The state of things at the end of May

It is nearly Memorial Weekend, which means I feel all of the things. Every year.

Today is the day, seventeen years ago, when a very tall boy kissed me in St. Malo. We kissed again at the top of the Eiffel Tower a few days later. Two years later he asked me to marry him, and I've been wearing that ring for fifteen years.

Eleven years ago this weekend, I gave birth to our girl, our Suzannah Grace. Our girl. Words aren't enough. That girl goes to middle school in a few months. I still tip-toe into her room at night to make sure she's breathing, to kiss her softly before I slip into my own bed.

Seven years ago this weekend, our infant son was baptized. I cried and laughed that day, too.

Every year of my children's life, they've had at least one set of grandparents here for Memorial Weekend, and usually both. We celebrate. Matt and I try to slip off for a little dinner date to quietly celebrate us, too. Sometimes I stress out about making sure everyone is happy during their stay, about making sure everyone eats what they like and no one is bored or restless. It makes me anxious sometimes. I cherish the togetherness--I truly do, and it is not at all lost on me how lucky our family is to have this weekend together each year--but sometimes it overwhelms me.

Last night as I waited to present awards for the English department at Senior Awards night, a group of teachers fell into a conversation about introverts and extroverts. One teacher looked at me with real surprise when I said I'm totally an introvert.

"How can you be an introvert?" he said. "You're a teacher!"

But the thing is that I can perform. I can take the stage, so to speak, and I have fun with it. I played the trumpet through college, an instrument that requires a girl to find her voice. I can stand in front of a class, and I love the microphone. Public speaking doesn't terrify me. What I'm not good at is, say, accepting invitations to parties or events. I'm not good at being with groups of people and socializing. It's not that I don't want you to invite me to your gatherings; I do. And often I will talk myself into going, especially if I'm going with someone I feel comfortable with. And I usually have a good time. But I also feel depleted afterwards, and in real need of a recharge in the form of solitude. That's what truly fills my cup. It's why I've learned at this ripe old age that I don't want to throw myself a huge birthday party when I turn any significant age, why I've taken the day off for the past few years and indulged in my absolutely perfect day: spending the morning at a coffee shop reading and writing, taking myself out to lunch alone, going for a jog. If it's possible, I will choose that every year of my life.

I'm not sure where I was going with this anymore.

Mostly just this, I suppose: I'm lucky and I know it and sometimes I still feel a lot of messy feelings.

There's this: My life is pretty wonderful. I've been married for nearly fifteen years to a man I love and trust and am happy to kiss at the end of every single day. He leaves his socks on the floor but he mows the lawn and cooks wonderful dinners and cleans the kitchen and loves me even when I'm crazy and haven't washed my hair. He sends me out of the house to write when he knows I need it. We produced two children who also happen to be humans we love to live with, and we just like them so much. We can walk to the shore of Puget Sound in minutes, and we can hop on the light rail and have lunch at Pike Place Market without much fuss on a Saturday. We live in a blue state, near the water, and near the mountains. Matt has a job he is good at and seems to enjoy (nevermind the fact that I cannot tell you what he actually does because it is too complicated for me). I have a job that both exhausts and energizes me, and I love it deeply. It challenges everything I believe in. It demands that I examine the person I want to be in this world. And I am so honored to do this work, even when it's hard, even when I don't get my way in every little thing. In the big picture, I am senselessly privileged in so many ways.

Memorial Weekend is always a time when I recognize and appreciate my family: my husband, my children, and our support network. Even if I'm overwhelmed, and scrabbling towards the finish line of the school year. It really is all awfully sweet.

But there is also this: the bigger picture often terrifies and sickens me.

Betsy DeVos confirmed that she she has no problem awarding federal money to schools who discriminate against whomever they please. Not surprising, but sickening. This is deeply personal to me. I have more words for this than I can share tonight. What a horrible human being.

And tonight my home state, a place I love so much it physically aches, was tasked with choosing who will take Montana's lone Congressional seat. The Republican candidate physically assaulted a reporter last night. I listened to the audio, I read the FOX news report. And then I kept reading. And oh, how desperately I wanted to believe that Montanans are better than this. Montanans believe in human decency. Right? We want to believe that about our homelands. But I admit I never expected Quist to win. Because we've already shown that, as a country, we are uninterested in human dignity or decency, and there's nothing we won't excuse to get what we want. Trump is an unapologetic bully and sexual predator and that wasn't a deal breaker. Gianforte can assault a reporter and be celebrated and defended because he was "baited" by the "liberal media." All day I hoped, wildly and desperately, that Montana would do better, but I was not optimistic. What I am is heartbroken. Because my home state voted for a man who donated to campaigns of white nationalists. Because my home state voted to elect a man who can assault another human being and receive absolutely no consequences. In fact, his actions only strengthened his status with his base. We saw this happen in November; there's no reason we should be surprised now.

(At what point is my home state no longer my home? For a long time I thought Montana would welcome me back. I no longer believe that's true.)

Nothing about this is okay. It has never been okay, and I will not participate in normalizing it. Just do me a favor, anyone who voted for him (though honestly, if you did, why in the world are you reading my blog?): Please never, ever talk to me of "values" or "personal responsibility" ever, ever again.

I don't know, this is just the state of things these days. Things aren't okay, even as I am senselessly privileged. Even as the ordinary, everyday circumstances of my own life make me as happy as any human being probably has a right to be. I don't really know what to do with that tonight, other than write about it here in my tiny little corner of the internet.

Weather

Today's weather mirrored my general state of mind: Cloudy and still, followed by a burst of hard rain, followed by hours of sunshine, followed by a strong and chilly breeze. All is calm now.

I can feel everything in an unstructured Saturday. We don't have many unstructured days. And while I'm grateful for them, the way I'm grateful for summer, they also tend to make me anxious. Left without a plan, a structure, my mind begins to churn. It's funny. Teachers will tell you they can't really relax until July, but July is the month in which I make myself most anxious. Each summer I find myself obsessing about something different. Like Mt. Rainier erupting, or "The Really Big One" -- Kathryn Schulz won the Pulitzer for the piece that had me pricing survival kits all summer, worried that we wouldn't have stockpiled adequate rations by the time the inevitable earthquake hit.

So maybe it's not a bad thing that my summer is going to be a busy one. We'll have our usual week in Montana, and it's our summer to fly to Minnesota. I also have a trip for school, and for the first time I'm accompanying Matt on a work trip, purely for pleasure! And I'm taking a class, one that starts before the end of the school year and ends in early September. And I'm planning a class, one I haven't taught in years, and one I'm changing considerably from the last time I taught it.

None of these are bad things. It is, after all, the life I want. This work is work I am privileged to choose. These travels to spend time with family are trips we are privileged to take. It's just that the part of summer that I most love, especially as a mother of young children, is going to be necessarily condensed. It means I will be pretty protective of the days I have at home. I want things to be slow; I want to stay grounded. Moments I cherish will mean everything: those afternoons in the backyard, while the sun slides across the patio and I move my lawn chair, following the shade. The sparkle of the sprinkler: diamonds against a bright blue sky, the sound of my children's laughter. (And, if I'm honest, the sound of their squabbling.) The echo of voices in the muggy air of the swim center, the sharp scent of chlorine and the slap slap of flip-flops on the concrete floor. Mornings at the playground, the kids kicking the soccer ball while I jog the track.

I'm excited for the things that shake us out of our routine (although our Montana trips are becoming a tradition: time spent in Bozeman, finding new coffee shops since the coffee shops of my youth have closed or changed, date nights at fun restaurants, hiking, grilling in my parents' backyard, driving to Glacier and swimming in Lake McDonald and hiking some more and camping and breathing the sweetest air of my childhood). I'm looking forward to every single scheduled thing, even though travel makes me anxious. Because so does stillness. My mind will hop on any available hamster wheel.

The hamster wheel, this weekend, is going a little nuts. Like the clouds and the rain and the sun and the wind.

But I do love weather. I love the clouds and the rain and the sun and the wind.

And so here we are, in May. I'm so ready for summer, even though I'm also so anxious. Sometimes I feel everything, everything, all at once, and it's too much, and I lose perspective. But sometimes I also remember to breathe. Tonight the winds have calmed and I am breathing.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. It's going to be a nice day, because I married a man who gave me beautiful children and who gives me everything I ever want out of this day: a short nap after church, a trip to Elliott Bay Books (plus a little quiet reading and writing time in the cafe), and a cozy dinner somewhere, usually Veggie Grill. Basically like my birthday. Plus, he offered to vacuum the house. Truly, those things--a nap, books, dinner, a vacuumed house--are worth more than anything a jeweler could ever sell me, and they make me infinitely happier.

Anyway, I love Mother's Day, because I love my children and my family and I feel just deeply grateful for this life. I'm grateful for the children who made me a mother, for the mother who raised me (even if sometimes I wonder if I didn't turn out quite the way she hoped), for the mother who raised my husband and who loves me too, for the fact that my children have grandmothers who love them deeply, for the husband who loves and supports and partners me in parenting our littles, for the friends who lift me up when life is hard--it's all connected! But I also wouldn't mind if Mother's Day ceased to be A Thing, because I think Mother's Day might be the most painful day some folks might experience in a year, for lots of reasons. The hurt runs deep. Becoming a mother has taught me that much as well. There are places in our hearts -- as mothers, as children, as mothers who are missing their children and children who are missing their mothers and as humans who feel absences in myriad ways -- that will always hurt a little more on this day.

Nothing is ever simple. A day of sunshine might still hold a chill, a storm, a quiet. And we all might remember different hours in the same day.

Cherry Blossoms and Brokenness

Life is just so weird right now. So lifey.

Part of it is that it's May. Finally! Finally it's May! We're all just limping pitifully along towards the end of the school year, the way we do every year. I don't like to generalize or speak for all teachers but I feel like this is the one generalization that is safe to make. The last six weeks are just so hard. Here's what May looks like for me at the moment: I'm impatient. I'm frustrated because in my mind I haven't seen the magic growth in my freshmen I feel I was promised when, back in August, I said, "So I'm scared to teach freshmen! I don't really know how to do that!" Those freshmen ruin my life every other day, even though I truly love those kids. I really do. But they ruin my life. Then again, I also fully acknowledge that I am all out of perspective, like it's just totally gone, every last drop drained, and that makes me a little sensitive.

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

At the same time, we are tired and sad and we have lost too many people. My school community is one I love so much, and there is nowhere I would rather be in the midst of this strange season of grief, but

but

I am unmoored

in so many ways.

So unmoored that I found myself crying in my classroom at 2:30 this afternoon, crying and feeling stupid for not learning a lesson I feel I should have learned by this point in my adult life, which is this: sometimes the things (or people) in which we invest our emotional energy are not worth the rent-free space we allow them in our minds and hearts. I think my dad was the first person to put it that way, a long time ago, when I was struggling with whether or not to maintain an unhealthy friendship. I am a grown-ass woman, but sometimes I still struggle with sensing when I'm investing too much emotional energy in the wrong places. The return just isn't worth that investment.

Be kind, always. Consider everyone's story. But set boundaries when they need to be set. There are some things on which we cannot agree to disagree.

It wasn't just this one day; it was the culmination of weeks, of months, even. Some of my relationships have shifted irrevocably since the election. I have become dehydrated crying over some of them; others simply leave an ache. Sometimes people's silences say more than their words. And sometimes people's careless words can't be shrugged or explained away with "Oh, you're just taking that the wrong way."

Words are what I have and all I know how to use; for me, silence is complacency, and words matter.

I wondered, today, what the right word is, the word that captures both deep loneliness and deep anger.

I wondered this as I slammed furiously and tearfully around my empty classroom, as I drove across town to pick up my kids, as I exercised in the late afternoon, as I soaked in the bath and tried to distract myself with a book that ended up being not so much a distraction as a validation and a beautifully written balm for my soul, because I believe the right books have a funny way of finding their way into our hands at the right time.

I still wonder as I write this tonight. But I'm also okay, despite my sadness and loneliness and anger. Because I'm a grown-ass adult, I guess. Sometimes I take too long to establish healthy boundaries, but I get around to it eventually, and then I'm pretty peaceful about things. And I know that what I have weighs more than what I've lost, when it comes to that. I'm lonely in this moment, but I'm not alone. I walked back to my classroom and felt safe in crying to a friend. I texted back and forth with another close friend this evening. Matt came home with Thai food and a hug, and I am home in those arms. These moments of authentic human connection are the reason I can sit here tonight, curled up on the couch with my husband while we watch a movie, and breathe. And try to recover some of my lost perspective. And feel gratitude, despite everything else: Brokenness and loss and mansplaining and misogyny and yesterday's utterly shameful vote on healthcare and the utterly depressing state of the country. (God forgive us for our complacency. God forgive me.)

I managed to squeeze in a quick evening jog the other day, on a day I didn't think I'd have time. I hurried from school to a meeting to gymnastics and I had a brief window of time before another evening meeting. I decided in that moment to go for a run, just a quick one, more to clear my head than to really work out. I ran through the streets near my home in the soft evening light, the warmest day we've had yet this spring. There's a stretch of sidewalk in my neighborhood that's full of cherry blossoms, a late scatter over the ground. They've mostly fallen free from the branches, and they coat the sidewalk like a silky carpet. The air on this street smells like heaven. A sudden gust of wind swirled them up, off the sidewalk and into the streets, and they landed in my hair as I ran past.

I don't know why these small moments make everything okay. Everything isn't really okay. But for the rest of the evening I felt so aware of the sweet evening air, the way my feet feel in sandals, the way my children kiss me goodnight and shriek their protests when I suggest I just crawl into their beds and sleep with them all night long. I thought about how things are hard right now, and about how I have felt lonely, but. I am not alone.

My heart hurts and I am angry tonight, but there are cherry blossoms on the sidewalk and my children safe in their beds. My friends hold my hands, literally and figuratively. My husband's knees bend into the backs of mine as I drift to sleep. I am part of something so much bigger than myself: this wide, pulsing, beautiful, broken world.