with genuine tears
she breaks the bad news: yellow.
an ugly color.
she gives hope to green
for this year’s judgment of us,
of poor-ranking kids
i know she means it:
i know she knows our hard work
because she’s been there.
on yellow Friday,
with grace i can’t quite master,
she’s won me. again.
that closes the week
with less money, but more pride
to be a teacher.
haunted by nightmares
was how this morning began:
insomniac’s fate
but then he woke me
with the love he always has
(embedded in lust)
and then a work day–
every basket now empty
(this school year’s first time)
and a lunch offer
out in the sun and crowd free
where hope lies waiting
tonight? i’ll sleep well
praying for a fresh new day
of this teacher life
“What the fuck–?!” She shoots a dirty look across the room, in the same space I have been standing watching with my own eyes as I monitor their ability to read sentences, their ability to respond to questions. “What did you throw?”
I have seen nothing. Not a speck, not a spitball, not an airplane.
“Can you tell me what—?” I begin, and am harshly interrupted by her friend whose phone I took away yesterday, who argued with me and cussed at me and told me that I should give her my phone if I was going to take hers, who said I don’t pay her bills and have no right to her property–“So you’re gonna ask her about what happened when he’s the one who did it?”
“I’m trying to figure out what happened. F, can you tell me?”
But before she can answer, all I hear is, slightly under her breath but loud enough so she knows I hear it, “Yeah, that’s right, she’s a racist.”
I call the boy outside, a boy who has sat in my class for two years and has never allowed a cruel word to cross his lips, and ask him about throwing the paper, which he adamantly denies, but I can hardly hear his response as I am already swimming in a pool of tears that sits just behind my eyelids, ready to fall loosely down into the hole that is this day.
Because I either say the wrong thing or make the wrong choice or don’t say anything at all, and none of it is ever right. Because I spend my life trying to be fair to all of my students, to all of the people in my life, even when they are not fair to me.
Because sometimes it feels like nothing I do will ever bring positivity, love, friendship, or trust into my life.
Because I was already crying before this class even began. After two months of planning, paperwork, training, money, and time, before we’ve even had a single meeting, my Girl Scout co-leader has just informed me that her daughters don’t want to do Girl Scouts and therefore, neither does she.
Because I promised my daughters that we could do this after a four-year break.
Because I’m terrible at making friends, and I feel like it is multi-generational, as my girls have struggled in recent weeks to click with her daughters despite the last three years of friendship. And I wanted to bridge that gap between the girls and their old friends and the mother who has warmed up to me, and build a foundation for something that could last for years.
Because I don’t have the right words, when I’m standing there watching a kid cuss in my class or at happy hour telling people what I really think, to do anything more than make people hate me.
“R, you don’t have your tablet today, do you need the paper copy of the book?” I try, several minutes later, a pathetic attempt at peace.
“Don’t even try to talk to me, Miss.”
Don’t even try.
Because, why should I? I got married when I was twenty years old and made my husband the center of my entire life. And whenever I try to reach outside of that safe bubble I built up for myself, I am misjudged, blamed, ostracized.
Because, the truth is, he is my one and only friend. And when I get a text at lunch as I’m walking around the gray-eyed dressed-up-for-autumn park, I have no one to share my sad news with once I arrive back to my school.
I have no one to call to talk through it.
No one but him.
And I spend so many moments of my days worrying that my daughters will face the same fate, the same insecurities as they enter adulthood. Which is exactly why I wanted to start the Girl Scout troop in the first place–to help them make and continue their friendships. “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold…” The tune of the song will forever be emblazoned on my soul.
Yet, no matter how hard I have tried, people have left my life for one “circumstantial” reason after another. And once they leave, they leave an abscess that I pathetically try to fill with a new set of… friends. Colleagues? Girls’ friends’ parents? Bueller? Bueller?
This is me, standing in front of my class, trying to hold together another day of teaching, another day of being a mother, a wife, another day of trying, and failing, to be a friend. And I may as well be the monotonous voice that no one listens to, searching in the dark for something that was never there in the first place.
Because I have heard nothing. Not a speck, not a word, not an offer. And I want to be like that brazen 14-year-old and shout out, “What the fuck?”
Only. I want an answer. Not a scapegoat.
It is a long and teary hug at happy hour
Between friends who share life’s moments–
The cold and the hot, the dark and the light–
And you can see it all in their bright faces
When they pull apart from each other.
So here i am in the dark corner, watching,
The outside of the table jabbing my ribs,
My drink taken away before i’d finished,
My mouth dry and with no one to talk to
And feeling quite like a girl at a middle school dance.
And after everything that i have built up
In the past twenty years–my marriage,
My career, my traveling, my three young girls–
I haven’t built up a friendship that would
Ever offer me such a hug.
The loneliness clings to the edges of my days
As my girls begin to find their place in the world,
Spending all afternoon up the street, online,
Arranging one social event or read fest after another,
Needing me less and less.
And that is why this happy hour stings my soul
As clusters share their weekend party plans,
Their impending wedding reception,
Their last escapade at the dancing dive bar…
None of which have or will include me.
And on year four in this place where my students’ love
Fills my days with hope for a better future,
I still have a longing, an inkling of loss
That trails behind me, wishing i could be someone else,
Someone worthy enough to be a friend.
at conferences she swings her legs
back and forth, swish… kick
and murmurs her replies,
her set-to-be bragging portfolio of pride
melted into a subtle acceptance
of just good enough
and with all eight eyes on her
she hears the same words
she’s heard for six years:
Talk more.
(when all the world is a whirlwind of noise
and she has the quiet demeanor of one who always listens, always knows)
and the rims of her eyes redden
after hearing the judgey truth too many times, and before a word escapes
her last-year-in-elementary lips,
they’re telling her not to cry.
they beg us then for questions, concerns,
wanting to fill in the ten minute gap that hangs like a carcass between us,
but my words are swallowed too,
behind my own quiet tears,
my own red-rimmed eyes,
and all i can hear is Scout’s voice
proclaiming that school is a lesson in Group Dynamics,
and my girl, my baby, doesn’t fit into that mold.
instead we fill the hallway with sing-song voices
to banter with her older sister,
one year ahead and one million years mouthier,
and my tears melt and her eyes soften and we move on.
we step into the cold autumn night and she clings to each of our hands, unwilling to pull away,
her last-year-of-elementary heart still as soft as six years back,
still my little girl trying to find her place in this whirlwind world.
i can’t believe our world this week–
surrounded by the same chauvinistic bullshit
my liberal baby-boomer parents raised me up against.
and it’s 2016 and i have three daughters and a man, a husband,
a born-and-bred Southern Baptist-raised Tennesseean, whose thoughts couldn’t enter the realm of filth so flippantly tossed
into the national spectrum
and we have a First Lady
who should be our Queen
whose words get twisted on my newsfeed within twenty-four hours
by. A. White. Man.
and i want to grab the world by its ears and shake some sense into it and put him in a swimming pool at age thirteen and have a hand slide up into his swimsuit.
and put him on a bicycle at age fourteen and on the middle of a spring day have a creeper follow him home and chase him into an alley and expose himself to him.
and i want to put him in the college library at age sixteen and have a stalker creep up behind him trying to reach up his shorts when he’s just searching for a poem by William Blake.
And I want him to go fuck himself and his white male privilege that I have never seen in my home–the home of my birth or my marriage–even in all its whiteness
And I want him to feel that terror of being female. Because every woman I know has had icy blood running through her veins in those moments of harassment and assault that have plagued us for all of time.
But he won’t. Trump won’t apologize and he would argue till the day runs dark, and all i can do is pray to a god i don’t believe in that my three daughters don’t face the same fate. That they will find a home as safe as mine with a man as good as my father or husband and a world better than the one we have set before them now.
Because it’s all i can do. Because i moved away in the pool and told my father about the flasher and left that library.
Because i’m writing this now and somewhere in the world eyes are reading it and taking one moment to hear that terror slip out of my veins and transform into the truth that makes me Silent. No. More.
this day, three years back:
an unfair observation
on a testing day.
i thought i was done;
trying to be good enough
was just not enough
and now? full circle–
a grapevine request to see
my expert teaching
from a district head
who saw just minutes of us
(speaking for us all).
now he’s bringing guests
to show others how it looks
to teach ELD
(the irony stings
with my facebook memory–
a harsh reminder)
but all things must change
from weak saplings to gold leaves
that have brought me home
because it’s Monday
the alarm sucks, kids are bored,
and fall won’t happen–
the classroom burns hot
from a boiler turned on
two weeks too early
and everyone thinks
it’s a holiday today,
so here i sit. wait
at the Jiffy Lube
with the rest of the world
panning for oil.
this is white privilege.
this is American life.
black gold that burns all.
This. This is why I teach. For three years she’s been in my class. She has gotten married. Had a baby. But she still can’t decode words. She still struggles with basic sentences. I know she has more going on in her mind than Bambara and Mali and motherhood, but I haven’t found a way to reach this girl. I haven’t been able to communicate with her in a way to help her understand. But “reliving” 1880s farm chores today, she said, “I got this. We do this in my country.” And today, today, today, she was the best at something. This. This is #whyiteach
ten years ago, as a young teacher,
i would have killed to have such a flawless lesson.
today?
one component makes me feel like a failure.
ask.
ask why teachers leave this profession in droves.
why we spend hours collecting fake data points to try to prove ourselves.
why every damn day they must be
interacting as if their intelligence
could not be shown in another way.
ask.
ask.
screw the introverts,
the six weeks prior of building up talk,
of transition handouts and forced verbal responses and
Socratic seminars.
this day, this day when i have them
writing more sentences in one period
than they’ve written in their entire
school careers,
i am judged as
not even approaching,
not even close to being good enough?
Ask.
i’ll tell you why.
because with all the hoops and all the hopes and all the reasons i came into this career,
some days,
rainy days like today,
dreary and plagued with doubt,
it sure as hell feels more like
an unsatisfactory career
than i feel like an unsatisfactory teacher.
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