Rocky Mountain H--oly crap!

In less than a week, I will leave to take my first solo vacation that does not involved visiting family.  Technically, I am still visiting family for the first few days, but after that, it is just me, a backpack, an REI guide, and about 8 women I have never met before hiking through Rocky Mountain National Park.  Oh, you didn't know I was this adventurous? Believe me, neither did I.

Last summer, I got wistful thinking about the boy graduating and the bulk of parenting behind me. (never over, but those formative years are done).  I thought that if I was this sad about it a year in advance that I would be a mess come actual graduation.  What could I do to change this narrative?  A friend suggested that I do something I have never done, something for just me, and the solo vacation idea was born.

I love to hike, so make it about hiking!  I have no natural sense of direction and a completely irrational fear of bears, so it had to be a guided hike.  Plus, as a woman, I have a healthy fear of hiking on my own due to serial killers, rapists, and misogyny.  Hello, REI guided tours!  I also flatter myself thinking if I was in a co-ed group of hikers that I would have to fend off the tiresome advances of my fellow hikers, so an all-woman group it was.  

I know this fat bastard is just waiting for me.

At first, I chose and paid for the REI trip through Yellowstone.  I couldn’t wait.  It was rated Difficult.  I know difficult; no problem.  I started buying supplies, thinking about how to get in shape, eating right during soccer season because I figured the less I weighed, the less I would have to haul through the mountains.  I, um, got a map of Yellowstone and plotted out my hike.  I watched the news from Yellowstone about bear attacks.  I was prepared.  However, two months before my trip, REI emailed to say that they could not get backcountry permits and the trip was off.  This news came at the end of the school year and I was beyond fragile at this point, so I wept my sinuses out.  The bitter disappointment!  What had I logged all those calories for?  I have to say that REI was great about reaching out, listening, and then helping me pick another trip to take within days of the cancellation announcement.  With some time to reflect, I really think it was the world watching out for me.  Have you seen what a terrible mess Yellowstone is right now?  Also, I don’t think they were lying about the difficult rating and while I have prepared and trained, I have a feeling that their difficult might be more difficult than my difficult.  

Me, my backpack, and a group of women set to take on Rocky Mountain National Park.  I can’t wait!  I also can’t believe it!  And is it grows near and I have packed and repacked my backpack 82 times trying to see what I need, what I don’t, necessity vs luxury, I am getting very, very anxious.  I love to hike but do I love to hike with a 45 lb pack on my back for four days?  I have camped twice in my life: once was terrible and prevented me from camping for another twenty years, but the last time was great!  But, even great, my body was really sore from being on the ground over night.  Will I be able to move after three nights on the ground?  What if all the women in my group hate me?  What if I hate all of them?  What if I am too scared to get out of my tent to pee at night and get a raging UTI from holding it in and then have to hike with a raging UTI?  What if I have seriously overestimated my physical condition to do this?  What if, what if, what if.  

What if I am stronger than I think?  What if I see things I have never seen before?  What if my kids step up and take care of themselves and each other while I am gone?  What if I find purpose, a sense of self, and the room to breathe in this busy world?  What if this is my “Eat, Pray, Love” (minus the love) meets “The Wild” moment?  What if my legs and lungs burn with every step, but I keep stepping?  What if, what if, what if?

The last time I was this adventurous, my friend Amy and I got into her Plymouth Laser with AAA maps and drove from Buffalo to Dallas.  No cell phones, no GPS.  Two dumb teenagers in a car pointed south.  We made it there and back and only got a little lost in Indiana for about an hour or so.  We made it then and I will make it now.  I don’t need to lead or be at the front of the group, I am happy somewhere in the middle.  I don’t need to make friends because I like my own company.  I don’t need to be a rockstar backpacker, I just need to do it.

I will continue to worry just a little because that is how I am wired.  I will lie awake and worry about small things and big things and google “bear attacks RMNP”.  However, I will also let myself stop to think about how amazing this will be.  How I have waited a very long time to do something as adventurous as this and how I deserve it.  All this will happen as I pack and repack my backpack another 82 times.  The one thing I never waiver on taking?  A journal to record it all.

I Am Woman, Hear me ROAR

If you know me, you know that I have been passionate about Women’s History since forever.  At first it was probably because I always liked history, it is after all, just a story.  But as I was enjoying history I was always wondering “where are the women?”.  Great about George Washington, but tell me more about Martha.  I had to do a lot of digging and reading on my own to find out where the women were because they didn’t teach that in the classes I was taking.  And I learned that they were there all along, doing all the same things these celebrated men were doing but in voluminous skirts and with a baby attached to them at some point on their body.  Go women!  When I began teaching, I became absolutely passionate about making sure we were not just reading the works of dead, white men.  We were reading Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” and talking about why she was so happy her husband was dead.  But even this wasn’t enough.  I wanted an entire class where we just learned about women and after some patience, some persistence, and um, some departmental debate, Women, Words and Wisdom was born.  This class is my passion, my chance to teach about the women we never learned about, an elective for curious students, and this is a class that I almost lost because I was too tired to fight.

I was told in March that budget cuts, teachers losing jobs, yadda yadda, my elective, my WWW, was being cut for next year.  March is the tail-end of soccer season. I was exhausted physically, mentally, spiritually; just a hollowed-out shell of a human. I was sad, but at the time, it just made me feel more tired.  I could see what they were saying and I nodded and went on with my very long day ahead of me.  The students in my class were livid.  They wanted better answers, they wanted to know if we could form a club, fight a fight.  (This is why working with teenagers is sometimes so rewarding: all that passion and fury!)  But, and I am embarrassed to admit this, it wasn’t until they presented their final exams that I remembered that I wanted to fight for this class too.  Their finals consisted of them writing a children’s book about their life, or some aspect of their life.  These stories were hilarious, they rhymed, they had original art work, and they were so, so personal.  They talked about not having their dads around, being raised mostly by women, about overcoming anxiety, about trying and failing and trying once again.  I sat at my desk laughing and crying and knowing we had created this safe space that they could be so vulnerable in and it shook me out of my exhaustion and reminded me I needed to fight.

And I know we are all exhausted and we run this world at the expense of ourselves.  We have to look at this new ruling of overturning Roe v Wade and we need to be shaken out of our collective stupor, and as always, we need to fight.  We are at this place because we are tired and we don’t go to vote or we forget that things are important outside our own small worlds.  Really, I don’t care if you are prolife or prochoice; I just want us all to be prowomen, and this ruling shows we are not.  This ruling is an attack on women, on their bodies, on their place in society. It is not about babies.  If any of this was about babies, there would be no child left in the foster care system or up for adoption.  This is about reminding women where they stand and forcing them, once again, to be smaller then men.  To be less than.  And this is going to hit women of color and women who are low-income harder than any other group.  Like all of history, really.

No abortion in the case of rape or incest?  What kind of Draconian punishment is that for having a vagina?  For being attacked and violated against your will?  For being held down and abused?  This is not okay!  This makes me want to scream “FUCK” into the void and I want you to scream it with me.  This is rape culture, this is saying boys will be boys and she shouldn’t have worn that shirt.  Fuck that.  Boys shouldn’t be rapists and she can wear whatever the hell she wants.

If you don’t think this ruling applies to your life at all, you are very wrong.  I am not going to have a child or get pregnant any time soon (two dusty eggs left in there and a shell of a uterus), but it affects me because it affects the young women I teach.  The women I teach with.  Women I know and don’t know.  It affects women.  It sets the precedent for changing any rule about women.  Did you know that it was only as recent as the 1970’s that women could own their own home, get a credit card, or a loan?  Maybe that is next.  I keep picturing the episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” where Moira’s money is all gone because she doesn’t have a spouse to transfer her balance to.  That will be me.  That will be you.

If you have never studied Women’s History, get a book and read it.  You don’t have to start at cave dwellers; find an era that interests you and read about it.  See where the women were and what they did and how they were treated.  Watch Mrs. America on Hulu if you want to see the original fight for Roe v Wade and why the Equal Rights Amendment is still not passed.  Be curious, be open-minded, be purposefully angry.  Be reminded, as I was, that we are never done fighting.  Be educated, be supportive of other women, be committed to being active in a way that helps rather than hurts.  It is okay to be still be exhausted! Be exhausted while you do these things.  I know it is hard to breathe and act with feet on our necks.  RBG has said so nicely that  “all I ask of our brethren is they take their feet off our necks.”  This latest ruling is not only standing on our necks, but stomping.  

Be a feminist.  See if the men in your life are feminists.  All it feminism means is that men and women are equal.  Teach other people this definition of feminism.  One can still be better than the other at different things, but equal in their standing in society, equal in how they are paid, equal in their votes, equal in how they get to live their lives.  Be angry.  Be shaken out of your exhaustion and be ready to find a place to show your voice.  At the very least, take comfort that we don’t have to do all this in a corset or voluminous skirts.  Yet. 

Wanted: Actually Affordable Teacher Affordable Housing

 If the American dream is owning your own home and that house being the symbol of your success and hard work, well, welcome to my nightmare and my current failures. I think that might be an old dream though, and the new American dream is just finding someplace you can afford to live.  But again, welcome to my nightmare and current failures.

I recently got very excited about a news story saying that there was some affordable housing being set aside for teachers.  I am a teacher!  I need affordable housing!  I scurried to find out what to send to who to see what I could do and in the meantime google-stalked this housing and appreciated the neighborhood, the floor plans, the cute exterior of my new home.  I entered a zoom call with 74 other people in the very tight market for these 30 homes.  Still good odds, I thought.  I had about four solid minutes of watching the presentation and thinking I could get one of these homes.  Yes!  I will volunteer 200 hours to Habitat for Humanity and build other people homes!  (ooh! I will need to get a tool belt and a flannel shirt). Yes! I have money for earnest money and closing costs! (look at me! So financially responsible) Yes!  I work for this district and I am a teacher!  Yes!  Until they got to the earnings slide and I gasped and sat open-mouthed as my heart tumbled out of my mouth, splatted on the floor, and lies there still.  Y’all.  I, a teacher, do not make enough money per year to qualify for teacher affordable housing. In order to be considered for one of these houses, a family needs to make 80% of the Median Family Income.   A three-person home, which me and two kids makes three, was over $70,000.  I laugh/cried when I saw that. Then I thought, they are adults, I won’t count them.  A single-person home, the income was $55,000.  I have no trouble telling you I made $51,000 last year; my income is public record.  I make $4000 too little to qualify for teacher affordable housing.  That $51k includes two coaching stipends and a professional pathways and any other hoops offered for a little more money.

I am a college-educated, professional woman who, as a teacher, cannot afford housing set aside specifically for teachers.  How is this possible?  And if it is this bad for me, what is it like for someone who doesn’t have a college degree? Someone who makes minimum wage? Where the hell are people supposed to live? Even if I did make the $55k needed for the teacher house, the mortgage and HOA fees would leave me about $1000 a month to live on. Oh, and don't think I didn't think about how to make that work. Well, if I only eat two meals a day and my Prius lasts another ten years and we never turn the lights on and keep the AC set at 80 and so on and so on.

The kids and I are currently in an apartment that is close to my school.  Even though they are considered adults by the government, they are still very much my responsibility to house.  My lease is up in December and I am holding my breath waiting to see how much rent here will go up.  And if goes up too much, then where do we move to?  When I look at other apartments, they are just as much and more than my current apartment and this current rent is now a stretch.  

I like to play this game of “Where Can I Not Afford to Live” each night and gaze at houses and apartments Zillow says are rentable in my area.  A current find shows a duplex down the street with a back yard!  My aging dog will be so happy!  Only two bedrooms though.  Looks like someone needs to go live with dad.  Oh. And one bathroom.  Well, it can be done. Maybe not with Sophie’s IBS though. Click on price; $2300/month.  This is $500 more than I am paying for my window-deficient, slightly slanted, 3 bedroom, 2 bath apartment.  Last year, I had a realtor friend set up a house search for me to see other options.  I asked her to please stop the search about a week in as the results were depressing.  Many of the options seem to include living among college students and a house that had recently hosted a murder in it.  Last year, I was hopeful and didn’t know that I was a teacher who couldn’t afford affordable teacher housing.  This year, I know who I am, I know what I make and really,  I am thinking that maybe the murder house wouldn’t be so bad. 

Currently selling for about 1.2 million, as is