flawed but authentic

“You are special” “You’re a special mom” “On your special day” the cards say. We all want to be special.

I find my peace in learning that I am not special. I am pretty much the same as everyone else. We all want the same things underneath it all: to be free from fear and from pain. To have our families be well. To be fed, to be housed, to be loved and to love.

In trying to give up my need to stand out and to be important, I find a deep source of compassion and humor. It is when I know how things “should be” that I get into trouble. I have to let them be what they are.

What a ridiculous life! We all fart and poop and show inappropriate body parts by accident and slip and fall and it is ok. It’s ok. We laugh and love and go on.

That’s all for now.

I can’t make all the difference I want to in my job. At least, I can’t always do it with a positive viewpoint. There is enough reality in my life to know that I can’t affect all the change I want to because it is, simply put, impossible. From getting students to see their best possible options to leading teachers into doing what’s best for kids - it’s all a moment by moment career. But, aren’t they all?

So in your jobs and your daily dealings with people I must ask: how do you get through without feeling entirely weary? How do you get up, wash your face, eat your Wheaties, and make it through another day when you don’t see the positive changes you had hoped to make an impact on when the hubris of your youth was your driving force?

I really want to know.

“Private party,” my son said to a kid climbing up the inflatable slide set up at the park for a friend’s birthday.

Uh-UH.

He said the words without hostility. I knew he was only repeating what he’d been hearing the other children say since the party crasher had jumped aboard, but still…uh-UH.

I called him by his first and last name. “Come here.”

“I don’t like you to exclude people,” I said to him. “We don’t do that. It’s not nice to make someone feel left out.”

He looked down. “Okay.”

I thought about telling him that the cool thing to do would be to make friends with the new kid, and then tell the others, “He’s with me.”

But it was a party, not an episode of the Book of Virtues, so I smiled and and let him get back to having fun. He bounced off.

There were a few other parents within easy earshot of my little teaching moment. And though it pains me to reveal to you what a douche I can be, I’ve got to admit, I reared up a little on my moral high horse.

Catch that? We don’t do that.

The hell we don’t.

Not fifteen minutes later, I caught myself having a laugh at someone else’s expense. That moment was also within earshot of others. If they knew me well, and they knew the person who was being chuckled about, and the situation, they might have thought none the worse of me. But to anyone not in on the joke, it would have sounded mean.

As soon as I realized it, I was ashamed. And not because it obviously contradicted my mini-lecture to my son of moments before, either. Oh, no. See, you got that right away. It took me hours to realize that in addition to being a jerk, I am a hypocrite. I was just ashamed of the being-a-jerk part.

I stared at the ground, wishing I could disappear. I stole a cowardly glance around. In my imagination, everyone had heard me snickering. Everyone was thinking what a harsh and hateful bitch I must be. I’m a fraud. I’m no good. I make baby Jesus sad.

Then my son bounded by, and it occured to me to look at my mistake the way I had looked upon his; the way a loving parent looks at your shit when they catch you knee deep in it. 

In my heart I heard the one who brought me here calling me by name.

Hey. We don’t do that. 

Okay. I’m sorry.

Can you feel a smile you can’t see? I believe so.

Now get back to playing.

If anyone had been watching very closely (oh, the conceit of imagining others are listening to every word, watching every step), they would have seen me lift my head, and move on with a little bounce.

I have met with a weekly spiritual study group on and off for a decade. We study “A Course in Miracles,” but I have come to believe that the benefit for the group members is not so much the topic we study as it is in the time we spend together.

I think that just having a safe place to go talk is what is responsible for the real life changes our group members experience. Just knowing that I can lay out the worst parts of me and have other people say “Oh, yeah, I do that, too,” like it is no big deal - that is healing to my soul.

One of the subjects that comes up ALL the time for us is driving. Otherwise sane people seem to have a great deal of difficulty driving without resentment, aggression and hatred.

I have a theory: most of our lives are spent in either public places or in private places. In public, we have one code of behavior. We expect a certain amount of interaction with other people and have subtle unspoken rules to make it happen smoothly. We have to face people and to make eye contact.

At home, we have an expectation that we can have our stuff the way we want it and that no one will barge in and mess with it (unless they are our housemates or family members - and that is a whole subject for a different time). We know how things “ought to be” and we work to keep them that way - whether our perfect picture includes dust-free baseboards or the freedom to leave empty pizza boxes untouched for a week.

But our cars are our little private spaces we take out into the world, and a whole clash happens. Our cars act like our larger bodies and serve as our surrogates as we whiz around at 70 mph. So a threat to our car feels like, and often is, a threat to our physical selves. It is the place where we experience how all of our ideas of how things “ought to be” as they clash with others’ notions.

On the road, we often find ourselves behaving in ways that we never would anywhere else. Insulated from real face-to-face contact, we can act like internet trolls, acting badly and then zipping off, never to see the offended party again.

We say “Drive Carefully” but I want to make a bumper sticker that says “Drive Like You Care.” Like the person in the next car is your daughter, your father, your friend. They might be. I know someone who honked at and flipped off a confused old lady who had cut him off - and then found out that it was his mother. He has never, ever lived that one down.

It is a truth easily identifiable that Education is a difficult place to be. Especially now with political correctness, impossible NCLB standards, and children who learn so differently that it’s easy to blame technology for all those ills. Let me be plain before I explain further in my story: they learn differently, but we are responsible for teaching them nonetheless.  Still, I am flummoxed at our nation’s denigration of our efforts.

I like change, lots of it. For work, for my personal life, and for the learning that accompanies it whether I take it at the time or have to learn the lesson later. My career thus far has spanned teaching English/Language Arts in four different school buildings, one private school, two middle schools, two high schools, and a plethora of different people. During this tenure, I have been classified as a teacher, teacher leader, literacy coach, and administrator. Much of what I learned about myself, then, is that I love to work with the less fortunate, the humble, the ones who crave learning. The biggest difference between teaching at a private school was the sense of entitlement and I’m ever grateful for the learnings I acquired from a simple, old janitor named Allen. When I left that building I digested much of the attitude of those teachers and sorted through it to discover that kids are kids and my job doesn’t change just because the population does.

Leaving that school I went on to work at the highest poverty middle school in our district and gave as much as I gave previously only to discover that for those students there was such an appreciation for my efforts. Their parents expressed it, too, and it was then I studied the amount of triumph of those students was proportionate to how deserving they felt. What a sobering thought, but that’s just the reality of it.

Recently, I ran into two of the private school teachers who asked what I’d been doing in the six years since I had taught with them. I rattled off  the litany of accomplishments and what I’d been busy with and we chatted cordially. We were, it needs to be said, in the middle of a department store and I knew it was the kind of polite conversation one has when catching up with acquaintances.

“So, you went over to teach at School X. Hmmm. How was that?”

Her meaning wasn’t even thinly veiled. She wanted to know, “What’s it like working with poor kids? With lots of Black kids? With those heathens and hoodlums who only come to school to fight and wreak havoc?”

It was to be a polite conversation. This really shouldn’t ruin it, but her tone set my blood to boiling in a matter of seconds. So I began the process of heaping burning coals on her head.

“It was great! I loved it there!”

“Yes, but was it different?”

I hated the way she said that word. Different. It crossed my mind to slap her right upside the head.

“Absolutely not. Twelve year olds at one school are the same as twelve year olds at another. They all have the same basic needs and deserve an education. They are all teachable.”

“Oh.”

Not the answer she wanted, I assume. Not what she hoped to hear that perhaps I feared for my life on a daily basis and that I’d been caught up in a fight or two and had to put someone in a headlock. That was, of course, true. But she was positively dripping with anticipation of hearing this. She nearly drooled to get The Goods On Poor Public Educators.

“So, you left there. Where are you now?”

I was under the impression, what with all her salivating, that she already knew. She had heard that I pretty much followed those Poor Kids to the high school where I am currently a guidance dean so I offered it up to her minus any fanfare.

“Oh. WOW. You’re there?” There was no way she wanted to hide her incredulous response. She reminded me of the viper news reporters chomping at the bit to get a juicy story.

“Yeah, I love it. It’s great.”

“Well, I hear bad things about that place. What are YOUR thoughts on working there?”

While I am ever conscious of the fact that I represent my school, my district, my city, and my career in education I know that I am to always be positive. It pains me to give anyone ammunition with which to shoot all educators. Yet, here I was in the middle of a store browsing the aisles for sweater sets. My arms were full of a couple of outfits and I had yet to try them on and didn’t want this to ruin my day.

But I didn’t even have to reply to her.

Out of nowhere a woman came around the corner. She had been listening to our conversation on the other side of the dress rack and came to confront the woman to whom I was speaking.

“What’s the matter with you!? Am I to understand that YOU’RE A TEACHER? There is nothing wrong with where she teaches or works or whatever she does there. My daughter went there and just graduated and I was skeptical of sending her there because of PEOPLE LIKE YOU who bash everything in this town when you don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you take your ass over there and see for yourself? My kids have gotten great educations at both those schools this lady just mentioned!”

It occurs to me that, obviously, I am This Lady.

But This Lady, the one who rocked my world by coming to my defense and the defense of all whom I care to represent, was now my favorite person on the planet. Would she balk if I kissed her full on the lips? Would she hate it if I picked her up and twirled her around the store? Could I send her on an all-expenses paid cruise to the Caribbean?

This Lady, me, will forever be grateful for that bitch slap moment when I didn’t have to sigh and explain myself ad nauseam about why I do what I do. The relief I felt after watching this stranger unleash on former colleagues was thoroughly satisfying.

To The Lady who saved me from having to defend my passion for educating ALL STUDENTS: you are my heroine. I didn’t even buy a dress or those sweater sets. You also made me restructure all future “polite conversations.”

My old housemate Dana was a flight attendant on those little puddle-jumper airplanes. Her typical day would be something like: San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles International. Los Angeles International to Bakersfield. Bakersfield to San Diego. Little hops with cranky people who were anxious about making their connection in time.

We often talked about how people lose their minds on airplanes. Whether they are afraid of flying, nervous about who they are meeting, sad about leaving, or whatever the stressor may be, people behave in ways on airplanes that they would never do in ordinary life.

 Dana was the recipient of their anger and stress. She was only 21 at the time, a beautiful girl with a radiant smile - she was often mistaken for Keri Russell in “Felicity.” But she didn’t let it get to her. The only time I ever saw her cry about work was because of management, not because of her customers.

 In fact, her company received letters almost weekly telling them what a good job she was doing. One said “Dana is the most wonderful flight attendant I have ever met.”

I asked her how she did it, how she kept her cool in the face of people abusing her all day long.

“I look back and I imagine them all as cranky 2-year-olds,” she said. “I just see them as tired and upset and needing something to make them happy.”

I love that. Now when I see people acting like idiots, I try to remember that they are just acting like their inner toddler. They are lost and out of control in a big, bewildering world where they can’t get what they want and they are acting out.

Hey, it’s worth a try, right?

Have you heard of tiny Melinda Mae,
Who ate a monstrous whale?
She thought she could,
She said she would,
So she started in right at the tail.
And everyone said,”You’re much too small,”
But that didn’t bother Melinda at all,
She took little bites and she chewed very slow,
Just like a little girl should…
…and eighty-nine years later she ate that whale
Because she said she would!!!

“Melinda Mae” from Where the SideWalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein

I’ve been eating a whale in small bites this weekend–tackling little things I’ve put off until they acquired sufficient collective mass to great to be ignored. The beast is comprised of tasks like organizing my tax receipts, filling out cub scout camp applications, small copywriting jobs, and various other things I apparently signed on for.

Procrastination is my lifelong companion. At thirty-eight, I’ve accepted that it is an incurable condition, like alcoholism or diabetes. It can only be managed,  never eradicated. Today I am less inclined to view it as a curse, and more disposed to understand it as a natural offshoot of many positive character traits (creativity, intuitiveness, flexibility). My brain is far-sighted. It’s the nuts and bolts of daily life that are blurry to me. 

I’ve had to learn a trick or two, and I’ve had to learn it, like everything else, the hard way. I’m a gulper, not a nibbler of life, but I’m getting better at taking small bites. When it comes to the good-for-you-but-tasteless bits, anyway.

 And so, this weekend, I started right in at the tail, opening envelopes, pulling files, signing forms, forcing myself to click the dreaded “new blank document” option from my word processor menu. I didn’t lock myself inside the house until it was all done. I didn’t binge. I didn’t beat myself up for not doing it sooner, or for having to fork over a late fee for camp, or over all the bounced check notices of last year that had to be faced, and filed. I didn’t make myself sick over any of it. I didn’t despair over the enormity of what had to be swallowed. I just bit off a piece of whatever was in front of me and chewed, slowly, until I was full. Then spent some time living life.

It’s Sunday night, and my plate is hardly clean. But I’m amazed, like I always am, at how much has been accomplished. Little Melinda Mae was hip to Goethe: the act of beginning something has power and magic in it, inverse to the terrible drain of avoidance.