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. 

Maslow before Bloom

One  of my favorite things to say when I'm teaching is "You have to do the Maslow stuff before you do the Bloom's stuff."

In case you didn't study psychology or ed psych, Maslow was a researcher who created a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. Essentially, you have to meet your needs for survival, safety, and belonging before you can meet your needs for growth and self actualization. 

Bloom was an educational theorist, who developed a taxonomy of educational objectives. Knowledge came before understanding  came before synthesis and evaluation.

So when I say you have to do the Maslow stuff before you do the Bloom's stuff, I'm saying that you have to make sure kids' basic needs - physical, emotional, and psychological - are being met before you  can expect them to meet higher order learning objectives. 

I kind of forgot that the same thing applies to me. 

I have been trying to figure out what to do with my life. I have been DESPAIRING of the fact that I can't find higher meaning and purpose in my life. And every day I've been writing the worst crap in the world in my journal about how I feel afraid and angry and alone, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I'm never going to reach self actualization without dealing with that stuff first

I don't know what that means yet, but I know that keeping it in mind and allowing and accepting it is the only place to begin.

I have to meet my Maslow needs first. And that's okay.

Despair

 Last week, I was sitting in the teacher's lounge at a middle school where I was substituting. The teachers sitting around me started talking about how the teachers at the high school were going to turn over in the next one to three years because so many teachers were going to retire. My ears perked up because I am still hoping to get a teaching job. Then I started to realize that the people they were talking about were all only about five years older than I am. 

I wonder if it's time to give up. 

I am 44 years old. I'm too old to start over. I am too old to try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. 

Do I regret the years I spent as a full time mom? ... Nooo? I mean, I don't think so. 

Do I resent the fact that spending those years with my kids somehow took me off the track to ever do anything else with my life ever again? Yeeeees. 

How many times when my kids were little did I tell myself that I couldn't do everything at the same time but life is long? How many times did I convince myself that it was all going to be okay, that I was going to have time to find myself again, that when my kids weren't little anymore there would be plenty of time to do all the other things I wanted to do again? 

And now I'm 44 and it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel like there's any time left to do things. I know there's a lot of life left, but it really doesn't feel like life thinks there's enough of me left. 

There's no happy ending today. There's no moral. There's no twist. Today there's just despair. 

Resilience

 When I was in my 20s, I used to say that I was very lucky. I was very lucky that every time I had really needed a job, one had appeared. 

I moved to Indiana after my first full year of professional teaching, and I signed up to sub in 3 different districts. By October, after subbing a few times at the city schools and exactly one time at the county high school, I was offered a long term sub job by the county that I hadn't even applied for. When it ended, I went back to subbing. Again, I subbed a few times at the city schools and exactly one time at the county middle school, and I got a call that very afternoon asking me if I would take another long term job. That job turned into a second job that took me through the end of the year. 

The next year, we moved to Texas, with very little warning. I sent letters to all the public and private schools in town and before the summer had ended or I had even set foot in the state of Texas, the Catholic school principal called me and said I was just what he needed. I worked there for three years. 

When my husband graduated and we moved to Pennsylvania, I worked as an SAT teacher and master tutor, teaching several classes a week, while I waited for my PA certification to go through. As soon as it did, I signed up to sub in several districts. Before I had even subbed a day, I got called for a long term job that lasted through the end of the year. 

This summer I had three interviews. One in my home district, where I have subbed for 6 years. One for the middle school in the district where I have long term subbed at the high school for the last two years. And one at an underprivileged school that struggles to keep certified teachers. No one hired me. 

I feel broken. I know I need to bounce, to keep applying, to take the rejection with a grain of salt. But in the back of my head, in the bottom of my soul I just keep asking, why does no one want me anymore?

The last job I interviewed for, the one which on the surface seemed like the least strong match, was the one that probably stung the most. When I saw the job posted a week before school started, when I got the invitation to interview, I thought, this is it. This is the job that's going to come through, that's going to change my life, that's going to be there right when I need it like all those other jobs have been. I told people about it. I almost bought books for the classroom library before even going to the interview.

When they picked another candidate, I was disappointed. Really though, I was deeply, deeply ashamed. Ashamed for thinking that I could get it. Ashamed for telling people about the interview and then having to tell them I didn't get it. Ashamed for believing that anyone would want me. 

The very first teaching job I ever applied for, the one that I don't talk about, was at the school where I student taught, subbing for my cooperating teacher. It seemed like a sure thing. I would be teaching content I knew to kids I knew and loved. But they gave it to someone else. The superintendent had promised the next job to someone and besides, he said. I looked sloppy. My clothes were wrinkled. My hair was messy. 

I went home and cried.

That winter break, before returning to my last semester of grad school, I sat on my parents' couch and read Writing Down the Bones cover to cover. I wrote for hours. In the evenings I went to the townie bar with friends, one of whom is now my husband, and shared pitchers of beer. I started to feel like a person again. I remembered who I was. 

And at the end of that break, the same school called me for a different long term sub job, which went to the end of the year and which turned into my first full time contract job the next year. 

I checked out Writing Down the Bones from the library a few weeks ago. My notebook is open. I'm afraid of the vulnerability to hope that something will come up , that something will change, but I'm beginning from the only place I know. Hopefully I'll find myself there again.