Who is left for me to be?

 I am sitting at a teacher's desk in a classroom that isn't mine. This isn't where I thought I'd be by now. This isn't what I thought my life would be. When I started substituting again, I thought it was temporary. A way to get my foot back in the door. A way to do the work, to be in the building, without all the weight that comes with being the teacher in charge, but to be here with kids and to be seen doing what I do best. 

I though that doing this would eventually lead back to me being a teacher. I thought I always was a teacher. 

I am sitting at a desk in a tech ed room, in a district where I've subbed for 7 years, where kids in grades 7-12 know my name. In a district where I've 3 times interviewed for a permanent contract teaching job and all three times been dismissed out of hand without even getting a second interview. It hurts. All the time. But it isn't the one that hurts the most.

Two days ago, I went back to the school where I spent 2 of the past 5 years as a long term sub, as the English teacher of record to 100 kids a year. I went back for the first time since I interviewed there for a permanent job that I thought was maybe mine for the taking. It was the first time back in a school that I thought would maybe be my forever school.

I sat at a teacher desk there, at the desk I sat at for a full year two years ago, and all day it was all I could do not to cry.

THAT interview? Was a room full of people I already knew. Three teachers I'd worked with, one had been my mentor teacher. A principal I'd reported to. They smiled and laughed at my jokes and nodded at my answers. 

And then they didn't pick me.

I thought I was already a teacher there. I thought I already was part of that department. I thought they liked me. I thought I belonged. 

So when I didn't get that job, it felt different. It didn't feel like oh maybe they just didn't give me a chance. Maybe they have me pegged as a sub and are having a hard time seeing me as an English teacher. Maybe they already knew someone and had them in mind for the job. 

It felt like a verdict. . It felt like people I knew, who knew how I teach, deciding that I wasn't good enough. It felt like confirmation that I'm never going to be a teacher again.

Two days ago I was back in that building for the first time since that interview. Other teachers said hi to me in the hallway and I looked at the ground. I had to blink a few times and pretend I had a runny nose when I grabbed a tissue.

I've always thought I would be a teacher again. I've always thought that I was still a teacher, just waiting for the right time to get a job again. Just waiting for the right job. 

I don't think that anymore.

So if I'm not a teacher, who is left for me to be?

One day

 One day you will wake up and you will be in your forties. Your children will be teenagers. Your days of publishing a blog every day during naptime, of playgrounds and storytimes and PBS kids providing your only opportunities to breathe will be a decade in the past.

You will look at your life and you will say okay, world, I'm ready to come back. I'm ready to go back to being the person I was before I was ever just somebody's mom. I'm ready to return in full force to being a person myself because these small humans who I have been consumed by for so long are people themselves. 

And maybe the world will say no. 

Maybe you will find that after 15 years of being a parent, you can't just pick up the life you had before as if nothing has changed. Things have changed. And the things you've done because you thought they made you a good mom, the part time work you've done because you thought you were "keeping your hand in it," the things you created out of nothing and the things you have adapted to meet the needs of other people? These things will all seem small and indistinguishable. 

You will realize that you cannot simply resume a life that you left. You will realize that the person you were lo so many years ago doesn't exist anymore and that you can't bring her back to life just be wanting to.

And you will grieve.

You will be angry and then sad and then angry again, all in the course of an hour. And you will feel like you don't have a right to have any of these feelings because of course you chose this life, you opted out instead of leaning in, you wanted to be with your babies and you were, and that should be enough.

It won't be enough. 

And you will want to write about it. You will want to scream from the rooftops about how life isn't fair and also you will wonder if you did the whole thing wrong in the first place, and fair doesn't come into the matter. You will want to process on paper the way you did when your kids were watching Curious George just so you could have a minute with your thoughts, only now your kids are at rehearsal or at work and your thoughts are too much to be alone with sometimes. 

You will think that you are too small, too insignificant, to have anything to say anymore. You will not want to put yourself out there because you've been rejected so many times, and so your writing, your words, your feelings, they'll fester.

You'll think you're not enough. 

You'll think this world, this life, is not enough.

Maybe it won't be.

And one day you'll pick up a pen and you'll write "I have nothing to say I have nothing to say I have nothing to say" in your journal for three straight pages. And then the next day you'll do it again while you wait for your no longer a baby girl to finish band practice.

And then one day you'll have something to say. And it will feel small and insignificant and you'll be afraid of being rejected. And you'll say it anyway.

And then maybe one day you'll realize that if you can't step back into that life you had in your twenties (TWENTIES) then maybe you'll just have to find a new one.

Invisible

 Last week, I went on an overnight trip with my daughter and 14 other teens from her school. They were participating in a high level academic competition, and I knew all of them, from 6th through 12th grade, at least a little bit from subbing. Another parent chaperone and I slept in the dorm, walked them to meals, recorded their performances. coordinated with their teacher coach and their parents at home. 

I am 45 years old. A dorm bed and shower are not my first choice. 

But these kids were delightful, and they did really well at their competition, and I was - AM - so proud of all of them.

So when we got back, and the school posted pictures of them, I was happy. I AM happy.

But.

I looked at those pictures and all I could think was that the other parent chaperone and I weren't in them. I hadn't asked to be, I hadn't thought I should be at the time. But here, now, looking back, I was looking at a picture of these kids and suddenly felt like I was never part of their experience at all.

I felt invisible.

I'm tired of being invisible. 

As a mom, as a substitute teacher, as a theater booster and band patron, I show up and I do the work and at the end of the day I disappear. That's the point, I guess. The point is that it isn't about me.

But can't something be about me?

I have been known to disappear  from group chats, from social  media, from my blog (ahem, ahem) and wait for someone to notice I'm gone. I know that's stupid. I know it's crappy and immature and that really everyone else is too busy and too caught up in their own complicated lives to spend time looking for me if I'm hiding.

But sometimes I just wish that someone missed me when I was gone. 

I wish that I was visible enough for someone to notice when I wasn't there.

Is that terrible? I hope not. 

Don't say anything

 I had an interview last week. "Don't say anything" I said to my husband and children as I told them quietly about it. They were excited and I bit my tongue. That was what I didn't want.

I had an interview and I thought I did fine. I was completely myself, I told the truth. I thought I was a good teacher. I thought I was a likeable person. I left the interview thinking, I know how this is going to go and I don't want to hope.

I didn't hope. I didn't count on it. I tried not to tell too many people I'd even been to it. 

And today I realized that they've been doing second round interviews this week and I definitely didn't get one.

I tried to not get excited, to not hope, to not put my faith in something that might not happen and you know what? It still hurt when it didn't happen. 

This sucks.

I want to stop trying, to stop putting myself out there, to give up. To stop believing that anything in my life will ever be different. I'll just do this forever or I'll go get a job at a Target. I don't even know what the point is anymore.

It suck and it hurts and I have to wipe my eyes and go about my day and just be good at what I'm doing now and who I am. 

Don't say anything. I know. I know. 

For the Fire

 My best most creative times came when I committed to writing every day. My darkest times happened when I committed to writing every day and didn't follow through. The shame, the fear of disappointing people, the labeling myself as a failure. They hit hard. 

The truth is I don't think that now I'm writing for the same reasons as I did when I was 29. I don't have a community that I'm writing for, I'm not up for any prizes. There aren't bloghops or comment trains. There's just me and the blank page and the sense of putting something out into the world and then no longer having any control over what happens to it. 

Natalie Goldberg talked about doing spontaneous writing at a church fair, about giving away pages she had written and never seeing them again. Keats allegedly wrote a sonnet every day and threw it in the fire.

I want to learn to let go. I want to learn to be less precious about my writing so that I can write. The good thing about not having any readers is that there's no one to disappoint. So hello world, I'm here to say that for the good of the craft, I'm going to write a blog post every day for the fire. That is, to throw into the fire. Except you're the fire. 

Right?

Right.

The Good

 I'm reading Just One Thing by Rick Hanson, in which he suggests practices to do regularly to develop what he calls a "Buddha Brain." One of them is noticing the good. So here is some good from my day. 

1. The girls who came to my substitute study hall made me laugh for 20 minutes and genuinely seemed to enjoy my company. 
2. My daughter's friend, who is a CODA, taught me the ASL sign for water today.
3. A girl in the class I'm subbing for right now just found her friend's toiletry bag in the bathroom and returned it to her. 
4. This is the third day in a row that I've written, even though I didn't always feel like it. 
   
5. I cross linked a bunch of products in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, which feels like a positive and complete accomplishment. 
6. My friend's child just made a capella choir for next year.
7. My youngest is going to the state competition for Future Problem Solving in a week.
8. A former colleague wrote on my Facebook wall that she was watching Matilda and told her spouse "That's all well and good but once upon a time I taught with the real life Miss Honey."

That's all I've got for now but I'll keep looking. What good have you noticed lately?

Soft

 Today is a quieter day. I am here at work, in a classroom full of high schoolers taking public speaking who are, as a matter of fact, silent. 

There is space for my brain to work and today it does not seem quite so much like it's out to get me. I've read an entire book of Billy Collins poems and the fact that beauty and poetry exist in the world is maybe in and of itself enough. 

I wish I had, as Virginia Woolf once so eloquently said, a room of y own. Sitting in other people's classrooms, watching other people's students, as I have done for 7 years now lends itself to a certain public kind of thinking. I would like to make something. I would like to be someone who creates, who inspires. My brain is soft and polite and it's hard for me to say no and so I am instead someone who can be trusted to say yes when the freshman asks to go to the vending machine. 

It's not the kind of beloved I wanted to be. 

But today in this space with these children, my brain feels soft around the edges and that is not the worst thing. There is beauty in my head and there is beauty around me and right now no one is trying to take it away. I know that later there will be dishes and there will be laundry, I know that there are bills to pay, I know I know I know. 

But right now there is quiet and there is recognition and there is no one asking me to be anyone in particular and maybe just maybe this softness is a thing I could learn to love again.

Because a vision softly creeping

Friends. It is 2026. I am 44 years old. 

It has been a long time. 

Five minutes ago I was lying on my bed, with my thirteen (THIRTEEN) year old baby girl nuzzling against my shoulder watching game shows on my bedroom TV because I forgot to sign into an streaming services. I had a notebook open next to me as well as a book of writing exercises that I kept opening and closing. Nothing felt right. Nothing spoke to me or inspired me. 

I was certain that I was out of words. That there was nothing left in me that had any meaning. 

My girls are big now, teens, with their own lives and worlds. My little one told her therapist the other day "Sometimes I like my friends more than i like my parents. Sorry mom." And I said, no, baby, you're thirteen. You're supposed to. That's the way it's supposed to be. 

I'm 44. I don't know how that's supposed to be. 

I'm a teacher, and I've always been a teacher, through all those years when I was "just a mom." But here I am now with two girls who don't need me all the time, who are busy with their own worlds, and I always thought that when I was ready I would step back into the classroom without skipping a beat. 

It's been years that I've been trying. 

I apply for contract jobs and they hire 22 year olds. 

I'm feeling like the world doesn't have much use left for me. 

So I'm lying on my bed, snuggling my teenage baby girl, and searching my library webpage for books on writer's block, for books on how to get unstuck, for books on how to find my words when I don't believe I have any anymore.

The only way out is through, friends. The only way to write is to write. 

I'd forgotten. 

So hello, old friends. I missed you. I know I'm probably speaking and writing into a void right now, I know there's probably no one listening anymore, but I'm not certain that that matters. 

I don't know where next is. I don't know who there is left for me to be. But I think this is the only place I'll start to find it.