Work: The empty hour

Just before the school year starts I make a flurry of preparations that feel as essential as taking one last deep gulp of air before diving underwater. The actual provisions made vary from year to year, but I usually realize in retrospect that they lean more toward the bizarre than the necessary.

A couple of Augusts ago I spent an afternoon making buttermilk biscuits from scratch, which I froze for the girls' breakfasts despite the fact that they had never before shown any interest in eating such a thing. Naturally, they refused to touch them. This year I loaded up on jumbo sized bottles of hair product. I also stocked up on ponytail holders for the girls, and, inexplicably, little plastic barrettes, which I have never used or wished to use in their hair before last week.

After the first week of school, it is clear to me that my preparations have once again been misguided. If this week is any indication, I will actually have ample time to buy shampoo. In fact, since Little E's pick-up time at her new daycare is an hour later than it was at her old one, I am left with 75 vacant minutes between work and pick-up. It feels like enough time to concoct my own shampoo from scratch or braid my head up in corn rows.

I should be happy, but I am conflicted about this. Maybe it's because I overheard a co-worker who is also teaching part-time this year explaining that since her children, younger than mine, didn't really need her at home her reduced schedule was really a selfish decision that benefited only her. Maybe it's because everyday last week when I came home, the men who are working on our kitchen smiled and said hello in such a way that the subtext was unmistakable: Why the hell aren't you at work, lady?

When I worked full-time I often felt overwhelmed and deficient in my duties both at work and at home, but I had the solace of martyrdom. I may not have been able to make it to the Hundredth Day of School party in Big E's kindergarten class, I may have had to sneak out of the faculty meeting if it ran too close to bus drop off time, but I knew for sure that I wasn't wasting more than a few minutes a day on myself. Last year I started working part-time and only occasionally felt overwhelmed or deficient, but still I picked up Little E 15 minutes after I got out of work. The pace of my days may have been more comfortable, but there was still little time not earmarked for work or family.

I know could spend my extra hour planning and grading at work, but that would make my salary reduction seem a waste. I suppose I could go to the gym or sit in a Starbucks with my laptop, but doing either of those things in the middle of the day would feel too indulgent. I could stay home and catch up on daytime TV, but surely the kitchen guys wouldn't appreciate that. For now, I'm making sure that we have a healthy store of toothpaste and toilet paper and hoping that with the second week of school will come a clearer purpose for my vacant hour.

Updating

My husband and I spent Thursday night (our first child-free night in months, as the kids were spending a long weekend at my parents') picking out flooring and fixtures with the contractor we recently hired to do some updating in our bathroom and kitchen. As with much of my child-free time, it was neither relaxing nor romantic.

I grew up in a house where for most of my childhood problems from dysfunctional toilets to stalling cars were solved with a trip to the library for the appropriate how-to guide, a fair amount of cursing, and eventually my father's own hands. After our evening with the contractor, I felt stressed and agitated.  My husband, who grew up in a family where every dilemma from an unhung picture to a burnt out taillight was solved by paying someone, asked me what was wrong. 

"I just want him to like me," I told my husband of the contractor, "and also to think I have good taste."

"You don't need to care whether he likes you," he explained patiently, "that's why we're paying him money."

The next morning, I started in on the ambitious redecorating project I had planned for the girls' room. As I set to work transforming a heap of leftover furniture into a new bedroom "set" for their room, I examined my motives for turning a sunny and responsibility-free summer weekend into an episode of Trading Spaces.  I decided that my sudden DIY fervor was driven by a need to prove my own handiness and self-sufficiency so that I might feel better about hiring someone to remove the faux-tile and crumbling vinyl the previous owners left behind.

Later, after we'd filled a contractor bag with the mountain of neglected stuffed animals and torn up board books that would go out with the trash, I announced urgently for the third time since we'd started cleaning out the room, "We need to have another child." 

Calmly, my husband dared me, "Sure."

In that moment, as I imagined rolling back the clock to pregnancy, infancy, toddler years, I realized what it was all about, all my priming, painting, drilling, decoupaging, for goodness sake.

I cannot keep Big E from drifting toward tween-hood, but I can take the bed I slept in through my teenage years, the one whose scrolly white metal and brass accents seemed impossibly glamorous at the time, and spray it a suitably little girl pink for her.

I cannot keep either of my girls from growing out of their clothes, their shoes, their babyhood, their toddlerhood, and, always on my mind lately, their childhood, but I can use chalkboard paint and casters to make personalizable underbed storage of the drawers from the little dresser that held Big E's 2T dresses and footy pajamas.

I cannot change the fact that Little E outgrew her toddler bed (or that we admitted this to ourselves about a year late), but I can paste her big sister's old headboard with cute puppies and kittens and varnish it over and over to convince myself that she will always love cute doggies just as she does now.

And the butterfly wall decals that I affixed above Big E's bed.  I wish that I could say that they are about embracing transformation or something equally lovely, but really they are about the constant scorekeeping between the girls, the arguing and accusing and fit-throwing that has me feeling like the kind of angry, yelling, furrowed-brow mother that I had never planned to be.  These butterflies are about how miffed I knew Big E would be by Little E's dogs and the frustration that I channeled into my vise grip on the handle of the race car cart as I pushed the squealing, squabbling girls through the endless Home Depot trip to stock up on spray paint and casters and drawer pulls.

Chalkboard paint and decoupage medium won't keep my kids from getting older every day, just as mourning the passage of time won't guarantee that I appreciate each moment I'm in. And having a baby to reset the ticking clock won't forestall all the growing and aging and changing.

And besides, where would he sleep?

Work: Final Assessment

A co-worker has a cutesy wooden plaque in her classroom that is decorated with the red apples and proclaims the three best things about teaching to be June, July, and August. I hate its sorority-style dot letters and the sentiment feels crass, but I cannot deny that it's mostly true. Of all the great rewards of teaching, one of the greatest is that every year has a distinct end and plenty of time to reflect and prepare for the next beginning.

Usually at year's end I have a long list of things I feel I must accomplish before the next school year begins.  The list is usually daunting enough to paralytic and I rarely accomplish more than a few of the things that seem so important when school is still in.  This year feels different, probably because I spent 40 percent less time at work.

It is really hard to find fault with the part-time schedule that allows me to find myself enjoying this at 1:00 on a Wednesday during the school year:

And, yet, naturally I can find some fault with it.  For one thing, this is where I've been relegated as a trade-off for my choice to spend my afternoons on the beach: 

My desk is located not in a classroom decorated with the witty plaque of my choice but in a glorified supply closet surrounded by castoff overhead projectors and the toilet plungers that stood in as javelins at the freshman class Greek Day a few years ago. Every year in June, strange bugs breed in the fluorescent light fixtures in my little closet and then fall from the ceiling to the floor where they inevitably get turned on their backs and spin pathetically as they noisily beat their wings in vain attempts to right themselves.

There's probably a metaphor there, but I don't like to think about it.  I do know that much as I loved this year and hope that next year measures up, I did find myself frustrated at times.  Recently, I had a huge fight with my husband about fudgesicles, more specifically his lack of wonder and appreciation at the homemade fudgesicles I had dreamt up and prepared for the girls.  You see, when he walked in at the end of his workday to see me in the middle of a giant kitchen project he looked to me more wary than impressed or fascinated.  I took this to mean that he was either annoyed by my mess, bothered by my spending money that I wasn't earning on high end fudgesicle ingredients, disdainful of the level of idleness that would even prompt someone to undertake such an inconsequential project, or some combination of all of those. I now realize with some embarassment that I may have read a little too deeply into this.

After I had stewed in my anger at his response for a night and then railed at my baffled husband about it for several hours the next day, it occurred to me that my ghost-like status at work just might make me a little attention-hungry and praise-needy.  I also realized that not earning a full-time salary has caused me to feel unsteady in the balance of power in our household and in my relationship with my husband.

I'm working part-time again next year, and I'm still happy about that,but I recognize that in shedding the burdens and stresses of full-time work I also lose some of the sense of worth and purpose that I didn't even realize I was getting from it at the time. Right now I'm just focusing on June, July and August, but finding a way to avoid strife over frozen treats --even if they are homemade-- is definitely on the list for next year.

Work: Breaking up is hard to do

Though I normally tune out when someone starts recounting a dream, I need to share one that I had a few nights ago.

I was at Little E's daycare waiting for some sort of student show to begin and I was angry.  The show, it seemed, was delayed and I was sitting cross-legged and sullen in a child-sized chair.  Head cocked, I glared at the center director and snapped my gum impatiently as she smiled politely and offered a continous stream of awkward apologies and acknowledgements of my patience, all while the rest of the parents squirmed in their little seats at the tension.  The dream ended when I stood up and announced that I would be heading out to the lobby to make a phone call --to our new daycare.

I didn't need an analyst to tell me that I was feeling anger toward the daycare; I'd spent enough of my waking hours stewing over the misunderstanding with Little E's registration for next year to be well aware of that.  I did think it was a neat trick of my subconscious, though, to bring together all of my personae in one room.

There was my crazy mom side, the one I keep in check almost always, the one who comes out primarily when I recount for my husband what I should have said in any number of situations.  In the gum cracking and cocked-head glaring was my inner bitchy 15-year-old, a version of me that I find myself in much closer touch with than many women my age simply because of my everyday proximity to a fair number of sullen teenagers. The director, though the object of my crazy self's rage, was also me in a sense, the teacher trying frantically to figure out what to say to mollify the seemingly irrationally angry parent. My polite and reasonable everyday self that works so hard to squelch the crazy mom side was present, too, in the form of the other parents in the room.

In thinking through my concerns about Little E's daycare, I've been feeling all awhirl as my various selves weigh in on how best to manage.  While crazy mom gets all feral at the first inkling that someone might be treating her baby unfairly, her more rational, albeit somewhat cynical counterpoint, the realistic teacher points out that Little E is not the only child in the daycare and not every parent request can honored nor can every child's needs be expressly catered to.  Still, the sulking teenager thinks the whole thing is so not fair, and is thoroughly pissed off at the director's power trip after we've been sending our kids there for six years now.  And while my reasonable everyday self grits her teeth at the shoddy treatment in the face of six years worth of tuition, she plasters on a tense smile because she knows that for now she still has to leave her kid with these people every day for the next couple of weeks.

Being a mother has been both a help and a hindrance at work; though I'm much more sympathetic and understanding than I was before I had kids, my commitment to the job is limited by my devotion to my family.  Similarly, being a teacher has both helped me in interacting with my daughters' teachers by giving me some insight as to their viewpoint, and it has also hurt at times when I've hesitated --sometimes at my kids' expense-- to be the difficult parent that I myself dread dealing with at work. 

In this case, reasonable me won out for the most part, though my teenage self was in evidence insofar as I chose to phone in my daycare breakup just as I did my high school breakup, though with much less name-calling and without a pre-written script and an audience of girlfriends urging me on.  I was pleasant but firm in explaining my decision to remove Little E from the program, and I only let crazy mom out when I reenacted for my husband what I would have said had Little E not been sitting right next to me when I called.

In all, I felt good about the way I handled it. Which is not to say that I can promise there won't any glaring or gum snapping when I go in to pick up Little E on her last day.

It's probably childish that I want to share this picture of Little E enjoying the superior playground at the new daycare with the director of her current daycare.  But would it really be a break up without a little pettiness?

Work: Those days that sting

When Big E was a baby she attended the teen parent daycare in the school where I taught at the time.  Every morning I would file into a classroom turned nursery with the teen moms, all of us toting backpacks and babies, and I would hand over my firstborn to a daycare staff that I knew had decades of experience and the patience and kind nature to not only spend the day on the floor playing with babies but to build trusting relationships with the high school-aged mothers, as well.

I knew that I'd be down to feed my daughter her applesauce at lunchtime, and that if I didn't run into her and the other babies riding their big red buggy through the corridors, a student or co-worker would and I'd get a full report.  Still, every morning of those first months of working motherhood when I'd hear her Separation Anxiety-fueled cry as I walked up the stairs to my classroom I would marvel in horrified fascination that as my heart figuratively broke, I could literally feel the smart of each stab of her gasping cry.

I would arrive at my classroom, usually late and with a class's worth of freshmen sitting cross-legged on the floor waiting for me, and I would suffer through the visceral sting brought on by those cries. I was too wounded to absorb a student's  heavy sigh or exaggerated eye roll as easily I would have in my pre-baby days, and everything felt so much harder than I'd calculated it would.

Time has helped to lessen the frequency of those days that sting, and this year's part-time schedule has helped even more.  But still, there are occasionally those days and yesterday was one.

On Wednesday night my husband attended Little E's Pre-K teacher conference and found that her teachers were not noting the progress in her fine motor skills that we and her occupational therapist had seen.  He also learned that through a series of miscommunications on both ends, we had not registered her for a slot in the class we'd planned for her to be in next year and so our only option would be for her to repeat this year's curriculum, during which, I suspected, she would continue sit quietly and be overlooked. After I got all crazy on the phone with my husband, I tried be less crazy on the phone with the center director.  She spoke in sympathetic tones and promised to look into the registration situation, but I got off the phone feeling no better and found myself lying awake at 2 a.m. berating myself for warehousing my child in a place that was convenient for me but not all that great for her.

I went into work feeling as if I'd betrayed my daughter by sending her off that morning to the place that had angered me to tears the night before. Little E knew nothing of this and she is pretty much okay with the daycare, but lately I  suffer even the smallest slight to her like a slash at my weakest point and so I got to work rubbed raw, too severely abraded to weather a snide comment, stray giggle or nagging e-mail.  But just as I cannot come home from a bad day, curl up in a ball on the floor and tell the children, "Work sucked today. Now leave me alone," I really cannot explain the trouble with corporate childcare or the crippling guilt of working motherhood to a roomful of 16-year-olds.  I had to play through the pain, but I knew I was hobbled.

There are countless women who manage this balance with more children I have and more important and time-consuming careers than mine.  It seems, though, that no matter how I try to make it work, both sides of my equation are somehow diminished. Yesterday I tended to my wounds by shopping and drinking frappuccinos with Little E, fabulous parenting if ever there was.  But I also fought on, setting up visits at two other childcare programs for next week. 

Flawed as I may be at work and at home,  I can only keep trying to get it right.

Work: The graduation speech I won't ever give

There is just over a month until graduation, and I stand before the students in my English 12 class gushing about the I-Search paper, our department-wide senior project.  You come up with your own question --about anything you want to know!  You tell your own story about where you looked for answers and what you found!  This paper is about you!  I'm selling it, but they aren't buying.

Because I really like every one of the 24 students in that class, I find all the lethargy and apathy, the heads resting on desks and fingers texting below desks, endearing rather than maddening.  My fondness for them may also explain why this year more than any other I've thought about my own senior year.

One vivid memory from those dwindling days is of sitting in my English class with an open copy of Light in August on my desk. It was just after lunch and the windows were open, the lights were dimmed, a mower hummed outside. Our desks were arranged in a circle that wrapped from where my teacher stood at his lecturn.  He rattled off analysis, and I mechanically entered into the margins gems like JC=Jesus Christ. 

When I sat down later to write my essay, all those notations may as well have been in Aramaic because, though years later I would strain to remember all my teacher had shared in order to pass it on to my own students, I hadn't really been in that classroom.  My head was gone from that place; it dwelled in the uncertainty of my prom plans, the dread I felt at the final pathetic death throes of my first serious relationship, the anxiety that oozed from my ridiculous need to keep secret my weekend job at McDonald's.  But mostly, I had moved on to college, which I just knew would be the answer to everything.

My students have moved on, too, but had I caught them back in January when they were still wholly present, I might have told them a couple things I learned when I was in their place. 

First, I could have told them that as much as they saw graduation as an escape, they would never fully leave here because this place would never fully leave them.  Despite the 10-hour drive, leaving home put no distance between me and the insecure high school girl who'd worried what her friends would think when her father pulled into the school parking lot seemingly jammed with Mercedes and picked her up in his rusted Ford Escort.  Yet, from my vantage point 500 miles away I was for the first time able to see that my parents' sweat and sacrifice was at least as responsible for my success as my note-taking and paperwriting and I cherish that to this day.

I could also have told my students not to cling too tightly to that mental image of college they've been chasing for the last four years. That day in English class I imagined college to be a beer-soaked bacchanal, and every weekend when I worked my secret job at McDonald's I'd bare the sighs and eye rolls of unappreciative customers by surreptitiously crushing their burgers as I bagged them and muttering under my breath Someday I will buy and sell you. 

In the end college was both so much less and so much more than I could have predicted.  There was, of course, beer, enough for a freshman 20, for a sagging GPA, and some situations dangerous enough to make me consider homeschooling my own girls for college. Truthfully, all that partying was a lot of fun at times, yet I know that in my dogged pursuit of the college experience promised me in movies and on tv I missed out on a lot of actual experiences.  And I never did end up buying or selling anybody; instead I met the man I would marry, convinced him to follow his heart and teach history to high schoolers instead of marching grimly into the world of business, and --to the surprise of the girl who zoned out in English-- decided that my own best fit was in the classroom.

Be open to anything, I could have told them, but make sure that you hold on to something.  Even as I write this, it sounds familiar, and it's possible that someone said it to me back then.  There was no shortage of advice.  My teachers, my parents, other people's parents, old men on scholarship boards, I recall them all telling me things that I could clearly see they considered very important.  I smiled politely, nodded gravely and listened to not one word, and for the same reason my students could care less about the I-Search: I already had the answer.

Even if I could break through my students' pre-graduation haze and force them to take heed, I wouldn't.  Right now, they all have the answer.

I really like them, and I want them to be able to enjoy that feeling for the few months it lasts.

Work: Slipping under

Third quarter grades are due on Wednesday and due to some very poor planning on my part, I find myself buried in essays, tests and reading logs.  Unlike my college years or even my pre-motherhood days of teaching, I cannot put the rest of my life on hold while I get my work done and I'm starting to feel like I'm slipping under without a breath.

In dealing with the stress, I initially turned to an old standby: simmering hostility.  I'm not proud to admit that yesterday I spent over an hour arguing with my husband about the sad state of his undershirt, which it seemed at the time, was a huge personal insult to me and an unflattering reflection of the state of our marriage.  Not a great day.

Today I went for a different approach.  I've been reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  Yes, it's been out forever and I'm still not sure whether it's annoying or worthwhile, but anything is better than stewing over undergarments so I am borrowing one of her "Twelve Commandments": Act the way you want to feel.

And so instead of acting like someone who wants to pluck out her eyes with a dull pencil rather than read one more analysis of the significance of water imagery in Annie John, I am acting as if grading stacks of essays as Little E climbs on me and insists that I be her mommy elephant is a truly relaxing way to spend an afternoon. 

Instead of indulging the anxiety I feel about getting these grades completed and entered on time, I am pretending that I'll have it done with time to spare.

Instead of hyperventilating at the thought of continuing to plan for and execute my classes and parent meetings in the midst of this, I am telling myself that this is more than manageable.

Instead of admitting to myself that I have no time to play on the Internet while 24 reading logs await, I am boldly writing a (rather weak) blog post.

I am acting the way I want to feel. Until Wednesday afternoon when it's all over and I admit to myself that I was really, truly slipping under.

Update: I have to admit, it actually worked: I finished even earlier than I'd hoped.  As it turns out, while acting as if I have it all under control may feel like a big effort, it is far less time-consuming than making everyone around me miserable.  I tried that trick again today when I set out for a three mile run but decided halfway through to act like someone who really loves a five-miler.  Sure, I gave up the act and called it a day at 4 1/2miles. But still...

Work: Strong Language

To walk down a crowded high school corridor is to visit a Babel of bad words.  The cacophony of curses that bounces off the cinder block walls during the morning locker rush shows more creativity and attention to word craft than any student-penned sonnet I've read in 10 years.

I should be offended, but the truth is I love bad words.

This wouldn't be a problem if I were a stand up comedian or long-haul trucker, but I am a high school teacher and so while I spend my days awash in profanity I am strictly forbidden from indulging myself. 

Earlier in my career the requisite restraint actually bled over into the rest of my life.  When Big E was born, I spent the final eight of my twenty-four hours of unmedicated labor at the birth center, and though by the end I was chanting over and again to the midwife, "I'm dying; you're killing me," I never once used a swear word in the birthing room.

Three years deeper into my career, I gave birth to Little E, again unmedicated.  This time, though, I did let the s-word slip just once as I tried to express to the labor nurse the intensity of one particularly effective contraction.

And now?  Well, I may indulge a little too frequently.  My husband, as if trying to reduce the profanity footprint of our household has gone all Ned Flanders on me.  Last spring, he injured his ankle playing soccer and told me that it "hurt like holy heck."  I took this to be about a two on a pain scale of one to ten and was only mildly sympathetic.  I felt bad when an x-ray a few weeks later showed that he'd chipped the bone but consoled myself by noting that I'd have been a better nurse if he'd communicated more effectively.  Free-floating bone fragments are more properly categorized as hurting "like goddamn f*@k." At minimum.

I try hard not to reveal my trashmouth side to the girls.   Yet when I was still sleep-deprived and hormonal from Little E's arrival, I must have let one slip because one day in a fit of pique Big E, then just over three, turned to me, glared and announced coldly, "You're a f*@king."  I gasped in horror and watched a deep satisfaction well up within her as she enjoyed my shock.

I mention all of this because I am starting The Catcher in the Rye with my two sophomore classes and thus nearing the day that comes in every school year in which literature compels me to unleash a string of profanity on my students, and by that I mean the infamous Chapter 25 and its five f-bombs. 

Where normally I dance euphemistically around swear words and adult content in class, in this case the wording is essential to the novel and the narrator's voice and because I love this book and want my students to as well, I often read it aloud to them. And so each year I find myself welling up with a little satisfaction of my own as I watch my students' shock at seeing their mild-mannered English teacher use such language without turning to dust.

Over the years, reactions have varied.  Some students blush.  Some want to analyze those particular pages in great depth so as to prolong the swearing.  Last year, when I read the chapter during a particularly frustrating time in my career, my sympathetic students responded with encouraging nods and a smattering of applause.

This year, though, I considered not reading it.  With my new part-time schedule, the frustration and anxiety that I used to feel about balancing everything has pretty much dried out and my new relaxed, satisfied outlook on work and life in general makes the thought of saying the f-word to a roomful of 16-year-olds feel irresponsible and a bit tawdry.

But, then I thought some more.  Life is short and swearing is fun.  So, why the f*@k not?

Work: The saddest chore in the house

The first time I had to clean out Big E's drawers, when she was a few months old and too big for her doll-size newborn sleepers and onesies, I balked at deciding what should stay and what I could give away.  Battling through lingering post-partum haze, I squelched the piercing sob that crept up the back of my throat by neatly folding every last tiny sweater and little dress, every stained kimono shirt and mismatched sock and packing them all away in a big plastic tote. 

I planned to use every single item again one day and so through careful folding, packing and labeling, I managed to avoid acknowledging that Big E and I were leaving a place to which we'd never return.  She'd never again be a fuzzy-headed, scrunched-up infant and I --for better or worse-- would never again be an awed and anxiety-ridden, sleep-deprived mother in her first weeks on the job. I was covering my ears and singing I-can't-hear-you-I-can't-hear-you to the ticking of the clock. Even at the time, I sort of knew that.

I had to face the futility of it all when Little E was about 6 months old.  Not only did she have drawers stuffed with outgrown clothes of her own, but in the basement I had a hulking fortress of plastic totes stuffed with hand knit sweaters and ratty burp cloths from Big E's babyhood.  I steeled my nerve and tore through it all in a trance, limiting myself to just a few remaining tubs. 

Afterwards, my husband had to drive with me to the yellow donation bin. I couldn't bring myself to be the one to heft up those bags and drop them away for all eternity.  For months after, my face would get hot and my throat would close up every time I thought about those bags that looked like sacks of trash but were really just the most important few years of my life to that point.

Alas, our house is tiny, the girls' dressers are Ikea flimsy, and I had to do some purging this week.

If it were just fleecy sweatpants and flowered dresses, souvenir t-shirts and adjustable waist blue jeans, I could manage.  I would have no problem passing them on to a friend's daughter, giving them up to a little girls whose parents can't afford footy pajamas, or even (if my father's claims about those donation bins are to be believed) allowing them to be cut into rags and sold by the pound for industrial cleanup.

They're not just clothes.  They are seasons, months, minutes of my girls' childhood that we won't see again. Embedded in their worn cotton knit are all the moments that have passed.

I can almost live with losing the important ones, the first day of school dresses and Christmas pajamas, the ones that got plenty of attention, that have been properly appreciated and photographed.  It's the little moments that are really gone. Little E calling me the mommy dog and she's my puppy curling up next to me in my bed while I try to sneak an afternoon nap --who even remembers what she was wearing, but I'm likely tossing it.

The blown moments that I won't get a re-do on kill me, too.  I don't remember which jeans and t-shirt Big E had on when I snapped at her for asking me what was for dinner --unleashing on her anger likely meant for myself-- but I do wish I could go back and take the deep breath I so sorely needed.  The jeans are gone, along with my chance to get that moment right.

It should be a lesson to me, all this angst over the clothes.  But, of course, I won't remember to cherish every second, to behave myself admirably in every minute.  Even if I did, the clothes would still get outgrown and the time would still pass. 

And I would still mourn the loss.

Work: The sick day paradox

A couple of weeks ago, a spot at the junction of my neck, back and shoulder started to hurt.  It kept on hurting and hit its peak earlier this week, when the tiniest move in the wrong direction resulted in a screamingly urgent shot of pain that made me think for an instant that my head was being wrenched off.  My husband urged me to take a sick day.

As if it were that simple.

At the beginning of each school year, I am allotted 15 sick days and they accrue from year to year. With young children in school and day care there have been years when I've had to take an embarrassing number of days, but this year I've lucked out and only had to take one. You would think that would make it an easy decision.  And yet it's so much more complicated.

First, there is the reality that Strep Throat, Stomach Flu and Pink Eye lurk just around the corner.  Because I never know when I'll wake to a feverish child or get the dreaded call from the daycare during my workday, I must be judicious with my sick days.  When deciding whether to spend a day on my own health, vomit is usually the gold standard.

My neck started hurting after a day at the mall.  The pain was particularly excruciating when I did the leaned back head tilt rear view-mirror-lipstick-check that is reflexive every time I get in the car.  So....shopping accident?  Vanity-induced repetitive use injury?  Considering that I only missed two days of work last year during the week the girls and I suffered from H1N1, I had trouble considering the neck pain worthy of a day.

Calling in sick is often more work than it's worth.  I spend as much time planning lessons for a day I'm not there as I do for a day that I am, and then I have the pleasure of returning to deal with the fallout of whatever went on in my absence.  There's nothing like starting the day by reading an angry substitute's report. Phrases like "completely disrespectful" and "some of the worst behavior I've seen" are particularly jarring at 7 a.m..  

Add to that the fact that my part-time schedule means that a sick day is only a partial break as Little E must be picked up at noon, the reality that sitting around my chore-neglected home is hardly restful, and the ego-driven sense that it is irresponsible --unfair even-- to deny my students even an hour of my skills and knowledge.

I opted to power through and skip the sick day, and my neck seems to be on the mend.

It started feeling better right around the time that I decided to take a personal day tomorrow. So much less complicated.

Work: And now I know...

I have been a teacher for ten years now, and in that time I have attended many special education meetings for my students, so many, in fact, that I assumed that I knew pretty much all there was to know: the jargon, the protocol, the flow charts. 

And then I found myself on the other side of the conference table.

Two weeks ago my husband and I sat in a special education meeting for Little E, the result of an evaluation she'd had with the school district's occupational therapist after her pre-school teachers had echoed my own concerns about her fine motor skills. 

I knew from my time on that side of the table that the people who sat across from me were professionals there to do their jobs, which, ultimately, was to help my child. Still, I couldn't ignore the fact that they were also there to tell me that she was decidedly flawed; worse, I was there to agree with them. 

Committing this betrayal while my daughter played happily at home filled me with a gnawing guilt.  This feeling was compounded not only by my mental list of the ways I'd already failed my child (pacifier, bottle, overzealous swaddling, liberal TV policy, extended period of denial), but also by my understanding that every day mothers cared for grown children with the needs of infants, slept on cots in their children's hospital rooms and birthed babies who would never take a breath. I was pretty sure that all of them handled their circumstances with more grace than I'd managed upon learning that my daughter was really not good at coloring.

Yet I doubt any of this internal mess was visible from the other side.  I knew my role in this meeting: small talk about the weather, conscientious note-taking, studious head-tilting and clarifying questions.

The occupational therapist who had evaluated Little E read from her report.  I knew from having been there that the people on the clean and clinical side of the table could separate the challenge from the child.  The fine motor delays that the evaluation had revealed were simply a problem to be solved and we were there to determine the best course of action.  But from my side, the view was a little hazier and the distinction not quite as simple.

Since the day of the evaluation when I'd sat at that very same conference table and watched my daughter, grim-faced with determination, fail to color properly, to cut with scissors properly, to form a letter, lace a card or trace a line properly, I had struggled with a measure of grief.  I wasn't exactly grieving for Little E, who was still the same sweet and silly, delightful and exasperating girl she had been before that day.  I grieved more for the fact that so early I had to retire the notion that she would travel the clear path I had imagined for both my daughters.  I grieved for knowing from experience that in school achievement is measured with pencil and paper, that preparation for standardized tests starts in kindergarten, and that none of this would come as easily to her as I wanted it to.

As the meeting neared its end, the chairwoman turned to the flow chart that is used to determine a child's eligibility for services.  From sitting so many times on the other side of the table, I knew that this was a matter of legality, of filling out paperwork and applying the appropriate jargon so as to get on with the real work of fixing problems and helping children.  She read aloud:  Is there a disability? Yes.  What type? Physical.  I felt my husband's hand on my knee.  My breath stuck in my throat, my stomach lurched, my head swam.

And I knew then that this was more than words and paper, jargon and protocol.  I knew then that despite my ten years on the other side of the table, there was a whole lot that I didn't know.

Work: Useless time sucks for wasted days

In the January issue of Real Simple magazine, there was an extensive list of "mini chores" that the editors suggested you could use to occupy a spare five minutes for "that juicy accomplishment buzz."  These tasks included things like tossing three old items from your fridge, dusting your houseplants, and creating an emergency kit with bottled water, flashlight and canned goods.

With all of the snow days we've had lately, I've had enough free time to alphabetize the contents of the refrigerator and grow houseplants from seed. However, the fact that I still own a magazine that I bought out of desperation a month ago for a flight that I didn't actually get to take, suggests that I'm not mini chore-oriented (especially since one item on the list instructs the reader to eliminate half of her magazine stack). 

You, on the other hand, may be the kind of hyper-efficient gal who spends her last free five minutes zipping around the house with a small can of white paint, making touch-ups as needed, per the list.  If so, you don't need Real Simple; you need to relax. Allow me to be of service with these useless time sucks, gleaned from my most recent snow day:

• Make elaborate plans and execute them poorly.  You might, for example, promise your children that you'll make homemade playdoh, though you actually have no expertise in this area.  Use an untested recipe from the Internet, so as to avoid success in your endeavor.  Attempt to salvage the sticky mess that results by baking their haphazard creations into a hot blobby mess.  Voila! You've created both a mess and more clutter.

• Plan an unfeasible escape.  If you are like me, your vacation budget is minimal at best.  This should not stop you from shopping airfares to Bali.  Do exhaustive research: plan outings, compare villas, deliberate over whether you should rent a car or just hire a driver.  Most importantly, convince yourself that you not only deserve this trip, you practically require it.  Consider it a medical necessity, as you are clearly vitamin D deficient. Have faith that your sense of entitlement alone will pay the bill.

• Build resentments.  I find that winter in New England is the perfect setting for this, but I suppose it could work elsewhere.  My method: find someone from a climate less punishing than your own (if you're in my neck of the woods, this includes pretty much everyone but the Inuits), notice how much happier/healthier/all-around better he or she looks than you.  Look at your own see-through-living-under-a-log skin and squishy middle.  Think about how much easier it would be to look as good as Mr./Ms. Rosy Glow if you had access to some decent produce or had been able to leave the house in the past couple of months.  Direct your anger at him or her.  (Helpful hint: You could do this with a copy of People, but I like to personalize it by fixating on the Facebook friend who keeps posting radiant shots of her healthy active life in Florida.  Like I don't know that she has totally capped her teeth since high school...cheater.)

• Compile a list of grievances.  The resentments that you've constructed in the previous exercise are a great segue here.  The fact that my only outdoor activity is digging a dog latrine in snow higher than my knees while others are providing photographic evidence of frolicking in shorts --that makes the list. You should also think about any naggingly incomplete home repairs, recent failures or disappointments, mistreatment at the hands of co-workers and/or service staff... Make sure you don't leave anything out.  You want an accurate catalogue of the bleakness that is your life.

• Ponder your failures.  Here's an example: After grimly digging a giant dog toilet in the backyard, I make hot chocolate for the girls.  Little E dissolves in sobs and recriminations, because, apparently, she doesn't care for the mug I've chosen.  Big E repeatedly points out to me that Little E has just said "hate," which, in case I have forgotten, she is not to say.  Clearly, as their mother, I am responsible for these foibles in my offspring.  I think about all the ways that I've failed them and try to decide which of these spawned these particular behaviors.  To kill some more time, I fret about how these little quirks will present themselves in adulthood.

• Lament your wasted time. There's little sense in frittering away a day if you're not going to spend some time mentally berating yourself for your lack of productivity.  Think of all of the things you could have accomplished with this time.  Look around at the mess in your house, but don't pick it up.  Instead, spend the remaining time asking yourself why you are so profoundly lazy, resenting those responsible for the mess or anyone else who has failed to address it, and amending your anguish over the enormous pigsty that your home has become to your list of grievances. 

If, when you've completed these steps, you find that you still have some time on your hands, get online and consult the long-term forecast to see when you can expect the next wasted snow day.  If you're anywhere near me, it shouldn't be a long wait. So maybe you should get on that emergency kit.

Work: Choosing now over later

A few weeks ago, I found myself at the end of a long line in the copier room at work.  Just as I began to settle in for the wait, an unfamiliar sensation washed over me. 

I folded the paper in my hand, turned on my heel and strode to the other end of the building.  That unaccustomed feeling, it turned out, was decisiveness and nerve, and soon I found myself in my program coordinator's room, stating my case for keeping my part-time position next year.  I'm pretty sure that one or two of my co-workers are hoping for my reduced hours next year and I'd been quietly fretting about having to return to full-time.  Yet until my sudden copy room flash of boldness and (what felt like) clarity, I'd hemmed and hawed about how and when to stake my claim.

My program coordinator was receptive and reassuring, and I got what I wanted.  I left the room puffed full of triumph and relief. That is, until the door shut behind me and my more typical state of doubt and misgiving took over.

I have loved my part-time schedule.  I've been able to very nearly finish my re-organization of the playroom, cook some impressive dinners, and, yes, even find the time to share my neuroses with strangers on the Internet.  My favorite part, though, is that it has made me feel human again, less torn between my various responsibilities and far less panicked about choosing which among them I can most get away with neglecting at any given moment.  And that is where my doubt comes from.

For my contentedness, my family is giving up 40 percent of my full-time salary and this makes me feel selfish.  We will not take a big vacation this year, we don't eat out too often, and I think we can all live with these things.  We're not saving much, though, and I worry about what will happen down the road.  I also worry about retirement, as my retirement plan is affected by my decreased position.  Will the girls hate me if their college funds are less than robust?  Will I hate the world when I'm dragging myself to work full-time 35 years from now?

Then there's the question of my own ambition...as in whatever happened to that?  There was a time when my parents drove an hour each way to bring me to the high school that would get me into the college that would make me a success.  I'm still making payments on the college loans, but the sort of achievement I dreamed of then is far less important to me now than knowing that I can make it to Big E's school when she presents her project on rainforest butterflies.  I wonder if I'm setting the right example for my daughters and what they'll think of my choices when they get older.

I try to find solace in what they think right now.  A few days after my moment in the copy room, I stood in line at the grocery store with Little E.  She sat in the cart eating a Valentine's cookie from the bakery and asking me her usual endless string of questions about anything and everything that pops into her head, when she stopped, slapped her forehead and marvelled, "I can't believe I get to leave early everyday!"

It was a vote of confidence in my decision that offered me a little glimmer of the strength of purpose that I'd felt that morning in the copy room.  I won't know for years to come whether I was right to choose happiness now over security later --or if that is even the cost.  I can only hope that I won't come to regret it.

Work: Snow Day

When I found out that school would be cancelled Wednesday due to impending snow, I envisioned myself sleeping in, watching the snow fall from the warmth of my living room, and finally tackling that pile of essays that I've been dutifully toting back and forth from work untouched.

When I had this vision, clearly I was in some sort of pre-property owning, pre-child having time warp.  Instead I pulled on my glamorous new boots and spent my day like this:

I forced the family out on a trek to the post-office (and hoped the neighbors didn't alert social services about our marching the kids out into the blizzard).

I dug paths for the dog, which she christened copiously --and disgustingly-- minutes after this photo.

I  made snow ice cream sundaes --harvested nowhere near the dog path, mind you.

I watched the girls play in the snow.

I watched them tire of the snow.



And I helped my husband shovel our driveway out from under wet heavy snow that lay higher than my knee.

All of it, to varying degrees, could be classified work, and yet it was the work that I actually get paid to do that remained untouched all day. 

Then, like a gift from the homework gods, they cancelled school for another day. So, naturally, I spent my time downloading pictures and writing this blog...

Work: Looking a gift horse in the mouth

My students have been really nice to me lately, and their benevolence concerns me.

I've experienced this before.  Years ago, when I returned to work still shaken after travelling to my grandmother's funeral, one student quietly spent an entire class period organizing and arranging every messy, overstuffed cabinet and shelf in my classroom.  In the last swollen, lumbering days of both of my pregnancies, an immediate hush would spread over the room any time I hoisted myself from my chair.  If anyone failed to quiet quickty enough, I could count on someone to come through with an angry hiss, "The baby!"  And of course, there was last year when among the various kind gestures from my students, there were countless back pats and shoulder squeezes.

In my experience, my students' solicitousness is directly proportionate to my own piteousness.  Only I'm not currently mourning, pregnant or fired.  Lately, I'm just a little...batty.  I'm trying to keep up with new curriculum and mountains of grading at work; I'm mounting Big E's dog-themed birthday party complete with homemade puppy cake, dog bone cookies, and tableclothes handstamped with pawprint paths; I'm replicating the same party for Little E this weekend --with the addition of the in-laws and a grilled cheese-themed dinner; I'm shopping for Christmas; I'm writing and losing lists; I'm trying not to think about the untouched stack of Christmas cards that must be addressed; and I'm kind of losing my head. 

The messy collision of work, birthdays and Christmas has me feeling frantic.  I find myself speaking at a pace my seventh grade English teacher once compared to a runaway train.  I am running down hallways and across parking lots, and --because as I am busy lately, I am vain always-- my rapid little high-heeled steps only make me look all the more deranged.

Recently, a student in my senior class cocked her head at me as I fumbled for a pen just before I started class.  "Are you...okay?" she asked, prompting me to launch into a rapid-fire recount of the previous evening's cookie-baking and tablecloth-stamping.  She has gently asked me the same question every day since. 

On Monday, after flying through Act II, scene i of Othello with a class of sophomores, I stopped for a breath and somehow managed to knock over my entire bag full of papers.  I waved off the students who rushed up to help and instead proceeded to tell, from my hands and knees (and like a runaway train), the story of how the dog had gotten into the birthday party trash, then my husband had set the alarm clock wrong, then he stepped in dog vomit, then he walked the dog vomit around the carpet... Since then they have eerily quiet and disconcertingly polite.

This year is supposed to be about equilibrium, but lately I feel like I'm hustling through life trying to balance a heavy tray cluttered with brimming glasses, overcompensating with every attempt and making a mess of everything.  I'm just hoping 2011 brings steadier hands ...and a lighter tray.

Work: On sacrifices and sensitivity

My part-time schedule has made me the Boo Radley of the English Department.

I'm a phantom, slipping out quietly while all of those around me go about their middle of the day business, no longer in meetings where I would have been vital last year, not even copied onto e-mails I might have been sending last year.  Stripped of my own classroom due to my part-time status, I spend prep periods in the windowless department office where the motion-sensored lights shut off so frequently that I've mostly given up trying to keep them on and have learned to make due with the one lonely fluorescent panel that acknowledges me.  Yesterday a co-worker ran into my cave to use the crusty office microwave; she startled when the lights went up and she saw me hunched over a pile of essays in the corner, cringing  from the sudden glare.  Boo.

In the classroom, though, I'm still there.  In fact, I'm feeling better than ever about my teaching because I'm not hassled by building politics or harried by five classes worth of planning and grading.  This makes it easier to live with the fact that I'm feeling vaporized in every other aspect of my career.  The decision to go part-time was not made in the interest of advancement; it was made in the interest of my family and my sanity.

My family is happy with the change.  And yet my sanity is tested.

My latest grievance is with world's lack of consideration for working parents.  I've long resented the lack of story hours and organized parent-child activities outside of working hours, and when Big E started school the stakes grew.  She may not have known that they were missing out on a mommy and me music class, but it's hard not to notice that all the other kids had a mother to wave to at the school Halloween Parade. 

The tipping point, though, came recently.  After I expressed some concern about Little E's lack of coloring skills and her teachers seconded it, I set out to address the issue.  This meant that, after some calling around and a fruitless doctor's appointment, I actually needed to speak with someone in the building where I work.

To admit that there might be any obstacle --no matter how small-- between my sweet daughter and whatever she might possibly want out of the world was excruciating, so the conversation would have been difficult no matter what.  That she spent most of our time together reading from a list of pre-schools attended by current kindergartners and suggesting that though she wasn't terribly familiar with any of them they would all be good alternatives to Little E's current school, which she said diplomatically, was not one they typically recommended, did not help. 

The common denominator in the list of acceptable schools?  They were all part-time programs whose exorbitant rates and unaccommodating hours made them impossible for our family.  I could have pointed out her insensitivity or the fact that Big E spent four years in the same program and is now the strongest reader in her class, instead I added this to the sagging sack of guilt I'd been carrying around since I'd spoken to Little E's teachers.  Drank Diet Coke while pregnant, once accidentally went through the car wash with her window slightly open, sent her to daycare for two and a half years...

My frustration over this issue is probably compounded by my concerns about Little E.  But if someone who works less than five hours a day feels the pinch, what about someone who works ten?

If only some noble-hearted Atticus Finch type could take up the cause...

Work: Flight Plans

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.

Mark Twain said this.  I was introduced to it on an MCAS practice test that I gave my students in my first year of teaching in an urban high school.  I stood in my windowless classroom full of teens, some struggling with poverty others with adjusting to the climate and language of a new country, trying to convince them of the relevance of not only Twain's aphorism but also of this test that would decide their academic fate. I wondered where this experience fell on the range of vacations.  Was this Hawaii or was I in Beirut?

 I alternately, and at times simultaneously, loved and hated what I was doing that year, but I always knew that it was no vacation.  Ten years later, work is no longer the wild ride that it once was.  I have grown more comfortable with my abilities and sharpened my instincts in the classroom.  I had children of my own and recalibrated my priorities.  My students have rewarded me much more often than they've punished me  And still, it is a vocation and never a vacation.

There are things that I love about my job: the students, the chance to read The Catcher in the Rye  on endless loop, the fact that it helps to pay the mortgage.  There are other things that I don't like as much.  The mounds of grading come to mind, along with the general lack of official recognition of my efforts, which when coupled with my duties at home sometimes feel Herculean.  There is also the fact that I am an introvert who cringes at conflict, and I am working in a position that calls daily for hundreds of personal interactions, each fraught with potential for discord and misunderstanding.  I sometimes feel rubbed raw.

Maybe nothing can be a vacation once it is tied to a paycheck.  When I read The Catcher in the Rye, I tell my students to pretend that I am not giving it to them, that they just pulled it off the shelf on their own.  I know that obligation saps enjoyment.

And yet, especially lately, I believe there's more. I just don't know what it is. So I sit here in the terminal, hands folded in my lap, patiently awaiting my vacation flight.  Unfortunately, I am forgetting that I am not only tour director but the pilot, as well.   If I don't get out of my seat, the plane will never pull up to the gate.

I am thinking about drafting some flight plans.

Work: Running away from home

We first set foot in our home a little over five years ago.  We took a perfunctory tour and  surveyed the backyard for a few minutes, where our real estate agent pointed out the possibility of adding a pool, as he had, unprompted, at every showing.  Then we stood in the street conferring with our agent.

We leaned against our car in the blazing July sun and gazed at the house as we told him that we wanted to make an offer.  He, too, stared at the house with its swayback roofline, faded Christmas wreath on the front door, and mouldering pumpkin remains on the front stoop, and asked, "What makes youse guys want this one, of all the places we've looked at?"

Well, we explained, there was the location: five minutes from my new job, across the street from a library and playground, convenient to the highway and in viewing distance of a quaint New England church in which we would never set foot.  But, more importantly, there was the backyard, a large grassy expanse with two huge leafy trees.

He pursed his lips, squinted his eyes, nodded slightly and then threw up his hands and shrugged.  At the time I thought he was conceding our house-buying wisdom, I realize now that he was giving us the international sign for Well, it's your funeral. 

When you are living in a 712 square foot condo with an even smaller shared yard, you never underestimate the value of space.  And when you are sharing that condo not only with your spouse, but your active toddler and hyper-active Boston Terrier as well, you really covet outdoor space.  When you are in this position and yardowners complain to you about the hassle of mowing and the agony of leaf-raking, you feel angry and you absolutely know that you would relish these jobs, that the satisfaction of working your own land would have you happily raking, mowing and trimming every weekend.

Until that is, you actually own a backyard and you realize that you do not revel in its maintenance, but instead find yourself running away from home.  This happened to me last weekend, when at a critical juncture in the landscaping cycle (long grass meets falling leaves), I found myself not mowing or raking, though both are in critical need, but first soccer-cleat shopping with my husband and then crossing state lines to shop a "designer bag replica" flea market so shady that when Big E later developed an itchy scalp I was convinced that she'd picked up an exotic breed of head lice from my new "cashmere" scarf.  All to avoid the yard.

It is, perhaps, because my vision of adulthood is a product of too much television that I imagined that at adulthood I'd be issued a sturdy, symmetrical home with a self-tending lawn. That my reality has turned out so differently, with so many more cracks, leaks, rodents, and, yes, leaves, is hard to accept at times.  It is a lot more work than I had imagined.

I know that I need to come to terms with my burden and deal with the grass and leaves.  But maybe I'll just bulldoze it all and put in that pool.

(Tragic Update:  That itchy head?  It really was lice, and though I cannot comment on their exoticism they sure are proficient at multplying.  This is clearly punishment from the lawn gods for my lack of gratitude.  The irony is that the time I really and truly planned to spend cleaning up the yard this weekend will now be spent combing, laundering, vacuuming, boiling,and bagging. Sweet revenge for condo-dwelling yard coveters everywhere.)

Work: Progress Report

It's progress report time at work.  So, in the spirit of reporting progress, I decided to take a look at how I am faring in my year of balance and despite a slightly bumpy start, it's going well. 

One of my biggest concerns, that shaving two-and-a-half hours off of my day wouldn't justify hacking 40 percent off of my salary, seems unfounded.  I've always noticed that if I take an extra two minuthere es to get Big E and I out of the house in the morning, those minutes seem to somehow repoduce along the way until I'm well more than two minutes behind schedule.  We will inevitably get stuck behind a school bus, my harried rush will cause Big E to cling a little longer at drop-off, the parking lot at work will be choked with other frazzled parents blocking the travel lanes with their own drop-offs, and on and on.

Amazingly, it actually works the same way in reverse.  Those extra two-and-a-half hours are amplified in the same way the two minutes are: fewer hours at work, fewer classes to prep, fewer papers to grade, less time wasted complaining, fewer hours spent panicking, and on and on.

And since my field has taught me that undocumented success is not success at all, here is evidence of my progress:

More playing fetch,

more playing house,

more apple picking,

more bike riding,





more tire riding,




more llama feeding,

more playgrounds,



and even more soccer (because there should always be room for improvement).



Not bad.  Now to work on the less photogenic details that I may have neglected, like more floor-mopping and more toilet-scrubbing...

Work: Caging the beast

At this time last week I suddenly felt myself swallowed whole by a rapidly mounting workload, and I didn't respond well.  I would say I acted like a real baby, but actually the regression was more primitive than that.

As folders of ungraded papers piled up on my desk and vast empty space stared plaintively at me from my lesson plan book, I lost hold of my rational brain and acted on my basest instincts.  I maintained calm at work but went feral at home, lashing out at my family for a rising panic in which they had no role.  My behavior was not unlike that of our semi-vicious Boston Terrier, except that she saves her attack for the outside world.  And we have a cage for her.

I have dedicated this year to balance, and the moment that it felt as if my workload might be toppling me, like a frightened animal, I went into attack mode.  With my husband,  I picked fights over minutiae --arguing both sides, if necessary-- and revisited years old grievances.  With the children, I struggled to maintain a thin veneer of reasonable humanity; of course, they were witness to all of the spousal sniping, the slammed doors and drawers and low-throated growling.  All this while I took care to present as perfectly serene at work.

I am so sorry about all of it and I know I need to fix this or we'll all be miserable. I will reconsider how I manage my workload, but, more importantly, when I feel backed into a corner, I will restrain myself.  Or buy a bigger cage.