sun-carved Halloween
witch’s brew and zombie belle
finding treats in tricks
and you won’t have this:
spinning autumnal joy swing
her trapped in between
and you’ll never know
what it’s like to live for them
(to live inside joy)
and you just can’t see
how losing this would mean all:
girls, home, husband… life
’cause it’s not a park
with green lawns, blue skies, red leaves:
it’s my livelihood
you’re a pic undone
where the sidewalk ends, my friend:
(leaves fall. i blossom.)
midnight wake up call
evaluation nightmares
(scores that don’t suit me)
early morning grades
rush to school to hide from kids
and try to catch up
small knock at entry:
“Teacher, may I please enter?”
(a small scared boy waits)
“Are you new today?”
and his brother trails behind
with soft pink gloves on
“From Uganda, yes.”
my papers sit in piles
forgotten on desk
i show them downstairs
where free breakfast awaits them:
eyes big and grateful
“What brings you here, boys?”
they exchange frightened glances.
“For a better life.”
ungraded papers,
nightmares–they’re all meaningless
in comparison
at least they are here–
where with beauty they’ll begin
the life we all want
three-girl agreement
rare these days–two schools straddled
ice skating it is
My small poet is lost in the world of text citations, a phrase I never heard until I was a junior in high school… Not as a fourth grader. And while my fifth grader keeps the world laughing with her dry humor and is at or above par in every subject, I can only imagine how Rio feels when she hears from the fourth teacher in her life, “She is so shy.”
It is the label of introversion. The stamp on her personality. And as she sits there in the hard plastic chair, her whole body shrinks underneath the shawl Heather made all those years back. She presses her knees tight against her chest and her eyes redden in her quiet attempt to hold back tears.
How did they end up with the same teachers, and why did we have to bring the kids with us? These are things that go through my mind as I see the 1’s and 0’s on her paper. As the English teacher lowers her voice to just above a whisper, almost mocking the small voice of my youngest; as the math teacher blatantly tells her she needs to speak up in science since there aren’t tests and that’s the way she can prove what she knows.
“It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be,” he assures me when we arrive home.
Not two minutes later, Rio asks me to cuddle with her in bed. I read her part of her book, then close it and wait. She has that pouty I-want-to-tell-you-something look. “Is it the conferences? Is it someone at school? Is it something you don’t understand? Is it your daddy?” (Because dark thoughts enter when I am so, so scared for her.) She negates all questions, and finally, in a barely-audible whisper, tells me, “I’m scared to go to sleep. I have scary dreams.”
It took her twenty minutes to divulge this to me, so I don’t press her for more. I talk about the weekend, about carving pumpkins, about me taking her trick-or-treating all by herself, just with me, as her older sisters have outgrown going with Mama and Daddy and have friend plans. Her red eyes soften when I ask her to think about these things, to dream about them.
But I will never know what’s really going on inside her mind. She will never tell me. It could be the disgruntled drive over to conferences when I discussed with her daddy an allowance-and-all-other-activity cutoff after so much backtalk about chores this evening. It could be the teacher’s tiny voice mocking her small soul. It could be Isabella’s snide remark when she asked her if she wanted to listen to her read her poems aloud last night, and the teary rush into the other room when it looked like she’d offered a voice to someone who didn’t want to hear it. (Isabella made up for it later when Mythili asked for a full reading and Izzy complimented–and was quite impressed by–every last one of her poems). And it could be… that she’s just having scary dreams.
But I will never know. Just like her teachers will only know her as the “shy girl.” Her sisters will always think of her as the “easygoing one.” And her mother? Everything about her–her dark hazel eyes, her small smile, her desperate need to wrap her entire body around mine when she wakes in the morning–will always be an endless mystery to me. One with clues I will pick up as she grows–from those sweet lines of poetry to late-night whispers of fear–as I try to find the meaning behind the poetry that is my small, shy, loving angel.
a grumpy Monday
drained by rudeness, overtime
but brightened by girls
science fair success
anthology finally done
we can breathe… for now
go to sleep with grins
knowing we tried our best try
to get through this day
It is Sunday night, and I haven’t thought about you all weekend. You have been sitting in ungraded piles on the tables by the door of my classroom. You have been unread and unmarked emails that I have chosen to ignore. Because I am raising three kids. And I am raising thousands of kids. And I have to have a balance between the two.
Because Saturday was running from store to store to party to party to house to house to out to dinner to home/friends/love/hate.
Because Sunday was more running (to the Lego store) to appease my middle child who always feels a bit left out. And another party, and another set of meals to make.
Because I need to breathe for a moment and think about what is most important. Is it my administrator telling me she’s tracking our usage of tablets that don’t work half the time so she can send the data to the district? Is it the kids in my first period who have been pushed into lockers and called faggot/whore/freak/thot [that ho over there]/cunt and causing me to stop the entire lesson to beg me to listen?
Or is it my girls, who beg me to teach them cross-stitch and ask me to stay at the advisory party and want me to skate with them and want me to wake them up at 6:15 so that I can make pumpkin spice bagels and vanilla chai tea and spend a moment before work with them?
You tell me. Tell me how to decide. Tell me how I am supposed to carry the weight of a thousand students inside the hazel eyes of the three girls I gave birth to.
Because thirteen years in, I am still not sure.
Because it’s Sunday night, and I am sitting in my dream house, that, thirteen years in, I can afford. Because the candles are burning and the music is playing and my girls have gone to bed. Because I’ve had a few glasses of wine and I have thank-you cards to write and grocery lists to make and weekend plans to destroy and a thousand kids, including my own, to raise.
Because there is never enough time.
And that is why I write. Why I love them. Why I hate how much they take from me. Why I live for how much they GIVE me.
And why I will not live by administrative threats. By school district doomsdays. Why I choose to live by these small requests that pile up around me like leaves falling in autumn. “Do something, Miss.” “Listen to us.” “Take me to the mall even if you hate it.” “Stay at my party, please?!” “I need you to cover me up.”
Because we all need that soft touch. That quilt of love wrapped around all that is evil in the world. That mother’s love. For all the thousands of kids who have it, who will never have it, who long to have it.
That is why.
what angers me now
is her quick accusation
that we just don’t care
bullied confessions
took control of my first class
(undocumented)
yet, she’s tracking us–
collecting district data
to prove we’re worth it
you cannot track kids
who’ve been shoved into lockers
with tablet data
one day she’ll see this
or continue on her path
of domination
either way, we win:
My lesson’s lost, i tell them
—but we needed this—
i actually hear
the harsh words they say to me
i truly listen
but she can’t see that
it’s not in her statistics
and therefore i fail
what angers me most
is how i love, love, love them
and how she doesn’t
rain-forced overtime
and a club cancellation
poured on my evening
frazzled two incomes
shuffle life like laundry loads:
nothing’s ever clean
quick pasta in pan
(middle one waits for boil)
i mad-dash the town
make my appointment
where my essay’s dissected
by native speaker
who can’t tell me why
subjunctive is needed here
yet, not here (nor there)
disgruntled, i sit
choose the last row, and listen–
same two birds chirping
pecking the rest out
our Spanish words now swallowed
by extroversion
and i can’t do it
i cannot sit in this class
with my girls at home
i can’t speak Spanish
or use subjunctive bullshit
—just say what it is—
it’s like our lunch talk:
Midwest culture won’t allow
taking last cookie
and if you offer,
offer three times before, ‘Yes’
(no cookie for me)
so i leave the class
i walk out, i give up, lose
(win time with my girls
who ask for reading
aloud, in poems stories,
mine and theirs and ours)
and we read Spain poems
remember Gaudí’s madness
in place of our own
and that’s my Thursday
just like any other: lost,
but not forgotten
First ice skating lesson after nearly a year break. After he lost his job and my dad paid for skiing and I didn’t think we’d have the time or desire for such an activity again. But they’ve been begging for months, and I finally conceded.
It’s a rush of a Wednesday saved only by the fact that Isabella gets out of school early for once and we’ve miraculously arranged a ride home for her. By the time I pick up the younger two and arrive home, we have just shy of an hour for chores, homework, piano practice and dinner to be on the table, all prior to Daddy coming home, in order for us to leave on time, drive through rush hour, spend fifteen minutes circling streets for a meter, run through the rain, and lace up three pairs of too-long-laces ice skates. All three girls beg me to stand by the glass as they practice for thirty minutes before the lesson, but I want to use what little time I have to fit in a walk and a listen to my Spanish book. I concede to ten minutes of watching them flash by me full of grins, squeeze in twenty minutes of walking, and sit through their lesson intermittently looking up while I write my weekly Spanish essay.
Mythili ends up not having a single kid in class with her. The young DU teachers group her with Isabella, one level up, which she seems to accept for the time being. But as soon as the lesson’s over, she puts her pouty face on. “Ice skating is BORING if I have to take a lesson by myself.” She whines about her skates not coming off, about how thirsty she is, and falls into a teary-eyed slump on the chaise lounge as soon as we enter the door, no “Hello Daddy” or hugs to pass around.
Before bed, tears still creeping into the corners of her eyes, she begs me to cancel, to change her lesson, to bump her up to the next level so she doesn’t have to be alone. I try to reason with her: it’s like having a private lesson, like piano, and what a deal! But there is no reasoning with Mythili. All I can do is promise (likely to no avail) to beg the teacher next week to let her join the other class, or I will, I kid you not (because I know this kid), have eight weeks of pouting and complaining in my future.
Their school pictures came in today. I waste no time in changing them out, and, sadly, all three look only slightly differently than they did last year. Does this mean they’re growing more slowly? I wish. As I walk through our new home and see their chubby faces pass me by in photos from the toddler years, my heart aches. I remember when they were so young, and their needs were so simple: eat, sleep, cuddle, read, bed. Yes, there were those random times when they would cry, cry, cry for no reason. (Perhaps there was a reason… but none of us will ever know).
But now? They have so many reasons to cry, to fight, to whine, complain… I can’t get dinner on the table without backtalk about setting it or the dustpan being lost or homework not being done or an argument about who did what last. They no longer need the simple list of eat, sleep, cuddle, read, bed. They need to be told that their voice matters. That their needs are important. That I need to look up from my writing to look at them. To fully look at them. To know that when they cry, they cry for a reason. A million reasons. Just like the rest of us.
And I wish I could turn back time, when their needs were so simple. I wish I could be the mother that I was, when I didn’t have to fight the battle of who needs what, from homework help to where the fuck is the dustpan-well-you-might-as-well-grab-some-paper-towels.
But I am a mother. I signed up for that battle of trying to figure out why that baby wouldn’t stop crying, of carrying each one of them in varying positions across the room, rocking, consoling, patting, singing, praying for silence. And I signed up for these battles too, however disheartening or day-cringing they make me.
Because when they cry, there’s always a reason. And as their mother, it’s my job to figure out how to make the crying stop.
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