childhood

This Is Why I Will Strike

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

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.

Boxes

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

It’s not like when they were little. When getting the Christmas tree brought all the joy and excitement of the season. When they would clamor over each other, fighting for their chance to be the one to put the angel on the advent calendar on Christmas day. When nothing mattered more than preparing for the joys of the season.

Now, lethargically, with little effort and a few forced smiles, they give up on decorating the tree halfway through the ornaments.

“It looks good enough,” they whine. “Can we be done?”

I see that all the large paper and playdough ornaments still sit in the box, their imperfect candy-can cut-outs laying on top of the crumbling Christmas-tree dough.

“But what about these? Your preschool ornaments that you made?”

“They’re too big. They’re not as nice as the other ornaments. They don’t matter.”

“They don’t matter? But you made them for us when you were…”

But I can’t finish. Mythili cuts me off. “We’re not getting rid of them, Mama. Don’t freak out. We’re just keeping them in the box.”

We’re just keeping them in the box. We’re just pretending to smile. We’re just going through the motions of the “magic.”

I don’t even like this holiday. How could I? I wasn’t exactly raised a Christian. I’ve just gone through the motions myself all these years. The lights, the tree, the advent calendar (homemade), the decorating of cookies, the baking of zucchini bread, the holiday cards, the portraits with matching outfits, the pies, the hours waiting in line to waste money on Santa pics, the presents.

Trying to build traditions. Memories. A family.

But now, not even grown, not even gone, they are boxing up their childhoods, their simple joys, their everything I’ve tried to build for them.

No one will ever tell you how hard parenting is because it is impossible to describe. From the midnight collicky cries to the ambivalent teen and everything in between, it is a constant struggle to raise a well-balanced, sentimental, sweet, and loving set of small human beings.

Yet, we keep trying. We keep putting up trees and stringing lights and playing Christmas music and baking cookies and trying to take every ornament out of the box.

We keep hoping that they’ll remember this. These small moments, these annual events, these attempts to win their love.

We keep hoping that they won’t leave us in a box as they grow.

But it is only a small hope.

Drifters for a Day

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

from desert to sea
 in a day’s drive through one state
 (miracles exist)
 
 rainforests between
 to prove heaven lives on earth
 (nature is my god)
 
 we found our daddy
 after cherry shopping; lake;
 beyond evergreens
 
 a driftwood dinner
 no one could have predicted
 in another life
 
 yet here we’ll find sleep
 all together in one room
 at earth’s clouded edge
 
 

Views from the Road

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

The beauty of the road is so much more than views. It is the elevation loss and gain that sneaks up on you as quickly as the road snakes its way along the Snake River.

It is the surprise of the desert that has made its rural-America mark in southeastern Oregon.

It is the spontaneity of stopping at state parks for a peek at history and scenery so breathtaking you feel you’ve stepped into a mini Grand Canyon.

It is the trail our ancestors walked upon that you place your weary soles on now, however twisted and stolen it may be. It is still a silent beauty resting behind a sleepy Americana town, waiting for rediscovery and firsthand learning for three young women.

It is the creek sparkling in the hotter-than-expected northwestern sun, and the quick dip that makes an afternoon sparkle just as brightly.

It is the curve that moves from summit to limitless landscapes, to the expansive end of the Oregon Trail, played out in a quilt of farm fields, and the hope they held for a better life.

The road brings beauty, and within this beauty lies everything you’d expect and wouldn’t expect: children bickering, bits and pieces of trash and clothing piled up in the backseats, state lines that bear no stoppable signs, audiobooks and downloaded movies, snapshots taken from a moving vehicle, trucks that hog both lanes, treeless mountains and endless vineyards, poverty and wealth found behind fences and up on winery hilltops.

The road brings more than views of tall pines, sagebrush-only molehills, and sleepy rivers. It brings us all a new world view where we search for ourselves and find ourselves in each other. Where children find joy in only their siblings’ company, where the road promises a pool at the end of the day and a reality check about small city poverty to remind us of what we have.

Can you see it from an airplane, from a train ride, from a walk down the block?

Never quite like the views you’ll find when you hit the open road. The views of nature, of civilization… of yourself.

You just need one set of keys, a whole lot of gumption, and a pair of soul-searching eyes, and you can find yourself a whole new world view.

The Only Home is Colorado

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

mountain views bring peace
 better than a city day
 our summer freedom
 
 camping in nature:
 reminder of what matters–
 family connections
 
 weekend getaway:
 my moose, their antlers, our love
 better than the beach
 

Refocused

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

with a broken fridge,
 limitations on dry ice,
 and carpool circles
 
 to pick up daughter
 from uncalled-for punishment,
 my Monday sucked ass.
 
 driving home in rain,
 she told me the whole story
 and other teen truths.
 
 then shared her essay:
 perfectly satirical
 (writer at fourteen)
 
 the rain flooded us
 and we laughed until we cried
 knowing that truth hurts.
 

DysFUNctional Forecast

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

one week after snow:
 sunny summer theme park day
 because spring’s fucked up
 

Location:E Cherry Creek South Dr,Denver,United States

Relationship Rules

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

my oldest asks for advice:
 What should I text the boy
 whose number my friend got for me?
 (just a pinch of middle school, relived)
 
 Ask him about his weekend,
 tell him you went skiing,
 ask what his favorite foods are…
 
 In a huff, she stomps out of the kitchen,
 her adolescent heels too stubborn for her old mum.
 
 That is terrible advice!
 I won’t say any of those things!
 
 How many successful relationships have you had?
 (my attempt at middle school banter)
 
 To which the youngest,
 just ten and always listening,
 banters back,
 Technically, Mama, you’ve only had one–your marriage. All the rest were epic fails.
 
 Touché, my smart-alec girls,
 for always knowing the brutal truth

Shards

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

an afternoon wind
 blew in a flurry of texts
 and opened this door–
 
 it knocked down a glass
 from our dishwasher-less rack
 (because all things break)
 
 it sent me spinning
 on my endless carpool trip
 (keeping up with kids)
 
 the sun was shining
 on my student-made pastry,
 unaware of shards.
 
 i swept up pieces,
 circled back to get daughter
 and wash more dishes.
 
 baklava melted
 like rays of afternoon sun
 in each of our mouths
 
 (a reminder that
 gusts of wind, circling drives
 are just shards of days)
 

Cheers to Tears

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

on Monday, a beer
because the cafe was closed
and i needed one

it was a sports bar
and the tears she shed were mine
in goodbye moments

(i didn’t share them–
not then, not out on the street–
only in words. here.)

because i’ve been there.
we have all been there. mothers.
sisters. wives. children.

i should have seen it.
the comings, goings of days,
built on loss and fear.

her tears were my tears.
her daughters were my daughters.
we are all the same.