skiing is breathing
fresh snow brings fresh life to life
winter is heaven
motherhood
Theatrical Debut
night of theatre
for the “quiet” youngest one
who shines on the stage
My Chauffeur
a milestone reached
after sixteen years a mom
she earns her license
Sweet Sixteen
sixteen years a mom
raising this beautiful girl
to face the world
arriving past dark
she softened in the sunlight
ready for the fight
ready for blue skies
to brighten her winter day
(born ready to play)
proud to celebrate
sixteen turns around the sun
(hot springs, sushi fun)
sixteen years a mom
sixteen years my daughter shines
with her brilliant mind
Fly Us Home
Wanting a better life for her family, my mother uprooted us to move to Denver when I was 11. Contrarily, her own parents had ripped her from Park Hill Elementary at the same age 33 years prior in the 1960s “white flight” migration. Always burdened by this blatant racism, my mother told us, “We’re moving straight to Denver, and you girls will learn the value of diversity.”
I attended Merrill and Cole middle schools and Manual High School, the latter two hosting the burgeoning Denver School of the Arts.
Unlike my tiny town in upstate New York, DPS offered me a side of society I’d never seen: racial violence in forced-integration hallways, a Chicano Mathletics coach, and a set of friends from multiple races, language backgrounds, and family dynamics. DSA offered me a spotlight into the world of LGBTQ acceptance and the privilege of the most inspirational teacher anyone could ever imagine–Mrs. Jana Clark.
Mrs. Clark and DPS are the reasons I became a teacher and the reason I came back to this district after teaching stints elsewhere.
Because Denver is my microcosm of what the world could be. What my mother wanted and what I was lucky enough to proclaim: I am a DPS graduate. I am a DPS parent. I am a DPS teacher.
DPS represents our world. Its teachers represent DPS.
Listen to the teachers. Their right to strike is your right to make this city the one we want to fly to, not fly from.
The Other Side of the Weekend
while blue collar job
asks my man to work weekends
we boil brushes
(lice infestations
plague parents’ weekend free time
nit-picking nightmare)
This Is Why I Will Strike
I just want to think about how hard-won this moment is. This day. This five of us skiing down a mountain together. This money we didn’t have before that we have now.
This fresh powder.
This view. Could you beat that view if you went anywhere else in the world? Well, could you?
I don’t want to think about the five years we, a family of five, lived on a frozen, constituents-unwilling-to-vote-on-a-mill-levy teacher’s salary of $48,000. The $10,000 out-of-pocket expenses we paid to give birth to our third child. The penny-pinching. The laying-out-$400-every-three-months to earn those goddamn fifteen credits so I could get a raise if I … changed school districts.
I don’t want to think about how Spain screwed me out of a decent salary and we came home afterward with $19,000 in debt, more than any we’ve had as a married couple.
I don’t want to think about the TWO 1998 cars we have outside our house right now, car-payment free.
I don’t want to think about a teacher’s strike. I don’t want to think about my refugees trekking across town on two buses and being huddled into the auditorium to wait, without teachers, the long seven hours until they trek back, because if they don’t wait, they might not have a meal that day.
About the hundreds of hours I, and every teacher I know, has put into grading, planning, meeting, educating (ourselves and them), in the ten months between August and June. Hundreds of hours outside our contract day listening to students tell us their traumas that are greater than any soul could bear, listening to our admin and school district rate us as failures when we wake before dawn and go home after dusk to bring our best selves into that classroom every day, listening to our coworkers decide between renting a slumlord shithole or buying a house an hour away…
Listening.
I don’t want to think about the thousands of union workers who died for this day. For this choice. For a society where corporate greed is not the only answer.
I just want to see my husband and my three girls gliding down this Colorado slope, this Colorado hope.
I want to ski. To smile. To rejoice.
I don’t want to go on strike.
But I will.
Just like I walked in and out of Manual High School in 1994 when my teachers asked me to support them.
Just like I lived on pittance pay for the early part of my children’s lives.
Just like every other union member everywhere who’s looking to find empathy in the eyes of the corporate monsters that rule our society.
I will strike.
And I will ski.
And we will win ourselves a bluebird day.
In Our Dreams…
a star cake could win
if we were a baking show
for amateur chefs
A Little Broken
I wish I could write you a letter.
But I have.
And sometimes it hurts to BREATHE.
To know the truth of the world we live in. To face the daily struggle that is parenthood in all its lice-ridden, ailing-dog, money-stealing reality.
To know that Failure begins with a capital F and follows me every turn I take. A teacher, a mother, a wife, a leader, a human.
Why is it so hard to be a human?
That’s all for today. And some lice and torn-ACL puppy pics for good measure.
Almost Invisible
I wish I could say I am a set of skis, but this is not the case. If I were a set of skis, I’d be flying down the mountain right now, powder billowing up around me in glittery fury. I’d be turning over moguls and clapping flakes off from the lift and racing my daughter’s skis down.
I’d be free.
But I am not a set of skis. I am a louse.
I am the louse found at the nape of my oldest’s neck, as pale brown as her hair, almost, almost invisible.
I am the louse that enters your classroom and tries for twenty minutes to think of positivity and negativity and mix it all together with nits for words in an online documentation that we all try to wash away with Nix.
I am the louse that enters your friendship, trying so hard to show you how genuinely I love you, laying my eggs in every place you thought you’d never find in hopes that with one, with just one minuscule combing, you’d choose to keep me there, tenacious and prolific and ever-loyal to the warmth of your scalp.
I am the louse that enters my classroom, sneaking between desks, reaching out with my frail antennae in the somewhat-silent attempt to encourage students to reach up, scratch, and move their eyes away from their phones and onto the idea, just the idea, that a good comb-through could bring them an education.
I am the louse hiding at the base of the bristle on the brush, in the stitches of the winter hood, in the soft cotton bedding bought from the bargain store. Waiting. Breathing in my twenty-four hours of life one solitary pull of oxygen at a time, hoping for a single strand to clasp, to scurry up, to hold on to until I reach the warmth of humanity, until I can rejuvenate my weakened heart with the blood of someone else’s life.
I am the louse of motherhood, the constant irritation of teen angst wishing to be rid of me, my frail footprints finding no real response to my desperate attempts to make a home on these humans’ hearts.
If I were a set of skis, I’d be flying across a Colorado bluebird day. Over mountain passes. Into a bowl so deep with powder you couldn’t find your tips.
But I am a louse. And lice don’t ski.
They breed.
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