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. 

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.