The Road Always Taken

There is a rumor going around that some families get on planes and travel to their summer locations and that they arrive at their locations the exact same day they left.  The exact same day!!! Is this true?  What?! People go on vacation without enduring cross-country road trips?  They can arrive at their vacation spot without deep-vein thrombosis ticking in their thighs and their happy family still intact?  What kind of witchcraft is this?! 

As it is summer, we have once again returned from a vacation filled with cross-country travel, mini meltdowns, mile markers emblazoned on our retinas and potential renal failure.  Ahhh, summer.  Summer and a McMahon road trip.  Old as time itself.  Pack everyone and snacks and set out on an adventure across America.  Sounds noble or empowering.  Sounds like we are pioneers setting forth across new land.  Really we are just trying to save a buck and might be a little crazy. 

This year’s road travel clocked in at a mere 3,400 miles as compared to last year’s expeditious 4,261.  This is the first time we have driven this far without a relative at the other end and it was as ridiculously far away: Austin Texas to New York City.  Well, actually Newark.  God bless Mark Miller and his help from the road where he steered our weary selves to the Newark airport to park and then shuttle into the city.  Day One was relatively easy and we joked about how every stop we stopped at looked familiar.  We have driven the same way once a year for 25 years, so yes, good chance we have stopped everywhere along the way.  On Day One, we always make great time, we sing, we listen to podcasts, we talk, I categorize the road kill by state, fun things.  (Armadillo and raccoon tied for most kills, Arkansas for the most road kill in a state.) Day One is always fine; miles click by, we think this is fun.  It is Day Two that kicks your ass.

Day Two saw us in Virginia.  This is a new state and that was nice for a while.  But interstate is interstate and we had a stupid amount of interstate to go. Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania.  Day Two is a long day as everyone is tired of driving, tired of music, of car food, of having to wait to pee.  Weariness sets in and you feel all the miles. But then, Eastern Pennsylvania was beautiful.  Like, ohmygod, beautiful.  Green, rolling, lush. Bucolic. Amazing.  Even in a Day Two road stupor, we enjoyed the beauty of eastern PA.  I kept looking for Amish, but as it was a Sunday, they were home doing good Amish things: going to church, eating strudel, raising a barn.  Thoughts of the Amish kept my mind busy and before long we were in Newark and managed to park, get a bus and get into the city.  We made it!

Not sure why is is sideways, but we were here!

We were in New York City!  We walked everywhere.  We managed about 8 miles a day and saw all the things and ate the food and only got in a car once to Uber.  It was nice not being in a car.  Even the subway and the ferry were nice because they were not cars.  But then, as always, there is the ride home.  Our plan was to stop in Philadelphia and do some fun things and break up the trip going back and then go to DC and do the same.  In my mind, I believed Philly to be the same size as Buffalo and that everything we wanted to do would be easy peasy.   Let me tell you, I stand corrected, Philly is not the same size as Buffalo.  More comparable to the NYC we just left and parking was impossible, traffic was snarled and angry and slow and I was possessed by a gremlin that rendered me mean and hating everything about Philly.  I hated that we couldn’t park and run up the Rocky steps.  I hated that it took twenty minutes to get three miles down the road.  I hated that I was hungry.  I hated that I had to pee and that there was nowhere to pee.  I hated everything like I have never hated before.  My kind family tried to console me with their words and I wanted to karate chop their kindness out of the air.  I wanted to throat punch the entire city.  I was angry and hungry and still had to pee.  Bill bought a beer at a bar across from Pat’s and Geno’s so we could all pee.  I have never seen the man enjoy a beer more.  Eventually we got our cheesesteaks and declared Pat’s better than Geno’s and decided no way to DC.  Enough with cities with no bathrooms or parking, it was just time to go home.

That drive was so interminable I am not sure if I can ever plan a road trip longer than one day again.  Truly.  We saw some beautiful things and I have some great stories to share in the next blog of people on this trip, but that car ride crushed me.  Bill, stalwart trucker’s son, drove and drove and remained whole until about Little Rock.  That is when he started answering us in grunts and clicks and I knew that the road had claimed him as well.  We made it home, showered and looked at each other with eyes that said “Never, ever again.”

I really would like to think that we will start flying everywhere we need to go.  That we will be among those families who get to their travel destinations in mere hours.  I would like to think that, but I can’t help but think of the lady driving a golf cart down the side of I-40 with her hair streaming behind her and an RV following her with its hazards on and I know you don’t get to see that level of crazy on a plane.  I also clicked off four new states visited and the kids clicked off five and there are so many more to go.  So, I do like to think never again, but I know, you know, we will do it again.  I’ll be here next summer writing about how I ruined another city by being hungry and having to pee and how it was the time of our lives.

In a Tiny Room

In my parent’s house in Buffalo, there is a bedroom at the top of the stairs.  It’s a tiny room and normal-sized people find it hard to stand up anywhere but in the middle of the room as the ceiling and walls are slanted on both sides.  This room is shaped by the angled roof and the way it was squeezed into being at the front of the house.  I love this tiny room and insist on staying in it every time I visit.  To me, once I step inside that tiny room with its slanted ceilings and window that faces the street, all my adult responsibilities seem to slide off my shoulders and pool in the depth of the carpet. 

In that tiny room, I know that down the street there is the elementary school where I still picture my 5^th grade teacher’s room to know which way north is. Further down the street is the middle school and my sister’s old house. And a little further down and to the right is the Village and the Opera House where I spent a summer as a wench in “Once Upon a Mattress”.  This makes my daughter laugh when I tell her, and emboldened, I share the spot I fell off my bike, or walked when I was angry or kissed a boy after a dance.  The buildings, the road, the town become familiar to her as the stories change them into events, occurrences, and history.

In that tiny room, I relax knowing that I will get to spend a lot of time with my parents. That for this week, they are just outside the door and not 1,500 miles away.  We will drink our shared coffee and talk.  We will eat our meals together. We will live together again for this short time.  We will sit on porches and decks and patios and use up all the words that seem to get twisted in phone lines and not as easy to get out.  They will revel in how big the kids are and make connections with them as young adults.  And the kids will laugh with them and talk to them and open up in ways I don’t ever see coming.  There is a comfort for them as well in Grammie and Papa’s house.

The porch is right under the tiny room and my favorite outdoor spot.

In that tiny room, I will make plans to see friends that I have known forever.  We will get together and talk and laugh and remember and share and whisper and scream and confide and reminisce.  We will be fifteen again for the night.  I will see family: aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, and someone’s new baby.  They will marvel at my kids and make them feel instantly connected into this amazing behemoth of a family.  My kids and Bill will marvel at all the people we are related to and ask now who is this?  How are we related?  Why is this stranger hugging me?  My daughter will ask if the party we are going to is large and I will say yes as my mother says no at the same time.  For her, it is small, for us it is gigantic.  A gargantuan grouping of people related by blood and past and love. 

In that tiny room, I will lay awake on my last night and wonder how long it will be until I lay under the slanted ceilings again.  I admit that some summers, I want to travel somewhere else.  Someplace exotic or unknown; somewhere I have only seen in pictures and want to see first-hand.  But I know that all of these places inevitably lose out to the internal compass pointing me always to Buffalo.  To family and friends and to that tiny room.  That tiny room with its slanted ceilings and window facing the street, where my heart no longer feels divided between the home of my youth and the home of the last twenty-five years; it just feels whole.

Baby. You Can Drive My Car.

One thing that I like about summer is that I have a lot of time to think about things other than all the things I have to get done during the day.  There is plenty of time to get everything done and nothing has to be done right then.  It is a nice thing to experience.  A normal person would really give into the relaxation and just become languid and fluid and be. However, that normal person is not me.  I take this time to really focus all my worry and concern on one or two special topics I have may have ignored during the year.  Previous years have seen me angsting over whether or not I would ever find a job combined with wide-awake worry wondering if this is the year that the A/C finally gives up.   I also like to flush out those unresolved issues I’ve tucked into the dark recesses of my mind and replay embarrassing scenarios from my youth.  I could clean the house, but I prefer unearthing dusty memories packed in cobwebs and shame.

Right here is where I like to keep how I misspelled rutabaga and lost the 5th grade spelling bee.

This summer, I have focused my penchant for worry and obsessive thoughts onto two things: fitness and how big my kids are getting.  I have a lot of words about fitness and nutrition, but I think they will take up their own post and the big kids are really weighing on my heart, so they go first.

I have found over the last year or so that I am that creepy old woman who smiles at babies and toddlers and even comments out loud how adorable they are.  I watch the little kids swim next door and hear their happy laughs and splashes and sigh.  Not because I want a small child of my own, but I think because it feels like it has been so long since my kids were little.  When they came in the house with a sweaty head that smelled like sunshine and puppies and tag and didn’t make me recoil and say things like “Shower!” or “You stink!”  Now I cannot even put a name to the odor that emanates from the boy’s room.  I just open the door, shoot some Febreeze in there and close it before it can infect the rest of the house.

At sixteen and fourteen, these kids of mine are adult-ish every day.  Oh, I know there is a lot of parenting to go here, but I am looking at them and seeing adults more than kids.  The boy is huge.  Giant.  He is a man-sized child living in my house.  Eating all the food, taking up all the room on the furniture, leaving giant shoes everywhere for us to trip on and flexing.  So much flexing.  But it is not just physical; it is how they handle situations or their dry, obnoxious humor.  Or the fact that we can have prolonged, intelligent conversations about things other than video games and horses.  And that they are really getting interesting and I seek them out to see what they think rather than hide in my closet for just two seconds alone.  This stage of parenting seems to be a lot of waiting, followed by helping to extinguish the fires of a teen crisis, followed by more waiting, a whole lot of talking, more waiting and plenty of time to sit and wait and think.

This week, the girl got her permit.  We are late to the game here as many of her friends are already driving, but we weren’t in a hurry.  Teaching a kid to drive really sucks!  It is hard to explain what she should do based on something I do and never think about.  I made weird “Oooh-ooh-AHHH” noises that I haven’t heard since my mother made those noises as I was learning to drive. It was an eye-opening day, and I realized that not only did I step out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger seat of the Prius, but in her life as well.  I am not longer buckling her up and taking her where she needs to go.  For now, I get to sit alongside her and watch as she decides what to do.  I can offer advice, suggestions and my thoughts, but I am not moving her forward, she is.  I can say “Watch for this”, “Be careful here” and make all the ooh-ooh-AHH noises, but ultimately, she decides what she is going to do.  It is pretty amazing and humbling to realize that this is where we are in her life now.  It makes me ooh and ahh and sigh over babies.  It makes me want to adopt a cat with crossed eyes because it reminds me of the boy when he was little.  It made me crow over Jack-Jack in Incredibles 2 to the point where Bill leaned over and asked if my milk had let down.  

This whole stage of parenting makes me a little nostalgic and a little nervous and a little sad over how fast the other stages have gone by.  It also makes me glad that I have the summer to realize all of this, obsess about it properly and prepare my heart for how quickly the rest will go too.

It's the End of the Year....

In an all-time teaching low, I started off third period by saying “Everyone stop and stare at the pimple on my forehead.  Yes, it is a pimple.  Yes, you can get pimples when you are old.”  And they did.  They stopped and stared and the table that instigated it laughed until they died and I am sure my pimple-rage is on Snapchat and all I could think is that this school year needs to end now. 

This has been a very hard year.  In addition to the normal working with teenagers: break ups, bad home lives, hunger, cheating, apathy and anxiety, we had some really big stuff happen this year.  Let’s list it:

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●     Two suicide attempts, on campus

●     A racial incident off campus, but widely talked about on campus

●     A student was paralyzed in a drive-by shooting

●     Another student died from a drug overdose

●     One student was arrested after I reported him under the influence

●     One student came to me from jail and is now back on his way to jail because he just couldn’t acclimate.

●     A coworker resigned suddenly.

Exhausting stuff at work and some exhausting stuff at home too.  Bill has had two terrible melanomas removed and just recently underwent radiation for metastatic tumors in his chest.  I am incredibly relieved and grateful to say that the radiation worked and the tumors are gone, but cancer is some scary stuff.  We didn’t tell a lot of people because we wanted to wait and see what we were dealing with.  We also didn’t tell a lot of people because when you have cancer, you still have to do life and maybe you are going on about your life and for three minutes forget you have cancer and then someone will remind you by saying “Hey, how’s your cancer?”.

Based on all of the above, I think that I encased my heart in a petrified sort of shell and have been trudging through the past few months.  I found I was impatient with my kids at school and my kids at home.  I enjoyed teaching, but not as much.  I laughed, but not as loud.  I worried about everything until I got to where I worried about nothing.  This is not the best way to do life and I was worried I was never going to shake the fugue.

However, today I went to a cording ceremony for AVID students and I felt a shift start to take place. I am not going to say that my Grinch-like heart grew three sizes because in reality, I have a ridiculously big heart; it is just tired from caring so damn much about people.  What I will say, is that petrified shell I encased my heart in definitely began to crack and fissure.  AVID is a class for kids who will be first-generation college attendees.  They might even be first-generation high school graduates.  They work hard, they go through four years of high school together in their AVID class and they make up a little AVID family.  I watched kids I have in my class or have had in class walk across to get the cords they will wear to graduation next week and I smiled.  I watched the parents I didn’t know hoot and holler and I felt their excitement.  I could feel the pride in my chest for them. Then one speaker talked about his mom, how as an immigrant she worked terrible jobs so that he and his siblings could do better and that was beautiful.  But when he, sniff, asked her to, sniff, stand, sniff, and he applauded her?  TEARS!  Wet tears from my eyes!  I can emote!  I can feel!  I am ALIVE!!!!!!

I tell you all of these things because I have to believe that other people out there are overwhelmed with the world at large and their smaller worlds at home.  School shootings, collusion, volcanoes, tariffs, tornadoes, hateful this, hateful that.  And that maybe you have locked your heart up tightly too.  You will get no lecture from me.  What I do hope though, is that like me, you will be surprised with some sort of good in your world.. Some joy.  Some pride or beauty or pure emotion that catches your eye, your ear, your heart.  Let it in. It feels so good to be reminded that there is good in the world.  It makes you want to shake off that crispy crust around your heart and get back into doing the things you do well: caring about kids, encouraging friends, loving your people.     

I sometimes struggle wondering what it is I am doing with this life, but as I watched those kids yesterday, I knew that along the way various teachers had truly impacted those kids and helped them along in their lives.  I really hope that I am doing some of that too and that I can continue to break down that crunchy casing surrounding my heart. There is only about one week of school to go and I now feel confident that I can get to the end of it with a little bit of grace.  And,  at the very least, I know that third period will never doubt that adults can get pimples too.

This is a Test, This is Only a Test

I am really struggling to find some grace for myself this week.  I hurt my back lifting sandbells incorrectly last week and haven’t worked out, not even yoga, this week.  I write this while drinking my second beer and eating Swedish fish I discovered in a drawer.  Today, with no tweezer anywhere nearby, I noticed a wild, pure white hair growing out of my temple like a deranged horned owl. Not the top of my head or even in the little hairs that grow across my forehead; straight from the side of my temple.  I am not sure if it compliments or detracts from the whisker on my lip which is so thick and prickly it would best befit a pirate.  This is not a glamorous time in my life, folks.

However, I think what really has me just stretched thin and taut and fragile though is state-mandated testing. I am tired of being flexible and in good humor and conciliatory to the chaos around me.  My room is a testing room so I am kicked out for most of the day.  My first class of the day met me at the room where we were supposed to have class.  This turned out to be a piano room. With pianos.  Oh, and the entire piano class.  But not to worry, we are flexible.  We left a note on the door and made our way to the choir room where there were risers, no desks and not enough outlets for computers.  I went on to proctor the next period and that room was cramped with exhausted children bubbling in bubbles.  By this time they had been at it for 2 hours and had 3 to go.  Some kids were already done and they had the choice of staring, reading a book, or sleeping.  Most chose to stare.  No talking, no doodling, no joy.  Not even when they get 20 minutes to eat their lunch.  Silence.  My proctoring period bled into lunch and if my sweet co-worker didn’t come to relieve me, I would have had to proctor through my lunch.  I like kids.  I chose to work with kids, but there is something so very necessary about eating food in a kid-free room for even ten minutes when you are with children all day.  It was an exhausting, soul-sucking day. 

                                             

We have another day like this tomorrow and three more days of this in May.  At one time, Texas used to require fifteen EOC (end of course) exams in order for students to graduate.  God bless the TAMSA moms who marched and protested and yelled loudly enough to get it down to five.  I could not imagine doing this fifteen times a year. I could not imagine your kids and mine going through this.  I would like to say that these tests measure what our kids learn each year.  That they are true indicators of knowledge not only acquired but used correctly.  Maybe some of the test is, but it really seems more like a test of conformity.  Are you a good test taker? Do you know how to take this test?  If you do, you’re fine.  If you are trying to take it based on knowledge and facts alone, you could be on shaky ground.  And if you are an English Language Learner or a Special Education kid, you will take the same test again and again and again, because it is not asking you what you know, it is asking you if you know how to take this test and you don’t because it is not written in any language you know.

I think it is time to really ask just who profits from this and why this is still a thing.  Teachers don’t profit by losing their planning time, their lunches and their classrooms. And it is definitely not profiting the students who sit in a fugue state for five hours and whose only relief comes when they whisper for a dictionary or the bathroom pass.  It is not the administration who organize and plan and then reorganize and put out test-related fires all day.  I just don't know why we do this and who it benefits and why it exhausts me and my people and every kid in school to a point where all we can do is eat carbs and cry a little.

Tonight, I will finish this beer and eat all of the remaining Swedish fish. I will find one or two interactions with kids tomorrow that make my day seem better.  I will actively monitor and walk myself in circles around that testing room.  That will give me grace for all the carbs I eat when I am sad and tense and tired. I will let my back heal and cut myself a break and always, always, lift sandbells with my knees from now on.  And I will gather some hope that with all I have seen on social media about these state mandated tests lately than people are getting ready to stop just thinking that these tests are a waste of time and start saying it. Loudly.   

I Don't Want Your Gun

February is a hard month all around: dreary, gray and soul-crushing.  It’s not anything and yet it is everything.  The shortest month that feels like the longest month.  February is hard enough by itself, but February watching children get murdered and parents cry and teachers die and the world go crazy is too much.

I’ve been caught in a quagmire of feeling everything and nothing.  I am also guilty of being caught up in me, my life, and my troubles that I block out those of the world around me.  I heard about the Parkland shooting but found it was almost 24 hours later that I saw all the footage, read all the words and I cried.  I cried for those kids, those adults and this messed-up world.  And I thought about my door at school that doesn’t even lock half the time.  And I thought again about those teachers and could easily see one of my people being the heroes that they were that day.  But you can’t think too much about any of those things or you can’t get up and get dressed and go into school the next day.  And you have to go to school the next day because you promised someone you would read over a paper or you know that one kid in second period hasn’t eaten yet and you need to be with your people and know that they are feeling what you are feeling too.

And you get really angry watching people argue about who the problem lies with instead of everyone just saying ENOUGH.  And you heart hurts when you hug your kids and listen as they cry and say how terrible this is and all you can say is that you know.  We know.  We have messed up this world and people are buying guns and killing you at school but politicians are offering thoughts and prayers, so check that box.  And your heart is aching and your brain cannot make sense of what it is coming in and you are numb.  You see the students of Parkland standing up and yelling ENOUGH and you have hope.  It slashes through the blanket of bitter despair you have wrapped yourself in and you breathe a little better.  You see students at your own school become activated by these students and you feel proud.  You read letters they have written to these young survivors and you feel encouraged.

You go to meetings and hear what you should do, what you should tell kids, where to put them in a lockdown and you are still thinking that your door doesn’t always lock.  You hear all the other things you are still supposed to be doing and you think, okay, I can do all this.  I can encourage this one to stay in school, I can get all my grades in, I can remember to fill out that form for my review, I can do all the testing and make sure kids know about the weird schedule on Monday and get the writing samples in from kids who rarely come to class.  We can do all that. 

We do all of that, so I will ask that people stop telling the world that teachers need to be armed.  Your kids are telling me in class that I should have a gun.  I don’t even wear my keys on a lanyard because the weight of them feels like a yoke around my neck at the end of the day; I cannot imagine what the weight of a gun would feel like.  I am a teacher, I teach.  I feed children, counsel them, laugh with them and encourage them.  I don’t shoot them.

Show Me a Hero

One of my teacher friends went to get her haircut this week and when they stylist asked her what she did and she responded that she taught, he thanked her for her service.  And we laughed about it at first and then said “that’s right”.  And let me be perfectly clear that I am not saying we are doing this like soldiers, or police or a first responder with bullets over our heads, but my God, we are fighting some serious shit this year.

Yesterday, before school even started, my people, my beautiful, filled with feelings, English-teaching people saved a life.  They saved a life before the 9am bell rang.   A student tried to go over the ledge on the third floor and they were able to stop this student.  They ran from their morning coffee and just talked to the student and held on, and called for help until a wonderfully strong and able-bodied man simply bear hugged the student and lifted this student back onto the ground.  While they were doing this, admin and counselors and the rest of us checked to keep other students away from the area.  Adrenaline pumped and everyone just filled in where we needed to be.  And after, our people, our first responders, were a mess.  They don’t teach you this stuff in college or teacher school.  It is not Teacher Ethics one day and how to be a hero the next.  And they were heroic, they were amazing.  They saved a life. I may have described it as fucking heroic shit, because, well, it was.

This is the second time this has happened here in the last month.  The first time was a shock.  The first time was very personal for me as I taught the student the year before.  I wept rivers of tears when I found out and stood with my people.  And they held onto me and checked in for days to see if I was okay.  I have since visited with that student and thought I was okay, but yesterday just reopened that I am not okay.  My people are not okay.  Our kids are not okay.  And we truly are on a front line every day.  We are helping kids fight depression and bullying and just the usual kids being shitty to each other.  We are feeding kids and fighting poverty.  We are listening to the talk about drugs and trying to get kids to make better choices.  We are helping them understand and combat racial divides. This is exhausting stuff friends. Remember, we are also still teaching them to capitalize their I’s, or stuff that doesn’t even look real to me in Math, or how their bodies work or how to take care of themselves and why people fought the wars they fought.  All in a day’s work.

I am exhausted.  My people are exhausted.  We are weary and eating every single carb in the world to numb the things we are holding onto inside.  But I sit here writing this on hall duty and I don’t care that I am on hall duty, because it gets me out of my room and out of my head and into the halls where the kids are.  And where one of my people sits playing guitar and trying to play away the things in his head and it is beautiful and both healing and haunting at the same time.

I am so very thankful that this is the last day before Thanksgiving break.  I am so very thankful that I will have a week with my husband and my kids who will get my undivided attention, instead of my leftover and much divided attention.  I am very thankful that my people, the people who hired me and inspire me and laugh both at  me and with me, these people who teach me to teach, these people who feed me bagels and knowledge, that these amazing people will also get a week like this.  These people are heroes and even heroes need some time off.