We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

Doe, a deer, a female deer but a Jenny is a female donkey

*names have not been changed. There are no innocents here. 

In the summer of 1981, in suburban Prairie Village, Kansas, the Shawnee Mission school district closed Porter elementary school and split its students between Belinder and Prairie elementary schools. I was entering fourth grade at Belinder, comfortable in who I was, kinda nerdy, but got along with most everyone. I had a hard time paying attention in class and never seemed to get any work done, but I had an amazing third grade teacher who figured out that I needed glasses, which was probably why I zoned out when she was teaching. I was also more interested in the chapter book I was hiding behind my math textbook, most likely a copy of Encyclopedia Brown’s latest. 

So entering fourth grade I thought life was pretty good. I had new glasses, I had a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and I would have the super nice fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Wright. 

None of that worked out the way I expected. The kids from Porter came into our world trying to find their own place on the shifting food chain, so me and my new glasses and weird haircut fell straight to the bottom. 

The new glasses meant that I could actually see what I couldn’t before: the disdain of the other kids in the classroom every time I raised my hand, spoke, or got out of my chair, which, to be fair, was often. I could also see the barely held contempt from the new fourth grade teacher whose class I landed in, who was not the super nice Mrs. Wright, but instead the young and glam Miss Billie Aaron. Fresh out of teacher college, she decided two things about me real quick: I was the most annoying child in the room, and she was going to break me of my worst habit - sucking my thumb. 

Yep, I still sucked my thumb in fourth grade, just one of a host of quirky behaviors that I didn’t understand at the time. I had no idea this was an issue at school, it had never come up before. No teacher had ever mentioned it, though my mom had been trying to get me to stop by painting my thumb with nasty tasting stuff, which didn’t work. I wasn’t even aware of doing it most of the time, it was a self-soothing tool. But Miss Aaron hated it. So she decided that every time she saw me with my thumb in my mouth, she would stop in the middle of whatever lesson she was teaching and stick her thumb in her mouth and stare at me until every kid in the room turned to also stare at me, and I stopped, humiliated. 

Eventually I stopped sucking my thumb at school and it became a bedtime only routine, until I managed to stop for good about two years later. I guess Miss Aaron won on some level. But on another, she ensured that I would never have any social capital among that group of classmates. I developed a hypervigilance around making sure I did NOT accidentally put my thumb in my mouth, so I chewed on pencils, pens, paper clips, shirtsleeves, my hair as it grew out, etc. It also meant that when I didn’t have something in my mouth I talked more, something Miss Perfect Teacher probably didn’t think through. HA. 

As the year went on, I was bullied constantly by the Porter kids. But aside from the situation with my thumb sucking, there are only a couple of situations that stand out for the straight up meanness of the kids behind the incident. 

Gather round younguns, and let me tell you about the olden days before The Google. Classrooms like mine kept a giant Webster’s Dictionary on the shelf in the back of the room, open at all times, accessible. Anyone could walk to it and look up something anytime they needed to. It was also a place to waste time looking up dirty words or random phrases, which was the favorite past time of a bruiser of a kid named Walter Egan. 

Walter was new that year, though I am not sure he was one of the Porter kids. Walter also didn’t have a lot of strong social skills, his way of making friends was to bully them into being his sidekick and doing his dirty work for him. Think Draco Malfoy, but Italian and well fed. 

One day during indoor recess, Walter and his henchman Billy French turned their attention to my name in the dictionary.  

I was on the other side of the room from the dictionary, obviously with my nose in a book. I slowly became aware that the entire class was focused on the two boys at the far end of the room, rolling on the floor laughing. I began to realize that whatever the joke was, it was about me. I felt my face getting red before I even knew why, and steeled myself for whatever was coming. 

They had discovered that in the dictionary, a definition for “jenny” is a female donkey. 

Awesome. 

By the time I finished the fourth grade school year, I was a different kid. My self-esteem had been obliterated. The friends from previous years barely spoke to me or played with me at recess, or did so only occasionally, depending on where the social pull was at any given moment. They would still play with me on the weekends in the neighborhood, though, when the social cliques of the classroom weren’t enforced, which just confused me even more. 

That one teacher did more to break me, and several other kids in her classroom, than a whole host of other teachers in the building all put together. At one point,  in a fit of rage and frustration at my inability to stop talking, she sent me out to the hallway saying “You add no value here, you only take away from your classmates who are trying to learn.” 

 As a teacher now, I understand where her frustration comes from, but I’m appalled when I think back at the way she treated those of us who weren’t perfect angels. I feel bad that whatever education program she attended did not prepare her for kids with ADHD, or really give her any classroom management skills at all. 

After that, I spent the rest of the year in the hallway as much as possible,   teaching another classmate how to read, because at least there he and I weren’t getting yelled at. He needed help she wasn’t giving him, and I needed to be valued. We had a pretty good time together, and we were both glad to be out of her line of fire. 

Plus, he knew that a jenny is also a name for a bird, a Jenny Wren. 

disconnected.

*I started writing this a couple of years ago as a coping device I think it’s finally time to post it.

In the fall of 1983, when I was 11 years old, a young friend of mine went turkey hunting with his father in the woods of Northeast Arkansas. There was some kind of commotion, and the man stashed his young son in a bush while he went to check things out. Meantime, another hunter came along, saw something moving in the bush, and shot it. The boy died instantly. At the time of the incident he was wearing an orange vest, and general hunting protocols suggest that you don’t shoot unless you actually see what it is you are aiming for. But my parents had to deliver this news to me, nonetheless. A wire in my brain disconnected.  

In early October of 1992, I was in college at TCU in Ft Worth, Texas. My best friend left a guttural, unintelligible message on my answering machine. The comical part of this story is that my roommate at the time was also named Jen, and her best friend from home was also named Laura, and the message was so discombobulated that we couldn’t figure out which of our dear friends had left it. She got a hold of her friend first, who confirmed she had not called and everything was fine on her end, thus the message must have been meant for me. I couldn’t reach my friend after several attempts, so I finally called her parents at home. In what must have been one of the most dreaded conversations of his life, her father shared with me the news; one of our friends was dead, and it appeared to be suicide; a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

I grieved. It was a deep, visceral grief that fell out of my bones like ash from the tip of a cigarette. I screamed and cried in between gulps of air as my roommate held me. I bought a plane ticket home, and went to the memorial service. I watched his mother shake hands and give hugs and smile warmly as people filed out of the church, offering their condolences. It was an unfair thing to ask of her, but it was what society expected. I watched the recent ex-girlfriend collapse at her feet, until the girl’s father scooped her up from the floor like a baby and carried her, soggy and screaming, to the car. Another wire in my brain disconnected. I flew back to Ft. Worth Sunday evening. 

The next morning, I learned of another friend there at college who had killed himself over the weekend, also with a gun. I had traveled to bear witness to the life cut short of one friend, only to miss another. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

In April 1995 I was working in a corporate high rise in Dallas when Timothy McVeigh parked a yellow Ryder rental truck in front of the Edward F. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and blew the face off the entire structure. These details and names are embedded in my memory like my childhood address and phone number. By 10am that morning the local news was reporting that there had been a bomb in Oklahoma City, and that the bombers were in a car driving for Dallas to do more damage (incorrect, but it was reported this way early on.) My coworkers and I huddled around a TV trying to comprehend the details. We were scared, but we didn’t have enough information to be truly terrified. Then the power to the building went out. Someone screamed. We scattered like roaches. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

The power had gone out because there was a construction crew installing a new street light in the intersection next to us, and they had accidentally cut a line under the street. But we didn’t know that until several days later. It was coincidental. What I knew at that moment was that I was leaving, regardless of my job expectations. I grabbed my purse and went to my car and drove home to my apartment. It was the first time that I can remember allowing my flight response to overrule my rational brain. 

Back at the apartment, my fiance was working from home, and we watched TV for the next 20 hours straight. It was then I first saw the image that many of us associate with that event: the firefighter carrying the tiny, lifeless body of an infant girl, her little legs and arms cradled so gently but also hanging loose. Another wire in my brain disconnected. 

Four years later to the day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planned and carried out their revenge saga at Columbine High School. I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina then. It seemed so much further away, and yet I understood it. I was bullied so much as a child, and suddenly those memories resurfaced in the days that followed, as news anchors interviewed locals and experts alike, desperate for answers to why or how this could happen. But I didn’t wonder. Bullying, bullying, bullies, more bullying, the news anchors cried out. In the back of my mind I understood how a kid could get to that place. “That place” was a black hole beneath a cobwebbed, dusty trap door in an old abandoned mineshaft in my brain. I couldn’t open that trap door myself, but I knew about the place, and the door. I knew it existed. I couldn’t reconcile this fact with the horror of what they had done, and it bothered me greatly. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

Then 9/11 happened. 

I was a mother by then, living in Kansas City. My little boy was not quite 14 months old. I had Good Morning America on the TV in the kitchen, just playing in the background of our morning routine. We were heading out the door when I realized something major was happening (I left the TV on for the dog most days.) I stopped and stood in the kitchen watching with my baby on my hip as the second plane hit the building and Diane Sawyer sucked in her breath. I heard her words as she tried to make sense of what was happening and maintain her composure on National Television. 

At that point, it occurred to me that my parents had taken the first international vacation of their lives the day prior, and were in London, England. Several wires disconnected in my brain. I took the baby to his babysitter. All morning long, I sat at work, in my office alone, watching television, trying to make sense of what was happening. Finally after lunch I went and picked up the baby and went back home. I sat with him in my lap and watched CNN, as wires kept disconnecting. I finally heard from my parents, when they were able to find an Internet cafe and send me an email. 

The mass shootings kept happening, of course. Schools and movie theaters, on and on. A wire in my brain disconnected, every single time. 

Over time as these events kept happening, the wires in my brain stopped simply disconnecting, and began disintegrating, like spent sparklers on the 4th of July. Nothing to reconnect someday in the future. 

When Sandy Hook happened, I had changed careers back to teaching. My youngest son was in the fourth grade classroom across the hall from mine. I stood alone in the middle of my classroom in a daze, spinning around and staring hard into every corner, trying to imagine, where would I hide their little bodies? How quickly could I truly get the lights off and keep them quiet as someone walks down the hall with an automatic weapon? If I used myself as a distraction, would they actually run when I told them to? And let's be real. When all this might be going down, would I leave them and run for my son anyway? Isn’t that what a mother is supposed to do? Would it be a Sophie's choice scenario?

And with that thought, the switchboard went dark. 

I had a full blown panic attack. 

See, the wires in the brain work like an old fashioned telephone switchboard of memories and experiences connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting to meanings and feelings of safety or fear. 

Like when I was 12 and I burned my arm on the 375° oven removing a cookie sheet, a wire in my brain that connected baking cookies to a feeling that was soft and safe and smelled wonderful, disconnected. It reconnected to a different memory. A new memory. This one held the slightly acrid smell of sizzling skin, pain, and a tidal wave of fear. But that is an acceptable trade off, you say. These are lessons we learn the hard way, and the next time you were probably more careful. Except, there was no next time. I never made cookies in that particular oven again, because we moved house shortly thereafter. It was disconnected. The new memory was sealed. 

This doesn't mean that I never baked cookies again. What it means is that I didn't allow my own children near a hot stove. I didn't let them help me bake or cook. Instead I put them in front of the TV, so they'd be safely entertained far away from the oven. They didn't learn safe cooking skills until they were much older, because of my fear memory. It never occurred to me to bring them into the kitchen with me when cooking to connect food prep to healthy habits. And this connection never occurred to me until I started writing this paper. 

After I melted down in my classroom trying to decide if I would choose my students over my son if there was an active shooter in the building, it was not just a single wire that disconnected. The switchboard fell completely silent. It lost power. And something broke in another part of my body. Because the switchboard was down, there was nothing to stop the fight or flight response, the adrenaline just kept going. It was like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing you can do except watch it surge out into the ocean and wait for it to stop burning off. 

I operated in full fight or flight mode, quivering and looking over my shoulder at every single odd noise, for almost two full weeks. The switchboard finally came back online, but many, many wires remained disconnected, permanently. My body began to break down from the stress of trying to function with so many disconnected wires. I started having fits of vertigo, migraines, chronic pain, and other miscellaneous health issues that were unexplainable by  my doctors. I was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases which may or may not have been influenced by that stress. 

Less than two years later, a neo-Nazi former KKK leader shot and killed three people at the Jewish Community Center in the city where I live, and was apprehended by police in the parking lot of the elementary school where I was teaching at the time. I don’t remember his name. I remember the names of the people he murdered, but not him. This happened practically in my backyard, my school was involved, though it was on a weekend not a school day. But it was no longer something that happened to other people in other cities, under other circumstances. Once again, as it did when I was a child, this had happened to people I knew. A new wire in my fragile, constantly overloaded brain disconnected. 

I started a new job in a different school in fall of 2016, on the campus of that particular shooting event. Once during a staff meeting, we were run through a series of active shooter training exercises. One of the teachers walked around with a nerf gun, slow and expressionless, and shot nerf bullets at the principals as they demonstrated ways to use furniture to hide behind. Many people laughed nervously at the absurdity as the principals tried to keep from being hit by nerf bullets. I did not laugh, because I was trying to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest. 

Poof. 

The switchboard went down again, right there in that meeting, and I bolted before I broke down in front of an audience of my peers. By this time in my life, the switchboard was having regular outages, sometimes triggered and sometimes random, and the physical toll it was taking on my body overall was becoming harder and harder to hide. I was seeing rheumatologists, neurologists, and going to regular physical therapy to try to figure out and fix what was wrong with me. 

During a summer school session around this time, when I work with special education elementary students, we went into a real lockdown because of a shooting at another school nearby. Two construction workers had gotten into an argument and one pulled a gun on the other. Do you have any idea what lockdown does to Sped kids? How changing their expected schedule throws them into absolute chaos? How terrified their parents were to get a text? Many left work and came to pick up their kids instead of letting them ride the bus home. I focused on pretending to be calm for the kid’s sake, but my heart didn’t stop pounding for hours afterward. 

Parkland. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida happened late in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day. It was on the news all evening, and the next morning. 

This one was different. Rather than go into the building shooting, the shooter pulled the fire alarm, and then began picking off students like a carnival game as they exited the building. So now we are supposed to teach our kids to ignore the fire alarms we’ve been warning them about their entire lives, override their natural instincts, and not go outside, because it could be a trap? A wire in my brain disconnected. In fact, several wires just sparked out. 

The morning after the shooting, I drove myself to school against every fiber in my being telling me not to do so. I turned up the radio, smacked my hands against the steering wheel and screamed inside my car to try and ride through the adrenaline rush that I could not stop from coming. That was just driving to work. Upon arrival in my classroom, I shut the door and cried at my desk. It took days for the adrenaline to die down. I had finally found a doctor who understood my pain, and was giving me methods to wrangle these adrenaline surges that controlled my life and wreaked havoc on my body. Together we were reconnecting wires where we could. But, I still didn't understand my trigger. 

Then in the fall of 2018, the school held an entire day of active intruder training for teachers. My disconnected wires and barely managed adrenaline could not keep a lid on things, and the switchboard went out again. Apparently, my panicked behavior was unacceptable to others. I was later called into my principal's office and told that I needed to work on not being so easily triggered. I was admonished for being rude to others. I had very little memory of the things I was accused of. But it was clear that it never occurred to anyone around me that I was in need of assistance, despite the attendance of several people with trauma training. 

Trauma. All my disconnected wires, switchboard overloads, physical manifestations and systems- these are all signs of trauma in the brain. As teachers we are trained to spot trauma in our students, but apparently not in each other. 

Also that fall, a parent of children at my school committed suicide. My linked triggers collided, and I fell into a vast, deep space of depression. I was in fight or flight mode 24/7, my switchboard stayed down for weeks at a time, and I became completely unable to cope with my day to day life. I zombie walked through my days, I came down with Shingles for the third time in my life, I fell asleep crying and spinning in an abyss of vertigo almost every night. With my husband traveling most of the weekdays for work, my teenage youngest son raised himself for about six months. 

Just reliving these experiences as I write them here has caused my heart rate to explode. My adrenaline still rises and overflows just thinking of it, remembering. Later, the pain and stiffness will come. 

These days, I have medications and calming, self-regulating tools that help me manage what is now a diagnosed Panic Disorder, along with Anxiety, Migraines, Fibromyalgia, and an autoimmune condition. All of which came along because of my brain's inability to handle the trauma of gun and terrorism incidents over the course of my life. And I am not even someone with a direct relationship to gun violence. Everything I've sorted out through therapy that is tied to my panic and anxiety is secondhand relational, at best. Imagine the trauma of someone directly affected by losing a family member, or surviving a school shooting, or even having to evacuate a building. 

Now ask yourself if you really don’t understand why teachers are leaving the field. Why we need common sense gun control measures at the federal level. Why we need better mental healthcare, because as a reminder, therapy is often not covered by major insurance. Try to understand the trauma of these situations, and you know in your heart, as we all do, that a good guy with a gun cannot stop that trauma from forming. Fewer dead children in any active intruder scenario will not stop the trauma of everyone in that building. Trauma is trauma, and we will all suffer it if we don’t change something. 

One Time on the Mulberry River…

Hi. It’s been a while. 
Much has happened. The worldwide Coronavirus pandemic continues, to a somewhat manageable degree in most of the industrialized world, but even more so in areas with less access to modern medicine. My oldest kid graduated college and entered the workforce. The younger one entered college, discovered he hated his major and changed it almost immediately, and is now living his best life studying music. I finished a Masters degree in Education. 

My father died. 

Twelve hours before he gave up the fight, while hospice nurses, private aides and my mother tried their damndest to get on top of the pain that had suddenly ratcheted up like a display of fireworks during a finale, I held his hand and told him it was okay to let go. I told him him he could rest, and I promised I would take care of my mother. I told him not to worry, we are ready for this, and if he was ready, then just let go. He held onto my hand like we were crossing a wooden step bridge over a wide gulch together, though I cannot say whom was leading whom. 

Ten days later I stood before an audience of over 150 people and gave a speech I’ve been planning to give for years. This was no small feat. It required an extraordinary amount of will, a cocktail of prescription drugs, and the knowledge that two tiny bottles of vodka were in my purse, just in case. I have never simultaneously wanted and dreaded a performance more, perhaps since giving birth. (That also involved sheer will and lots of drugs, but no backup vodka.)

Twenty years ago I could speak before an audience with no problems, I have a decent amount of workshop training in live speaking, actually. But somewhere along the way I developed a bizarre, crippling fear of stages and microphones. It isn’t the speaking that makes me panic, it isn’t the audience. It’s the microphone. I don’t know exactly why. This is why it’s called a Panic Disorder. Anyway, I did it. 

And it was good. People laughed in the right places, I didn’t pass out, I didn’t chicken out, I didn’t need the airplane bottle of vodka. I’m proud of it, both having written the eulogy and delivered it. So I’m putting it here. And then I think I’m gonna move on.

I’m no longer collecting snippets of ideas and thoughts and stories knowing my father will die someday soon, and I have a speech to give. Instead, now I have a stack of his own writing- his thoughts, essays and emails- to edit, and hopefully publish. I’m gonna call it:

”One Time on The Mulberry River“  

*********

Thanks everyone for coming today to help us celebrate my dad. He gave a few eulogies in his life, those that know him well know that he was never short on words. But he always said it was different, getting up and talking about someone you loved so much. So I’m giving it a shot. 

Love of words was something I definitely shared with my dad. I was never into golf, I don’t have the hand/eye coordination. Chris caught the love of golf, and dad was so proud of him and his game. But I mostly think of something completely different than words or golf when I think of the things my brother and I inherited from our father. Because the number one thing I learned from my father is empathy. 

 

Empathy. Dennis had an unending reserve. A bottomless, cold water spring, of empathy. And he taught it to me, indirectly, at a very early age. 

 

Let me tell you a story. 

 When I was little, I remember being at The Jones Store with Dad and Chris. It was crowded, it may have been around Christmas time, and there was a guy in a wheelchair making a scene near the escalator. People were pushing past him and ignoring him, as if he were a homeless beggar in the street corner. I remember feeling a little scared, I was small and the guy didn't speak clearly as part of his handicap, and that kind of freaked me out. But my dad stopped, surveyed the situation, and asked the man if he needed to go downstairs, which he did. Dad told us to stay put, and took the man's chair, tipped it back gently and rode with him down the escalator. Then he got back on the up escalator, collected me and my brother as we went about our day. 

 

I don't know why I remember this event from about 1980 so clearly.  Maybe it was because dad left us standing there among a huge crowd of people. All I know is that in that moment, I understood that helping people, that looking out for others without being asked is a responsibility. 

 

Dennis paid it forward often and regularly. So observant of people around him, he could see when someone needed assistance or even a kind word- a retail worker getting reamed by a customer, a waitress in the weeds, anyone- he would verbally acknowledge their struggle, telling them to hang in there, or don't let the bastards get you down. 

 

And he would sometimes intervene, telling someone berating a retail clerk to relax, or back off, or give the guy a break. As a 6ft tall white man with a deep voice, people being jerks rarely challenged him back. 

 

My father never met a stranger. He would strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Waiting in line, sitting at a table in a restaurant... to the extent that he would sometimes even butt into conversations he was clearly eavesdropping on, to my and my brother's horror. 

 

Oh, were we in a hurry? Too bad, Dad is lecturing that guy in Dick's Sporting Goods about the virtues of DIY camping gear, he just uses a foam egg crate he's had for 30 years, works great, you don't need all that fancy expensive stuff. 

 

"One time on the Mulberry River..." Is a sentence that filled me with dread. To satisfy his need to talk to someone when nobody would listen anymore, he volunteered for many years at a retirement/nursing home. He would spend a few hours a week talking with residents who didn't get many visitors, listening to their stories and enjoying the audience, who would rapturously listen to him telling his own stories. He enjoyed the minutia of their past lives, giving them a chance to tell their own stories, and finding out details that made them special. 

 

It was always about people. 

 

It was so much about people for him that the career he finally settled into and built for himself was in Executive Search. A recruiter. A headhunter. In his career in executive search, his goal was Finding talented employees for companies to hire. “He called it Mutual Need Fulfillment.” Most of you know that phrase well. 

 

I worked with him for 10 years, and sidenote: if you had told me at age 16 that I would spend a large chunk of my career working alongside my father I would have laughed you out of the room. But we actually worked pretty well together. Our similar personalities that threatened to destroy our family when I was a melodramatic teenager living under his roof meant that when working together as adults, we could read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences. This was super annoying for the rest of our family, although still a better scenario than my teenage years. 

 

At some point in my early college life my dad came across a framed glass picture that we call "The Thought Picture." It is a series of statements about how hard it truly is to live your life as the embodiment of good. He gave it to me, then my brother, then he bought one for himself, then he started buying them for anyone he decided needed one. Eventually he couldn't find them anymore and he worked with an art store to make them from scratch. 

 

It is, essentially, Dennis's moral code. His rules to live by. The bottom line is there will always be forces working against you; Do Good Anyway. 

 

When I said that my father never met a stranger, it really isn’t that simple.  Dennis made friends everywhere he went. But he didn't have just friends. 

 

• Because you don't float down a river in a canoe in whitewater rapids over and over for decades- until you know each other's habits and strengths and can guide each other through safely with but a few words - with just friends. 

• You don't create golf tournaments to honor tragically deceased buddies and then play that tournament for 30 years with just friends. 

• You don't hike to the top of a 14,000 foot mountain peak - or just short of the top- and tend to each other's injuries  - and egos - with just friends. 

• Fraternity brothers from a lifetime ago. 

• His KCBobos Book Clubbers. Who recorded themselves reading a book for him when he could no longer see well enough to read the selection at hand.

• His Core of Four. His “Let’s Roll” crew. 

 

It is Mutual Need Fulfillment personified. He didn’t just talk about it. He lived it.  

 

The thing that I've avoided touching on so far has been, of course, how much he loved my mother. I consider myself a decent writer but on this topic I am without the proper words, I struggle to convey the depth of their relationship. 

 

It's a fairytale, honestly, a love story that most of us know cannot exist in the real world, yet here they are. They met, dated for 6 weeks, were engaged and married 6 months later in 1967. 

He always let her win, he ate everything she put in front of him regardless of whether it was good or not, he worked to give her the things she wanted whether she knew them or not. 

 

His weakest moments and his greatest fears revolved around just the chance of her unhappiness. He would tolerate no such thing. He spent much of the last five years trying to prepare for her to be comfortable after he was gone, as if that would somehow be possible. 

 

At the onset of the isolation of the Covid-19, he was a little cavalier regarding staying home in quarantine. After a while, my brother and I decided it was time for a Come to Jesus meeting. 

 

"I'm dying soon anyway, what do I care if it's the cancer that gets me or this Coronavirus?" 

 

I said, fine, but if you take my mother with you, we're gonna have a problem. "Oh." Nothing more was needed. He would risk himself, but not her. 

 

I want to wrap up here with a couple of poems. I first came across Ithaka by greek poet Constantine Cavavy in 1994, when it was read during the funeral of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Secondly, my father knew that I have a nerdy love of old books, that I collect them. Mostly volumes of Shakespeare but I have quite the collection of other poets and writers as well - Spenser, Whittier, first editions of classics from long ago. At some point, he gave me a crackled, disintegrating leather bound copy of Tennyson poems, probably for a birthday because there is a Hallmark envelope marking a place like a bookmark. I don't know if the spot was chosen, or by chance, but it happens to be the center of Tennyson's long poem "In Memoriam." 

 

Now, I am not going to read you all of In Memoriam, it is long and tedious and only the English majors among us care. But I am going to read this one section. 

I wage not any feud with Death

For changes wrought on form and face;

No lower life that earth’s embrace

May breed with him can fright my faith

 

Eternal process moving on, 

From state to state the spirit walks;

And these are but the shatter’d stalks, 

Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.

 

Nor blame I Death, because he bare

The use of virtue out of earth;

I know transplanted human worth

Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

 

For this alone on Death I wreak

The wrathe that garners in my heart;

He put our lives so far apart

We cannot hear each other speak. 

My father was a lot of things, but subtle wasn't one, so I doubt his bookmark envelope was placed purposely. I never asked him. I think I’d call it kismet. Or maybe what Ann Lamott calls “Tiny Epiphanies.” 

 

Regardless, these words soothe me, may they bring you peace, as well. 

 

##

 

 

Be sure the pot is big enough.

 

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine posted this recipe on Facebook. It is, of course, hilarious. We think it’s from a military cookbook, something where feeding a lot of people and having a recipe like this wouldn’t really stand out. But for most of us, it stands out as not just hilarious but ridiculous. The kind of thing you would see on one of those slapstick comedy TV shows of the 70s and 80s with Carol Burnett and Tim Conway, or maybe an old episode of I Love Lucy. 

But this is 2020, and we have elevated the ridiculous to the sublime. 

And the more I look at this recipe, the more I realize, this is the metaphor. This is the exact metaphor I’ve been looking for to describe my job, a teacher in the American education system in this, the year of the Covid-19. 

We have been asked to cook an entire camel, with an entire lamb, 20 chickens, 60 eggs and 110 gallons of water, in a pot that is not large enough. It needs to feed a bunch of people, and it needs to feed them well. There is a recipe. There is an idea of a plan. And there are ingredients. It should be okay, right?

The problem is, when you cook something in a pot that isn’t large enough, not everything gets mixed together correctly. There might be too much pepper over on this side, or too many eggs over here, or the chickens in this corner might not be cooked all the way through, so some people might get sick, who knows? You do the best you can, with what you have. 

Be sure your pot is big enough. FOR A CAMEL. Or, teaching remotely to students too traumatized to care. Or teaching in person, wearing a mask and standing behind plexiglass, while other students are on a computer from home at the same time. Make sure you are prepared to deal with your own mental and physical health at the same time, plus that of your own family, friends, and students and their families. Be sure you are teaching through the syllabus at the same expected pace as a normal year, regardless of whether anyone is keeping up. Be sure you communicate with parents in 6 different ways so that if they can’t figure out how to get their kids online and into your classes it won’t be your fault, but it won’t be theirs either. Don’t drink too much wine, get some exercise, eat right. Brush your teeth. Maybe take a shower. 

Be sure your pot is big enough. 

Nobody has a pot that big, I assure you.

Mad World.

I realize I haven't posted here in a while. Most of my quarantine thoughts have played out on Facebook. But recently I hit my wall of "this is ridiculous, what is even happening?" So, here we are.

 

 

Last summer I was preparing to go on a trip to France as a chaperone with my son's high school band. I was shopping at our local Bag & Baggage store, looking for a good crossbody bag that could hold all of my goodies, but not be super heavy. I was there late in the evening, close to closing time, and it was just me and the manager in the store. We started chatting about my trip, just conversation as she showed me some options then left me to browse.

Somehow we got on the topic of someone I know who has a thing for Tumi briefcases. Now this person has a whole selection of really nice leather briefcases in a bin in the basement. Things he doesn't use anymore, but can't seem to get rid of. I was complaining because I know these things take up space and they're never going to get used again, they should be donated, some of them are broken, they would need to be fixed before they could be used again. But this guy just can't let them go. In fact, if you bring it up, an absolute temper tantrum will ensue. And as she was walking around the store tidying up her racks, she started telling me stories of people that she knows that love their Tumi bags, they are after all very high quality and can last forever if cared for properly. But then she mentioned people get attached to their things, it's hard to let go.

And as she said that, I absentmindedly mentioned that it might be because his parents divorced when he was away at college, and got rid of all his stuff when they sold the family home and split up their households.

She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me.

"Honey." She said softly. I looked up at the change in tone. "He has baggage."

It gave me goosebumps.

Oh my God. He literally has emotional baggage manifesting in his baggage.

 

Now, watch as I tie this into teachers returning to school this fall.

 

We've been through a lot to be teachers. We go through a specific teacher education program, with a rosy outlook plan to love and teach young minds to prepare them for the real world. And then we get into the classroom where we discover that over half of that gets thrown out, because technology changes constantly, districts update guidelines, reading programs and new math every 2 years. Then throw out the other half of what we learned about student engagement, because our biggest worry will be keeping our little loves alive.

 

Every time there is a school shooting, teachers get a little more PTSD. In fact, the rise in school shootings have completely changed how we teach and function in schools. Our biggest fear used to be tornadoes that might hit before we could get everyone into the safe place. Now it's that we may have to choose to die throwing our bodies in front of our roomful of children.

These are split second decisions. Decisions we all know we could make in the fraction of a second. It's a terrible ask, but it would also be over immediately.

Now you want us to plan to die, while learning, juggling and managing completely new teaching methods. Maybe. But not on purpose. Some may get sick and die immediately, some possibly further down the road. You want us to traumatize our kids in the process in the name of prevention by hiding our expressions that helo convey safety and love. And you want us to do this every single day, for months on end, not knowing if these new procedures will or won't keep us protected.

 

Maslow's hierarchy details how the brain can't learn unless basic needs are met. Basic needs include food, shelter, safety. We all learned this in our teacher training, including district administrators. We apply this ti students every day. Yet, teachers are being asked- no, told - to function without their safety needs met.

 

Our desire to be healthy and our will to live has become baggage. Many have already drawn that line and said no, this is too much. Many will try to make it work. Though I plan to give this a shot, I'd like to hang on to what health I have left, I have already given up so much in terms of my personal health. I am someone for whom this disease could potentially be more dangerous. 

 

We should all be ashamed it has come to this. But if you've been online lately, you know the savagery directed at teachers who have tried to raise alarms doesn't remotely show that. 

 

Bitches be bonkers. Pt 1.

Wow. I didn't intend to stop writing here for six months. I thought about writing, fairly often, but like many thoughts I have these days, it would just flit away into the sky like the dandelion puffs that will soon fill my yard, replaced by another, probably more urgent thought, and on and on until something came across my brain that actually required action. Thoughts like I have to pee, or hey, the bell rang, I probably have kids in my classroom, I should go there. I even wrote some thoughts down in my the Quick Notes app on my phone, things I didn't want to forget, that might be worthy of writing here. Nestled in between the grocery lists and migraines and low blood pressure drop attack tracking memos that I keep, there are some things I might consider writing about. But I never do. Because if I do that, then I have to explain why it's taken me so long to actually come here and write. And I haven't wanted to talk about that. 

Against my better judgement, here we go. 

Last summer I fell into a pretty deep depressive episode, the type I haven't had in maybe 12 or 15 years. A big, bottomless pit I could not visualize a way out of, nor could I avoid it with my usual tricks of changing things up when I felt the storm coming. You know - diet, sleep, exercise, slow down and relax, drop some things from my busy schedule, etc. See, I've learned manage the beast, so to speak, with that bag of tricks, and it almost always works. I had stopped drinking the winter previous due to some new meds, so I didn't have to worry about that one.

Oh hello, the meds. For migraine of course, after I spent three days in the hospital last spring with a vertigo migraine that did not resolve, I was put on a new regimen of meds to keep the migraines at bay, and it worked, mostly. I can live with one or two migraine headaches here and there. But spinning for weeks at a time, no. The meds worked, but possibly contributed to the depressive episode, even though one part of the cocktail is specifically an anxiety suppressant. I digress. 

So I've been depressed. It was at it's worse in October, which I've written before is a rough month for me in general. I finally got on an antidepressant, which made things worse before they got better, but now seems to have evened back out. It's a shitty cycle, feeling this depressed, when you know that some exercise and maybe a decent meal would help but that's just one of several impossible tasks, and you had a shower yesterday thank you very much, we're doing pretty good here, okay mate? As we come around into spring, I am better, but I am not 100%. I'm trying. But I'm tired. 

When it first started I was also have anxiety attacks daily, the kind where I had would have to leave my cart and run suddenly out of a store and get into my car so I could hyperventilate and cry, triggered by something as simple as a memory. I'm not really sure when that started, but a number of things happened around the same time: we moved house, we dropped our oldest son at the airport to fly to college in California, and my mother had surgery to remove a supposedly benign tumor camped out on top of her brain that was pressing on a nerve. I'm pretty sure that one is the proverbial straw.

I think I could have handled the first two, it was really the third one that broke me. My mom is the family caregiver. And though I take that role as well, I was not prepared to see her in such a vulnerable state. I spent the day at the hospital with my dad while she was in surgery. It went fine, though all day, and finally we were able to get into see her in ICU. She was lucid and starving for ice cream (which is apparently a thing, post surgery,) and super shaky, but in good shape. I left and headed home. And this is where I have to stop and explain some things. 

****************************************************

In February 2015, I was doing my student teaching in 7th grade social studies, when I got a phone call I had always expected to get, but was still unprepared for. You know the one. That friend that everyone has, who was crazy and fun when you were teenagers, but who somehow never managed to grow up and made bad decisions. That friend who was still acting crazy and doing too many drugs for a woman over 40 with a kid, still taking advantage of everyone who would listen and constantly take and take and take while you give and give and give until you just cut the cord, unable and unwilling to support toxic people in your life anymore. That friend? She had a heart attack and was brain dead, but on life support until her parents could get back to town from their vacation. It was time to say goodbye. 

And of course I went. I dropped everything and went, and stayed all evening at the hospital, with old and new friends, her parents who had come straight from the airport, her husband. I made the calls to the out of town friends who couldn't come. I was the one with the battery pack in my purse so her dad could charge his phone, I was the one who could answer the questions about the specific countries we visited on our trip to Europe after high school that the organ donor people wanted to know about, so they could determine if she was a safe donor. (I have no idea about the drugs, I wasn't asked that question, I assume it would have shown in her blood if it was an issue. I hadn't spoken to her for about a year at that point, it's possible she had stopped, but given the heart attack and an astonishing weight loss, unlikely.) I was the one who drove her parents home after all the supports were removed and she was wheeled off to give her organs to others who could use them. I was in crisis mode, I was in problem-solving mode, I was in caretaker mode. I was not in goodbye mode. I did spend a few minutes alone with her, though. And as I sat there and brushed strands of hair out of her face, I ran my fingers along her eyebrows and thought, well, it's a good thing she got her brows done recently because if she knew all these people would be getting so close in her face with her brows all raggedy, she'd be super pissed. And then I really understood she was gone. But I didn't cry. I couldn't. 

The following weekend there was a funeral and then a luncheon at her parent's home. It was lovely and so many people came and we all got to tell stories and be silly and sad together. But at one point I went to check on her mom. I found her in her study, with some friends, chatting nicely about her grandson. "Oh Jenny!" She cried out as I entered. "I desperately need your help. Would you please fix my phone." My tech savvy precedes me, I supposed. She knew I was teaching computers when not student teaching in social studies, I had told her that in the car, as we struggled to find something to talk about on the drive home from the hospital. 

"Please take my daughter's number out of my phone. I can't stand to see it anymore. I don't know how to delete it."

I was not prepared for that. I wasn't ready for her mother to want to delete her from her life, or mine. It almost took the wind out of me. I smiled tightly, did as she asked, and returned it to her. "Thank you, darling. You've been such a gift." I hugged her and turned to leave the room. I barely got through the doorway before the sobs began to choke me. I ducked into the closest door and thank God, it was the bathroom. I sobbed and cried as quietly as possible for a good ten minutes before someone else came in and helped me compose myself to leave. 

I tell you this story for a few reasons. One, I needed to get it out. I needed to admit that it hurt me to lose this friend, that I still feel guilty that I chose to cut her out of my life for my own sake, because she was toxic, even as I know I needed to do that. I gave up on her. It hurts me that I never got to say to goodbye to her, or tell her I loved her. 

Two, that evening was the first time I had ever watched someone die, for real, this is really happening, not on TV or in a movie. It is not the same. It is devastating, no matter who you are or how you are connected to that person. Even though she was already brain dead, the machines kept her chest heaving and her pulse beeping, her heart pumping. But when they turned off the machines there was nothing. It was the most horrible silence I have ever heard, except the time I visited the Dachau concentration camp, with her at my side. The silence of that place felt evil, it made your hands clammy and the hairs on your arm stand up. This just felt empty. Hollow. 

*********************************************************************

Last summer, seeing my mother in the ICU with all the machines beeping, even as she sat there speaking and giggling about her cute male nurse and eating ice cream, the memories of that evening in 2015 came over me like a tsunami wave. I couldn't breathe. I was terrified, and for two solid days I vacillated between hyperventilating and sitting in my closet crying where nobody could hear me. I didn't understand what was happening, I knew I was having anxiety but had never experienced anything that crippling for so long. Usually I have an anxiety attack and it goes away in a few minutes or hours, tops. This lasted for days. I did not go back to the hospital to see my mom. I couldn't. I was paralyzed with fear. I told my dad that I came down with a cold and didn't want to expose her. I didn't see them again until she was back at home a few days later. I completely disregarded any caregiver duties I thought I would be doing to help them while this was all happening because, total shut down. 

I finally went to my doctor and said, please help me. I need to function. She gave me a short term anxiety prescription to interrupt the cycle, and then also wrote me a prescription for the anti-depressant. Which I didn't fill, because I didn't think I needed it. Yet.  

More later.

**The title refers to the Netflix show On My Block, which if you haven't seen the first season, you should. Second season drops in a couple of weeks. 

 

And now we are 16.

Last Sunday my youngest son turned 16. I wasn't there to celebrate, as my husband and I had to divide and conquer: I went to Parents Weekend for the college student; and dad managed birthday weekend (Chief's football game) mixed with high school Homecoming weekend for the sophomore. It's hard to believe this is where we are. 

Will was an easy pregnancy, even though he laid wrapped around me sideways like a damn tire and I always felt like I should turn sideways to walk through a doorway. And he was an easy delivery. My doctor suggested, since I had proven I could do this fairly uneventfully once before, that we schedule an induction on the due date. Works for me, I said. How about a week earlier? Funny, she said. But no.

Fine. On September 23rd I went in at 8 am, had a drip by 8:30, an epidural by 11, and a baby at 2:20 pm. Easy as pie. Except for the part where he peed into the doctor's face and hair as he skidded out the canal into her arms. He literally peed coming out. I may have mentioned this before, but this would be the first in a long history of peeing in inappropriate places. 

He was the most relaxed infant you've ever seen, except for the part where he screamed every day at 5:30 pm like a freaking clock. It was horrible, and there was nothing you could do to make it stop. I learned to relax and let it go. Visitors had more trouble accepting it. It didn't really stop until after he was four or five months old. He wasn't really a colicky baby, because it wasn't all the time, it was literally every day at 5:30 for about 30 minutes. Otherwise, he was pretty chill. 

Sometimes it's hard being the second child. Or the third, fourth, whatever. The youngest. There are no fancy scrapbooked baby picture albums, we can't even be bothered to doctor out the red eye sometimes. There's a lot of hand-me-down toys, clothes and shoes, at least until they're old enough to care or their bodies don't match the sizes anymore. 

Sometimes it's better, though. Parents hover less, when they've been through it all once before and everyone survived, so you get a little more freedom (or less, depending on that older sibling's choices.) I definitely hover less in some ways, but more in others. I'm trying to keep my helicopter parked and stored. I try harder now than I did with his older brother. 

I hovered over Will more when he was younger because he had no fear, of anything. Thus he had to be watched more closely. If there was water, he'd jump in, before he knew how to swim. I had to keep a boating certified floating vest on him - the kind with a handle at the top of the neck, anytime we went to a pool, because he would just jump right in. I put him in swim lessons at age 2, after I had to go in twice fully clothed to get him out of the pool, speedy little bugger. Once he knew how to swim, he started swan diving off the high dive, running from the back of the board. It was hard to watch, the lifeguards always stood up and prepared to go in until his little head popped up just as happy as he could be. Rock Climbing? Yes. Roller Coasters? Hell yes. Boogie Boarding? Eh, well, frankly he was more interested in just digging in the sand. An enigma, this one. 

This child who was once a chubby, dense toddler is now lean and stringy. He is a lot like my brother, actually, in build - lanky and broad shouldered, not as tall, though he will probably get taller than he is now; and personality - just as goddamn stubborn. He can't help that. He comes from a long line of midwestern, dustbowl surviving, stubborn as an ox and just as strong, do it my way, people. It runs deep.  

And as he got older, he did develop a wee bit of a temper. And by wee bit I mean Zero to Shit Storm in about 30 seconds. He didn't have a short fuse; he had no fuse at all. 

He can still throw down like the toddler days sometimes. Those hormones surging through his scrawny adolescent frame still sometimes takeover and push all brain function into the frontal lobe. The only difference is that it doesn't happen in the grocery store, it's a show reserved just for me or dad at home where it's safe. He can sometimes be a walking middle finger. We've learned to manage that a little better, as part of the overall protocol to help with focus and attention at school, and making sure he eats. He's like a Snickers commercial, put some food in him and the Gremlins go away. (Shut up about my mixed similes.)

But he's also kind. He loves little kids. He loves dogs, even though he's severely allergic to most of them (thus the poodle at our house.) He loves playing drums and marimba. He loves composing for percussion. And he's good at it, too. He loves playing goalkeeper in soccer. He likes all of these things more than school. He still has trouble maintaining focus, he got that from genetics, too. Sorry about that, dude. But he knows what he needs, he's learned how to set the right conditions to be successful, and sometimes he even makes those choices for himself without being reminded. Progress. 

I'm clean out of little people at my house. My fridge is full of Cokes and Gatorade instead of juice boxes, my freezer holds Hot Pockets instead of breaded Dino Chicken. Although, the frozen waffle supply is the pretty much the same. He drives himself most places, so he relies on me less, unless its far and/or at night. This is okay, and yet sometimes I am lost because of it. What will I do when he also leaves for college? I may have to side hustle and drive for Uber just to feel needed. 

He is doing so well overall, at 16, that most of the time I can keep my helicopter in storage. I keep her gassed up, though. You never know.

Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Eighteen years ago this morning, around 2 a.m., I waddled into the birthing center lobby at Menorah Medical Center to have a baby. They tried to send me home. My husband tried to say I told you so, then thought better of it and shut his fat mouth. Because I had had enough of these shenanigans, 24 solid hours of being squeezed like some giant hand was wringing out my guts like a wet washcloth was enough. I planted my feet and said with quivering lip, "I AM NOT LEAVING HERE WITHOUT A BABY." The night nurse sighed heavily and checked her watch, glanced at my husband who was quietly retreating further away from the desk, then said fine, we have rooms, I guess you can stay. 

Drew was born later that morning shortly after 11 a.m. He was perfect. 

As a toddler he put himself to bed at 7:45 p.m. every night, and fed himself from a baggie of Cheerios and an apple juice box and watched cartoons while we slept in on Saturday mornings. (Under the watchful eye of his dog, Cady the german shepherd, his second mother. Having following me around for nine months like a blind assistant dog, constantly underfoot practically tripping me every single day, now she ignored me completely and only had eyes for Drew. Unless I was letting him cry it out, in which case she came to me with disapproving stares, small yelps, and even low growls until I would retrieve him. She was not having this Dr. Ferber bullshit.) 

As a preschooler he talked early and often. Constantly, in fact. (Shocking, I know, that an offspring of mine would talk to a fencepost. Who knew.) He spoke in full, grammatically correct sentences by age three, and at age four would carry on conversations with strangers about the differences between a regular tractor, a back hoe, and a combine. God Forbid he spot an older man wearing a John Deer trucker hat. Be prepared to sit a while, sir. 

Much of his younger years are already documented here on this blog. I stopped writing here about my kids several years ago for a few reasons, time being one-I got busy. But also for their privacy. Birthdays are a little different, though. 

Today he is eighteen. We've disrupted his world this summer by moving house, and now are preparing to send him off to California to attend San Diego State University. He can't wait. He's excited to join the marching band, live in a dorm, and continue being the independent, level headed, don't look back kid he has always been. I've said it many times, in many places, and I've said to him as well: my son has never looked back to see if I was still standing there. I know this, because I am always still standing there, at least for a few more minutes. He is always just moving forward, on to the next thing.

He only ever looked back once, when he was six, and realized he was lost among the throngs of people at Disneyland. For five terrifying minutes of my life I had lost my kid in a giant theme park. But he found a safe, mommy-looking woman with a cell phone and she called me, and we had him back in less than ten minutes total. Lesson learned: he could get lost for a few minutes, and be okay. Moving on. 

He'll do just fine all the way out in California. He's comfortable there, after living there a few years and visiting so many more. We have friends he can reach out to for anything, surrogate family, if you will. He knows what to do if he gets lost. 

Happy birthday, Drew Boo. You're an adult, you even got a voter registration card in the mail. Use it.

Go as far as you want to go, buddy. You know how to find us.  

 

Kill your darlings (downsizing edition)

Well, we did it. We traded in the oversized suburban American Dream home for a right-sized townhouse with a deck that feels like a treehouse, a man cave finished basement and remodeled bathrooms. We sold a good amount of our large furniture, including some favorite pieces we just wouldn't have room for and some of my trash to treasure pieces that I planned to paint and sell but never got around to. I've been selling things on Facebook Marketplace for weeks. We thought we had gotten rid of enough stuff to fit nicely into the new place. Or at least, I thought so. My husband had been telling me for weeks we had too much stuff and I wasn't facing the truth. I ignored him, comfortable in my spatial understanding of the two homes.

I was ridiculously, hilariously, wrong. Dammit. 

We also somehow ended up moving on the hottest day of the year so far, over 100 degrees, and I wish that was the biggest problem of the day. The good news is nobody went down from heatstroke. 

What we thought would take four guys and one truck eight hours total to move us ended up taking additional crews, another truck, and 12 hours. 

Not only do we have too much stuff, we don't have the right kind of stuff for the room configurations in this new house. Exhibit A: 

What we have that sits in this window is my great grandmother's fragile lyre game table, which looks lovely with my mother-in-law's ceramic Chinese bowl sitting upon it.

What we need is some kind of credenza which holds electronic and network components.  

This is a repeating dilemma throughout the house, ad nauseum. 

We will get there. It will probably take many more listings on Facebook Marketplace and a bunch of trips to IKEA. I will have to figure out how to decorate a house that is based on grays and chrome and modern fixtures when I've spent my entire life decorating in creams and beige as the neutral background and natural stained wood and shabby chic as my inspirations. 

I love the new place. I just need to figure out how to make it work. But I'm exhausted. Maybe I'll just let it go and spend the rest of my summer watching old episodes of Fixer Upper. If Joanna Gaines can blend gray and natural wood and get modern farmhouse, maybe I can, too. 

 

It Comes and Goes in Waves.

I tend not to be an openly emotional person, when I’m not spinning and exhausted from the vertigo, that is. I think I’ve written before about how I prefer to be the caregiver not the care receiver, and emotion indicates need, to me. I’m not a stoic, don’t get me wrong, I just prefer not to lose my shit in public. It isn’t that I’m not sensitive, I’m actually quite sensitive, I just don’t like to show it. It’s also because I don’t just cry a few tears to smudge my makeup, when I lose it, I LOSE IT HARD. I ugly cry, and it usually involves waves of sobbing and hyperventilating. Like, it freaks people out. Ergo, do not want. But I’m smart enough to know you can’t stop an avalanche, so I make an extended effort to make sure that when I feel an emotional response welling up that I can find a place where I can hide and do that privately. 

Interestingly, the new meds that I’m on to hold back the vertigo have had a side-effect of managing my moods and emotional responses, and as we’ve slid into May and my son’s graduation from high school, I’ve found that situations that would normally have sent me looking around in a panic for a place to hide and bawl have not bothered me much. Hmm. This is okay. I can work with that. It’s so much better than the crying that came every day with the vertigo earlier in the spring. So, so much better.

Last night was the last high school band concert my oldest son will participate in, and it was fun and bittersweet. And while I managed not to cry without too much effort, I could feel little rumblings of powdery snow shake loose from the snow-packed mountain of my carefully managed emotional stability.

Today, though. Today I didn’t make it. This morning, as happens on many a Thursday morning at the school where I teach, we celebrated a Bar Mitzvah of one of my adorable 7th grade students. And after he read his prayers, the rabbi gave his blessing. And today he really swung for the fences. He spoke of how special this child is, because of his sensitivity, and that in fact, the degree of his sensitivity is his gift, his service, to the world. It was lovely and sweet, and reminded me of my own son. Whoops. 

As I sat in the back listening, I could feel the heavy rumbling, setting off that avalanche as waves of snow started roaring down the mountain. I got up and snuck out the back, and began looking for a place to hide. I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. As it happens, I found my way into the office of our school psychologist, who, bless her heart, “went to a meeting” so I could lose my shit in peace for a few minutes.  

I’m good now. My in-laws arrive tomorrow evening, graduation is on Saturday, Mother’s Day is Sunday. Now that I’ve given myself a chance to let it out, the mountain is safe again.

Onward.