January can be a difficult month. It’s long. Packing up the Christmas decorations is not my favorite chore. Returning to school after two weeks of winter break is tough for both students and teachers, for various reasons -- the readjustment is hard both for those of us who had a wonderful, restorative vacation and those of us who had a darker time of it. And then in the midst of this January slump, we have to get ready for semester finals, and kids are stressed and there is all this grading and I’m trying to call parents and get kids to dig in and get shit done or at least not give up all hope if they’ve been floundering because I know that sometimes kids who make terrible decisions in October can and often do pull it together by March. And then it’s also the month when my children always seem to get their worst colds, and inevitably I’m always stressed about how to juggle staying home with sick kids with semester finals and worried about getting sick myself. The dread, as it turns out, is worse than the reality: that this is a season of life, that colds can and will happen, and we will roll along and deal with it.
This week there are stacks of notebooks on my desk at school, papers bundled together with brightly colored binder clips on my desk at home, papers spread across my dining room table. I stay up too late on school nights. I make lists. On Monday, I will grade all of my freshmen reading logs. On Tuesday, I will grade all of my sophomores’ close reading assignments: color-marking and passage analysis. I will grade five junior composition books each day this week so I don’t have to haul a giant armload home. I will grade all of their commentaries on Thursday night.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I sip mug after mug of green tea and grade papers on the couch while I watch reruns of Friends after the kids are in bed. It’s not efficient, but it is comfortable. At 11:45 or so, I give up, pack up for the next day, and crawl into bed. On Friday I pack the remaining comp books into my car and head home with them, determined to blast through them as soon as I get home with the kids. I will finish grading them before five o’clock while the kids watch Home Alone 2, and then we’ll head to West Seattle to meet Matt for dinner.
I pour a glass of wine. I write comments with my purple Pilot Pen. I prefer green, but it’s the end of the semester, and I’ve run my green pens dry.
(I fell in love with these green pens so many years ago, back in my high school creative writing class. I wrote in my notebook on one difficult morning, “Just give me a green pen, and everything will be okay.” And my teacher responded, “You’ve learned the secret of small, everyday miracles.”)
Even in the midst of this grading, the work that, at this time of year, seems like nothing more than frenetic drudgery, there are these small gifts. In all of these awkward teenage sentences there are some that sing. I know perfectly well that I’m not teaching a bunch of future English majors but I am teaching a few who love language like I do, and I am teaching some who are learning to let their minds and hearts open a bit more all the time. One boy accepts a grade that is less than the one he wants, but he says, “I actually read this book, and I loved it.” I’m teaching kids who are doing things they didn’t think they could do.
And of course there are also the kids who give up, or never tried to begin with. There’s the kid who fights me every single day, the kid who needs the attention of everyone else in class all the damn time, the kid whose contempt for me, for school, and for his classmates casts a shadow in my room even though I know there is more to his story than the one he shows to me. But on a Friday afternoon in January, as dusk falls across my backyard and I sip my wine and read these sentences scrawled in a notebook, I feel like I’m just muddling through the only way I know how. Sometimes I think there are other jobs I could do, and even be objectively good at. But as crazy as I feel in this one, as heartbroken, as discouraged, as frustrated, I’m not sure anything else could bring me this kind of joy. A boy loved a book. A girl wrote passionate sentences, far more than she was required to write. A girl stopped by my room to hug me after school. A boy smiled when he understood that he is going to pass English.
I’m counting on all of this to carry me through the end of the semester with a reasonable amount of grace and good humor, because it is all too easy to be sucked into a giant collective pity party about how terrible everything is. I threw just such a party for myself the other night. Isaac had a deep, chesty cough, and Matt came home with a sore throat and clogged sinuses. I suggested unkindly that next time he felt like he was getting sick, maybe he could let me know before I started cooking a dinner he wouldn’t be able to taste and the kids wouldn’t eat anyway. And then I burned the damn dinner. And then Matt told me about some changes that are happening at work, and naturally I heard, “I’ll definitely be quitting my job, just so you know, so please freak out right now.” (He indicated nothing of the sort, and possibly my almost-freakout wasn’t strictly necessary.) I decided to sleep in the study, figuring my sniffling husband would get better rest without my rolling him over all night long when he started to snore -- and also, truth be told, hoping I’d avoid his cold germs. But then I crawled into bed with Matt anyway. It was warmer there.
I woke up yesterday morning determined to look forward to the day. Doesn’t that sound so obnoxious and trite? But it’s true. I made plans right away.
“We’re going to pick up Isaac right after school,” I said to Suzannah over breakfast, “and then we’ll make popcorn and watch a movie.”
Her eyes lit up. “Isaac!” she said. “Mom says we can do popcorn and a movie after school today.”
“And it’s show and tell today!” he cried.
Oh, bless them.
And then I got a text from Matt, suggesting we meet at the Elliott Bay Brewery for dinner because he knew I probably wouldn’t be in the mood to cook. Can we go to Veggie Grill tomorrow night, then? I replied. Sure, he said. All of it so ordinary. Popcorn. Dinner out at a place we go to all the time. The promise of a Saturday out in Seattle -- Pacific Science Center, maybe, but it doesn’t even matter. Something. Just the four of us, doing ordinary things that we might do on any ordinary Saturday. These are the things I remember about our weekends, these beautiful ordinary moments. Holding our children’s hands between us, walking through the rain on Seattle streets, singing in the car, sharing a smile if our children nod off in the backseat, rolling our eyes if they play their latest version of the Stinky Feet game at top volume.
I look forward to all of it. And that’s what gets me through January: finding things to look forward to, from tiny little gifts of time to myself, say, an hour to curl up on the couch with a book on a Friday afternoon, to the promise of a three-day weekend in Leavenworth with my husband and children and brother and sister-in-law. A different view of the mountains. Snow. Fog that settles over our neighborhood in the quiet evening, without the biting cold of November. The knowledge that the cherry blossoms will be bursting over the sidewalks two months from now, that the smell of spring will work itself upwards from the damp earth.
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