Giving Thanks

A few weeks after I posted “The Sweet Spot” on my blog,  a woman named Heather posted a comment. She had a question, she said. Could I please contact her?  I’ll admit I was pleased-- someone other than my friends and family was actually reading my blog! When I received an email back from her, it was a little bit of a disappointment, since it was immediately clear that she may not even have read my blog. She was on a mission, and she was enlisting any blogger she could find to spread the word.

Heather is an eight-year survivor of mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused by asbestos exposure. She received her diagnosis in the month of November, just a few months after the birth of her daughter. She was told she had fifteen months to live. Now, Heather is one of the few long-term survivors of this deadly cancer, and every November she pays tribute to her recovery by acknowledging something in her life that she is thankful for every day throughout the month. This year she’s encouraging other bloggers to write about something they’re thankful for, in order to help her spread her message of gratitude and hope

I wasn’t sure I was going to participate. I’m technically not even blogging anymore; why make an exception for someone I don’t know? It seemed like a nice idea, of course. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, why not express some gratitude? Still, nothing was pulling me towards the keyboard or making me sneak downstairs to hide out with the laptop.

Honestly, the last couple of weeks I have not feel grateful. Mostly, I have felt annoyed and grouchy, punctuated by frequent moments of rage. The girls have entered what Don calls the “Threatening Threes,” that notorious year when our three-year-olds threaten to drive us to the brink, and we in turn must constantly stop ourselves from threatening to throttle them. Dee Dee, having pretty much maxed out her measure of defiance and destruction while still in her twos, is really not so bad. She still makes a mess out of anything she can, although not her own feces anymore, and that is indeed something to be thankful for. She also provokes her sister mercilessly and listens about as well as our obdurate hound dog, Howie-- that is, not at all. Still, she is generally cheerful and enthusiastic, and can mostly be persuaded out of total obstinacy by the threat of a book not being read.

Sylvia, on the other hand, is driving me batty. Oh, she is still so sweet, so loving. The other day she climbed into bed with us at 5:30 in the morning. In the dark, I feel her soft little hands find my face. 
“Mamma, I like you. I love you!” she says, over and over again. I am still half-asleep, and the half that is now awake is not very pleased about it. Still, it’s hard not to respond to something like that. 

“I love you, too,” I mutter into the pillow. 

A few moments of silence. Maybe she went back to sleep? I am now completely awake. After all, it is very important that my brain be wholly alert in order to wonder if she is asleep. If she has fallen asleep, maybe she won’t be so tired and grouchy later. But if she’s asleep, the alarm will wake her! Drat, I should have put her back to bed immediately. But then she would have woken up Dee Dee... Can she possibly be asleep? Can I move my arm without waking her? 

“Mamma, I like you. I love you,” she says again, softly stroking my face. “In the morning, we’re going to have cereal!” 

And so it went until the alarm finally went off at six, when I gave up and staggered into the kitchen to make tea and pour cereal.

Yes, Sylvia is very sweet. She is also infuriatingly whiny, teary, clingy, and needy. Not to mention violent. She gets this look of total fury on her face and comes after you. “Mom, Sylvia just hit me/pushed me/pulled my hair!” It’s sometimes hard not to laugh, to see the violent rage erupting from such a cute little cherub of love. But then, of course, comes the requisite time-out, and the rivers of tears, and the wailing that goes on and on and shreds the last faint remnants of my nerves.

And what privileged tears they are! Tears because I won’t get her juice, or she can’t have a piece of gum, or it’s time to turn off Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. Tears because I tried to help her pull her pants down to use the potty or moved her cup a fraction of an inch to keep it on the table. There is nothing in her little life to be truly unhappy about, and yet she cries and cries and cries.
"What are you even crying about?” I ask her, near tears myself. “Stop crying!” This, of course, does not help.

Probably it is worse because I was--okay, am-- a crier myself. In my sister’s old bedroom at my parents’ house there is a wardrobe with mirrored doors that go almost to the floor, in which I had the perfect vantage point to observe myself cry. The sight of how miserable I looked was more than enough to renew my waning sobs and bring on fresh tears. Oh, poor me, I thought, my face distorted with grief. Why did no one come? Did no one care? Oh, how sad I look! Boo hoo hoo hoo. Now I am the hardhearted parent who drags my wailing daughter to her room where, gratefully, there is at least no mirror.

There is nothing like having young children to make you live in the moment, since, so often, a moment is all you get. The other morning, Dee Dee and Sylvia were sitting together in the armchair by the fire, a Curious George book open on their laps. Dee Dee was reading to her sister, prompting her with reading strategies. “Sylvia, now you say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen.’”

“I wonder what’s going to happen.”

Awww, Don and I whispered to each other. Look how cute. Don got out the camera. Within minutes, the book was splayed on the floor, and I was pulling Dee Dee’s hair out of Sylvia’s clenched fists and dragging her-- crying again-- to her room.

That evening after dinner, Dee Dee and Clayton went to play in the basement. Loud, mostly happy noises, along with the occasional crash, came up the stairs. We chose not to investigate. Soon, however, here they were again.

“Come see the pirate ship we made!” Clayton said excitedly.

“Come see the pirate ship we made!” Dee Dee echoed.

They trotted down the stairs with their identical gates, identical haircuts. I steeled myself for what havoc the making of the pirate ship had wrecked. But it was not too bad. They’d just arranged the pillows from the sofa on the floor in a very rough approximation of the shape of a ship. They immediately took their positions, clearly bursting with pride. Don and I stood side by side, admiring the heap of pillows on which our two children were now perched.

I remember my father once talking to me about the importance of choosing a partner with whom one shared interests. You could fall in love without it, sure, but it was shared experiences that would keep the passion alive. I remember thinking of my father’s words once early in my relationship with Don, while we rested on a rock during a mountain bike ride, taking in the view. I loved this, Don loved this, and doing it together, I loved Don more. In that moment, I got what my dad had been trying to tell me: these experiences would sustain us, the love we shared for things outside of ourselves feeding our love for each other.

Before we had kids, Don and I used to have lots of those moments: long bike rides and road races, backpacking trips and foreign travel, Saturday nights dancing to Sons of Ralph at Jack of the Wood. Now, like most parents I know with young kids and passions of their own, we mostly tag-team. I go biking in the morning, so he can go in the afternoon. I get up with the kids so he can sleep in, but then I head out to write before he even gets his coffee made.

But as we stood together in the frigid basement office, admiring the pirate ship made of pillows, I felt the same all-encompassing love as I had on that bike ride so many years ago. Just moments before I had been irritable with the chaos and sheer volume around the dinner table. Now I felt a surge of love for my kids-- for their imagination and enthusiasm and love for each other-- and I loved Don more because I knew he was feeling it, too.

So what am I thankful for? It’s too easy, too cliche perhaps, to say my family, although of course that is blaringly true. But I’m also thankful for small moments like those, moments that elevate me above the everyday tasks and frustrations of parenthood and allow my love and joy to be writ large on the quotidian canvas of my life.

I finally decided to heed Heather’s suggestion and write a blog post about gratitude last Saturday, as we left the annual holiday parade. The kids were cold and tired, and the van was a long uphill slog away. I’d start walking with the kids, we agreed, and Don would go and get the car. As soon as Don was out of sight, however, I realized that the street on which we had agreed to meet was still closed to traffic. I tried calling his cell phone to revise our plan, but it went to voicemail again and again.

We couldn’t continue the way we were headed, but I felt hesitant about steering the troops up an alternate street before I’d talked to Don. The corner where we’d stopped had a grassy shoulder. 
“Sit here,” I told the kids, attempting to drape our one small fleece blanket over all six of their legs.

“I’m cold and hungry and my feet are tired,” Clayton said, more observation than complaint. Dee Dee’s hands looked almost purple with the cold, and Sylvia had totally disappeared beneath the blanket. A cold front was blowing in, the sky a dreary gray and the wind blowing damp and cold. Cars full of fellow parade-goers going home were lined up in the street, and the relative coziness of their cars only seemed to underscore our own exposure. I called Don again and again, while the policeman directing traffic threw us puzzled looks.

Dee Dee chattered away cheerfully, but Clayton’s face looked pale and exhausted.
“Where’s Daddy?” he asked. “Will he find us?”

There was nothing traumatic or catastrophic about the five minutes we waited on that corner. We were not stranded on a mountaintop in a snowstorm. We were chilled, not hypothermic. Don called me as soon as he reached the van, and soon after we saw him creeping towards us in the line of cars. We cranked the heat in the van and made hot chocolate when we got home. But for those few minutes when I watched my kids sitting huddled together on a street corner, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude: for the cozy house we’d return to, for the food I could offer my kids, for the warmth of the wood stove that would greet us as we climbed the stairs at home. For those few moments, I felt viscerally just how fortunate we were. Thank you, Heather, whoever you are, for reminding me to notice.

To learn more about Heather’s story, visit mesothelioma.com/heather.

The Sweet Spot

Today, I watched both the sunrise and the sunset over the ocean, which is not as implausible as it sounds. It is November, after all, and all fall the sunset has been creeping slowly to the south, although until this evening I honestly hadn’t noticed. This morning, the sun rose like an iridescent tennis ball above a blue-gray court of water; this evening it hid behind the high rises but turned the sky a cotton-candy pink. Sea gulls stood on the beach in puddles of pink water, pink clouds billowing out above them. I passed a woman walking a German Shephard who was barking and pawing at a horseshoe crab. On the seat of her gray sweatpants were the words “Love Pink.” At that moment, it was hard not to. The whole beach was pink, and everyone was happy. Two teenagers in bikinis splashed each other in the waves, pretending the water wasn’t freezing, while the rest of us pulled up our hoodies and smiled at each other. Kids trotted down the beach with their beaming parents; no one was tired or grumpy or had just lost their temper. Everywhere I looked couples were holding hands or kissing. I hadn’t even left yet and already I was trying to figure out when I-- no, we-- could come back.

The last two summers, Don has suggested a beach vacation, but both times I have dragged my feet. I just couldn’t bear the thought of sun-burned, mosquito-bitten kids with sand in their diapers trying to sleep in a sweltering tent. And I know Clayton. He goes in the water once and immediately wants to change into dry clothes. Then he’ll play in the sand for twenty minutes and announce, “I’m all done playing.” He doesn’t seem to understand that it’s supposed to be a day at the beach, not an hour.

All in all, a beach vacation just seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Why not just go to a lake? There was sand, there was water. Wasn’t it practically the same, only without the salt and the inflated prices and the five-hour drive? No, Don insisted, it was not, although he did not push the matter. “There’s just something about the beach...”

Today, I got it. There is just something about the beach. Even Myrtle Beach, with its ugly building and neon lights, has that something. All afternoon I couldn’t pull myself away. A thousand thoughts were buzzing in my head, but there was something in the steady roar of the waves that hushed them.

I’m in Myrtle Beach for a TESOL Conference. I came to earn credits towards the renewal of my license, and to escape, for a few days, the tedious requirements of my children. I’m leaving with an energy and a vision I haven’t felt in some time. This morning, after the sunrise, I rode my bike the five miles from the cheap hotel I’d booked on priceline back to the Marriot and settled into the front row of the big conference hall for the final plenary speaker. Over the next hour and a half, my shrunken little educator’s heart grew two sizes. Kelly Gallagher is one of the most inspirational speakers that I have ever heard. I wanted to be him, with his badass powerpoint slides and his books he tried so modestly not to plug. I could imagine every one of the ninth grade students he teaches being in love with him. I was a little bit in love with him.

After all the hate and disrespect thrown at us in North Carolina recently, Kelly Gallagher’s talk was a cool breeze off the ocean. Sure, he’s an educator, not a legislator, but still it was deeply reassuring that there are people out there who, one, have a clue about what makes a difference in education, two, are making noise about it, and three, are still in the classroom themselves, doing their best to make that difference.

And he wasn’t the only one. Yesterday’s plenary speaker basically shouted from the proverbial rooftops that we should do away with the dreaded five paragraph essay and teach real writing instead. She made me want to finally stand up to the sour-faced teacher at my old school who is still using the exact same moldy lesson plans she taught from twenty years ago and say, “See!” Of course, not all the sessions blew my socks off in quite that way. Still, my rusty teacher toolkit is practically bursting with new strategies that I can’t wait to try out once I get back to teaching.

This fullness I’m feeling... I know it’s not just the professional inspiration and the vibrant colors in the sky. My brain feels swollen with ideas, my heart stuffed with a sense of possibility. I know at this stage in the game, I’m probably not going to go after that Ph.D in Applied Linguistics that part of me hankers for. Probably it’s too late to be an English Fellow with the State Department. (Or is it? The flyer I picked up said there’s an allowance for dependents, so I might as well check the website.) Still, I feel something shifting. All those teachers, they’re fighting the good fight. Maybe I’m just getting ready to join up.

At last year’s conference, I felt like hiding my name tag; I was ashamed of the empty spot under my name where my school affiliation should have been. “I’m not in the classroom right now,” I kept apologizing. This year, it’s different. That empty spot-- I know what goes there, even if it’s not printed: “Mom.” I actually feel proud of that. It’s taken the better part of the three years that I have been out of the paid workforce, but it seems I’m finally feeling good about the identity piece of the path I've chosen.

At the end of the conference, I ran into a woman who had done her student teaching in my district. She’s clearly an awesome teacher; I’d gone to her presentation last year and been awed by the work she’s doing. Where was I now, she wanted to know. “Still with my kids,” I said. She got this look in her eye and told me she was pregnant. She was trying to figure out what to do about work once the baby came.

Probably she’ll stay in the classroom. Most teacher moms do, which is probably why it can feel so lonely on this side of the fence. But talking to her about the challenges ahead-- how will she manage to pump at work, how much time can she off take without losing her job-- I felt at peace. Being a full-time mom has been the hardest job I’ve ever done. It’s not the same kind of got-to-keep-all-the-balls-in-the-air hard that I know working moms face, but it’s its own hard. And I’m finally starting to feel proud of the work I do.

This afternoon, I walked down the beach, searching for shells to take home to the kids. It felt good to miss them, to imagine their happy little faces as they sorted through the treasures I’d brought for them: the hotel pens and pads of paper, the hard candies-- meant to lure you to buy books-- that I’d swiped from the publishers’ tables. I had that post-conference glow, and I smiled to myself as I realized that I might be able to hold onto it for a while, since it won’t have to endure, on Tuesday, all the buzz-killing minutia of an ordinary day of school.

When I get home, I’ll store this year’s conference binder next to last year’s. The glow will, inevitably, fade. Still, I’ll type up my notes and read Gallagher’s books and a thousand more that Dee Dee and Clayton and Sylvia will hold out to me. Gallagher talks about the “sweet spot” of teaching, that elusive place somewhere between making kids hate reading by shoving text analysis down their throats and leaving them alone to flounder in incomprehension. I look forward to trying my hand at that again. For the moment, with ten years of my career behind me and surely decades more to come, I’m glad to be enjoying this sweet spot, with my children.