Last Days of the Old Normal

 I’ll admit it. I was wrong in my last post, comparing our recent plague-times to the good old H1N1 scare of 2009. My goodness, what a simpler time it was TWENTY DAYS ago. So much has happened since then.

We were in this weird limbo that weekend when I wrote that post. I’d just learned that a student’s sibling had been hospitalized with a confirmed case. I wasn’t supposed to know, but there it was. I knew. My 1^st period class was already seated. The bell had rung. And then a colleague came to the door to pick up the student’s belongings.

Discreetly, in the hallway, grieving beneath a businesslike efficiency, she told me. Now she wouldn’t have to bear that shock and sadness like a secret. We had each other’s back, and the family’s back, too. But I wasn’t supposed to know. So I acted as if I didn’t know.

Deep cleaning was set to happen over the weekend. All I could do was wipe down the desks with Clorox wipes and check my messages, waiting for the doctor’s office to call me back. They told me to call Public Health. Public Health told me to wash my hands and wait to see if symptoms showed up.

That weekend felt like it does when there’s a huge snowmageddon predicted that will supposedly shut down the city, but you don’t see a single cloud in the sky. Ostensibly, everything was still fine. We shopped for extra groceries just in case. But I planned my lessons and worked on my IEPs because there was no way, no way the schools would close. How would they possibly?

Monday, it was all the students could talk about. Those who were still coming to school, that is.   Every day for the past two weeks, my classes had been growing smaller and smaller. Fewer and fewer teachers were coming to work. There was news that two schools in our huge urban school district had closed – one of them citing a similar level of exposure that our own school had experienced. Still, we kept on going. I was proud to keep on going. The students who kept showing up needed routine and caring adults now more than ever. I figured I would keep showing up until they told me not to. I would NOT give in to Townspeople-of -South-Park-level panic. I. Would. Not.   

Tuesday started out normally enough. I woke up at the usual extra-early time to drive The Boy to track practice in the dark. I sat up lazily, picked up my phone, scrolled through social media, and clicked on a story about the situation in Italy.

Italy.

And somehow, everything shifted.

I didn’t consciously change my mind about the seriousness of COVID-19. My mind just changed; its floor giving way to a bottomless well of grieving clarity. I felt sick. Not the sickness of a cold or flu…just a tidal wave of pure despair. I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. As soon as I’d arranged for a sick day and a sub, I fell into a deep sleep filled with anxious dreams, not waking up until mid-afternoon.

And then…I got up. I worked on IEPs. I wrote lesson plans. I read emails about how horrendously my 4^th period class had behaved for the sub and started working on a new seating chart. I emailed my colleagues reassuring them that I was all better and would be back at work the next day.

Wednesday, there were fewer students than ever, full of questions and concerns about coronavirus. We watched Governor Inslee speak during our Social Studies class. I answered their questions as best I could. I invited them again and again to wash their hands at the classroom sink. I gave my 4^th period class the sternest of lectures about how they’d behaved for my sub the day before.

And then…the announcement came that schools were closing. None of us could believe it. The students weren’t even happy, as I’d expected – just stunned. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t possibly be true.

But there it was.

And here we are.

A new normal.

It’s a normal I honestly can’t get my head around to define. I’ve called and texted emailed and emailed and texted and called, making sure everyone’s safe and sound. I’ve posted distance learning activities and smiled from the bottom of my heart when I see my students’ sweet little sentences. 

I’ve watched the cherry tree in our front yard go from cold bare branches to Laura-Ashley rose-colored buds to gloriously full cotton-candy bloom.

 I’ve fed the steller’s jays, who wait for me every morning like my own special flock of chickens. 

 

I’ve cancelled trips and hit “refresh” over and over on Amazon, jockeying for a grocery-delivery time slot. I’ve flailed in frustration trying to teach myself how to set up an IEP meeting on Microsoft Teams. I’ve done yoga on the kitchen floor in between e-mail pings from work. I’ve sat for hours with cats on my feet and shoulders. I’ve let my hair grow wild and mermaid-tangled and free.

I’ve absolutely savored all this extra time with my own kids, both of them teenagers now, so gorgeously themselves. They talk non-stop about D&D and video games. They binge-watch their shows and keep up with their schoolwork with minimum nagging. The Boy practices guitar, Grrrl writes and draws. They come and go from their rooms, making their own lunches but gathering as a family at dinner times.

I’ve cried only once – when I read about the high school principal in Brooklyn who died from this. Good people are going to die. The helpers. The ones who put themselves in harm’s way. I cried and then I picked up my phone and saw an opinion piece from the Seattle Times criticizing us teachers for letting our students down. I cried a whole lot more and stayed up all night delving into an audiobook to put it out of my mind. I woke up with a killer migraine, took some meds, answered some emails, had my first virtual team meeting.

The next day, I made enchiladas.

Mr. Black and I just ebb and flow, loving each other, still, with an older, stoic love. We are family to each other. We do what has to be done. We help each other, laugh with each other, squabble when it’s time to order online groceries – a process I love every bit as much as he detests. We move around each other like two old compatible cats in this strange new day-to-dayness of our lives.

What’s coming next, I can’t begin to imagine. The Battle of Hogwarts? Who can say. But, just as Hagrid said, a few books before that Battle of Hogwarts, “What’s coming will come, and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.”

Godspeed, my gentle readers. Stay safe. Wash your hands. 

Plague & Privilege

I don’t mean to make light of it. Or maybe I do. It all feels so familiar, is all. Remember swine flu in 2009? Remember how people drove to other counties and stood in line for hours with their kids for the vaccine?

Grrrl was one month away from her 3^rd birthday – just young enough to get her in under the wire when a limited supply of the vaccine became available at our pediatrician’s office. I felt a little silly showing up an hour early, but there was already a line around the block. In November. In Seattle. During a phase when Grrrl had some pretty serious opinions about never wearing a coat. Other parents were smart and had one waiting in line while the other waited in the car with the babies and toddlers. And they all had coffee. Why oh why had I not thought of bringing coffee?

Meanwhile, Mr. Black had already survived a confirmed case of that very swine flu two weeks earlier. He’d quarantined himself in our bedroom and actually managed to not pass it along to the rest of us. Still, my Grrrl and I hunkered down in the rain and waited for the vaccine line to move, reading her favorite books and singing her favorite songs, coat-less and coffee-less. We didn’t get swine flu. We didn’t even catch colds.

Now my Grrrl is 13, and she diplomatically asks if she can stay home from her Saturday activities. “Are you worried about coronavirus?” I ask.

“No, I’ve just had a bad week,” she says stoically, and after some encouragement tells me that some adult at school publicly called her out and scolded her for holding hands with one of her friends in the hallway. She’s not outraged, or even angry. Just quietly, deeply mortified.   

To make her feel better, I shared some of my own stories from the week. It started with dumb jokes, of course. Somebody coughs. Three other 8^th graders yell and point “Aahhh! Coronavirus!” and it’s all fun and games until the anxious kid with seasonal allergies won’t come to school anymore.

The next time something like that happens, it’s not a joke at all. A different anxious student is screaming for real and demanding that student at her table stop sniffing (to be fair, it is pretty gross). But the also-anxious sniffing student she’s screaming at is crying. “It’s just phlegm. I don’t have coronavirus.” He happens to be Asian, and he’s fed up in a way he doesn’t completely grasp after several days of this. I intervene and manage to make it a little bit better. But the boy still cries on and off for much of the day, and the girl hasn’t been back to school since.

At my yoga class, the teacher asks us if we’re all working from home as much as possible. I’m surprised to be the only one in the class who doesn’t answer with an enthusiastic “YES.” When I say that I work in a middle school, so much about them freezes. Not just their bodies, but their facial expressions. It’s like..they have the presence of mind to not chase me from the room with pitchforks and torches, but they haven’t perfected a replacement behavior for that impulse. I joke about it on social media, but that look of frozen terror in those faces is going to haunt me. There’s something very….not funny about it.

At school, the jokes continue. We’re asked to present a lesson from our school nurse during homeroom to curb the hysteria and channel all that anxious energy toward hand-washing. You're welcome:

In the hallway, students are joking “Let’s lick the doorknobs so they cancel school!” There are reports of students fake-sneezing at people in Starbucks because HILARIOUS.

By Friday, well…shit gets slightly more real.

I am almost supernaturally calm, because this was inevitable. While the parents of our school’s Facebook page start engaging in exactly the rhetoric one would expect of parents on a school’s Facebook page, I wash my hands and discreetly message my doctor’s office for next steps.

Over the phone, a Public Health nurse advises me to just keep swimming, but monitor for symptoms for the next fourteen days. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Fever? Nope. Coughing? Nope. Shortness of breath? Nope with a side order of nope sauce. Lately I’ve been starting each morning by taking a big, luxurious breath of rich, creamy, full-fat oxygen. I count my blessings. And I acknowledge the privileged space I take up in this world.

I’m honest with Grrrl about all this, and I talk her through the likeliest scenarios. I assure her that even in the worst-case one, the four of us will be safe and sound with our health insurance, our paid sick days, our ability to purchase food and supplies ahead of time, our access to technology at home, and our being in low-risk groups to begin with.  

My fears are for the people who don’t have access to all of that. And my fears are for a society that is elbowing them out of the way to snatch up the last bottle of hand sanitizer.

My Vitriolic Valentine

How do we know it’s that bad? He sent me an email that was maybe an apology, or more likely one of those “sorry you’re such a fruitcake” non-apologies, and I didn’t even read it. Instead, I blurred my eyes out of focus so as not to accidentally ingest any possible doubled-down toxicity as I clicked through all the necessary steps to send it and any further attempts at contact directly to my Junk Mail folder.

And even though it happens to be Valentine’s Day, this has nothing to do with ghosting some bad old boyfriend. No. I’m ghosting my son’s high school guidance counselor instead.

I don’t care to share my son’s business on here, but I do want to write about my own experience of the fallout from my attempt at helping him sort out some things at school. I want to share it because it was one of the more surreal moments in my 10 years of IEP team meetings, and I need to air it out before it rots in my soul and hurts forever.

The last time something like this happened, The Boy was 4 or 5 years old, still in preschool and undiagnosed. Some preschool dad went full asshole on me on the playground. Screamed at me “I’m sick of YOU, I’m sick of your KID! He should be kicked out of school!”

I high-roaded it and waited for an apology that never came. I heard through the grapevine that his wife was “torn” – appalled by hubby’s bad behavior but super-proud of him for standing up to, um, that autistic kid and his mom on a preschool playground. I saw him years later at some kid’s birthday party and he actually tried to talk to me as if nothing had happened. Ha. I saw him again at a high school open house a few years ago and I actually moved seats so I wouldn’t have to see the back of his big stupid head.

There have been a lot of awful moments between then and now on the ASD Road to Life in the Mainstream, but that first moment is the one that can still bring bitter tears to my eyes all these years later.

Today, though, I might have to crown a new king of that particular domain.

He didn’t like that I’d emailed at night and then expected to hear back by late morning. He didn’t like that I said I’d drop by the school that afternoon if I didn’t hear back. “Didn’t like” is putting it mildly, though. He rhetorically tore me several new ones today. Scolded. Talked over me. Scoffed and made these little high-pitched laughing sounds. Kept on going even after I’d said “Please stop, you’re making me uncomfortable.” I am not exaggerating any of this. And yes, I admit that my whole email/drop-by strategy was on the obnoxious side, but the vitriol he spewed in my general direction….he hated me in that moment. Hated me for sending an obnoxious email when I was confused and upset and worried about my kid. Hated me for showing up at that meeting still upset and worried and confused.

He tried to explain how busy teachers are. I told him I know that, because I am also a teacher. He told me he was surprised to hear that I’m a teacher, because I don’t conduct myself like a professional educator. He told me my email was bullying. The Boy was sitting right there crying. I started crying too. Nevertheless, he persisted. Eventually he had to leave for another meeting, and it was time for The Boy’s dentist appointment anyway, and we left.

Yes. This all really happened. I don’t believe it either.

So. I didn’t curl up in a ball and die like I wanted to. I cried in my car for maybe 30 minutes, replied to the administrator’s apologetic email with a simple, straightforward account of what had happened, gathered my wits about me, and drove to my own school.

My students had been making valentines…little choppy pink and red hearts and scraps of pink and red paper all over the floor. They were so excited about our upcoming mid-winter break that they all joined in with the kid who makes fart noises and fart-noised up the joint until I begged them to stop and a girl explained “Fart noises are how you know we LOVE you, Ms. Floor Pie!”

Still, in the pit of my heart I kept hearing it. “You don’t conduct yourself like a professional educator.”

When the kids went joyfully home for the day, I cried all over again. A few colleagues have reassured me that I’m not crazy and that I did not, in fact, deserve that level of vitriol. But I’ve been at this game long enough to know that I’m never going to change vitriolic minds.

So, okay. I don’t need to.

But I also don’t need to shut up about it.

Never Not Broken

Art by Emily Winfield Martin

Part One: Love

What I hear is a very familiar outburst of “SHIT!” in a high-pitched child’s voice, trying out the power of that word. So familiar, in fact, that it barely registers at all except for the out-of-place surroundings.

She’d made a mistake, knocked some things over, spilled the coffee. It’s pretty much the only reaction you could expect if it were water instead of coffee, my classroom filled with middle schoolers instead of a posh organic grocery store filled with posh organic shoppers. I am one of them in many ways: Prius in the parking lot, well-crafted fingerless mittens on my hands, and the money to pay for a mini-cart filled with fresh organic oranges and cookies and grapes.

But in just as many ways, I am not one of them at all. I don’t look up or even grimace when she hollers “SHIT!” and spills the coffee. I don’t freeze up until I hear the stern man’s voice in response: “Go. Now. Without your coffee. GO!”

I only look when she strides right past me out the door, not a child but a grown woman, striding out the door and down the sidewalk screaming “FUUUUUCK! AAAHHHHHH!” like it’s just another Thursday at my job, except there’s no staff of loving adults who will graciously head her off; no quiet counselor’s office for her to take deep breaths and plunge her hands into some kinetic sand; no one to bring her a granola bar and ask her if she’s ready to try again.

In the posh organic grocery store, there is only nervous laughter and commiseration among the staff and shoppers. If they were my students, we’d unpack it. I’d insist on grace and respect for the person who is struggling, but I’d make a space for the others to share their feelings about it. We’d share stories about the times when we got angry and lost it. We’d even reminisce about the time when I got angry and lost it. (“You were SO MAD, Ms. Floor Pie! We thought you were gonna quit that day!” So did I, children. But I felt much better after I took a break and came back when I was calm.) And then I’d remind them that we’re not robots and that we all experience anger and frustration. It’s what we do next that counts. And we’d make a plan for how to welcome the student back in when they were ready.

But it’s a grocery store, not my classroom, so I just keep rattling my mini-cart up and down the aisles, taking the deep breaths I wish I could have coached that woman to take and feeling pretty certain it wouldn’t have done a damn bit of good anyway. People say it all the time. We’re doing them a disservice. What about the Real World? What will they do then, when there’s no kinetic sand and no breaks in the counselor’s office and no granola bars and only a cold world of consequences? What then?

“Sorry about that interruption, ma’am,” says the manager when I pause by the La Croix’s to decide on a flavor. He looks like a younger, more earnest Ron Swanson. He probably thinks I look so shell-shocked because somebody yelled “SHIT” in my favorite posh organic grocery store.

I’m supposed to tell him it’s okay, but I can’t find the words. So instead I just blurt, “I work with mentally ill children.”

This is a pretty big exaggeration, but not entirely untrue. Not to mention rhetorically effective. The flash in his eyes.

So I keep blurting, motioning to the fruit and cookies in my cart. “All of this food is for them. They’re having their Writers Celebration today and every single one of them, even the ones who hate school the most and always refuse to do work…every single one of them wrote a story.”

He nods, maybe wondering what my point is. There’s no real need to keep blurting, but there I go anyway. “And I’m so PROUD of them, but I’m so worried about them, too. That woman sounded just like some of my students when they get angry, and I feel like I just saw how the rest of the world will see them when they grow up…and I know that no matter how hard I work every day and how much progress they make, there’s really nothing I can do to…to keep that from happening to them.”

And then, because I can read true empathy on his face, and because I’m pretty sure he cares but has no clue what to actually say, I add “But I know you have a job to do and a store to run. I understand.”  And truly, I did.

“Thank you,” was all he said. But he really meant it.

 Art by Emily Winfield Martin

Part Two: Hate

Weeks later, during a particularly wonderful but also particularly challenging school year, I’m still pondering that episode. I’d meant to write it up as a Christmas-themed blog post, but something stopped me. Maybe I didn’t want to put a false glow on something that, in fact, is not as glowingly simple as that story makes it appear.

Weeks later, in fact, I found myself crying slow, calm, steady tears in a movie theater by myself on a Thursday afternoon instead of in my classroom, where I should have been.

I was at the movies because my principal had sent me home for the day.

My principal sent me home for the day because I’d straight-up lost it in her office, sobbing and sobbing because one of my students, in his disability-manifested anger, had ranted at me in the hallway in a particularly sexist and rape-culture tone, and because he’d recruited another of my students to join in, both of them braying the joyless laughter of white men reclaiming their power.

I was crying because several female colleagues I love and trust did most assuredly NOT have my back on it, in fact high-roaded and blamed me for it. (“He’s just a baby,” one of them is reported to have said in a department meeting the next day.)

I was crying because this is not the first time something like that has happened.

I was crying because every time it happens, the message is “Floor Pie, you’re just too sensitive. You need a therapist. You need to get your shit together on your own time.”

I was crying because, as rotten as it feels when stuff like this happens, I absolutely do NOT want to quit this job. I can’t keep myself from it. It’s the only thing I’m this supernaturally good at. It’s the only thing that makes me feel like I’m worthy of taking up my privileged space in this world. I’m called to it. I love it even when I hate it. I couldn’t quit it if I tried.

Art by Emily Winfield Martin

Part Three: Resolve

This story doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, and neither does this work. I came to it with passion and ferocity, but that doesn’t mean I get to be the heroine of the narrative.  And, like I tell my students, I’m not just some right-doing robot. I get hurt and blow up too, just like they do. And when that happens, I take a break, maybe curse in the privacy of my own home instead of posh grocery stores and classrooms. I cry soundlessly in the back rows of movie theaters. Then I go home and watch TV with my kids, plan little vacations, order Indian food with extra samosas. I talk it through and through and through with my husband who tries to make me feel better by saying things like “Well, you work in public education. Public education is messed up.”

This work breaks me. But…this work builds me. This work lets me feel hopeful in an increasingly hopeless world; it lets me feel like I am doing something helpful for the people most likely to be steamrolled under the emerging dictatorship we’re all living with because we can’t bring ourselves to die for the cause just yet.

So, here I am. Hating what I love, loving what I hate, joyful and striving and so very, very tired. There are things I could do next. There are ways I could keep doing this but make the parts of it that suck at least suck less. There are good days, bad days, unmemorable days, and summer vacations. There are times – lots of times – when I feel connected to this world with benevolence and joy. There are times when I’m counting the days to the next school break. What’s next for me and this gloriously ridiculous career? One way or another, for better or for worse, it’s likely to be more of the same.

That’s not a happy ending. But I suppose it’s a hopeful one.

Heroic Toaster Oven

The other day, our yoga teacher taught us about Akhilanda, a goddess whose name literally means Never Not Broken. Strangely apt.

So, winter break draws to a close and a new decade begins with an entire continent on fire; begins with another country bombed by orders of a petulant impeachee; begins with children who should be my students by now still caged and traumatized at the border, and my social media feed is mad that not enough people know or care.

The social-media shaming about our silence and complicity really stings, I’ll admit. I mean…I still haven’t done anything about any of it. Two summers ago I held up this sign at local rallies. Every so often I send little donations here or there. There’s a part of me that sees the news and rages and dies inside, believing I should be out there burning shit down instead of feeding the cats and taking down the Christmas tree. But here I am.

It’s been nice having two weeks off…not just from work, but from the whole swirling vortex of humanity that is public middle school special education. It’s been nice to clean my house, go to movies, eat full meals, and spend time with family and friends like an actual human person.

When I dive back in on Monday, I won’t be sorry. I’ll simply enter a different dimension; switched from ‘off’ to ‘on’; a swimming pool opening for Memorial Day weekend, busy and flooded and serving its purpose. This is my purpose.  

And I don’t mean “this is my purpose” in a grandiose way. I mean it simply. Functionally. Not heroically. Less like Wonder Woman, more like…I don’t know, a toaster oven or public transportation or something. A mundane and necessary miracle that’s actually widely available and everyone’s gotten used to by now. I’m a toaster oven that loves being a toaster oven because I AM A TOASTER OVEN. What else can I be?

But, while we’re all still in a New Year’s reflective state of mind, I’ll also add that this whole business of becoming a special education teacher kind of was my own little ‘hero’s journey’ of the past decade. It started with The Boy, who will be turning 16 this year and that part is no longer my story to tell. Suffice it to say that through his story, I found my way in to this chapter of my own. It felt heroic at the time. It felt like I’d saved my own kid from a burning building and then went running back into that building to save as many others as I could.

I believed in my heart that I could work for and within that system without being coopted by it. And…you know…I sort of can. But it doesn’t look or feel anything like you might expect. It’s lonely. It’s strategic. It’s political. It’s complicated. It's fraught with opportunities to fail. It’s just hard work. Hours upon hours of relentless work. There are folks who would have read my blog and cheered me on back in the day who pretty much think I suck now, or that my school does. One of my best friends and mentors used to tease me about ‘siding with the oppressor.’ Meanwhile, among my colleagues and administrators I am always and forever Luna Lovegood at the Ravenclaw table. Quibbler, anyone? 

And so, between the sober reality of being more toaster-oven than heroine and the even-more-sober reality of our literal world being on fire/at war/doubling-and-tripling-down on the intentional traumatizing of children at the border…I have to say…I still kind of want the cape. 

I want my little endeavors in my little corner of this doomed world to count for something, It has to mean more than just scrambling to stay afloat at a challenging job while Australia burns into the sea. Even (especially?) in the context of this post-45 apocalyptic terror storm we're all living in, I need to believe that the work I'm doing is somehow part of a solution. I want this story – this 10+ years story that is the Floor Pie blog – to have an uplifting ending, and I want Tina Fey to play me in the movie version.  

Basically, I just want to keep telling this story like it’s a story…not like the middle class medium latte with a side order of compromises and Powerpoints that it actually is. My being-a-toaster-oven notwithstanding, there truly are still loads of good strong stories to tell. Maybe this year, some of them will find their way to the pages.

Happy New Year.

Speak Up, Shut Up

Art by Emily Winfield Martin

Am I on the autism spectrum myself? People have joked that I am, behind my back but supposedly with love. Did I really never talk when I was in preschool and early elementary school? I know I did. At home I did, anyway. I was the Master of Ceremonies, Kermit the Frog of the Muppet Show, ordering my little sisters around. At school? I don’t know. I remember lots of people, teachers and students alike, being concerned that I “didn’t talk.” This perplexed me. How could I talk when no one was starting a conversation with me? What was I supposed to do? Just, like…talk? To nobody? To anybody? It made no sense.

But all through school I was weird, weird, weird. Too bossy at home with my sisters, too introverted everywhere else. There was a little success in being funny; in making fun of myself before it occurred to anybody else. Now that was a crowd pleaser. Making myself the joke. Meanwhile I was studying the normal people and trying to learn how be like them. Had it pretty well mastered just in time to go to college and be sneered at by all the people who were cultivating weird. Again…it made no sense.

Eventually I figured out who and how I actually wanted to be, and life got good. I put the weird years behind me, never fully believing I’d been particularly weird in the first place. Even then, I blamed it on context. Normal old Berks County, PA not knowing what to make of a girl who was sometimes funny and sometimes didn’t even talk. Didn’t let the door hit me on the ass on the way out. Found my people, found my friends, found my lovers, found this job and that, found my way.

There was a part of me that was always afraid it would show in up the gene pool, though. And sure enough, it did…but not at all in the way I was expecting. For there was The Boy in all his fierce and furious glory. Oh, he talked all right. He was athletic and smart. And he was fearless, or so it seemed. I was so relieved and proud.

Until….well. We know this part of the story. The Boy’s on the autism spectrum, and having a name for it ignited my own dormant superpowers, and I blasted my way back into a teaching career, running back into some figurative burning building to save everyone else now that I’ve saved my own child and myself.

You know who hates that origin story? Administrators. Even the good ones. Save everyone? From a figurative burning building? I don’t know where they all learned how to do this, but they all know how…they can somehow just switch off their mirror neurons at will and become a vacuum devoid of any and all social cues. I’ve seen it so much now, from my own son’s IEP meetings to casual conversations with colleagues. You have to stay “positive,” where “positive” is defined as “never critical of the school district in any capacity, ever.”  Speak up. But also…shut up. Even my non verbal social cues are too much. Too much nodding in sympathy, too much eyebrow raising, validating some family’s narrative that could land us all in hot water if we don’t watch out.

When I was brand new, and working in a building where it never occurred to anybody to see me as much of a threat, an angry mom showed up in the office during 3^rd period. The office called to tell me. They asked discretely if I wanted them to call security. I said no. Instead, I asked them to send up someone to cover my class and told them I was coming down. They let me. I think they were just too surprised to know any better.

The mom was there in the lobby, fierce and frothing. “Let’s get out of here,” I said matter of factly, and told the receptionist I was going off campus. Again…they let me. To this day I am amazed I got away with it.

We walked. It was a splendid autumn day in a fancy West Seattle neighborhood. Bright blue sky, juicy yellow leaves splashed all over the lawns and sidewalks. I offered to take her out for coffee. Stunned, she agreed. As we walked the few blocks to the cute little neighborhood coffeehouse, I apologized for what had been happening. I explained all the backstory. Explained which steps would be in her and her son’s best interest. I told her all the things I liked about her son. And I told her about my own son, and all the struggles we’d had in our early days of having an IEP. She ordered a hot cider and I ordered a nice hot coffee for myself, and we sipped and chatted. I was back in time to teach my 4^th period class. And although we had our ups and downs for the rest of her son’s time at that school, she never, ever showed up at school ready to kick someone’s ass again.

I’m proud of that story, but I’m terrified to ever tell it to anyone I work with. I was just following my instincts. Doing what I thought was right. My instincts are good, is the thing. At least…I think they are? Hard to tell anymore. More often than not, my instincts tend to get me in more trouble than an anxious little introvert can bear.

You’re too quiet. Unless you’re too loud. You’re too much. And you’re definitely not enough.

Last year, a gen ed language arts teacher pulled me aside and said, with a mean-girl smile on her lips “I think you’re confused.” She didn’t like how I’d been helping the students with IEPs navigate their way through her assignment. I had a simple explanation. I wanted to speak up. I started to explain.

But the tears came. And nausea.

I excused myself to the nurse’s office. (It’s mighty nice working somewhere with a nurse’s office.) By then I was pouring sweat and shaking. And the tears and the tears the tears the tears.

They called the paramedics. My blood pressure was so high, they worried I might be having a heart attack. Too much. Shut up.

I cried until my teeth chattered. I shook.

But I wasn’t having a heart attack. Later, my doctor reassured me that I was at extremely low risk of that particular problem. Panic attacks, though. That’s another story.

Aren’t I so weird? Who has a panic attack just because some sorority girl teacher is an asshole to you? Me, I guess. Go tell the people who think I’m on the autism spectrum. They’ll find it hilarious.

Well.

It was a year ago. Teachers in my district get three free visits to a therapist per school year, so I used all three learning how to successfully breathe my way out of an approaching panic attack. I haven’t had another one since then, knock wood.

But I’m hurting, my friends. I’m hurting and carrying all the internalized otherness of my youth with me in the bottom of my gut after all these years. I don’t know how to navigate the world like a “normal” person, and it scares me so much. Speak up? Shut up? I never can get it right.

A high-up higher-up person sat me down recently, after a meeting that had the potential to be awful but somehow hadn’t been…possibly because I’d kind of hit it out of the park? She told me as much. A rare honor. Such a finely articulated compliment, and from a revered administrator who rarely ever gives them. All the things I’d done well. All the things I’d done right. All the good things about me in general. There were some “but’s.” There were some pointers. There was some heavily-veiled subtext, but I’ll never know what it was.

Still and all…they see my worth. I mean…they see it to a point.

I can’t shut up. Even when I know I’m supposed to. And lots of the time, I can’t speak up, either. Not in a way that anyone will hear.

The thing is, I know I’m good. I never ever would have attempted a career in teaching middle school special ed if I believed otherwise. I know deep in my heart that my very weirdness leaves a deep and powerful well of awesome within me, to the point where I kind of can’t not be awesome. I’m just…awfully sloppy about it most of the time, and it’s hard for the other grown-ups to see.

The kids, though? They see. And I guess that’s the only possible closure this story can have. So I’ll just keep trying; navigating this path because I’m viciously compelled to, sometimes awesome, sometimes awkward, sometimes just plain tired. It doesn’t always have to make sense.

Periods

Threshold

I understand Spanish but I can barely speak it. They crack up when I catch them teasing a classmate about her “novio,” and want to see what else I’ll understand, trying to out-do each other with nastier and nastier words, gleefully watching my face to see if I know what they’re saying. There's an adorable joyfulness about it, like when a 4-year-old chases you. These dudes were 4 not that long ago. It's heartwarming to see it in their faces.

Elopement

The trick with Student P is to not go looking for him. “I’m good at hiding,” he’ll say proudly.  Once he realizes that I’m not looking for him, though, he’ll always come and find me. Wide-eyed and joyful, hates work but loves his teachers, refuses to write until he finally sits down and cranks out something that could be the opening act for Being John Malkovich. He is open and raw and soft and scarred; no posturing whatsoever; almost terrifyingly childlike and amiable. There’s a raging darkness in there that I wouldn’t dare attempt to peer into. But I sense it.

Prep

I didn’t plan this conversation. I didn’t even know I was going to see Student Q today. He’s not my student anymore. I barely recognize him anymore. But we’re happy to see each other and I want to say something, so it falls right out of my heart. “I’m worried about you.” And his face…just opens. It’s as if there’d been a hard shell around it, and I can see it just crack right open. We just talk. It’s a really good talk.

Every single person I tell this to is quick to remind me “It’s not going to do anything” and “You can’t change him” and “You can’t fix this” and I flipping know that. I know that. But I don’t care. We had the conversation. We saw each other. We heard each other. That can be enough.

IEP Meeting

Right in the middle of this wacky week, I’m taking a half-day and signing on the “Parent/Guardian” line of an IEP signature page instead of my usual“Special Education Teacher” line.   

I never take The Boy to school, so I miss the turn and don’t know where to park. I don’t know which door to go in, either, and he is bemused by my incompetence. He’s taller than me now, and we’re walking down this high school hallway past all these teenagers and posters for the winter dance. Ten years ago I was having an existential crisis over whether he would be ready for kindergarten in the fall.

It’s a good meeting. He’s having a good year. But I still feel winded and broken at the end of it. If I’m really honest with myself, at the core I guess I still don’t see his deficits as deficits. And I’m deeply sad and sorry that the rest of the world does and always will.

I wish things could be different. But he’s happy and settling into adolescence without too much friction. He’s growing so fast and far beyond my reach. 

Class

Student R brings his colors to school but can’t quite bring himself to wear them. Folds and unfolds the crisp new bandanna on the table in front of him with a heartbreaking childlike reverence, like it’s his new dinosaur or train or science kit. People higher up than me have known for longer, they have more power, more knowledge, and they are trying to do what they can. So I just keep teaching. Teach the whole class, then sit with him and teach it all over again, and he’ll get out the work and try. He’ll usually try.

Department Meeting

It’s my turn to share a “positive” about my week. And even though this week has been beyond ridiculous, I know exactly what to say. Through all this storm and stress, I feel love for my students and trust in myself. And it strikes us all, the moment I say it, how simultaneously huge and insignificant that is. Love and trust.  Half full. Half gone. But half full.