets were dry, and my desks had been unstacked, but they were scattered, shoved everywhere. My media cart was wedged in the back of the room; the side table on which I keep crates of kids’ portfolios was all the way on the other side of the room. One of my bookshelves was actually standing on top of my desk, still fully loaded with books. (It’s a small one, and fairly light, but still, I had to unload the entire thing to hoist it back to the floor. I didn't mind. It made it easier for me to wipe down the shelves.)

Suzannah and I spent a couple of hours in my room today. I had a vague idea of “stopping in” for a bit, but when I saw the state of my room, I knew I couldn’t leave until I’d set this small corner of my world in order. Suzannah embraced the task of helping me wipe down all the desks and asked cheerful questions about high school. She spends a fair amount of time there with me, and she seems so comfortable with the idea of someday being a high school student (though she envisions herself in my class, loyally selecting a desk near mine -- I do so love my eight-year-old). Today, though, I said, “Hey! You’re about to start third grade! Let’s just enjoy that for now, shall we?”

I tidied, wiped, sanitized, recycled, and rearranged until I felt sweat beginning to trickle down my back. I cleared away little odds and ends I’d meant to get rid of back in June. Suzannah smiled when she noticed the pictures of her and Isaac on my desk.

“How old is Isaac here?” she asked.

“Oh, gosh. Well, that picture’s a couple years old. He’s not quite two.”

“So...that means I’m five. Yep, that’s about right.”

This year, I’ve decided, I will actually add more current pictures of my children to my desk. It’s just that the two I have now capture them in such a beautiful, innocent moment on a lovely summer day, before Suzannah started kindergarten, a few months after Isaac learned to walk. I look at those pictures and I’m grounded, no matter how I’m feeling at school. Returning those pictures to the clean surface of my desk reminds me that every day, the world is new. It’s a good way to feel at the beginning of the school year.

And this is how I transition from crazy to calm, from dread to the quiet beginning of anticipation. From feeling unsettled to feeling optimistic. I begin to remember why I love this, even if I can’t put it into graceful words yet. I begin to remember that it matters, that I am about to return to my place as part of a greater whole.

Today I decided on specific days for planning each of my classes. I have a plan for planning, I suppose. In the meantime, I resolve not to be so crippled by anxiety that I can’t be present in the last sunny summer days with my family. We swim in Lake Washington, eat dinner on our patio, play in the yard. We go to the Elliott Bay Brewery and cross the street for ice cream at Husky Deli. We go to Veggie Grill and eat the breaded cauliflower appetizer off the summer menu. We’ll attend Matt’s company picnic, and the kids will play in the bouncy house and the splash park. We’ll squeeze in another family hike in the mountains. We’ll use up the rest of our sunscreen.

I’ll be ready, when the time comes, to return to my classroom. I always am. Even when I don’t feel it, I trust it -- I trust the process. I remember the sweetness of September. Until then, there are moments left of summer. I know I can’t keep them, but I can hold out my cup and let it be filled.

These small moments

The thing about forming deep attachments to people is that they don’t always last. Or rather, the attachment might, but relationships change and fade away. This is the natural order of things. People grow up, move away, move on -- it happens. This is the rhythm of the universe. But sometimes, the relationships hold even as they change, and years later, you might find yourself gifted with a spectacularly beautiful day in which you spend time with people who meant so much to you years and years ago, and it feels, also, like the natural order of things.

Today felt like a gift. As a teacher myself I know how powerful and intense student/teacher relationships can be, and I also understand that despite their intensity, many of them -- most of them, really -- fade over time. People remember many of their teachers fondly (I hope) but they don’t necessarily stay connected. But I’m thirty-five years old, and still. Still! One of the people I always want to see when I go home is one of the best high school teachers I ever had (I spoke about her in the interview, thirteen years ago, that landed me the teaching job I still have today), and so we remain connected, years later. I love Becky, and I love her daughters, who I babysat for a couple of summers after I graduated. They were younger than my own children are now when I spent my days with them. They were candelighters at my wedding. And now they’re adults, twenty and twenty-three years old. I had coffee with their mother last week in Bozeman, as I always try to do when I’m there, and she mentioned that she and the girls were heading to Seattle for a few days this week.

And that is how I wound up spending the day with them today. We met at the Woodland Park Zoo, and I brought Matt and the kids, and it was just delightful beyond words. I couldn’t believe how much they remember about the time we spent together -- they were so young! -- but I love that they do, because they were such a defining part of my summer days for awhile. I took them everywhere with me. I remember giving them piggy-back rides around downtown Bozeman, driving them in the backseat of my new car, taking them to ice cream, to the park, to the pool. When Matt and I took our children swimming at Bogart Park in Bozeman less than two weeks ago, I told him about taking these girls there, too. They really felt like family more than babysitting charges; I brought them out to my parents’ house all the time, and when we took my grandmother out for lunch on our way to Bozeman on our recent trip she asked about them because she remembers them, too.

“You trusted me so much,” I said to Becky today. “I just kind of took them everywhere I went.”

She shrugged. “I knew you,” she said.

Today I watched these two young women interact with each other in this beautifully sisterly way, still so different from each other, still so completely fabulous. I watched them play with my own children, which burst my heart in the very best way. And I thought about how strange time is, how these two little girls have become adults while I still feel so much like my eighteen-year-old self sometimes, how they have their own lives now, and how utterly lucky I am to be able to share this day with them. I think about how much their mother has meant to me for over half my life now. I think about the moment today at lunch when my two little children were both tugging on their arms, and I don’t even know what to call that, really. I could only smile and say, This is so great.

***
I didn’t forget about writing down three positive things each day for seven days; in fact, I scrawled them in a notebook on our trip, but I decided not to work to hard to post while we were on vacation. The internet break felt really, really healthy and necessary. But! I’m back now, so here are twelve good things.

Huckleberry riesling and huckleberry ice cream. Swimming in Lake McDonald, the way the cold water closed over my head when I finally worked up the nerve to plunge in, the view of the mountains when I resurfaced. Field roast and baked beans cooked over the fire. Falling asleep in our tent, curled around our children. Walking to Apgar Village in the cool dawn because Matt needed breakfast supplies, buying a hot chocolate, and returning to our campsite for pancakes and French press coffee. Driving across northern Montana, taking the wheel on the Chester road -- maybe one of my favorite quiet stretches of highway -- while my family dozed. The sunsets east of Shelby and just south of Great Falls. The first shower after camping. Showing my children the house I lived in when I was their age, driving them past my elementary school, my middle school. MacKenzie River Pizza (twice) and Leaf & Bean coffee (a bunch of times). Pickle Barrel sandwiches and huckleberry soda in the park. Swimming at Bogart in the afternoon heat and in the rain. Hiking to Emerald Lake and Heather Lake and Grotto Falls. Losing my sunglasses, and finding them again next to a rock where I’d stopped to rest and adjust my boots. Running along the highway with a view of the Bridger mountains. My dad’s famous popcorn in his ancient popcorn popper. Date night at Over the Tapas: poached pear salad, goat cheese croquettes, grilled asparagus, and vegetable Wellingtons (which I told Matt were the best thing I’d ever tasted). The trout aquarium at the St. Regis travel center. Homemade huckleberry scones. A cute neighborhood pub in Coeur d’Alene. Watching my son break into a grin on the carousel at Riverfront Park in Spokane, especially after he thought it would be too scary. The way our house smells when we return to it after a vacation -- like home.

Is that more than twelve? I stopped counting. They are all small, simple things, but they are the things I remember most. The small things make me appreciate the big things: my family and this time we had together.

At our campsite at Glacier, Suzannah turned to me and said, “Four things made this a perfect day. First, we got to ride the shuttle to Logan Pass. Then, we had ice cream, and then we played in the lake, and then we had s’mores. When you get four things like that it’s a great day.” Later, as we enjoyed our dinner, she said, “Ahh. Milk and a fire. Perfect.” Indeed, this is how my children bless me every day. They remind me to be present, right here, in the simple joys of our lives. Perfection is found in these small moments: in ice cream, in jumping into a lake, in a chocolatey mouthful of dessert roasted over a fire.