noticing flowers... and other things

When we were in Italy for the year, everything was novel: walking around our walled city of Viterbo; getting a coffee; taking a walk along the Via Francigena; going to a lake; making friends.  We have been home for a year, and so much has happened in the past year -- we returned on July 1, 2019, and it is now June 14, 2020, so, yes, a year -- and yet, I have felt stymied about what to write, thinking that I had nothing to write since we were back to normal life, life as everyone knows it.  I did not have the adventure of a new place and new people, nothing that anyone would want to hear.  But, really, if I were to look at back at my 100+ entries from that Italy year, I would see that most entries were about ordinary things -- students, classes, walking our kids to school, moments on ordinary days, patterns that came up, good days, bad days, learning to speak up, decreasing confidence, increasing confidence, beauty, connection.

Back here in Waltham, Massachusetts, I will see, if I use those topics as guiding topics, that so much has happened in the last year to notice, to write.  My Italy blog wasn't about my awe in seeing St. Peter's or Caravaggios or Venice; it was about the simple, the ordinary, the daily.    And the more I wrote, the more I noticed.  The more there was to write about.

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One summer I lived in Alaska for graduate school.  I thought that I would love that the sun does not entirely go down, that it stays light all day; I didn't -- I missed the cover of dark to rest naturally and not feel that I should keep going.  I thought that I could never learn flowers, that flowers were flowers; but then I learned a few flowers that a friend mentioned before I went -- Indian paint brush and forget-me-nots and fireweed and lupine.  As I learned Indian paint brush, I started to notice what was beside it.  As I learned the flower beside it, I noticed another.  Eventually, I knew five different flowers.  By knowing one flower and then two and then three, I started to see more.

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While I did yoga in the living room a few mornings ago, Hannah, age 8, did her homework that was due at 10am.  She said, "I need a flower!"  She ran outside and came back with something pink.  When her dad helped her, he asked her, "Where'd you get the flower?"  She pointed out the window.  "Okay," he said.  "You've got a rhododendron."

My mom liked rhododendrons.  I like them, too.  We have a rhododendron bush -- bushes? -- in our yard.  It is difficult for me to learn flowers, in the same way it is difficult for me to learn trees and people's faces.  If the trees could speak and tell me their stories, I would learn their stories, and eventually I would notice enough details about their bark and trunks and leaves and branches to remember their names.  But I know that at first it would be where they are and what their stories are.  For people I need a similar framework -- a context for where they are and what their story is.  Then, after a few -- or many -- interactions, I'll remember their face.

In Berkeley, California, where I lived for four years, wisteria abounds.  It wouldn't do as well here, but lilac reminds me of wisteria.  Lilac leaves help me to identify it, too.  Daniel has pointed it out for years, so I've gotten pretty good at identifying it.  But it's work for me, paying attention to details of flowers and trees and houses.  I also want to know which trees are boxwood, Japanese maple, dogwoods.  My mom knew them.  When I was in my twenties, I did some weeding for my mom when she wasn't home because she had asked me to or mentioned it or maybe I was making up for being a pill, I don't remember.  When she came home and I showed her my progress, she said, "Those were all flowers that you pulled up."

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There is plenty for me to notice from the past year back here at home.  Does it matter whether the observations are from Italy or from Waltham?  No.  

Take the time, I tell myself, to notice and to sit with what you notice.  

Write it.

surgery

Crumpled into a wheelchair, not interacting or being barely polite with the man pushing me, I thought, "Is this how it's going to end?"

The corridors were empty, silent, dark.  It was one in the morning.  We were heading to the elevators.  But they were so far away, and we couldn't get there.  Down in the ER, I had told a nurse that the pain had gotten much worse.  The morphine from a couple hours ago must have worn off.  My husband had just left when the pain got so bad that I needed to tell someone.  The nurse said, "Can you wait until you get upstairs for more medicine?"  I said, "Okay."  I didn't want to trouble anyone.  (Yes, I would do this differently, knowing what I know now.) 

She told me, "We want to get you into a room.  They say they'll likely do surgery later tonight or tomorrow to remove the appendix.  But the elevators down here aren't working.  So we can take you outside and in an ambulance to the other side of the hospital, or we can put you in a wheelchair and take you around the hospital to the other side."  I was so cold.  I had a fever.  I didn't want to have to get ready to go outside.  I had told them that the pain was like the pain of labor.  I'd had four kids, one without the epidural.  That's what I told them -- like labor without drugs.  They shook their heads okay.  Note to self: don't use that analogy again.  While it meant everything to me, the most severe pain of my life, it meant nothing to them.

I thought of Grey's Anatomy.  Wasn't there an episode (I've watched many seasons) where someone gets kidnapped in the bowels of the hospital?  This was me, away from everyone except one man an this wheelchair, in search of an elevator we might never find.  Who knew we were here?  And I might die on the way anyway.  He had no medicine with him; his job was simply to get me upstairs.

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I crouched out of the wheelchair and into the bed.  Safe.  Relieved.  And yet in so much pain.  The nurse tried to hook me up to things (which things, I don't know), but it was hard.  And I complained and complained every time she touched me or even when she didn't touch me.  I kept repeating, It hurts so much it hurts so much it hurts so much.  She called in reinforcements.  They tried and tried.  But the needles wouldn't go in, the blood pressure was too low, they couldn't give the pain medication.  I remember it all as a haze, of being in the middle of a few people who were trying to get me comfortable but couldn't, and I cried and cried and cried and complained -- oh, I felt bad about being so difficult, but I couldn't stop whining and crying and saying, That hurts!

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A doctor walked in, fresh and morning-looking.  I had slept.  They must have gotten the medicine in somehow.  He reviewed my case with me, told me he was debating whether to give me antibiotics or to go in and remove the appendix just in case it was a problem.  I smiled and deferred.  Did I mention the horrific twenty hours preceding this morning?  No.  I didn't mention being hunched over at school between parent conferences, wishing to pass out so that I would get whisked away and taken care of and the stomach pain would go away and I wouldn't have to figure out what to do.  I didn't mention that I nearly crawled my way to my car; that I have a high tolerance for pain; that I thought that I was going to die the night before; that I'd never been in such bad shape in my entire life.  I'm a forty-seven year old healthy woman with four kids.  I teach high school, and I do yoga and walk every day.  I'm lucky and healthy and have a full life.  I'm never sick until I'm really sick.  This is the worst sick I'd been.  Debilitating.

I didn't say this.  He said, "But, you know, you look great.  I think I'll just give you the antibiotics, and that should clear things up."

He thought some more.  "On the other hand, maybe we should check it out just in case.  Just to be sure. Yeah, we can go in laprascopically to check things out and take out the appendix if it's a problem.  It's an easy surgery.  You'll be out of here this afternoon."

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Who Am I Today?

prompt from Journal of Expressive Writing: Who Am I Today?

I am my mother.  I am not my mother.  I want to keep everyone happy.  I want to speak up and make myself happy.

Today in sophomore English, I read Billy Collins' poem "On Turning Ten" with my students over zoom.  I was thinking that this poem might resonate more with them than the Tralfamadorians' sense of time in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.  I don't blame them for being confused by the Tralfamadorians.  The first time I read Slaughterhouse Five, over twenty years ago, I had no idea what was going on.  I got through it, but I thought, Gracious, I need to sit through a senior class where Donna (colleague) teaches this novel.  She had the structure of the novel down, and could break it into manageable parts to such a degree that every character and symbol and motif seemed obvious, glaringly obvious.

The Tralfamadorians don't see life as a linear experience.  They see it as all moments at the same time, co-existing.  They see it like a mountain range, peaks and lows all together, not separated or chronological.  Their version of time is so antithetical to ours, or at least to mine.  I am a linear thinker, goal-oriented, hour to hour and point to point.  Step to step to get to desired goal.  This summer I want to write every day, learn piano by picking up a song that one of the kids is working on and trying a measure or two, add to my Italian vocabulary.  I will be able to see how I started with nothing, reached point A by one date and point B by another date.  So, no, the Tralfamadorian version of time is not mine.

But then, as Billy Pilgrim experiences a moment in time and then is thrown into another moment of which he is reminded, I think Oh yes! This is how time works.  One moment reminds us of another moment that we think of as past, but really, it's also our present.  And our future.

In Billy Colllins' "On Turning Ten" the speaker was an Arabian wizard at one age and a soldier and a prince at others.  He used to think that, if he skinned his knee, he would shine.  He learns, upon turning ten, that, when he skins his knee, he actually bleeds.  I am not just a forty-seven year old woman, mom, friend, teacher, wife, neighbor.  I am also still the six-year-old who rejoiced when she realized that her first grade teacher, Sister Patricia Anne, adored her.  I am still the teenager who decided, when she saw a parent take away the confidence of her siblings and other parent, that she would never allow someone that much power over her, that she would never let someone take away her confidence.  I am still the twenty-four year old who needed to leave Boston and move to California jobless because she had to stretch.  I am still the adventurer of two years ago who took a job in Italy for a year and then moved with our family of six to Viterbo, Italy.  I am a mom who loves not driving to work during quarantine and instead settling in at home, prepping in the sunny dining room, spending time at home and being happy to be at home so much.  I am this homebody, too.  Is it Whitman who says that we are contradictions?  I'm one of those, too.  I am still learning to speak up, no matter how many times I've spoken up before.  I am working on not worrying about upsetting people or about whether people like me.

When I hide out because I am angry, I am that protective, self-preserving child.  When I hesitate to speak up at a faculty meeting, I am that dutiful Catholic school girl not wanting to get anything wrong and to get everything right; wanting to be liked and admired and not criticized.  

When I tell my husband that he needs to move out, I am that girl who read her books instead of playing flashlight tag because that's what she really wanted to do; that applied to go to Italy in college after an initial parental no; that moved to California with no job.

I am myself again.

smart

"Mom, you're great."

This is Sebastian, our fourteen-year old.  He is watching me practice a song on the piano.  He's been taking piano since he was five.  He likes playing the piano, or perhaps he likes being able to play the piano.

As I continue to hit the wrong keys, miss my cue to hit a key, hit three keys at once and at the wrong time, Sebastian stops and says, "Okay.  Now you're going to begin every time I hit the C."  We play, and he shakes his head a little to the time and he says, "C.....C.....C...."

I love his patience, his hands, his affection, his working with me.  I am in awe of his ability to teach me.  

I tell him, "Sebastian, you're really smart."

He looks at me and says, "Which kind of smart?"

I say, "The one where you get people.  The emotional smart."

He smiles.  

"Good," he says.

Battles

Connor has earned $17 by putting together two dining room chairs and mowing the lawn.  He decides that he wants to buy Skittles, a huge bag of Skittles that costs somewhere between ten and twenty dollars. We try to eat healthfully at home. A $17 bag of Skittles?  That's a big bag. Bad for the teeth.  Bad for the body. Bad for energy.

No way.

But if Connor wants to get Skittles, he'll walk with me through the woods to Staples to get them. This means an hour plus of walking and talking with Connor.

A retired friend emails, "I vote for the Skittles."

So do I.

Pat

The private school where I teach held a zoom vigil last week in the wake of recent killings of Black people.  Students of color spoke, faculty spoke, parents spoke. I watched and listened, amazed by the courage and strength, especially of the teenagers.  One junior spoke about growing up in Dorchester, around mostly Black people without money.  His mom told him, "When you drive, don't drive fast.  Don't play your music loud.  Don't put down your windows."

He said, "Then I came to Thayer, and the Thayer kids were all speeding into the parking lot in their jeeps, blasting their music, windows down.  And then I went to Scituate and Cohasset, and I thought, 'What is this?' " Scituate and Cohasset are wealthy South Shore towns with both year-round homes and summer homes.   You can leave your bike overnight at the beach, and no one will take it.  My husband and I have called Cohasset a "pretty how town," a phrase that I think we got from e.e. cummings. Scituate has at least two country clubs, and Cohasset at least one.  

Both Scituate and Cohasset are virtually all white.

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Scituate is my favorite place in the world.  We went to Scituate for the entire summer, starting when I was four.  I knew nothing about race, and I didn't think about whether a place was white, likely because ninety-nine percent of my life was white.  In the summers, we played tennis and golf and rode our bikes and went to the beach.  As we got older, we babysat almost daily.

When I was a junior in high school, I applied to a summer school program at Milton Academy.  It was called MASP -- Massachusetts Advanced Studies Program.  The guidance counselors at my Catholic school had told me about it, and they told me of other students who had gone.  Kids lived at Milton Academy for six weeks, and took classes six days a week.  I got wait-listed.  At the Open House, my mom and I listened to one teacher, Ted Allen, talk about writing.  He dazzled us -- I don't remember what he said, only that Mom and I were a bit starstruck, realizing, Oh, that's why kids come here.

The director spoke and some other teachers spoke about the program, diversity, learning.  

On the ride home, my mom said, "Well, now you know why you didn't get in."

I didn't know.  

She said, "They talked about diversity and increasing the number of minorities in the program this year.  You're not a minority."

When affirmative action comes up, one of my sisters still says to me, "Remember?  Because of affirmative action, you almost didn't get into that summer program."

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I was sixteen.  I went to a nearly all-white school.  My family was bitter about the waitlist; I was surprised since I'd always been told how smart I was by my Catholic school teachers, but not bitter.  I wasn't good enough; other kids were better.  I sent back the paper to say that I wanted to stay on the waitlist and hoped they would let me in.

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When MASP accepted me some time later, I sat at the kitchen table with my parents and debated whether to do the program.  I felt conflicted: on the one hand, I wanted to go; on the other hand, I felt impatient and false.  I kept saying that I wanted to become a social worker, but I wasn't doing anything towards that goal.  If I was serious, I should start working at a shelter now, for the summer.  Going to summer school seemed a luxury (and it cost money, a lot of money!  I think it was $1800 back in 1989), and I needed to get going on my career.

My parents listened.  To their credit, they didn't laugh or condescend.  They told me that I had plenty of time to work in shelters and that this summer program was for just one summer, that it wouldn't get in the way of my desire to be a social worker.

I signed up.

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I got the writing teacher we'd heard speak, the charismatic one that impressed my mom and me.  Ted Allen.  He was dynamic, asked the hard questions, made us think on levels I didn't know existed.  At forty-seven years old, I think, Wow, it would be great to take that course now; I could get so much out of it.  I was a kid who liked happy endings, was dutiful and hardworking, and didn't, I think, really get nuance.  I loved Ted's dynamism, bluntness, charisma, intellect.  I was so out of my league, and I partly knew it, and I partly didn't.

He had us watch Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and I was confused at the end.  I remember his reading from my journal one Friday (on Fridays he read excerpts from our journals; if there was something that you didn't want him to read or read aloud, you just had to mark that in your journal), and my entry started like this, "Do the Right Thing was good."  I remember being both excited that he was reading an entry of mine and embarrassed that my first sentence was so elementary.  I remember that I wasn't sure what the point of the movie was and that I didn't totally get it.  I appreciated it, but I didn't really get it.

One day Ted thrust his black arm out over the table (what I would ten years later learn was called a Harkness table) and said, "What do you see?"  We were quiet.  He repeated himself, "What do you see?  Say everything that comes to mind.  Go."

I'd never talked about race in a classroom before, never heard people talk openly about race anywhere.  I didn't know what to say, and I'm not sure whether I said anything.  But I remember that this boy, Jake, who lived in a town neighboring mine and who seemed so much more experienced and worldly and smart and mature than I was, spoke up and said something that wasn't positive, something that, it seemed to me, he didn't necessarily think, but he understood that others did and he understood that saying these things, these racist or biased things, was what Ted was trying to get us to do.  To go there to that place.  To get race right out there in front of us, like his black arm.

I said nothing.

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One Saturday when I was sitting by the tennis courts, Ted came and sat with me.  I told him that MASP didn't look at all like my high school, which was nearly all white.  I didn't know what to do about this, how to make my high school more like MASP, more like the real world.  

Ted said, "Change schools."

I was about to be a senior in high school.  I didn't know what to do with that advice.

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My family was still going to Scituate, but only on weekends.  This was the first summer, I think, that my family didn't go down from mid-June through Labor Day.  (This helped me to miss Scituate less, though I still missed it.)  One Sunday I invited a group of MASP friends to come down to Scituate for the day; it was about thirty minutes from Milton.  Caroline, Jenn, Cecilia, EunJin, Pat, another Jen, and maybe another person or two that I don't remember.

Caroline and Jenn and Jen are white, like me.  Cecilia and EunJin are Korean.  Pat is Haitian.  I was still trying to remember the difference between Asian and Haitian and got confused sometimes.  Pat was black, and she lived in Mattapan, I knew this.  And I knew from my parents that Mattapan could be a dangerous place.

But I wasn't thinking about all of this.  I was thinking about a Sunday in Scituate.

Someone -- my parents?  my grandmother and aunt who lived up the street? -- picked us up and drove us to my parents' beach house.  We hung out on the porch, we walked to the beach, we talked and talked and laughed and laughed.  Except Pat.  Pat sulked.  And I didn't know why.  We tried to get her to join in and talk, and I asked her what was wrong, but she shrugged, said very little, and kept a towel over her head at the beach.  I was annoyed: what was wrong with Pat?  I had invited her to spend the day at my favorite place in the world, at my parents' house, with this group of people that she was friends with, too.  I couldn't understand why she was in such a bad mood.

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Pat and I stayed friends through the summer though I still felt frustrated by that Sunday in Scituate.  We exchanged letters that fall, and I remember that I was shocked by her elementary-school print and incomplete sentences.  And I wondered how well we had known each other.

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It's thirty years later, and I'm at the zoom vigil to honor Black Lives Matter and the most recent violence against a Black person, against George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer.  I'm listening to this black teenager talk about growing up in Dorchester and going to see his new Thayer friends in Scituate and Cohasset, and his being shocked that these places exist, places where white kids his age drive around in jeeps in their bathing suits, blasting music and singing and looking like something out of the movies.  I think, What a shock for him -- that these wealthy white towns exist just thirty minutes from his neighborhood where he has to be careful when he walks outside the house, where his mom doesn't want him going for runs these days because of what happened to Ahmed Aubery.

And it's then, thirty years later, that I remember Pat on the beach in Scituate, towel over her head, not talking to any of us, in a seemingly bad mood.  What was going on for her?  What worlds were colliding for her?  What did she feel driving down Ocean Avenue and sitting on the beach in a sea of white, so likely the only Black person in sight?

I sat in Ted's class and read and thought and talked about race and inequality and injustice.  I looked at his arm when he thrust it in front of me, afraid to speak and afraid not to speak.  But I didn't take the conversations and questions and pull them out of the classroom.  I wasn't a horrible or thoughtless kid, but I was ignorant.  I was so ignorant that I didn't take what I learned on Saturday in class and see it on Sunday in Scituate with my white family; didn't get that Pat's letter did reveal that we hadn't really gotten each other, or rather, I hadn't gotten her; her education or neighborhood or background hadn't crossed my mind.  

I turned seventeen that summer.  I can be disappointed in myself for not getting inequality or race or injustice or paying attention to the right things.  If I forgive myself, then I also need to forgive the students in front of me, the ones who worry more about their GPA's and college applications than the Black experience at our school.  But I'm the teacher now.  

Ted Allen told me years ago when I was the student, "Go to a different high school."  

I don't want to go to a different high school.

I want to make my classrooms better.  My school better.  I want to have the conversations in the classroom, in classrooms similar to those Milton classrooms, to get my students to see real life outside the classroom in ways that I didn't at their age.

The Hardest Step?

May 31, 2020

"I've read books about parents' getting divorced, but I never thought that it would happen to us," says Mary through tears.

I never did either.

I've thought and said aloud, "I'll stay in this marriage because of the kids."  We have four kids, ages 14, 13, 10, 8.  I teach high school Latin and English, and I remember the student essays about the worst moment of a kid's life, when parents sat down their kids to tell them that they were getting divorced.

I tell our kids on Sunday morning, "Your dad and I love you very much. And we have been having problems, so we are going to take a break.  He is moving out for some time."  I'm pretty sure that those are the words I use, though I stop and cry a lot, and Daniel adds to what I say.  The big kids sit on the couch, some tears streaming, saying very little.  Hannah sits on Daniel's lap.  Connor, age 10, sitting on the floor, keeps backing up, farther and farther until he's under the shelf that the tv is on.  He's made himself so small that he fits.  I told Daniel what Connor would ask.  And he does.

"Why is Dad the one moving out?"

"We think that it's best for you kids if I stay here," I tell him.

"Your mom is very competent," Daniel says.

Connor stays hunched in his corner under the tv.

Hannah is sitting on Daniel's lap.  She gets up and gives me a hug.  

The big kids sit and stare.

One kid says, "I thought you were going to say that we had to do a better job with our chores."

Another says, "I thought you were going to say that we were having a family movie."  

We laugh.  

We cry.

Part of me cannot believe that we are doing this to them.  That I am doing this to them.  I have a choice: I can forgive my husband for what is called an emotional affair.  The third.  Or fourth, if you count the high school ex-girlfriend twice.  But I'm not sure that I can really and truly forgive again (or maybe whether I ever did), and I don't want to be feeling anger and resentment in my own house every time something smaller comes up, something unrelated to these relationships.  

I need some ease. Emotional ease.

Our kids know that they are loved and valued.  I know they do.  I do not feel that way in my marriage.  

I wouldn't want them to stay where they didn't feel loved and valued.