Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Reader, they hired me.

Mere days before winter break, the school where I was subbing offered me a full time job as a special education assistant. And while I’m old and jaded enough to understand that an entry-level full-time job in one’s chosen field is about as much of a Happily Ever After as a Disney princess’s Love’s First Kiss, I can’t deny that it is a definite turning point. A new path.

And so, at the terrible risk of sounding like a big fat self-deluding bloggy narcissist, I’m going to embrace this moment with a little benign grandiosity. I’m going to say I’m proud of myself. In fact, I’m going to say holy frijoles, maybe it took me until my forties but I have finally learned how to somewhat-successfully navigate the world of Career without getting my butt kicked.

I have a job that I like so much, it barely even feels like work. I have the job I wanted at the very school where I wanted to work. And I have a plan…a plan which unfortunately involves taking the GRE again, but a plan that will keep things interesting and challenging. A plan that just might someday let me be an innovator in the world of special education. A girl can dream.

But for now, I have a few years of apprenticeship ahead of me. Rather than rock any boats or leap on any soap boxes, I’m going to hunker down in the cracks and learn the trade. Like every other person in this field, I am here for the students. But I’m also here to learn. I’m here to listen more than talk. I’m here to accept whatever absurdities and frustrations come my way with grace, and to quietly lead by example.

I will not be blogging about any of this. In fact, I doubt I’ll be blogging much at all. At least not for a while.

When I first stumbled upon this whole blogging endeavor, The Boy was four and Little Grrl was just a baby. I’d just given up my work-from-home proofreading gig. Co-op preschool was out for the summer. For the first time in years, I had the time to pick up writing again. Not only that, but I had a built-in supportive Open Mic Night at the Campus Coffeehouse audience in my fellow members at Offsprung.

This is where I told my stories, pondered and reflected, and found my voice – first as a writer and then, amazingly, as an emerging special education parent. But most importantly, and against all my cynical preconceptions of the Internet…this is where I made some real friends and turned what would have been casual IRL acquaintanceships into something more meaningful. You guys are the best. Where would I be without you? You are the wind beneath my wings. Literally. Officially, even. All the hyperbolic adverbs.

Now go forth and be excellent to each other. And, you know, read the archives if you’re so inclined.

TTFN.

Without Ever Knowing Why

I was in the faculty room at the school where I’m subbing when I heard. Everyone was talking about it in hushed tones. Everyone except the kindergarten teacher, a new father, who was having a lively conversation about diapers with another teacher who’s a new grandmother.

As our buzz about the day’s tragedy got louder and more disturbing, so did the diaper discussion – almost as if in self defense. All around the table there were calls for gun control and better access to mental health support, calls for getting the police involved no matter what the age of the student, speculation about whether or not something like this could happen at this school and what we’d do if it did.

But the loudest of all was the rather vivid description of how to clean a soiled cloth diaper to perfection. Two teachers begged him to stop. And then we all stopped.

Quiet.

Which is what we all needed, really.

Obviously I can’t speak for each and every teacher everywhere, or even every teacher in the faculty room that day. We all have our own sensitivities and convictions and fears. We’re just people, after all.

We ended the day on the playground, where the 3rd grade teacher and I conducted a team Messy Science activity – the diet coke and mentos geyser. Pure joy. Boys and girls of various ages, race, class, and abilities sharing a moment of joyful Science! on a Friday afternoon. This is what we’re here for.

I wasn’t even thinking about it as we walked the students to the busses. I wasn’t thinking about it until I came home from work and saw the flood of humanity all over Facebook.

I can’t quite share the outrage or the fear or even the sadness. It’s all just too big right now. Too much to fathom.

All I can share with any sense of certainty is this old John Denver song, sung by the Muppets. It’s been in my head all day, ever since the faculty room fell silent. And all I can wish for anyone right now is peace.

“It’s in every one of us
To be wise.
Find your heart,
Open up both your eyes.
We can all know everything
Without ever knowing why.
It’s in every one of us
By and by.”

Joy of Six

Oh my girl. You are six, and six is only the beginning. But there you go already, wild and free. You’re braver than I ever was, but you have my introspection, my imagination, my love of books, my weak-knee’d adoration of all things cute and puppy-dog-eyed. You have a brother who challenges you but also follows your lead; who takes the fear and mystery out of “Boys.”

We were walking home from school the other day when suddenly you broke away from your brother and I, ran across the playground with joyful abandon I’d never seen from you on this school playground before. Six months ago, you’d sit in my lap and cling and whine to go home while your brother and the big kids played.

But this time you ran right into the thick of it toward a boy you know from your kindergarten class, leaving us in the dust. You made some incomprehensible in-joke and the two of you laughed and laughed. A few days later I saw you at recess, from the other playground where I was working, and there was that brave girl again, tearing around the playground in her pink hood, laughing with her friends.

Whatever you are, whatever you are becoming, you are not me. Why all the relief, I wonder? Was it so bad to be me at six? I was very happy in my own way, mired in my own little world of wonder, imagination, and self-imposed seclusion. Your challenges will be completely different from mine. No less heartbreaking, of course.

But perhaps I’m just slightly relieved that I won’t be reliving verbatim my own specific awkward, painful childhood moments through you. There will be different ones, nowhere on my radar yet, I’m sure. But it will be your path. And I will be the mother; not the born-again girl forever reliving my own girlhood. I knew that already, of course. But it’s nice to remind myself again from time to time.

I’m so proud of you, my girl. I love your heart-melting innocence and your unabashed delight in raunchy humor. I love your spot-on Homer Simpson voice and your wide-eyed adoration of all things American Girl. I love your pinker-than-pink dresses and your messier-than-a-college freshman’s bedroom. I love finding pieces of your writing around the house, especially the draft of your “Fem Song” (which I can only assume is a “theme song”).

I love that you have fallen asleep to the same Cocteau Twins album every single night since you were tiny. I love that, no matter how many times we tell you, you call the Beach Boys the Beach Brothers. I love that your expletive of choice is “Aw peanuts.” I even love that you’re still awake right now, interrupting my typing to hug me and say softly “When I grow up, I want to be an author!”

I love how you are shades of each of us, and yet entirely nothing like any us. And I love how you completed our little nuclear family. Our darling exclamation point. Our cherry on top. Our little star of Bethlehem, joining us just in time for Christmas and giving us an extra holiday to celebrate during this merry and bright season.

Happy birthday, my girl. This is only the beginning.

When the Working Day is Done

My new job is like a double-crack latte sometimes, and I mean that in the best of ways. I love it. Even the really tough days are such a charge. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep because I’m full of ideas for the next day. Sometimes these ideas fall flat, and sometimes they absolutely soar. Sometimes I come home and find myself exhausted and extremely short on patience. But, more often than not, I find myself over-energized and…seeking.

There’s no school this whole week for parent-teacher conferences. “Welcome to Miller Time,” said I, tearing into my delicious Friday with joyous abandon. By Monday, though, I found myself outside in the relentless early morning November rain in my Crocs and jammies, desperately raking soggy leaves off the sidewalk for sheet mulching.

Mr. Black was still in bed when I dragged my drenched self back inside. I tried to make light of it.

“Ever notice that whenever I’m not at school, I’m doing some crazy gardening project?” I said with a smile.

Oh, he’d noticed, all right. Lucky for both of us, he finds it endearing. But I wonder how long before the cuteness wears off.

The wild energy doesn’t just pour itself into home improvement projects. It seeks fun, too. Not sex/drugs/rock-and-roll per se, but whatever the geeky forty-something mom version of that might be. I yearn for a social life that’s every bit as vibrant and over-stimulating as my work life, and it’s simply not available to me anymore.

Sure, there’s Facebook and the occasional meet-up with friends. There are date nights and pillow talk with my sweet honey. There’s lots of raucous horseplay and general silliness with the kiddos, which probably comes the closest to meeting this newfound need for speed.

But I miss happy hours that lasted all night and ended with diner breakfasts and falling asleep on each other’s floors. I miss how forthcoming we used to be about our hopes and fears. I miss ill-advised drunken kisses and crushes where you actually had the option of telling the other person how you felt. I miss my old friends.

I kind of miss my new friends, too. We’re all so busy, so partitioned off from each other with our families at our centers. That’s as it should be, of course. But I can’t help it. I miss other grown ups. I just do.

I’m sure I’ll be feeling more at ease next week when work starts up again and I can pour all this energy where it belongs. For now, though, I wouldn’t say no to a little responsible-version-of-fun. Friends, you know where to reach me.

Fracture

I thought he’d gotten himself in trouble. His teacher’s face was so serious as he stooped over, one hand across The Boy’s shoulders, rushing him off the playground toward the principal’s office. The Boy’s face bore an eerie look of zoned-out defiance.

“What happened?” I asked, privately irritated beyond belief by whatever it was he’d done to make his teacher so upset.

“I think he’s injured. I don’t like the way that arm is hanging,” the teacher replied gravely as they hurried past.

“What happened?” I asked again, but they’d already disappeared into the building. I ran after them, still not quite believing it. Turned out he’d fallen off the monkey bars, going super-fast to impress his friend.

The school nurse was gone for the day, but it was pick-up time and there were lots of parents around. One was a nurse and another was a PA. While I uselessly attempted to hold an ice pack on the wrong arm and fumbled with a borrowed cell phone, they set to work making The Boy a splint out of an ace bandage and an old cardboard box.

“He needs to go to a hospital,” the PA told me. “His arm is broken.”

“Well, it might be,” The Boy corrected him. “We don’t know for sure yet.”

The PA gave me a subtle look that simultaneously said “What a precocious little guy” and “Yeah, no, that arm is totally broken.”

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the ER at Children’s Hospital sporting a name tag that simply said “Mom” and my last name. In the Children’s Hospital, everybody calls you Mom.

“Ohhhh. When is this ever going to be overrrrrrrr?” groaned The Boy, holding his homemade splinted arm at an awkward angle, trying unsuccessfully to enjoy a Star Wars movie.

I used to love hospitals as a child, almost as much as I loved airports and hotels. Curious George Goes to the Hospital was my favorite by far in the George canon, and I adored the Fisher Price hospital playset with its X-ray machine and groovy little goldfish pond on the grounds. When I had my tonsils out, I was secretly thrilled to get to stay overnight. As an adult, I even enjoyed my extended stay in the postnatal ward recovering from my C-sections, ordering vanilla milkshakes and getting acquainted with my wrinkly little newborns.

Now, though, the fluorescent lighting, incessant waiting, beeping, and crappy TV reception could just kiss my grits. The Boy was poked and prodded and blood-pressure-cuffed and morphined. Let me tell you, if you think it’s fun to Sherpa an Aspergers child through a massive and uncomfortable routine change, just try it when the Aspergers child is on morphine. On the plus side, he loved watching the wrist watches on the Home Shopping channel.

“I’m very concerned about radiation exposure,” The Boy insisted to the tech as she wheeled him into the X-Ray room. She was kind and respectful enough to engage him in a real discussion about the safety precautions they would be taking, which now makes me wish I’d gotten her name so I could send her a nice basket of Thank You pears or something.

His shirt, I noticed, was still covered in wood chips from where he’d fallen on the playground. His hands were still filthy from spending most of the day on an all-school field trip to a nearby beach, and his socks were full of sand. Such a strange, oddly heartbreaking juxtaposition in this sterile hospital room.

Finally, seven hours later, he had a fresh new cast and we could finally go home. “I actually enjoyed small portions of that experience,” he remarked.

I’d only intended to take one day off from work. One day to chaperone the field trip at my kids’ school, and then I’d go right back to my new job as a substitute special education assistant. (Although “substitute” is really a misnomer. More often than not, it’s a lot more like being a temp.)

Anyway, there’s a lovely built-in flexibility to subbing/temping/whatever that suited this situation perfectly. I had to give up an assignment I really enjoyed at a developmental preschool. But when The Boy was ready to go back to school full-time, I was able to line up a new assignment in an EBD program that’s been working out beautifully so far.

Maybe a little too beautifully. The team and the administrators really like me. I really like them. The students are absolutely nothing like any students I’ve ever worked with before, and they challenge, frustrate, charm, inspire, and absolutely break my heart. Sometimes I amaze myself. Sometimes I can’t believe the stupid mistakes I make. Sometimes I’m so fried at the end of the day, I simply don’t want to go home and scrape up the energy it takes to be with my own kids.

I don’t know how I feel about that.

Mr. Black does pick-up and drop-off now, and he’s gradually starting to know more about what goes on at school than I do. He knows the parents of Little Grrl’s new friends. He gets the compliments from their teachers. He even coordinated and hosted a playdate last week.

My new mentor insists that I need to push through the discomfort and give my kids and myself the space to pursue our own paths. “You need to let go,” she keeps saying.

Another mentor of mine would probably agree. He’s fond of telling this story about a mother who was a notorious helicopter parent all through her daughter’s preschool years. Sure enough, on the first day of kindergarten, her daughter fell off the playstructure and broke her arm.

“It happened because I wasn’t there,” said the mother.

“It happened because you were always there,” is the response.

And indeed, I can’t help but notice that The Boy happened to break his arm on the one day I took off from work to be with him at school. That last hour at school, after we’d come back from the field trip, was such a tumultuous one. I’d shuttled back and forth between both kids’ classrooms, spent too much time in Little Grrl’s art class and missed meeting up with The Boy when he expected me. By the time I found him, he was having a mini-meltdown in the hallway with his special ed teacher because I was late.

He’d managed to cheer himself up and go join his class on the playground. I stayed behind to talk with his special ed teacher. And that’s when it happened. That’s what I was doing when I saw his teacher rushing him inside.

The Boy is very athletic and a joyful risk-taker. He’s taken dozens of scarier falls in his day with barely a scratch or tear. Did my being there throw him off his game somehow? Did it collide the worlds of Home and School and create such a sense of disequilibrium that he lost his balance on the monkey bars?

Conversely, is my not being there messing him up in ways I don’t know about yet? I can’t read his daily behavior report without knowing that I write those same daily behavior reports for my students, too. And while the reports cull it down to the basics and provide the most essential information, they don’t even come close to telling the whole story. There are volumes of subtleties and nuance that I simply do not have access to anymore.

The Boy’s arm has been healing beautifully, and his days at school have been relatively trouble-free. When there are challenges, he works through them with the special ed team at his school, just as my co-workers and I work through challenges with our students. And in that sense…well, we’re all part of the same “village.” That’s the best I can hope for, anyway.

“Love is proved in letting go,” goes the line from some poem I read in high school whose title eludes me. How convenient if that were really true. How painful. How simply real.

He built himself an under-the-cast scratching device out of Legos, which I spent a fun-filled evening extracting. The fun, oh it just never stops.

Illusions I Recall

“It’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.”
– Joni Mitchell

I’ve known this song my whole life. Well, at least since sixth grade. And it was the Judy Collins version, a favorite of my mom’s. I didn’t discover the Joni Mitchell original until I was much older, well into my single-girl-in-Philadelphia stint, coming out on the “maybe this isn’t so much fun after all” side of things.

I’d broken up with a perfectly fine boyfriend. Well, “fine” in that he was gorgeous and available – even if that last one was mostly due to his own inertia. We had a lot of fun together. Or so it seemed before I gave up weed in the hopes of getting a corporate job that might require a drug test. You know when you’re not stoned and suddenly an entire box of Entenmann's heavily frosted Valentine’s Day cupcakes doesn’t seem quite so delicious anymore? Yeah, that.

It was the right thing to do. I don’t even think he minded that much. I’d been a lot of work for him. We went our separate ways and that was that. But then came the loneliness of no longer having him on my couch, in my bed, across from me in our favorite restaurants or next to me in the video store…the knowledge that a better-matched partner surely existed for me somewhere, but how the hell do you find someone like that in the gritty Gen-X bars of Philadelphia or the sterilized cubicle world?

And that’s when I glommed onto Joni Mitchell’s version of “Both Sides Now.” It’s slower with more intensely felt regret and introspection than the Judy Collins one. It fit my mood perfectly. I’d tried love and life both ways, all possible ways, really, and here I was just as weary and flummoxed and alone as a sixth grade oddball just beginning to notice the world outside her imagination.

I strove to understand things, always. We didn’t have anti-bullying workshops or widespread use of terms like “sexual harassment” or “verbal abuse” until I was older. Feminism was still in its second wave glory which, in my young mind, pretty much translated to “Be good at sports” and “Boys are stupid.” Meanwhile, messages like “Fit into a pair of Jordache jeans” and, well, “Have a boyfriend” were much louder and more prevalent. And, of course, “Nerds like you are unfuckable and, in fact, barely human” was the loudest message of all.

So, while I waited for the 90’s to come and change all that, I strove to understand things. That’s where my power came from in those days. I wanted to know every angle, and I could usually analyze and outsmart to the point where I simply knew I wasn’t the inferior outsider I appeared to be.

Lucky for me, the 90’s did come and I grew into my nerdiness with a vengeance. I went to college and found my tribe. I began to navigate a social life outside my imagination. I could almost pass for normal, but I didn’t really want to anymore. Life was good. Life only got better, really, just like Dan Savage says it does. Still, in many ways I can’t help feeling just as weary and flummoxed as ever.

Striving to understand things only gets you so far. Because no matter how sharp and deep and nuanced your thoughts are…they’re only your thoughts. Your version of things is only one among many. You can put your absolute best out there and still get knocked on your ass. A lot. And the more you love and engage, the more you put yourself and your ideas out there, the more opportunities there will be to run up against ignorance and abject misunderstanding.

And the more you try to think over and around and through those misunderstandings, the more you realize that simply analyzing them isn’t enough. Each turn reveals complexities upon complexities until you just have to stand back and be amazed that human beings can even have conversations about the weather and somehow manage to understand each other. What are we all doing here?

At some point, I guess, you have to accept that you can’t control other people’s understanding. You just can’t. And instead of trying to out-think it, perhaps the better course of action is to immerse oneself in the imperfect flow of humanity and just go. Do. Make it about the process. Be in the moment. Get bruised and knocked around, have your assumptions challenged and maybe even proven wrong, let someone else’s philosophy inspire you even as it confounds and contradicts you.

Perhaps there’s no real harm in seeing something from both sides now and finding yourself more confused than ever. It doesn’t always have to make sense.

Things We Used To Do

This marriage goes to eleven. Years, that is. Married for eleven years and nearly-inseparable as a couple since the late 90’s, when Spice Girls roamed the earth and Linda Tripp brought vicious office gossip to a new terrifying low.

When you meet the love of your life at age 28 and marry him at age 32, you don’t really think of it as “growing up together.” But that’s exactly what it is. You know that line from Annie Hall, about how a relationship is like a shark? It has to constantly move forward or it dies? Moving forward sometimes means leaving things behind.

There are things I miss about the old versions of “us.” And there are things I’m very glad are in the past. But no matter what, they’re worth remembering as we settle into middle-aged contentment. Here are just a few of the things we used to do, in no particular order:

Go grocery shopping together. Every. Single. Time. What’s up with that, new couples?

Carry on a six-month long-distance relationship in the days before Facebook, Skype, or having e-mail accounts on our home computers.

Make mix tapes for each other.

Take red-eye flights. With carry-on luggage only.

Turn simple misunderstandings into epic, multi-day, heartbreaking You Don’t Understand Me fests.

Walk across the Fremont Bridge and up the steepest part of Queen Anne hill together every day after work. For fun.

Follow NBA basketball.

See movies like Coyote Ugly and Six Days and Seven Nights in the theater for Mr. Black’s old film critic gig.

Wash the car with liter bottles full of water that we’d carry down from the apartment.

Think we were going to get married at city hall and have only one child.

Think we wanted to be a lawyer and a graphic designer, making ourselves slightly miserable in the process.

Watch reality dating shows. All of them. Married By America. Mr. Personality. Temptation Island. Joe Millionaire. Proud to say we drew the line at Joe Millionaire 2.

Watch Dr. Phil together. Zod help us, we really, truly used to do that. I think Mr. Black secretly liked feeling superior to the guys on that show who couldn’t husband their way out of a paper bag.

Stay up all night playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

Get jealous of each other’s crushes and distractions. (Honestly, I don’t know if Mr. Black ever did this in the first place, but I did it enough for the both of us.)

Have sex only during particular times of the month with the express intention of spawning, paying close attention to things like basal body temperature and ovulation predictor tests.

Start dinner at 8:30 p.m. Cook together in the same kitchen, sharing counter space and everything.

Watch the WTO riots from the roof of our building.

Spend entire weekends in bed together.

Spend entire weekends watching Twin Peaks episodes on VHS.

Spend entire weekends at Home Depot. Or Bed Bath and Beyond. Or Babies R Us.

Make spectacular fools of ourselves to stop the baby from crying. You never really know a man until you’ve seen his “Mr. Poopy Wipes” puppet show.

Wake each other up in the morning with a rousing chorus of The Daily Show’s Slimmin’ Down With Steve.

Attend all four days of Bumbershoot, dawn ’til dusk, walking there from our Capitol Hill apartment.

Give each other anagrams challenges with the Scrabble tiles. Best one ever: Boutros Boutros-Ghali --> So our tuba is log broth.

Worry that somehow married life would make us lame. Because, you know. We were so cool to begin with.

Happy anniversary, Sweetie!