though the leaves are dark and gray
spring warmth has peeked into February
bringing bright buds of hope
out from under winter’s dust
i spend the afternoon on my knees
pulling back remnants of last year
tossing battered bits into the compost
readying my earth for its awakening
red and green and even aspen
tease me from their burrowed roots
promising with winter’s end
that color can come back home
Friday, seventh period, fifteen minutes before the last bell:
“The reason we are reading all these picture books is because we’re going to walk over to an elementary school next week, interview kindergarteners, and create books for them. I did this in middle and high school and it was one of my most memorable classroom experiences. And a couple years ago I met a new DPS teacher who had gone to that elementary school. He not only still had his handmade book, but also said it was one of his most memorable school experiences and one of the reasons he became a teacher.”
“I’m going to ditch that day. Who’s with me?”
No one will ever tell you this when you’re in college. They’ll pump teaching up, make you think it’s your dream job, make you think you can change the world. That you can be there for one student or two or a thousand, and that you’re going to make a difference.
You’ll believe them. You’ll have small glimpses of hope and happiness every day. Kids who come in an hour early to clean out all your poor-urban-handout, made-for-elementary desks that have shelves underneath that high schoolers can barely fit their legs under and spend the entire school year filling with trash from vending machines that are open all day, and hiding and losing phones and tablets in, and leaving grant-requested precious books inside.
Or the kid who brings you spicy Eritrean food with his mom’s homemade injera bread to dip your tongue into another continent after all the hours you’ve spent helping him write essays for three years running, before dawn and after dark and every lunch in between. It all melts away with saffron and perfectly spongey texture soaking up the lost moments of planning, grading… Of other parts of your life.
Or the Nepali girls who play their fairy-like music after school, pushing all the desks to the side to practice their modern mashup dance of a culture you couldn’t begin to understand for the CultureFest that brings the quilt of your students together in an unforgettable annual celebration.
But.
It takes SO. MANY. Of those bright moments to erase the daily apathy, rudeness, and downright disregard that SO. MANY. Students have.
So I send him out. “You don’t want to develop a relationship with our community, participate with a kid, make a difference, and fulfill a promise to the kindergarten teachers who I told I would bring twenty-one students to interview? You want me to disappoint a five-year-old child?”
“You do whatever you want, Miss,” he says, packing up his backpack and walking out, fifteen minutes before the last bell on a Friday afternoon.
“Whatever I want” is to enjoy this weekend I have promised my just-turned-thirteen-year-old for six months. To get the hell out of this city, drive like a maniac into blue skies and snow, and participate in life with the children I hold closest to my heart.
But first there was a rock slide. I-70 closed ten miles before our destination. Then I arrive at the elementary school and my middle child is pouting like she’s two, refusing to tell me why. I leave her and her sister at piano to fulfill my carpool duties and get stuck at a string of red lights. Bruce comes coughing home after working in a knee-deep-in-mud manhole all day, takes a shower, and water leaks through the second-floor ceiling onto our beautiful wood floors, leaving a crack in the drywall and a repair-bill question yet to be answered. When he comes downstairs, he is shivering like a wet chihuahua, goes straight to bed, and informs me he has the flu. My middle child still pouts, has picked up the cold the other three of us have had all week, and has a canker sore the size of Idaho.
The two remaining children complete the two-hour ordeal of grocery shopping with me, picking out swimsuits for all. We return home to frantically make eight sandwiches, do two loads of laundry, pack up five people’s crap to fill the topper, and I lay my head down close to midnight only to be disturbed by the buzzing dryer, the curious kitten, and the Dowling need to clean the entire house before I leave.
But wait, since Bruce is sick, I now have to sacrifice two hours of this pressed-for-time morning to sit with Isabella in her Dumb Friends League volunteering orientation. I rush to Walgreens, the only close store, to get ice before our looming six-hour drive, and the goddamn store is out of ice.
Izzy’s friend finally arrives after Bruce officially declares he isn’t up for it, and I don’t even take the time to call my mother to ask her to come in his place. I hit the road like a woman on fire and blast my way through half the state, circumventing the rock slide by 140 miles, blue sky and snow, blue sky and snow.
We stop only two times. To get gas and load up on caffeine. And to avoid a mule deer who jumps in front of our two-lane trek. The girls minimally whine about how much longer and are we halfway there yet, but not enough to even raise the hairs on my neck. I’ve got a great playlist blasting U2, Bruce Springsteen, Usher, Adele, and Lennon, views worth a million bucks, and an open road.
I’ve got a thirteen-year-old whose aunt calls later to wish her a happy birthday and ask her if she was miserable about the double-time drive: “No way. I got to come to Glenwood for my birthday.”
I’ve got a middle child who is chipper today and takes blurry pictures for me and learns how to program the GPS to five different destinations as we navigate the back way.
I’ve got a baby girl who spends the entire six-hour drive happily drawing on and erasing her whiteboard to start all over again.
I’ve got a glimpse of that hope again. When we finally reach the exit from the circled-back, eastbound side of I-70, after passing twenty signs, taking three side routes, and talking about the rockslide all week, a Colorado State Trooper parks in front of two rows of orange cones that guide every car off at this exit.
“Look, this is where the highway is shut down,” I announce, taking a glance around the bright young faces that surround me as we have made a “record” time of five hours forty minutes when Google said 6.5.
“I wonder why,” Mythili ponders.
“Oh, Mythili,” but I can’t finish because I am laughing so hard, I am so deliriously happy that tears are streaming down my cheeks as I try to hold in spurts of laughter and joy that have been bottled up inside me since fifteen minutes before the last bell on Friday afternoon.
But I don’t need a bell to set me free. I just need a glimpse. A glimpse of blue sky over snow, of students who love me for how hard I work for them, of children who are grateful and humorous and quirky in these small moments that make a life, whether they are the fifteen minutes before the last bell or the fifteen tears that just need to fall.
Just a glimpse, a glimpse.
thirteen has arrived,
rearing its ugly head with back talk
and tormenting sibling rivalry,
with GPA pressure in seventh grade
and the desperate need of a young girl
to isolate herself from her family
(for a film in her “genre,”
to write her story,
to paint silver nail polish on
my mother’s-her-ladylike nails,
alone, alone in her room)
alone, alone as a mother
i brought her home from the hospital,
and she wouldn’t open her eyes for ten days,
so infused with jaundice-yellow skin
and the vast ordeal of
a long and painful labor,
and i could barely walk,
and she would barely eat,
yet she was mine, mine,
my first take at motherhood,
my first trial at real,
gut-opening, visceral
pain
from my heart into my groin
from my heart i have raised her,
one failed attempt at control
after another, her bar as the oldest
set higher than her sisters would
ever hope to even catch
in their strained glimpse
beneath her slender shadow,
me always asking more than what
she wants to offer,
fighting through tears we’ve
shared on too many nights
fighting through to become this
surreal force that connects
her face to mine,
the picture that sits on my
windowsill at work always bringing the same comment,
“That one, that one looks like you,”
the only one of three to be my twin,
too high-spirited to capture,
too strong-willed to be anything less
than my firstborn
my firstborn turns thirteen today,
placing a moratorium on that dwindling youth
i tried to trap years ago
when she couldn’t sit still on the naughty step,
at the dinner table,
or in between my endless kisses
on her chubby cheeks–
nor now, as she bursts through doors, breaks ceramic pots
i’ve had her whole life,
spins circles on skates
and chases,
chases,
chases that dream we all still hold in our hearts when we are thirteen,
when we still think the world is ours,
that we will be the best kid,
student, friend, daughter….
knowing that we will open our eyes when we’re ready,
sit still when the time is right,
back talk to find our voice,
and never, never, never
be anyone other than ourselves
quit or try harder?
plague of my life sits waiting
under setting sun
my daughters beg me
for a morning to see them
(no more predawn work)
i try exercise
to beg love for the body
that i lost for them
i give up dairy
and drinking; saying bad things;
but it’s not enough
time swallowed by plans
i will never quite finish
(and ungraded work)
i beg clarity
from my second (lost) language,
for tongue-trapped escape
but it’s not enough
to find that pivotal time
lost in the shuffle
i beg forgiveness
from the self i promised me
twenty years ago
i hope i find it
hidden in filtered sun rays
that trickle through time
One month in and my senses surround me. Not just sensibility, sensitivity. I am surrounded by the smells, the sounds, the sights present in the world that for so long I only experienced through rose-colored glasses:
Walking along a local business district block, looking for an ATM: At four o’clock, I pass three bars packed with people. Tall glasses of white wine, foaming beers, laughter spilling out onto the sidewalk from the too-warm January patio. And the loud-mouthed couple stumbling across the street.
“She su-ure got you good on that one, didn’t she?” he shouts to her, just two feet away, inside-voice distance.
“Just shut up and get in the car. It’s way too early for the cops to be making their rounds. I’ll take side streets till we get home.”
He struggles to open the door and she slams hers shut with a thunderous thud that breaks through the golden tinge of the setting sun.
Sitting beside my father’s fountain: endless free booze at my fingertips. My football-shaped empanadas being devoured with a nice cold glass of IPA. The smell of beer after beer wafts across the end table as I bear through the intolerable sounds of commercials and crowds that make up a football game. The team wins–another reason to throw back a cold one, to celebrate.
The Saturday night walk down Broadway with the two youngest girls. So much to look at, so much clarity. Pizza dough spun into the air, Uber cars double-parked while waiting for clients to crawl out from under their weekly pub crawl. A crowded ice cream shop where Denverites ignore the impending snowflakes and gorge themselves on wine-infused, beer-infused, whiskey-infused flavors that my girls reject as easily as Brussels sprouts. The chilly, bootless walk back to the car as the flakes increase, the rundown liquor store and, not five feet further, the ominous figure lying half-conscious on the sidewalk, unwilling or unable to move his legs to let us pass. The look in his half-slit shockingly blue eyes: rejection and fear and loathing. The look of someone without a choice.
The morning radio show cracking jokes about how their producer had a once-in-a-lifetime invite to the playoff football game and got so wasted at the tailgating party beforehand that he can’t recall one second of the glorious victory, the plays that make memories, the two-thousand-dollar view. Like it’s funny. Normal. Acceptable Sunday behavior.
The spousal budget discussion, the bill review, the savings goals, and the harsh admittance that easily $200 a month has filled our recycle bin for years. I can still hear the tinny clang of the bottles being dumped, wantonly echoing and overfilling the three-foot-tall bin. Biweekly collection could never quite gather up, or empty out fast enough, the waste found in those bottles.
The memories that flood my thoughts. That time when I said this, wrote that, did … That. The predictive nightmares that fill my nights with giving in, giving up, making the same stupid mistakes.
Did I see these things before? Taste them? Hear the sounds of sobriety, of drunkenness, with such clarity? In those early days of marriage when we scarcely drank, where a bottle of wine given to us as a gift would sit for so long on top of the fridge it would gather dust before we thought to open it? Did I notice the partying that surrounds everyday life for so many people? The weekly, sometimes three-times-weekly happy hours of my colleagues? The fountain of alcohol in my parents’ home? The casual remarks that begin so many stories–“I was lit/wasted/drunk when…”?
Did I have this sense and sensibility before we built up, day by day, a nearly-irreversible pattern? Did I hear, see, taste, smell, FEEL like I do now, one month in?
I can’t quite remember, or I don’t want to fully admit, that the time before and the time after won’t be similar. Like getting married or becoming a parent. There’s no going back. There’s no way I’ll ever be the same.
There’s only sense. Taste. Touch. Smell. Sight. Sound.
And sensibility. Sensitivity.
Sense. Sensibility. Sensitivity. Quite the elixir for a good Austen novel; or, better, the book that will carry me through parties and streets and football games and morning drives with a clarity I never want to lose again.
i want this captured
to remember this evening
(dark, icy outside)
not the budget talk,
the back talk, the endless talk
sucking life from days
this. this song, this spin,
this moment of childhood.
ice the sweet playground
no darkness. no cold.
warmth found in sisters’ giggles
that silence all talk.
scheduling request
based on lawsuits they have lost
adds work to my plate
there’s no equity
for teachers, kids, or parents
trying to get by
so i’ll wake early
make gradebooks for fake classes
and do twice the work
i just want to know:
who has time to litigate
with kids in their life?
questions unanswered
to close a winter Monday
just sprinkled with sun
thievery on kids
with granted Christmas wishes:
a new kind of low
scooter happiness
snatched from public library
while books stole our hearts
between this and puke
and sis stuck in Kentucky
(in snow of all things)
this week weighs heavy
for this mom, sister, teacher
(no end to winter)
but the sun was high
and we’re rich with two jobs now
(solved our scooter blues)
and we have love here
stolen from youth to old age
given to these girls
burst from these dark days
of post-holiday winter
news to change a life
(or ten thousand lives)
cause that’s how many she’ll touch
in her tenure here
this comes full circle
(the young-mother sacrifice,
the risky Spain year)
to work with passion
to be led with compassion
to love, love my school
it’s all i’ve wanted
thirteen years waiting for strength
to be my leader
i’d like to break free
like our DNA pea lab
(alcohol release)
they questioned this choice
(this isn’t science class, Miss!) yet their eyes were bright
bright eyes keep me sane
when dark thoughts hover so close
to this extraction
they see where love is
hidden in cells’ nuclei
ready to break free
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