Gratitude and Grief

My son turned fifteen today. 

I've told his birth story so many times, even in this space. Today in the car, driving home from bowling, I reminded the kids that fifteen years ago I spent the day cuddling Isaac on the couch in our family room. I was blessed with an intense but mercifully quick and uncomplicated labor, and two hours after he was born we bundled him into his carseat and drove home from the birth center. The winter morning was frosty and still dark, but I felt nothing but buoyant joy.

I was also starving, so Matt bought me a breakfast burrito in the McDonald's drive-thru on the way home. Orange juice too, I think. Like the grilled cheese I devoured immediately after Suzannah's birth, it was the best thing I'd ever tasted.

We arrived home just after Suzannah's auntie Morgan had fed her waffles for breakfast. We'd planned to introduce her to her new brother but take her to daycare for a few hours to let us settle in and keep a normal routine for her for a little longer. She only had two more weeks of daycare before she'd be home full-time with me until the following September. But as luck would have it, Matt wound up taking her to the pediatrician around lunchtime; she'd spiked a fever and had a runny nose and cough. Today we laughed about Matt announcing to our pediatrician that oh, by the way, we'd also had a baby that morning.

I asked Matt to bring home a quarter pounder for lunch, so back to McDonald's he went. This might not be such a grand memory, except that it makes all of us laugh.

I was a more seasoned mama the second time around, and I had my own bed, my own couch. Isaac had no trouble nursing from birth, and my memories of that day are cozy despite the sleep deprivation. My doula called later that afternoon to gently encourage me to nap, but I couldn't take my eyes off my son. I didn't sleep until that night, with my baby nestled next to me in bed. It was a perfect day.

*

This morning Isaac and I walked the dog together in light drizzle, and then we all went to lunch at the Spar before heading to Tower Lanes. We didn't check the schedule ahead of time, so when we learned that bowling wouldn't open until 2:30 due to a tournament, we booked a reservation at a much smaller bowling alley in a neighborhood we love. The kids played in the arcade for awhile first, gleefully redeemed their tickets for handfuls of trash, and then we headed to our next destination. All four Winslows were on our game. I mean, by our third, we were on fire. Each one of us bowled strikes and spares like nobody's business. Listen, I broke 100. That doesn't happen a lot.

After bowling, we stopped for coffee -- well, a cortado for me and an espresso for Matt, and baked goods for the kids. Without any prompting, they both shared theirs with each other and then offered us bites as well. Back home, Matt diced an onion for me -- he likes to help with dinner prep -- and Isaac asked if I wanted to play Blokus, the game we played nearly every morning back in 2020 when schools shut down and which he almost always refuses to play with me now because apparently I "overdid it." (Please.)

Isaac takes after me in that he is a total homebody; he'd almost always rather stay home than go out. It made sense, then, that he requested a night in for his birthday rather than a favorite restaurant meal, even though Saturday night is our usual family dinner night out. He wanted tater tot casserole and homemade cake, and this little thing is so endearing to me. So Matt baked the cake and made the ganache frosting, and I made the tater tot casserole. (Not Tim Walz's recipe, though; I made that on election night and I can never eat it again. It was delicious in the moment, though very heavy -- he uses bratwursts instead of ground beef -- and when I understood how the night was going to go it was all I could do not to throw up. All night long, I regretted the Election Casserole. For Isaac, I chose a simpler version -- ground beef and green beans, plus the cheesy goodness of freshly shredded cheddar topped with tater tots. We served it with a green salad.) He opened his gifts after dinner but before cake, and he was sweetly appreciative of everything, as he always is.

*

Here is a thing that is always part of Isaac's birth story: His name means "He laughs." I couldn't have known then how much my second-born child would make me laugh every single day of his life, no matter how dark the day.

*

Here is a thing that is impossible to untangle from my son's birthday: on the day he turned three, my lunch break was interrupted by the sound of a colleague's screams.

"They killed all the kids," she cried.

On the day my son turned three, twenty first graders were slaughtered in their classroom in a public elementary school in the United States of America. On the day I was excited to celebrate my son, I swallowed back my terror and tears for my last class of the day, and as soon as the bell rang I rushed to pick up my own first grader from her classroom in a public elementary school in the United States of America.

I have written about this and written about this and written about this and it feels like screaming in a locked, empty room. Parkland: 17 dead in 2018.  Uvalde: 19 children killed in 2022. And all the others, too many for me to remember by name on demand, even though I've tried to write about them, tried to donate money every time another one happens. This is shameful, that there are too many to recall, to name. The fact that my country excels in mass shootings is a shame that should be named.

The year my son turned three, the year twenty children were slaughtered in their school, President Obama wept and Republicans openly mocked his tears. This year my son turns fifteen, and we have elected people into the highest offices who shrug their shoulders and say that school shootings are merely a "fact of life."

I think of those twenty children from Sandy Hook every year on this day. I think about how they should be home from their first quarter of college right now, or working at their first post high-school jobs. They should be hauling home laundry bags, sleeping in, catching up with high school friends.

Their parents should be able to hug them hard after missing them for months.

The blood of these babies coated the floor and it continues to coat our hands.

*

It's hard to have hope in this country, in a country that reelected an unapologetic racist, a misogynist, a rapist, a monster. In a country where folks think they deserve absolution if they didn't vote for him but voted for those in their cities and states who will uphold his monstrous agenda. We are a spectacle and a shame. But as Rebecca Solnit often reminds us, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Hope requires work, not complacency. Hope means we acknowledge that things are very, very bad and they will get worse. But Solnit also reminds us that we can build paradises and sanctuaries in hell. For that is where we are.

*

I write all of this from a place of relative safety and extreme privilege. I know this. And I write from a place of hope, because my children deserve this. My daughter deserves our protection and my son deserves our accountability. My son has been granted every privilege, and I know that raising him to understand this requires work beyond raising him to be "good." Because "good" white straight Christian men have caused immeasurable harm when they haven't been taught to interrogate that privilege. Even the progressive ones, even the kind ones. And we've devoted too much energy to their hurt feelings at the expense of people's lives.

*

I am aware, every day, of the darkness. But do not underestimate my capacity to embrace joy.

It has been a dark, hard year. Personally, professionally, locally, globally.

I am aware, every day, of my privilege. This year has knocked my sideways in ways experienced by lots of folks with fewer supports and resources. What I know I need to do is channel that privilege into action, with the energy I am privileged to have because I've had supports and resources. It's the most important work we can do, and I'm still learning it. I believe this is our collective responsibility. To interrogate this privilege and act on it. And to listen. To listen.

My children's birthdays make me contemplative, I guess. The personal becomes political. 

*

We can build paradises and sanctuaries in hell.

*

I wrote this five years ago: Every year, and especially every December, the darkest month of the year, I look at my son, at both of my children, and remember the light.

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

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

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

“Morning, Baby,” I say.

“Whatcha doin’?”

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

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

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

“Smell,” he says, wiggling them.

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

An entire first-grade class, murdered.

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

(Mustache Day at school.)

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

Balancing the scales

I've decided not to do Christmas cards this year. 

I know some folks are doing great ones: whimsical, playful, humorous, or just an attempt to maintain tradition in a year that challenges most of them. I wondered if creating a Christmas card would bring me a sense of healthy normalcy, because I do enjoy making them each year (I'm always in the "find the candids that show us as we are" camp and I think that will always be my style, because to me that's the fun part about making the cards, and it's us), but this year, it feels like a box to check, and this year, it feels especially important to reevaluate the importance of checking boxes when it might be healthier to let go of the expectation.

I've spent a lot of time talking about self-care with my students and trying to practice it myself. I've spent the fall working longer hours than I have since my first year of teaching, with not a lot of return plus the added scorn of what feels like, oh, everyone who isn't a teacher. Everyone has an opinion about teaching in a normal year, but in a pandemic year, it's pretty obvious that the "respect" folks claim to hold for teachers is pretty hollow when they're personally inconvenienced. (I know it seems I'm generalizing here. But also, I'm really not.)

In a normal year, even a hard one, I don't spend this much time feeling so defeated, angry, exhausted, and just...sad.

There are good things. Of course there are. Even in a pandemic, even in this strange context, even though I'm still struggling because what I do can never really translate to a screen, there's still no other job I want. Even now, so much is possible. Especially now, I owe my students the best I have to give. And my students still make it all worth it, so I'm still here.

But I'm tired of checking boxes. I think any teacher could tell you that we're feeling pretty micro-managed in a lot of ways right now (can we be trusted to be professional if we're teaching from home? Some folks seem skeptical about this, and it's not a coincidence that these are the same folks who seem to think that teachers are greedy takers if they dare to expect a professional salary). So I check a lot of boxes these days, boxes of no authentic value, merely to prove that I'm earning my paycheck.

Christmas cards do have authentic value to me, depending on the spirit in which they are given and received, I suppose. But this year, I can't do it. I can't check a box for the illusion of normalcy. I tell everyone I love to let things go and extend grace, and I am choosing to do that for myself as well. This is a thing I am letting go.

I'm sorry, Friends and Family. I do love your Christmas cards and will gratefully receive them if you choose to send them. If Christmas cards are transactional for you, though, and you choose not to send one our way again because this year I can't respond in kind, well, it is what it is. I don't know how to weigh my well-being against someone else's expectations right now.

Sometimes, the scales don't always balance.

*

I spent the first few Thanksgivings after college away from my immediate family. That first year, Matt and I prepared our own Thanksgiving dinner in our little one-bedroom apartment above the roaring traffic of Pacific Highway. I made my mom's scalloped corn, and he cooked a turkey. We had mashed potatoes. He made the pecan pie that he still makes every year. And every year, I would marry him all over again for that pie.

The turkey was a little dry, but the memories of the day are still pretty sweet.

We thought about trying to recreate the coziness of that day, with a little more experience and a bigger kitchen. In the end, though, we opted for ordering our dinner from McMenamins in Tacoma. A big Thanksgiving dinner is only a little bit about the food; it's really about the togetherness and cooperation and warmth. I didn't want to stress about a giant turkey dinner and the kitchen cleanup for the four of us when my daughter is just as happy to eat chicken nuggets and there was no reason to put out a spread of pita crackers and brie or fresh veggies and olives, too. Instead, we ordered food to go. I made my mom's scalloped corn anyway because it's really easy and I love it, and Matt made his pecan pie, because. See above.

It was a good decision. Matt and I took turns heading out for long runs and walks in the cool sunshine. (Matt probably ran twelve miles, but I don't want to know. I dug out my Turkey Trot shirt and ran my own personal 5k, then walked another hour listening to a podcast.) We hung out together. We allowed time for us to enjoy ourselves apart: iPad games, quiet reading. Late in the afternoon, Matt drove down to pick up our dinner and dropped off a couple of slices of pie for my brother and sister-in-law; after all, I think we've enjoyed every Thanksgiving since Isaac was born at their house, just minutes from our own.

In a non-Pandemic year, my high school students make hand turkeys in English class the day before Thanksgiving. Since I couldn't do that with them this year, I brought the tradition home to my own family. I realized, too late, that I'd left the good supplies -- the feathers and googly eyes -- in my classroom. But we had plenty of construction paper and card stock. We had glue. We had markers. We had random bags of dried beans and lentils from the art bin I put together when Isaac was born and I spent nine months on maternity leave with a three-year-old, determined to try "home preschool." 

A crafty Pinterest Mom I am not. But we had fun. Even my husband, who seemed resistant at first, got into the project.

"This is actually really calming," he said, as we cut feather from construction paper. He even held up dinner a bit because he wasn't "satisfied with the plumage." I told him he'd have to finish later.

*

Dinner was off-the-charts delicious. Not as good as our traditional family dinner where multiple households work together, but it was never going to be that. However, it exceeded my expectations for takeout turkey and all the sides, I didn't emotionally invest in the preparation while battling the grief over what was missing, and cleanup was a breeze. We had a Zoom call with my parents afterwards, and while it couldn't compare to our usual post-feast game of Clue, I'm still grateful we could see their faces.

*

As I made the choice not to do cards this year, as I said it out loud to my husband and cried just a little -- a strange but increasingly familiar mix of relief and grief -- I wondered if maybe we should just give ourselves permission to be a little quiet this year. Not to overcompensate with more lights, more spending, more stuff, more attempts to recreate the normalcy we cannot have right now. And maybe we should rethink what we consider normal anyway.

No: I didn't wonder. I wished it.

*

Every December, right around New Year's Eve, I write a huge Year-in-Review entry in my journal (my actual journal, not this public blog; it's really just for me). I've done this since before Suzannah was born, and it's interesting to see my answers to the same questions year after year. It goes without saying that I've been imagining my 2020 Year-in-Review entry for about seven months now.

One of the questions is Who did you miss?

Everyone. Just everyone.

It's a strange holiday season, for sure. We've spent every single Thanksgiving since our kids were born with my parents, brother, and sister-in-law. Over the years, we've added a few kids to the mix. It's always a cozy, lovely weekend -- one of my favorites. We've never spent Christmas on our own. But I think about the thousands upon thousands of place settings that will sit empty next year, and about the folks who have never been able to take holiday gatherings for granted in the first place. Togetherness looks different this year, but it means we can still hope for next year. And maybe it's not a bad thing, to focus on what matters, let go of what doesn't, and grapple with the sometimes heartbreaking in-between. To let ourselves celebrate and grieve, both, and let it shape us as it may.

Gratitude in the anything-but-normal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this: What is your biggest dream in life?

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

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

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

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

Bonus Days

During my freshman year of college, I waited nearly a full day longer than almost everyone else on campus before I began my 11-hour drive home; four of us were driving two cars and had agreed to travel together, and two of the girls had late finals that meant I had to wait until the next day. Despondent, I called my grandmother to vent about my loneliness and boredom as my dorm emptied. She offered a different perspective.

"Just think, though, hon," she said. "You're already packed, you're done with finals, and you have the day all to yourself. I call days like that 'bonus days.' You have this gift of time to do something you really enjoy."

As tempting as it was to sulk, or feel that I was missing a day of my Christmas break, I remember it fondly all these years later. I rarely had my dorm room to myself, but my roommate had left early. I basked in the quiet, stretched out on my bunk bed, and spent the entire day reading a book. I even remember the book; it was Madeleine L'Engle's A Live Coal in the Sea, and I read it cover to cover that day.

***

I've been anticipating snow since last weekend, when the forecast predicted snow all this week starting on Sunday night. Sunday night produced nary a single snowflake at my house, and we didn't have as much as a late start. I woke up every hour all night long to peer out the window, waking for good at four o'clock on Monday morning. I was grumpy and tired and disappointed. This Montana girl loves the romance of a snow day, since we didn't get them growing up. It's easy to romanticize snow when you don't have to shovel it well into March and April, and it is precious to me now.

(And I know I've written this before, but if you live in a place accustomed to snow, kindly keep your snarky comments to yourself. Driving on ice out here, where we have steep hills everywhere, is so much harder than driving on snow and ice in any other place I've lived. I'm far more comfortable driving in heavy snow in Montana or Minnesota than I am driving in just a little here. When it snows here, we have ice, the roads are terrible, we don't have the infrastructure to handle it, and we stay home, thank you very much.)

On Monday afternoon, I decided to clean my kitchen to cope with my disappointment. Not ordinary cleaning, like wiping down the counters and making sure all the dishes were put away, but the kind of cleaning that involved emptying every single cupboard and cabinet and scrubbing the inside, and then scrubbing the outsides as well. I washed the silverware tray. I cleaned the junk drawer. I watched a movie (The Fugitive with Harrison Ford from 1993, because I picked it up at Easy Street Records for like three bucks and I love it, shut up) and an episode or two of Friday Night Lights, and somewhere in there I managed to cook West Indian red beans with coconut rice.

I made Matt admire the silverware drawer more than is normal. He's a good sport. But later he said, "You...do this sort of thing. When you're sleep deprived."

The first flakes fell just after eight o'clock last night and hope surged again.

"It's not going to snow," Isaac grumped. We'd been so disappointed that morning. "It's not going to stick. It doesn't even matter."

But hope is a killing thing, and it kept me up all night again. It was nothing like the beautiful fluffy flakes of last February, but before I went to sleep we had enough to coat the grass, our patio furniture, and the swing set with a thin, glistening layer of snow.

I didn't sleep well until the first call came at 3:38 this morning alerting us to a two-hour delay; the call announcing that schools were closed followed at shortly before six o'clock. We managed to keep the kids inside until first light, at which point they donned snow gear and headed outside to make the best of it. We have enough lawn to support quite a few snowballs, even if the snow isn't thick.

I stayed in bed as long as I could, listening to the kids and their early-morning restlessness. Matt and I cuddled sleepily for awhile.

"I'm going to clean out the dining hutch this morning," I said against his chest. He laughed and laughed.

I know we have to make up the day, that we now have a three-day weekend instead of a four-day weekend over President's Day. I know my colleagues were hoping for a two-hour delay -- all the benefits of sleeping in without the penalty of making up the time. But listen: today was perfect. Reader, I cleaned my dining hutch. I dusted my house, and then I scrubbed the bathrooms and vacuumed and mopped floors and found other random dusty corners to clean. I made tomato soup and grilled cheese with The Good Bread Matt thought to buy for me. We all had hot chocolate. I had the coziest, most delicious nap, the best sleep I've had in days. I finished one book and started another. Isaac and I worked together building the model Space Needle I bought him on our Day Out together, our trip to Seattle Center and lunch at the top of the Space Needle, his belated birthday gift over winter break. I snuggled with our daughter on the couch.

It was a Bonus Day in every sense of the word.

We're returning to normal this evening: Tae Kwon Do classes and trumpet practice. But the coziness lingers. Isaac ate his bowl of roasted vegetable curry and said, "Supper's really good, Mom." I'm not evening opening my school planner. The dishwasher hums. I've had a perfect day cozily together with my favorite people. I know I have to make it up, but every single moment is worth it.

Better Than Perfect

I have long believed that the Friday at the end of the first week back after winter break is more important, more restorative, than the Friday that begins winter break. So here I am, wearing pajama pants and sipping wine and typing away here after spending an hour on the couch with a book. The kids are watching whatever silly thing they're watching. I'm baking some appetizers from Trader Joe's before I start roasting sweet potatoes and wilting spinach for our easy yet satisfying and nourishing dinner. It might snow on Sunday night.

Everything feels cozy, and I'm doing okay.

But as much as I had a truly wonderful winter break, and as much as I understood that to prolong it would only result in anxiety (two weeks is the perfect amount of time for me to have "off" before I get edgy and need a bit more structure), I have really struggled this week. I've cried too much during my lunches and planning periods. I felt so demoralized on my first day back; my school is under construction, and there isn't even enough parking for staff, let alone students. I have the privilege of a "part-time" schedule that allows me to take a deduction in pay in exchange for a sweet schedule in which I can take my children to school in the morning before I go to work, but that also means that by the time I show up in the auxiliary parking lot 45 minutes after the first bell, suddenly, there are no spots left for me, even though I didn't have this issue before break, ever. I parked illegally for an hour until someone else left (I went down to check the lot during my planning period) and I could move my car.

"If I show up tomorrow and have nowhere to park," I said tearfully to a colleague, "I'm going right back home." I meant it.

My seniors left me upset and frustrated before break, and things didn't feel any better on Monday. I'd caught a rotten cold, and I was chugging water and sucking frantically on cough drops that made me queasy just to get through a class. My head was pounding before lunch. And because I'm a logical person, I decided that was a good time to examine the inherent value of my job -- both in the teaching (am I even doing anything worthwhile for these kids? Is there even any point?) and in the program I coordinate, which, right now, feels incredibly lonely and futile, and like, if I'm the only one who cares, what is the actual point? These were my thoughts as I bought a Pepsi from the vending machine. I hate Pepsi so much, and I don't think I've plugged coins into that machine since I was pregnant and needed white cheddar popcorn in 2006, but my head hurt so much and I needed something.

Tuesday was slightly better. I snagged an actual parking spot. My sophomores, who've been sort of a tough bunch this year, were engaged and sort of charming and I had a good time with them. Matt had chopped all of the vegetables for supper the night before, so it took very little effort for me to cook a soup three of us enjoy and one of us tolerates and then I managed to get everyone to Tae Kwon Do on time. On Wednesday, I wasn't coughing so much, and I cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed the house. Yesterday, I woke up after the best sleep I'd had in a week (no cough drops gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth all night!) and decided there was a small chance I might still love my job after all.

And then the package came, delivered to my door in the rain on a cold and damp January afternoon.

***

Matt and I were married seventeen years ago, on a December night in my hometown in Montana. Seventeen years ago, we didn't feel the need to see each moment unfold through the cameras on our phones (because seventeen years ago, phones didn't work like that). We experienced everything as it happened, unfiltered. Seventeen years later, we have, simply, an actual album of photographs, an album of photos taken from the disposable cameras left on the tables at the reception, my journal entries, a CD and a video, and our memories. It was one of the best, most perfect days of my life, and the days that followed, hunkered down at our little cabin along a snowy river in the mountains, are forever memorialized as perfectly, wonderfully cozy as well.

But marriage isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect.

Perfect is, for instance, the dinnerware set we registered for seventeen years ago, when we headed to Macy's on a summer evening. We were so young, barely into adulthood; everything we had in our little apartment had come from my family's farm or IKEA, so I felt a certain weight to this task of choosing plates and bowls our children, God willing, would eat from. We aimed that little gun at sheets and towels, at kitchen gadgets. But the pots and pans, the plates and bowls and saucers and coffee cups -- those mattered the most to me. Sheets would be replaced, and gadgets were gadgets, but the plates meant something more.

It's not that they were fancy -- the opposite, in fact. They were the things that would bear our use every single day. Our cereal, our coffee, our dinners. Seventeen years ago, we ate Tuna Helper and four-cheese macaroni from WinCo off those plates; today I serve up food cooked from fresh vegetables, straight from the Moosewood cookbook or my favorite recipes from whatever food blog I've decided to follow. Appetizers from Trader Joe's baked on a Friday afternoon. Cookies baked from a child's fundraiser. I never needed or particularly desired fancy china, but I put more thought into this dinnerware than any other thing we registered for. These would be a part of our life, every single day.

Matt, unsurprisingly, was less opinionated on the matter, so he was agreeable to my choice: a set of dishes patterned in green and blue, in swirls of vines and leaves against a white background. My favorite colors. They also reminded me a bit of the dishes from my own childhood, a blue-and-white Scandinavian pattern. I simply loved them.

But dishes used daily are dishes subject to daily life, and that includes some fumbles, some cracks. A wineglass shattered before we moved from our apartment into our house. A plate broken. A bowl dropped. And then another. And another. I realized recently that our bowls -- used for cereal, for rice, for stir-fry, for soup -- have suffered the heaviest use and the most casualties. As the bowls broke, we replaced them hastily. We have a handful of functional, perfectly serviceable and reasonably attractive bowls from IKEA. They're blue; they don't terribly clash with my dishes. But I've noted the absence of the bowls I chose out of love. Love for the pattern, love for the new life I was beginning. And I mourned a bit. Oh, it was silly, I thought. They're just bowls. We're a family of human beings who drop things sometimes. We are blessed beyond measure, and we want for nothing. But I saw our stack of those beautiful bowls shrink, replaced with the perfectly plain, functional IKEA bowls. And I mourned. I did.

***

Matt and I have everything we need, really. He is notoriously difficult to shop for. If there's something I want but don't need, I send him a link, which is why I have some beautiful journals embossed with my initials, with the particular paper and thickness I like. At Christmas we like to donate to organizations we care about instead of using that money for gifts (though we both still find little things to give each other, which is why I always have a lovely box from LUSH, for instance, because Matt knows how much I love bubble baths).

I am grateful for everything I receive from people who love me, but I truly want for nothing.

And yet, the box that arrived this week brought me to tears.

***

Matt looked up the pattern for our dishes -- now long discontinued -- and ordered another set of the bowls we've eaten from, loved, abused, dropped, cracked, and shattered. I sliced open that box with my children looking on.

"What is it?"

"Ohhhh."

"There's no scuff marks!"

A set of perfect bowls, in our perfect pattern, the one we chose for the family we didn't yet have more than seventeen years ago. They were pristine, unmarked by the scrapes of spoons. But that wasn't even the point. The point was that they were there, that my husband had thought of them, that what had been broken and cracked had arrived whole again. I didn't care about the scuff marks. I cared about their ability to hold a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats or the soup my son likes.

Last night was Leftover Night. It was Scrounge For Your Food night. We had Sunday's chicken soup, Monday's white bean gratin, Tuesday's buffalo cauliflower Soup, Wednesday's Thai peanut noodles with broccoli. We had various unopened packages from Trader Joe's: fish sticks, chicken drumellas. The kids dug around in the freezer for vegetables.

"Can I use this bowl?" asked my daughter, lifting one of the new bowls in her fingertips.

"Of course," I said. "Be careful." I couldn't resist adding that last part, but I almost bit my tongue. I want them to be careful in the way that I want them to take care always. Not because any one thing they touch is sacred, but because we try to move through the world with care, with attention.

I want my children to use those bowls. Those bowls are precious to me, but I don't want anyone to be afraid of using them. I don't want anyone to fear scuff marks.

***

Matt lost his wedding ring at the pumpkin patch a few years ago. It slipped off his finger in the hay pit on a cold October day while he romped with our kids. He searched for it in vain, but finding a ring in a hay pit is the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

We could replace the ring. Because, in the end, the ring is the symbol, and not the thing itself.

"I miss the scuff marks," Matt said, when he slid his new ring onto his finger. A Christmas gift. "I miss the scratches." I understood.

Because nothing is perfect, really. It's life. It's ours. I'm grateful for every moment that reminds me of this, scuff marks and all.

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

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

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

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

"Hi," she said.

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

Where were you? (Or, Grief and Despair and Teacher Appreciation Week)

Every day, I write in a Gratitude Journal. It's not my regular journal, the notebook I carry with me at all times that catches whatever happens to fall out of my head and onto the paper; it's just a place for me to jot down something every single day. That's all this notebook holds. Because I believe deeply in the importance of practicing daily intentional gratitude, even when things are garbage. Maybe even especially then. It tethers me to hope, I guess, and it also reminds me to notice things, which is essential for a writer. The way the cherry blossoms fall to the sidewalk. The smell of the morning. The increasingly fleeting moments when my son slips his hand into mine, just for a second, when we're crossing a street together. Realizing that we have vegetable spring rolls from Trader Joe's in the freezer after all -- or, even better, that I mentioned offhandedly to my husband that I really wished we had those lava cakes from Trader Joe's, and two days later he slipped some into the freezer without saying anything. He's seriously awesome like that.

I haven't written anything today, even though I have plenty of gratitude welling inside me. But there's something else welling inside me: Fatigue. Heartbreak. Rage. Right now, as I write this, I feel exhausted with the effort of trying not to let it completely and totally consume me, because I'm afraid of what that looks like. If I were to pick up my Gratitude Journal right now, I might write that I'm grateful I got to bring home both of my babies from school today when other parents are waiting in the hospital because their babies were shot at school. And isn't that sick? Isn't that just ridiculous? Rage. Fatigue. I'm so tired of this.

Where were you when you learned about the eleventy billionth mass shooting of 2019, or the eleventy billionth school shooting since Columbine, since Sandy Hook, in the United States of America? I tried to search the actual numbers, but they vary a bit. Basically, it's more than one mass shooting per day, and how many days have there been in 2019 so far? I don't know, I'm too tired and angry to do all that mathing. It all adds up to this: Way Too Fucking Many.

Here's where I was:

I was sitting in my car, waiting for my kids after school. Feeling guilty because I didn't teach well today. Because I haven't parented particularly well today. I've been snappish and tired at all of my kids lately, the kids born of my body and the kids who also share my heart. They all piss me off because that's what happens in May and I am not always good at Rising Above.

I was reading another article about extinction and all the ways we are incinerating the planet. I was reading Mike Pompeo's actual words: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade." This is from our Secretary of State. Are we living a horrible dystopian novel? I think we are.

I was reading about the man in Ohio who raped and impregnated an eleven-year-old child, and because of Ohio's "Heartbeat Bill" (House Bill 493), that child will be forced to carry that pregnancy to term (or as long as her child's body can) unless her family has the resources to get her the hell out of there. A child that is younger than my child. If you think there is ANYTHING okay about that, if you think this is in any way "pro life," then you're a fucking monster. Exit stage left, good-bye, we're done here.

I was reading more posts about Rachel Held Evans. And grieving. Grieving. I would never have guessed that her death could have impacted me on such a visceral level, perhaps because I never could have imagined her death. Not now, not as a writer and wife and mother of two very young children, not as a person I've wished for years was one of my actual real-life friends. I'm just about to start reading her latest book. I'm looking at pictures of her with Nadia Bolz-Weber, and these two women -- this is not an exaggeration -- changed my life and gave me back faith I'd thought I'd lost, women whose words felt like a whisper in my ear when I wasn't sure there was any room left in church for me. Rachel's blog has been on the "Required Reading" list of this blog since I discovered it, way back whenever. (I've been trying to write about her for days. I think I still will.)

I was tired and angry and sad and defeated. It's May, which is the worst time of year to be a teacher. The worst. I don't want to do it anymore. I feel inadequate in every way, exasperated in every way, and utterly convinced I've come to the end of my time of being any good at it. I know this is just what happens in May; I have years of journals to back me up. This is part of the cycle, and I've learned to trust that. But still. Still. The feeling is hard. Add to that the feeling of pressure to just keep up with everything and be competent in other areas of my life, because hey! I'm not just a teacher, I'm a wife and a mother, and when I leave campus I have to enter into a totally different space. Most of the time, that is a deep blessing and I have the privilege of finding a beautiful balance in my life. I have a partner who is wholly involved. I have the privilege to choose to work "part-time." (Which comes with a whole lot of bullshit I've written about and will write about again, but never believe I don't understand the privilege in the choice -- to do the work I love and maximize my time with my family in a way that supports us all.) But today, I was tired of juggling track and Tae Kwon Do and soccer and band and confirmation. Matt and I are chaperoning four field trips in as many weeks. This month we have belt testing and two concerts and I forget how many games and track meets. (These are the things that make me realize that the sources of some of my stress and fatigue are also the things I write about in my Gratitude Journal. This is what it means to be a mother.)

This is the month in which our daughter turns thirteen, and it matters to me, and I am also exhausted already trying to make it matter and be the perfect hostess and make it special for her, because I'm her mother, and so far all I can manage to do is say to Matt, "So, we'll grill food outside over Memorial Weekend one night." What else? How do I do this well? How can I make it matter to my girl, my firstborn? One of the only things that tethers me to any sense of hope? And also, how can I look her in the eye, knowing what a horrible mess we adults are handing her?

That is where I was this afternoon, when I learned of the latest school shooting. How many times have I written about those here? Isn't that absurd? I was angry and tired and sad, sitting in my car, waiting for my children. Compartmentalizing, because I can't be dumping all that on kids who are nine and twelve when they jump in the car bursting with things to say: "Can you sign my field trip form?" and "Let me tell you what happened in Conditioning today." (Please, God, let me never forget the loveliness of these ordinary moments when my children tumble into the car, elbowing each other, arguing over whose backpacks are taking up too much space, one person heaving her trumpet case into the front seat, the other shoving a permission slip in my face and reminding me that Popcorn Day is tomorrow.)

That was four hours ago. Only four hours later, and the school shooting (two suspects in custody, UPDATED ONE STUDENT DEAD, eight others injured) is already way down on the news, underneath "Mueller fought Comey memo release" and "Tax documents show Trump businesses lost more than $1 billion in a decade."

This is where I am now: sitting at my table, after Tae Kwon Do, after soccer, dinner simmering on the stove, trying to write through tears in my eyes while my kids relax in front of the TV, which is a rare treat on a weeknight. I apologized for snapping at them earlier. And I told them: "There was a school shooting today."

And they said, "Another one?"

How does that response not shatter your heart? How can we have that conversation again? Again? But we did. And we will. Hey, America, maybe for Teacher Appreciation Week, instead of free notepads and pens or highlighters and cute little notes in our mailboxes, you can get us some fucking gun control.

So that's where I was, and that's where I am. I wish I lived in a country that cared about its children -- all of them. I expect better. Or maybe I just want better, long for better, dream for better, because to expect implies hope, and frankly, tonight, I'm fresh out of that. The place in my heart that holds hope has been taken over by Despair. And Rage. And Fatigue.

I still believe in practicing intentional gratitude, despite the grief and rage and despair. And maybe that's why I write anything here, too -- because words connect us in our grief and rage and despair, and maybe that's what hope is, the impossibility of holding hands in the darkness, swimming for the light.

The cherry blossoms, the air, the music

Less than two months ago, by this time on a Sunday afternoon, the sky would be well on its way to dark. Less than two months ago, I sat at the table where I write now, waiting for snow to fall. Since then, we've had the most snowfall I've seen in western Washington in my entire adult life. We missed five days of school. My daughter sprained her ankle during her first soccer practice of the spring season, which happened on a rather lovely afternoon during the first week of March; the next day the sky began to spit snow again while we waited for X-rays, and she learned how to navigate crutches through freezing slush. Ten days later, the temperatures soared into the seventies, hitting record highs. I love the feel of spring air on bare arms, and the sharp scent of freshly-mown grass, and everyone knows how much I love the first sign of cherry blossoms. But the sudden heat in the wrong season is so unsettling to me, as are the predictions that we're in for a hot and dry summer. That might sound appealing after so much snow, but I know we'll spend August breathing nothing but smoke. Again. And I can't believe there are actual people who continue to deny the effects of climate change.

But still, now, at the end of the slog that is the month of March, I believe in gratitude, in experiencing as much as I can with great joy.

This was my Friday evening: Suzannah ensconced in her room with a book, Matt and Isaac outside playing basketball. I sipped wine and read my own book as a pot of buffalo cauliflower soup simmered on the stove. Everything about that soup was wonderful, especially the fact that Matt prepped all the fresh cauliflower, carrots, onion, and garlic I put in it so it was really easy for me to throw together, and also my son happens to love it. Suzannah tolerates it, barely, and that's fine too. Matt brought home nice bread from Trader Joe's, and Friday is our Family Movie Night, so no one could be too grouchy.

I've felt like garbage for a couple of weeks now, battling the same cold as everyone else in Washington state. So many of my students have been out sick, and let me tell you how thrilled I was when one of them sneezed all over the keyboard of my laptop when they were using it to access a PowerPoint for a presentation. It reminded me of having toddlers and the times when they would sneeze directly into my eyeballs, and then we all had colds for four years with only brief breaks, like maybe a week in May and a week in July? Those weeks when nobody had runny noses were nice. Or maybe we'd just given up and resigned ourselves to enjoying spring afternoons and summer mornings despite the snot. Whatever. I'm recovering.

On Friday afternoon, I decided to go for a jog instead of heading straight to the couch, because the cherry trees are blossoming and the air is pleasantly warm and the streets of my neighborhood are so lovely, even on a slightly overcast spring afternoon. And on Friday night I went to bed early and slept deeply -- for the first time in weeks -- without a cough drop gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. On Saturday morning the kids let us stay in bed longer than they usually do, and then we all headed out for Suzannah's first soccer game. I do love the first soccer game of spring, that feeling of being back, of moving and playing (even if it's not me on the field; maybe I just mean the feeling of all of us waking up and wanting to be outside). Suzannah's doctor wanted her to wait until next week to return fully to normal activities, so she couldn't play yesterday, but she was there for her team, and the rest of us cheered for these girls we've been cheering for the past three years. The game happened to be at the muddiest field in King County; our first game was there last year, too, in the pouring rain, and Matt and I laughed at the memory of Isaac and the coach's son playing hard anyway until Isaac slipped and fell in the mud and there went our plans to head directly to IKEA afterwards, since he was drenched and angry and covered in wet, sloppy mud from his cheekbones to his toes. But yesterday we sat in the sunshine, in sunglasses and T-shirts. After the game we went out for lunch at 7 Seas, and I ate half of one of my very favorite sandwiches in the entire universe and drank a cold beer with it. We went shopping for my nephew's first birthday. We stopped at a coffee shop we love, and I ordered mine iced. The kids each took a sip and gagged dramatically. Back home, I had just enough time to go for another little jog in the sunshine that just calls me to move and be outside and take a bubble bath before eating a quick dinner (the other half of that fabulous sandwich) before heading to the high school for a Big Band showcase. Suzannah joined jazz band this year, and her band director is really, really good and I am constantly in awe of what he is able to draw from middle schoolers who have only been playing for a year or two. They joined the jazz bands at the high school for this showcase, which mostly featured Jazz I, but absolutely all of it was phenomenal. Full disclosure: I was not really looking forward to spending several hours of my Saturday night at the high school, but when I drove my happy daughter home afterwards, I had absolutely zero regrets. The musicianship was phenomenal, and as someone who had an excellent musical experience throughout high school and college, I have obnoxiously high standards. And I also just really loved watching my daughter enjoy the night with her friends, even if it meant she did not want to sit with me. Also, there was cake and an auction. Look, I don't even go to the auction for my own school, because those kinds of social events are seriously the absolute worst for an introvert like me, like who would I even be cool enough to sit with? But at this auction, all I had to do was sit at a table with my family, eat cake, and enjoy the music. I loved every moment of the performances. Music like that is my thing.

Matt and I figured our little guy would be tired and totally done before the night was actually done, and we weren't wrong, but he actually lasted much longer than we predicted. We kept glancing over to see him grooving. The and took a break near the end to auction off a bunch of things, and at that point, Matt and I looked at each other and said, yeah, our son needs to go to bed. What was funny is that neither one of us really wanted to leave, when I'd assumed that both of us would want to be the parent to head out early and tuck him into bed. In the end, Matt took Isaac home, and I sat alone at our table, just really loving it all -- these high school kids who've worked incredibly hard, their teachers who bring out the best they have to give. Watching my daughter with her friends. Cheering for her after their final combined number and catching a glimpse in that moment of the wonderful person she will become. Is becoming.

I write all this to remember, simply because it's a snapshot, a moment in time in an ordinary month, a long month, and it reminds me of everything I love. It reminds me to stay grateful in these long months. To notice the small things. The cherry blossoms and the really good sandwiches and the sweet moments with our children, who are growing and growing and growing. Spending these gorgeous spring days and these music-filled nights with my family is my thing. I suppose I lead a simple life, but it's mine. It's ours. I never want a single moment to pass without my noticing, because to live in these moments is everything, everything I ever wanted, even before I knew I wanted it.

Snow Days

I smell snow in the air.

My husband is out for a late afternoon run as it grows dark. My children are watching the Super Bowl. We don't follow football at all, but my daughter became a fan when the Seahawks won five years ago and she actually enjoys (and understands) it, so every year now, regardless of who's playing, we humor them and buy fun snacks and enjoy the day in our own very low-key way. I'm about to make a big pot of sausage, sweet potato, and kale soup for dinner, because soup sounds good on a night that smells like snow and because my son loves it and asks for seconds. My son has become someone who eats absolutely everything I cook, and yes, we've made and heard all the jokes about how expensive it's going to be to feed this boy as a teenager, but I don't care. I love feeding him. I love watching him eat something that isn't plain pasta or a chicken tender, I love the moment when he announces he likes it, and I love serving up a bowl of seconds.

It isn't snowing yet.

We didn't have snow days growing up in Montana. I remember missing school for a day in elementary school, maybe third or fourth grade, but it wasn't for snow, it was for windchill, much like the Midwest has experienced this month. We lost power, and it was too cold to play outside. We built a fire in the basement fireplace, and I remember, vaguely, feeling excited about that more than actually missing school.

It's not like that where I live now. If snow is in the forecast, I look out the window and up at the sky for hours, mentally planning how I'll adjust my calendar if we have a snow day. Most of my teacher friends hope for a two-hour late start rather than an entire cancelled day, because they don't want to lose our built-in snow day. If we don't lose a day, we get an extra four-day weekend; usually that's Memorial Weekend, but this year our make-up day is next Friday. I figure, either I get a four-day weekend now (we had Friday off to grade between semesters) or I get the four-day weekend for President's Day. I tend not to get too angsty about a day here or a day there. We all have 180 days somewhere.

But I will never not love the romance of a snow day.

During my third year of teaching, Matt and I drove our little Honda Civic all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis -- with stops in Bozeman both directions -- for Christmas. Driving in the winter had never bothered me; I'm a Montana girl who went to college in Minnesota, and if the roads were open, I drove on them. But that trip, a year after we were married, was exhausting. We drove from Washington to Montana, where we stayed for two nights. We drove from Bozeman to Fargo, where we stayed at a cheap hotel next to a bar. Our pug had gotten carsick and vomited in her crate. We tried to clean it with cold paper towels at a rest stop, but I still smelled it all night long. After a short night on an uncomfortable mattress, we pushed on to the Twin Cities. Matt and I both had terrible colds, and we filled up a plastic grocery sack with used tissues as we drove across three states. The drive home was worse. We left Minneapolis at six o'clock in the morning, intending to make it all the way to Bozeman. It's a long drive on a summer day, but we battled blizzards and black ice for over twenty hours and nearly a thousand miles, stopping only for gas and hamburgers with creamy tomato soup at the 4B's in Miles City, Montana. We rested for a day in Bozeman before heading home. Driving through the mountains in whiteout conditions was worse than black ice across North Dakota; we slowed to a crawl over Lookout Pass, our wipers ineffective against the spray of snow from the semi-trucks that barreled past. We thought it would be smooth sailing after Spokane -- at least the interstate was relatively flat after that -- but we gave up at Moses Lake, checking into a motel that would take our dog before slumping into a booth at Denny's. We barely made it out of the parking lot the next morning, but driving was manageable in the daylight. I told Matt I never wanted to make that drive in the winter again, and we haven't.

We turned onto the street to our house shortly before lunchtime, one day after we expected to make it home. Our lawn -- for the very first time since we'd lived in our house -- was coated with a layer of snow. Not quite enough to completely hide the spikes of grass poking through, but enough to make me squeal out loud and turn to my husband and say, "Look!" Snow had become beautiful again.

We had a two-hour late start that first Monday back. It started to snow again that afternoon, and before the end of the school day, the district decided to close for the next day. My very first snow day. I still rose at five o'clock to turn on the television, to see the name of my school district scrolling across the bottom of the screen. That, I think, is a thing we've lost: the excitement of turning on the news in the dark to watch those scrolling names. Now we get texts, e-mail alerts, automatic callouts. It's much more efficient, of course, but romance and efficiency don't mix.

I put on a movie and cleaned our house, even though we hadn't lived in it for two weeks. I dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed the bathrooms. Later that afternoon I went to the Starbucks up the street to grade the junior IB Literature projects I'd neglected in Minnesota. And before dinner, the news announced that schools would be closed again. Two snow days in a row! Magic! I wrote in my journal the next day: All the branches on the bush outside our bedroom window are encased in ice. Each and every spindly little one. When I took Blondie outside the only sounds were the cracking of ice, and snow and slush falling from the heavy tree-tops, bent over and unaccustomed to the extra weight, as loud as rain.

Ten year ago we had three days off leading into winter break. My coworkers complained about making up the extra days. I was miscarrying a baby at nine weeks, bleeding and crying and pretending I was fine as I responded to e-mails from my students who were wondering how to submit the assignments that were due that week. I curled into a blanket, grateful for the respite. I didn't have to pretend to be okay.

There are flurries in the sky. Flakes fall and then it stops for awhile. But I know the smell of snow.

In January of my daughter's kindergarten year, we lost an entire week -- Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and that night they called off school for the following day. It wasn't even snowing yet, not really, but the roads were icy, and while my friends in Montana and Minnesota scoffed at my school district I will say that I would far rather drive in heavy snow in either of those places than in just a little bit of snow or ice on our hills. Snow fell that night and continued for a couple of days before turning to freezing rain. It covered the snow in an icy sheen and bent the trees. The streets glistened under the heavy gray sky.

Anyway, I shouldn't say we lost those days. They had the potential to be sort of terrible, because everyone had colds, and then Isaac's turned into an ear infection and mine turned into a sinus infection. But the forced relaxation was so good for us. It had been one of my most difficult semesters of teaching with two of my most difficult classes -- classes that had me wondering if I'd come to the end of my effectiveness as a teacher. Four days of breathing space gave me the reset I needed. I wore sweats, drank a lot of coffee, read a few books, and watched all five seasons of Friday Night Lights (a Christmas gift from my husband). The kids built a snowman outside and blanket forts inside. I am a person who likes to be able to say, I have done this and this and this; I am a checker of boxes. But it was so good to put it all down for a few days.

I've been writing this for hours now. I keep wandering away to do other things -- to make the soup, to read another chapter in my book. The football game is over and the internet tells me it was a boring one. Snow is falling again now, and the tips of the lawn are white. The district has called a two-hour late start. But it's supposed to snow all night, and I think tomorrow will be a snow day. Matt thinks that because we already know we have a delay, we won't have to worry about waiting for a phone call at five o'clock in the morning, but teachers don't sleep well with the maybe of a snow day. I know I'll wake during the night just to peer out the window, to see if flakes are still falling in the glow of the neighbor's backyard porch light.

Two years ago, in early February, we had two snow days in a row. The first day I read almost all of Swing Time by Zadie Smith while the kids played. On the second day I was restless enough to empty out every kitchen drawer and cabinet and wipe them down while the kids watched Groundhog Day. It was tremendously satisfying.

Snow days are inconvenient. They mean a lot of scrambling to adjust my teaching, and if we have more than one, the days are tacked on in June. But I don't care. These unexpected gifts of time to just be with my family have become a tapestry of memories over the years, and when I think of the blanket forts, the hot chocolate, books read and movies watched, when I think of our kids piling on our bed at six o'clock in the morning begging to go outside, when I see them charge across the unblemished yard in the first gray light of morning, I think, what's an extra day in June?

30 Days of Thankfulness

Despite the fact that I am angry and heartbroken a lot these days, I still also try to be intentionally grateful, every day. What I've realized is that it takes very little for me to be deeply content and happy in my own daily life -- and despite the horror of the big picture, our individual lives are still made up of these beautiful moments and experiences that matter.

Social media in November is often full of folks sharing what they're thankful for, and it's not a bad practice, but I find that if I just try to list "Things I'm thankful for" every day for a month it just turns into the same list. Of course I'm thankful for my family, my home, my friends. This year, though, I'm borrowing from my old friend Jen, who shared a new approach on Facebook: "Thirty Days of Thankfulness" grounded in the ordinary details of our daily lives. I've been writing them down all month long, and tonight I thought I'd share them here.

Day 1: Person
One of my very truest friends. I call him "Coach" when I write about him online. He's one of the most important people in my life, and I can't imagine my life without him in it or the person I would be without him. He makes me want to be the best version of myself, and he loves me even when I fall short. He's honest with me. He always manages to find my re-set button, even long-distance, and he always seems to bring the perspective I need. He's really raised me as a teacher, and as a human.

Day 2: Animal
The otters and harbor seals at the Seattle Aquarium, where we spent a couple of hours this month with my friend Jessica and her kiddos. Also the octopus, who was alert and energetic and fun to watch. (The animals were great, but thinking of them really reminds me about how thankful I am that I still have this friendship from my childhood, and that our kids know each other, and even when we don't see each other for a long time we can still hang out like no time at all has passed.)

Day 3: Cozy Place
My living room couch on late fall or early winter Sunday afternoons, especially with Isaac's fleece Batman blanket.

Day 4: Snack: Pop Secret Homestyle Popcorn (only because I can't have my dad's homemade popcorn whenever I want it). My absolute favorite time for this is after school on Fridays...I pop some for the kids and me, change into pajama pants, put on a movie for them, pour a little red wine for me, and curl up with a really good book.

Day 5: Place
Kalaloch, on the Olympic Peninsula. Matt and I love staying in a bluff cabin for anniversary getaways in December. My soul is so peaceful there -- the wild ocean in winter, the empty beaches. I think it does for my heart and psyche what Lake McDonald does in summer, with fewer people. (A lot fewer people.) We spend all our daylight hours exploring the beaches, and at night we curl up with books and drinks and snacks and a fire, and it is perfect. Also: there is absolutely no wi-fi. The cabins do not have televisions or telephones. In case of emergency, there is a phone at the main lodge, and if you really need to watch a movie or whatever the main lodge also has a cozy library/game room with a TV, but I love (love) the opportunity to disconnect with technology and connect with the human I'm with and really just be present in my surroundings in a way that feels like a luxury.

Day 6: Pair of Shoes
I so don't care about shoes, like at all, and I would happily go barefoot all the time if I could. I'm thankful for my Danskos because they last a long time and I don't have to think about what to wear most days, and I can kick them off as soon as I walk in my door.

Day 7: Scent
Roasting chicken on Sunday evenings (one of my favorite meals, and we have this once or twice a month, always on Sundays). Pumpkin or caramel or cinnamon-scented candles. Christmas trees. My husband's t-shirts when he wears them fresh out of the shower. (My husband, freshly showered.)

Day 8: Restaurant
The Elliott Bay Brewery in West Seattle, which we have loved for our entire married lives. Actually, our love for EBB dates from before we were married. We've practically raised our children there. I love their cozy booths, their grown-up grilled cheese, their Cabernet (Matt loves the beer more than I do; I prefer wine), their burgers (the BEST!), their ahi tacos, their vegetarian chili, their monthly specials, and the folks who know us well enough to know exactly how our kids like their carrots steamed.

Also, Plum Bistro, one of our favorite kid-free date spots. (I really, really hope we can go soon.) Their Fresh Thyme Quinoa Pie is so good I could cry just thinking about it, because suddenly I want it and I can't have it right this second. I also really love their Olive Pesto Tofu and their Tempeh Vermouth. Bonus: it's easy walking distance from my favorite bookstore.

Day 9: Blog/website
Goodreads! Do you like to read? If you do, and you're not on Goodreads, GET ON GOODREADS. I love reading what people think about the books they're reading. I love writing about what I'm reading.

I also love jennibick.com because I am always in search of the perfect journal and all my favorites come from there, and the customer service is above and beyond.

Day 10: Time of Day
I really love early mornings, if I need to be out earlier than usual. I love the still quiet. I am, by nature, a morning person; it's just that since having kids I so adore having a little time to myself after they go to bed that it's hard to get enough sleep to really appreciate those early mornings. (My daughter, it seems, is following in my footsteps. Jazz band starts at 7 a.m., and I have no idea what time that child gets up. No matter how early I get up, she's always up first.)

On ordinary weekdays, I love the time when I get to school, Americano in hand, and -- unless I have a meeting, which happens about once a week -- I have a quiet hour in my classroom.

On weekends, I love the time when the kids have gone to bed and I'm curled up on the couch writing and/or watching Neflix or tucked in with a book and often and gin and tonic on the couch. Matt and I are companionably together, even if he's watching something and I'm reading.

Day 11: Traditions
Every November, the week of Thanksgiving, I watch Pieces of April. Usually it's the night before Thanksgiving, while Matt bakes (or at least preps) the pumpkin and pecan pies we contribute to Thanksgiving dinner. It is my very favorite movie, ever since I first saw it shortly after it came out -- almost fifteen years ago, I think? I'll always love Katie Holmes as April, although everyone in it is absolutely perfect. It's a simple story, really; April, the estranged daughter, invites her family to Thanksgiving dinner at her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The movie follows two strands -- the family's drive to the city, and April's meal preparations, which are foiled by a broken oven, so she has to rely on the kindness of her neighbors. The conclusion is beautiful and I sob every time I watch it. Someday I'd love to watch it with my mom.

Day 12: Gadgets
This isn't really a gadget, but I don't...know anything about gadgets, or what counts as one. So I'm going to say our new stainless steel refrigerator, which we had to buy because our freezer stopped working. And we got to buy it form one of my former students, a quiet boy with a radiant smile. I never forgot that smile, and seeing it again seven years later made everything about the experience pretty okay.

Day 13: Something old
Our dining room table, which came from my grandmother's house on the farm. The sides could fold down so that it fit inside the corner of the tiny kitchen in my first college apartment; I can also add heavy leaves to extend it across my dining room. It's sturdy and well made, and I've never seen a table with internal gears that turn when the table is widened to accommodate more people.

Day 14: Something new
The bookshelf in Suzannah's bedroom, because it restores my sense of order and gave us a reason to clear out so many things she no longer needs. Her piles of books are off her floor!

Also: our new roof. We've needed one for awhile, but not urgently. I'm glad we took the time to get it looked at well over a year ago so we could plan and save, and now we'll never need to spend another penny on this roof as long as we live in this house -- and my husband won't have to climb up there to try to scrape off the moss anymore. (I'm a worrier. I didn't love it when he did that.)

Day 15: Experience
Watching my daughter play soccer under the lights at night. We had this fantastic referee at a game in Puyallup last year who said, "Girls this age, you don't get 'em under the lights very often, but there's just nothing like it!"

Also, watching my kids compete in their first Tae Kwon Do tournament was so much fun. I love everything about Tae Kwon Do and I am so thankful it's become part of our lives, and I truly believe they're learning from the very best of the best.

Finally, I so love our family weekend getaways, and this is the point in year when I start to look forward to them: Great Wolf Lodge for the kids' birthdays, Leavenworth in late January, and Portland/Powell's in February. This is how we get through the post-Christmas slog: hotel pools, cozy meals, lights, sledding, bookstores.

Day 16: Recipe
My grandmother's potato salad, which is sublime. I remember watching her make it -- cutting the potatoes into precise uniform cubes. Her careful slicing of the egg. My mother makes it beautifully; I've never tried. I fear I lack the patience, because I take after my grandfather.

Something I do make, and something I love this time of year: soup. I love soup recipes. I love cauliflower-chickpea soup with cranberry chutney and Indonesian sweet potato and cabbage soup, both from the Moosewood cookbook. I also love pumpkin and white bean bisque, or coconut pumpkin soup topped with diced cooked chicken, or Portuguese kale and potato soup topped with sausage.

And I really enjoy the cheesy black bean and quinoa bake from the Picky Eater Blog. (We've gotten so many recipes from that site; I should add it to Day 9.

Day 17: Store
The Elliott Bay Book Company
Third Place Books
King's Books
Powell's
Basically any indie bookstore (which is where I choose to buy books, because I have access here and I believe strongly in supporting independent bookstores)

Day 18: Quote
From my two very favorite writers...

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up." --Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

"A story untold could be the one that kills you." --Pat Conroy

"My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call." --the first sentence of The Prince of Tides and, very seriously, possibly, my next tattoo

"The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough." --Pat Conroy

"Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most." --Brian Doyle

"There are stories in the air as thick as birds around me, he would say. I will save these stories from starving, he would say. I have a great hunger for stories, he would say." --Brian Doyle, Mink River

Day 19: Clothing
My favorite socks from Kalaloch Lodge (otters, orcas) and my Turnip Shirt. I wear it with leggings and a stretchy skirt when I just need to Not Care. Also, the folks who work in the produce section at Marlene's, this fabulous natural foods store near me, love my Turnip Shirt.

Day 20: Keepsake
My maternal grandmother's wedding ring and my paternal grandmother's necklace, the one she designed and had made a few years after my grandpa died. They're not pieces I wear, but they are special to me. I am not usually sentimental about things, but these small things feel like tangible connections to my family.

Day 21: A disappointment or a fear
This is hard. I want to come up with something more concrete to share, but for now, I'll just say that something I thought I wanted is something I am far better off without, and I'm thankful for that realization, for what it's taught me. There's a reason we have all these pithy sayings about hindsight.

Day 22: Book
The one I just finished, for providing the perfect Thanksgiving weekend reading experience: The Witch Elm, by Tana French. I was nervous about this being a stand-alone because I love the world of the Dublin Murder Squad, but it may actually be my favorite so far -- even though I warmed to so few of the characters, French's ability to take us inside their minds and learn what drives them is what sets her apart form the mystery writers I read "for fun."

The one I'm currently reading: The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley. It's a modern re-visioning of Beowulf: Beowulf in the suburbs. The language is stunning and I'm loving it.

Also: All the books I go back to when I need a particular page or passage...this quote from The Overstory by Richard Powers (also a stunning read) resonates:

Someday you'll need to take down a worn-out volume on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

Day 23: Feeling:
The moment I slide into sleep on a Sunday afternoon, cuddled under Isaac's fleece blanket
or
The way I feel when I'm completely caught up in grading and my desk is clear
or
Leaving my house on Wednesday morning after I've cleaned...scrubbed bathrooms and vacuum lines in the carpet. My colleagues make fun of me, but I'm up hours before I take my son to school, and I love coming home to a sanctuary in the middle of the week. And my house is my sanctuary -- I do better when it's not cluttered and dirty.

Day 24: Photo
My current Facebook profile photo, a drawing my son made for me -- two hearts holding hands, labeled "Mommy" and "Me." That's more of a drawing than a photo, though. I love photos of my children than show them being their absolutely true ridiculous selves, snapped in the moment. I love photos of our family in our favorite places: Bozeman, Glacier. Matt and me Kalaloch, the wind whipping my hair, the ocean in the background. Or even just the ocean, roiling at the shore in the first light of day.

Also: Google sends me "Rediscover this day!" notifications, and I love the pictures that remind me that four or five years ago my children were so short and round and little and soft. I would never wish them backwards, but oh. My babies.

Day 25: Luxury
Reading and/or writing alone for an uninterrupted stretch of time. Wandering through a bookstore by myself. Having alone time at the Elliott Bay Book Co. -- books, coffee, wine. Sitting alone an airplane, once I've calmed down. Reading, ordering a glass of wine.

Day 26: Charity, non-profit, organization, etc.
Matt and I have given to all of these, and all are worth of our support:
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society - https://hias.org
American Civil Liberties Union - https://www.aclu.org/
Southern Poverty Law Center - https://www.splcenter.org/
Everytown for Gun Safety - https://everytown.org/
Planned Parenthood - https://www.plannedparenthood.org/
Pat Conroy Literary Center - http://patconroyliterarycenter.org/
Homeless Humans of Tacoma - https://www.facebook.com/homelesshumans.help/
NPR - https://www.npr.org/

Day 27: Song
Right now I really love listening to my CD from the 2002 Concordia Christmas Concert when I'm driving, since that one is in my car. That and Sarah McLachlan's Wintersong. At this time of year, I want to feel everything -- the darkness and the light -- and this is the music that takes me through it all.

Day 28: Gift
At the end of the last school year, my departing seniors gave me a copy of Because I Had A Teacher. They'd written messages inside, and I keep it close by for days when I need to remember why I do this job. It works. Every time I read what they wrote, I'm reminded of what a deep privilege it is to do this work. And that gift is one of the best I've ever received.

Day 29: Something at home
Simple comforts that I love coming home to: my microwave heat pack (I love curling up with that in bed, or during Sunday afternoon naps, or on the couch at night when I'm curled up with a book); the candles I light in the kitchen that smell like caramel and cinnamon or spiced apple toddies; the Norwex cleaning products that allow me to clean my house really efficiently; my snowflake mugs that I only use during the holiday season; my kids' drawings hung up in different parts of the house; my pajama pants and slippers. Honestly, I'm a homebody. I love coming home and I love spending time here with my family. Which brings me to this...

Day 30: What I'm MOST thankful for
This is the most obvious, but I'm most thankful for my family. The family that raised me and the family I live with. My husband and my children, my reasons for breathing. I grumble about the dirty socks, the crumbs on the counter, the toys strewn across the family room, the noise, the bickering, the fact that I haven't had uninterrupted time in the bathroom in over a decade...but the things I bitch about are also the nudging reminders that the sources of those irritants are people I love with every breath I take, and I will choose it all, again, every single day, with my whole heart.