Why I celebrate holidays I no longer believe in

There were the years I couldn’t fully enjoy the holidays because our gatherings were too different from earlier ones I’d loved. And now those lesser holidays are gone, too, our children grown and our dogs buried and our bodies both softer and more brittle than they’ve ever been. What I wouldn’t give to have moments of them back, even to hear my children bickering at the table again.

So I don’t wish any part of this year’s Thanksgiving away, even though the TV is on too loud and is too full of commercials for sweaters and tools and jewelry and perfume and red and green and sleigh bells and news of coming floods. Even though we spend too much time sitting in front of it and even though I miss those who aren’t here.

In the mornings my parents and brother and I watch Perry Mason and Leave It to Beaver and The Rifleman. On Friday my daughter–stuck in immigration limbo in another country–sends me an Instagram post about Thanksgiving and cultural hegemony and how simply rebranding Thanksgiving upholds colonization. (I haven’t seen her in more than a year. I don’t know when I will again, or how each of us will have changed by the time we do, what things about each other we’ll be surprised by because FaceTime will not have revealed them. My missing her is so deep it’s not even an ache. It’s something I don’t have a word for.)

Yes, I think. And.

I want to answer her, but I don’t know how to say how it is for me.

I know what the holiday is and isn’t and I care but I will not give up being with the people I love. Not because I’ve been conditioned or socialized to want it. I want them because they are me, they are mine, and they are still here and I can.

My mother and I spend some of the holiday agonizing over a decision about attending a Christmas party with extended family this year. My mother is now the oldest of us, a development I once understood would come to be, even as it felt impossible, then, that one day all those who came before her would be gone.

I’ve reached a stage where, on a good day, I am more grateful for what remains than mournful for what I’ve lost. (Will that be true when only my generation is left?)

We decide we should not go to the gathering. Risk-reward calculations are so difficult now. Are we saving ourselves for something our choices are taking from us?

My old dog whimpers when we come in the door on Friday after two nights gone. She’s too fragile to travel now, and she stayed home with my son, who spent the holiday with his dad and his siblings who have a different mother. I have to hold her for a good long time before her body stops trembling. I wonder what she felt while I was gone, if she wondered if I’d return. I hope not.

That night we watch Ted Lasso who says, about parents, that he has learned to love them for what they are and forgive them for what they’re not, and I wonder how things might be if more of us could do that about all kinds of things. I wonder if we could, or should. (I wonder if my children will do that for me.)

Maybe that’s an idea that makes it easier for those with relative comfort to remain comfortable.

Maybe not.

I don’t know.

My son sits down on the couch next to me, to check in with his old dog who isn’t leaving my side. I’m so grateful he was able to care for her while I was gone. I’m so grateful he’s here.

I think about the year he was in second grade, when, the week before Thanksgiving, I read him a story about Natives and Pilgrims and the origins of the holiday, and he told me it made him sad, that he didn’t feel good about the holiday. As his nose touches our old girl who now, like a baby, wakes mostly just to eat and poop, I remember all the versions of boy and dog each of them has been, and I want the moment to last forever, even as I know that all I might hope to hold onto is an image of it, and that the wanting has turned the moment to memory before it is even over.

Ka-Boom

On Wednesday my head exploded. Or maybe it was my heart. My soul? Something. Everything?

Maybe it didn’t explode. Maybe it just boiled over. I have known for weeks that something was building under the surface. Bubbles of anger kept rising within me, occasionally splattering some mess over the stovetop of my day, but I’d just slap a lid on it and do my best to turn down the heat (which looks a lot like eating chocolate and watching Ted Lasso every night).

On Wednesday I had a meeting with my principal to discuss the class she’d observed as part of my formal evaluation process for the year. She opened with: “When I left your room, I walked back to the office and announced to the office staff: ‘And that, folks, is how it’s done!'”

Isn’t is strange how, sometimes, affirmation and praise can be the things that push you over an edge you didn’t fully realize you’d been teetering on?

The news is full of stories of all the ways in which students, teachers, and school systems are struggling. On Tuesday we learned that a local middle school (one that some of my school’s students attended) was shifting to remote learning for the next three weeks because student behaviors have become so unsafe.

Meanwhile, in my classroom at a public charter school that serves students who attend our local public high schools half-time, things are going great–better than they ever did when I was last a classroom teacher, 12 years ago. The class my principal observed is full of 16- and 17-year old boys who like to design and build things (they are in our engineering and manufacturing program), and they have stayed with me for 6 weeks focused on reading complex informational text and writing summaries. (Yeah, that’s as dry and academic as it sounds.) Many of them have told me how much they dislike English class because it’s just not their thing. And yet, I have never had a bad or even difficult day in class with them. (Truly. The biggest disruption thus far came from one boy bringing in a bag of candy the day after Halloween.) I have been keeping this state of affairs mostly to myself or downplaying it when others ask how things are going. When I listen to my colleagues in other places, I feel guilty to be having it so relatively good.

But I have also been feeling angry. Angry about nothing and everything. The anger seemed so wrong–how could I be angry when things are going so well?–that I stuffed it as soon as I became aware of its presence. Wednesday, as I processed with my principal the lesson she observed, I finally understood where it’s coming from.

As we talked, I began to see clearly that things are going great not because I’m lucky, and not because I’m teaching in a charter school, where students have chosen to be, and not because I have especially “good kids.” (I’d tell you how much I hate it when teachers and others declare some kids “good,” but that’s a digression I’ll save for another day.) Those first two things might be at play, but other factors are far more important in explaining how I knocked my lesson out of the park:

  • I’m working in a small school with a healthy culture and strong leadership, where students are known and structural components of the program make it possible for them to form positive relationships with staff and each other.
  • I have reasonable class sizes (24 and 27 students).
  • I’m working my ass off, struggling and generally failing to limit my work to 1/2-time hours (20 per week) for my contracted 1/3-time job (13.2 hours per week), but because I can afford to teach only two classes and my personal life demands are manageable, I have time (no, am giving time) to do all the things we know are part of good teaching practice.
  • I know how to implement good teaching practices because, thanks to my years as an instructional coach, I’ve had the opportunity for deep, sustained learning about how to teach well.

Because of all these things (take away any one of them and the outcome would be different), in spite of everything we’ve all been through since March 2020, I’m able to be a really damn good teacher this year. It’s hard for me to write that last sentence, socialized as I have been to be modest and avoid any behaviors that look like arrogance, but I think it might be the most important thing for me to say–because it’s at the root of why I’m so angry and sad and disheartened about the state of public education.

I’m not a good teacher because I’m especially talented at teaching. I’m not. In fact, teaching is, in many ways, a poor fit for me. I’m deeply introverted and probably further along on the neurodivergent side of the autism spectrum than most people know and I hate being the center of attention. I’m not charismatic and I’m not a performer and, frankly, I’m not anyone’s idea of fun. I’m serious and earnest and I often don’t get the joke.

But I’m a really good teacher these days–the best I’ve ever been–which means that most people who are teachers could be, too, if they had what I have and were given what I’ve gotten. (Hell, most could be far better than me because they are so much more suited for peopling than I am.)

But I’ve had all of these things, and that’s why I’m not experiencing the kinds of distress that most teachers are this year. It’s why I am having the best teaching year I’ve ever had AND I’m not sacrificing my own health or my family’s needs to get it.

So why am I so angry? BECAUSE EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE WHAT I HAVE AND THEY COULD IF WE WOULD PULL OUR COLLECTIVE HEADS OUT OF OUR ASSES. BECAUSE IT’S CONFIRMATION THAT ALL THE BULLSHIT ABOUT SELF-CARE AND HOLDING BOUNDARIES TEACHERS HAVE BEEN SURROUNDED BY FOR YEARS IS THE GAS-LIGHTING TOXIC CRAP I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS AND I SUFFERED NEEDLESSLY THINKING MY INABILITY TO BE OK IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM WAS MY OWN PERSONAL FAULT AND FAILING.

(yeah, I’m shouting)

I have confirmation now that it wasn’t my fault. I have confirmation that things can be different, even in the midst of multiple kinds of existential crises and systems failure. I have confirmation that all the contortions I’ve put myself through trying to make things better were a waste of time. I have confirmation that the system is as broken as I’ve feared.

We know–from all kinds of research–what our kids need to learn. I know, from both research and deep anecdotal evidence, that the biggest factor in student behavior and success is what the adults are doing. Not the adults in their homes, but the adults in their schools. My students have chosen to attend my school, which is an indicator of factors that might make it more likely that they will be successful, but collectively they bring with them the same full range of challenges that exist in most public school classrooms. I am not perfect in my practice, by any means, and not all of my students are thriving, but what’s happening in my classroom is so relatively good it often feels unreal, and if we truly valued our children the way we like to say we do, we’d put our money where our mouths are and do school differently so that teachers could have the time they need to learn, collaborate, plan well, and respond to students as individual learners because that is what’s best for kids.

Other countries do this. But we don’t. That’s the bottom line. (Insert screed about capitalistic values and how our children should not be treated like products or commodities.)

Instead of figuring out how to give teachers and schools what they really need to do a good job, politicians and school board members and parents are fighting over mask mandates and library books and the non-issue of CRT, generally to advance their own political agendas. We’re using our limited educational resources to manage a public health crisis and to comply with superficial directives (such as taking time for add-on social-emotional learning activities rather than making structural changes that will actually provide social and emotional supports) that will allow people in state-level administrative positions to look like they’re addressing our problems. I am so sick of what we do in schools being driven by adult needs to justify our practices, and too many days, I feel like I just can’t fucking take it any more. I retired earlier than planned because the system felt so damn broken and I couldn’t stomach being complicit in pretending that it wasn’t or that if we just tried harder or did some superficial things differently we could stop harming students. I couldn’t stomach being complicit in asking teachers to do more with less and contributing to the unmanageability of their jobs. I walked away from something I gave my life to and believe in the value of to my very core because I lost faith that things could be different.

And then I took this job. I took this job because it is both part of the system and apart from it, and I wanted to see if that was enough of a difference to make a difference. I wanted to find a way to not give up and to give to my community without having to give too much of myself. I have told myself over and over and over to focus on what I can control (my classroom) and the good I can do (for my students and school community) but I’m too angry at the ways in which all of us are being used and misused and how my continued willingness to be used (my true hourly rate is paltry, I don’t work enough to earn benefits, and my goal that I’m failing to reach is to work only one day a week for free) is part of what allows the brokenness to continue. I’m too angry about how all of this mangles my stupid heart and the hearts of so many people who want to serve and support our kids. Even though I’m a socially awkward introvert who often finds humans exhausting, I still love us, especially the youngest of us, and I’m so bone-deep weary of the ways in which we keep actively choosing to fail each other.

I have no grand conclusions here. I know that writing this here and publishing it on my little personal blog won’t change anything, and that I’m likely to have even less impact than that character in Network shouting about being mad as hell, but I want those of you who read here to know that our schools aren’t all right, and that our issues have not been caused by the pandemic, just revealed and exacerbated by it. I am writing here to bear witness, more like the people in that same movie shouting from their windows and fire escapes than the network executive having a televised meltdown, but maybe if enough of us do that it can be the starting place for putting broken things back together. Or, at the very least, for cleaning them up.

Winter’s coming

Sometimes, these past few months, as I let the world’s news glance off me, I allow myself to sit (only for moments) with a growing truth: That the bedrock upon which I lived for more than 50 years is shifting and breaking, and there is no putting it back (any more than one can put the earth back after a quake), and that this time of relative (surface) calm (in which I can push looming catastrophe into the canyons of my life, out of sight/out of mind) might someday, in retrospect, feel like the last weeks of fall, when the beauty is mostly (but not entirely) gone and you can see the shape of the season to come, and you want only to cling to the vibrant colors as long as you can, the way you imagine the last few leaves would be doing if they could, you know, literally cling, and could know anything about the inevitabilities of temperature, wind, or their fate. We know the spring will come round and everything will bloom again, but not for them.

Not for them.

A few dots

The Bad Guys Are Winning

We’re Not OK

A War on Books?… (via ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom newsletter)

Is Cozy Season a Cry for Help?

How to write a poem

First of all–and most importantly–you can’t go looking for it. (Except, of course, when you do, as I am here.) You will go looking, most likely, because you want it and you’ll get tired of waiting for it to come tapping on your shoulder one day when you’re in line at the grocery store or strolling the library shelves or walking the dog, as if your writing life were a romcom and you are a young Meg Ryan (if she were weightier, somehow, and far more deep, like you) and the poem is Tom Hanks or Billy Crystal (but smarter and more handsome). Honestly, you can go about it either way–looking or not, purposefully or not–but the best ones happen upon you, usually when you’re engrossed in some other pursuit, in being alive.

While you’re doing that–being alive, living a life–the true ones will come at you sideways, catch your attention for a moment through a fragment of memory, a snippet of language, a scent that takes you home. It’s such a balancing act, you know? There you are, immersed in some experience or another, and then, this other fascination comes along and you have to decide if you will follow it.

Let’s say you do. (You’ll have to, if you’re going to write a poem.) You turn to follow what beckons, to see where it might take you.

From there, well, things can go so many different ways. (Isn’t that part of the thrill of it, that you can’t know how it will all go?) It’s the beginning of the dance, and it’s different for all of us, really. It’s different every time, even though it might feel like you take the same steps over and over again. The more you write, the more you’ll come to know and hone your moves, develop your way of being with words. Some of us rush in, stripping ourselves bare before we’ve hardly gotten through the door, while others peel layers slowly, savoring each new revelation before reaching for the next. Either way, surprises abound, things we couldn’t anticipate when we started.

So many think it’s all about that first draft and getting it on the page. They think the passionate melding of your senses with your language with your hands with your memories is the heart of the matter, the most important thing; they think that’s what writing a poem is. Sometimes, rarely, maybe. But write long enough and you know: That’s only the beginning, that initial tumble into the sexy potential of it all. The next day (or week or month), when you open your eyes to light and see not a grand passion but crumpled sheets and stale metaphors and the mess of your feelings strewn across the page: That’s when you decide if where you’ve gone is worth a longer stay.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes that heady frenzy is the point, and it’s enough just as it is. Maybe you’ll walk away from it, grateful for some thing it helped you see or know or remember. Maybe it was just an itch you needed to scratch. Maybe it was nothing, and you can see that and it’s fine, just fine. It was what it is. You go back to walking the dog and buying groceries and picking up library books, perhaps more primed to notice the world’s glances that come your way, that spark that could turn into a real poem.

Sometimes, though, you know it’s the beginning of something more than words scrawled through some feeling’s heat. It’s something you could sustain, that could sustain you. So you turn toward it and hold on.

This is where the work begins. (All poems are work, just as everyone says.)

At first you tackle the easy things, a word here or there, a phrase, a clause. You begin tentatively, seeing where things hold and give. The more you come to know the poem, the deeper you’re able to go. You add, delete, and combine with confidence. You trim the redundancies and the modifiers that are about nothing but nervousness or bravado or fear. You might write or cut whole stanzas as you realize what the poem is going to be, to mean. The more you polish, the more clearly you see, and you keep only the parts that work with the whole. The poem begins to gleam. You do, too.

Sometimes, it’s as easy (and difficult) as that. Other times, you get snagged or stuck. You do and undo, do and undo in futile loops. You might come to doubt yourself. You might tell yourself that you’re a shit writer who’s never written anything worthwhile and that you’re probably not capable of writing at all. Get over that. It’s just early life trauma coming around to have its way with you. Don’t let it.

However, if you try and try and try and can’t get anywhere, it’s time to take a step back and consider radical revision. It’s time to look hard at the frame you built in that first coming together, to see if the way you began allows for a structure that holds. Do you need to let someone else be the speaker, change the tense, impose (or tear down) a form? Oh, how hard it can be hard to realize that what you’ve written doesn’t work, that to save any of the poem you will have to rebuild from the ground up. You might hate doing this because you’ll feel as if it won’t even be the same poem any more.

Maybe it won’t. It might not be worth saving, the thing you’ve turned your beloved poem into. You might have to let it go.

If you’re not ready to do that, you could try just putting it away for awhile. Go about your business and get some distance. When all you can see is weakness, when you can’t remember what you ever saw in the poem anyway, when you’re sick of the sound of its voice, when the poem on the page just can’t become the one in your head, maybe give it a rest. Just put it aside. Let it be. (You might even try writing some new poems for awhile.)

One day, when there’s a chance the words might sound fresh again, pull it out and see what it is to you now.

Sometimes you’ll realize you were an idiot, that you were just too close to the whole thing to see what you had. Other times you’ll realize it was as doomed as you thought, or that even though it’s not all that bad, it just isn’t and can’t be what you hoped for. Let it go, if that’s what’s true. Do so with peace. You learned something from it, you know. You always do.

None of your words are ever wasted.

*****

These words grew from an exercise from The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Solano. It’s a book I picked up last summer, when I was strolling a bookstore and imagining what the coming fall would be. I thought I would be fully retired, with lots of time to write. As I had no ideas about what I might want to write, I thought a book of exercises might be useful for building a consistent writing practice, a good way to discover what you want to focus on.

As this week turned toward its end and I realized I hadn’t written anything (again) or (again) felt the pull to write anything and knew I didn’t want to write about any of the things that had been yammering inside my head, I pulled out this book that I’d done nothing with (so far) but put on my shelf.

The book contains a writing prompt for each day, and I chose the one for the day I’d be publishing this post, November 14:

Teach Us: Write a poem that teaches the reader about something….Have this “teaching” happen through the poem, but have it be about something else entirely….See what you can teach the reader when you write the poem about something other than what is being taught.

Feel free to let me know what you think the true subject of the writing is. 🙂 I did not write a poem, and you don’t have to, either. The beauty of a book of prompts is that the whole point is just to get you started. You can do what you want with them, and this was a week in which I needed to do more of what I want and less of what I think I should. It was nice to shut the yammering up for a bit.

Hello darkness my old friend

So much can change in seven days.

One Saturday it’s all sunshine and pumpkins and leaves blazing against blue skies, and the next it’s wet sticks and relentless wind, the willow’s branches swept bare. I scoffed at Cane a week ago when he suggested that it would be our last sunny day until spring, then conceded that, perhaps, it was the last of a certain kind of sunny day. But I didn’t mean it. I thought we’d surely have more.

I was wrong.

The coleus plants that have flourished in our window box since August withered in days, and the pumpkins on our front porch seem suddenly garish. One afternoon I stepped outside to carry our old Daisy down the steps she now too often stumbles upon and was surprised by the cold that bit me right through my sweater. In just a week our corner of the world went from glorious to grubby and grim.

So now we turn inward, toward candlelight, simmering soups, woolly socks, and soft blankets. These are the weeks–this short lull between holidays–for sitting away a whole afternoon in a cafe with an old friend. For playing a game in front of a fire, and clearing a table to hold the pieces of a puzzle. It’s the beginning of wondering where another year has gone and of pondering what we’ll make of the next. Tonight darkness will descend before we’re ready for it, and we’ll feel something inside ourselves hunkering down for the long haul of winter, even though its supposed beginning is still weeks away.

I’m more than a little sorry to let go of what feels like true autumn, those afternoons of kicking crisp leaves with boots that feel new simply because it’s been so long since we’ve worn them. But this late stage is just a different kind of true, one that tests our loves in ways that easy days never do.

(A human can learn a lot from her canines about adaptation and comfort.)

Would love to hear all about how you weather this time of year, and what it’s like in your part of the world.