Here's the real bee in my bonnet

A friend recently texted me and asked my honest opinion about N's middle school. This friend is now in CrMS' resides area.

I gave her a long explanation (broken up into about a zillion small text messages....because I'm not a savage) that CrMS has been a good experience for N, and I have no real problems with the school.

And that is true.

What I am still cranky about three years after the middle school decision was made is that I CONTRIBUTED TO ALL THE BULLSHIT that I criticize other people for doing.

By sending my kid to CrMS, I did what other people around these parts do when they move into another county to avoid the district schools.

I did it on a smaller scale, but I did it.

And I'm disappointed in myself for this, even though CrMS is where my kid wanted to go. I guess there was no real way to win this.

I know what kinds of stories I heard.
I know what teachers encouraged me to do, where to send her.
And I know "the talk" in the district: which schools are "good," which programs are "good."
N has been drinking the high school juice in her own way.
Worrying about which school offers which "career path" when she has no clue what she wants to do with her life.

I'm disappointed that I didn't live up to what I say I believe: that it really doesn't matter where a kid goes (for the most part) if they have involved parents and a solid foundation and you know the rest.

I'm mad at myself (and everybody else who runs away or sends their kid to the "better" schools) because wouldn't all the schools be better if we put our smart, hard-working kids into them?

That is the bee in my bonnet.
The thing that makes me cranky as hell at this whole "school choice" process. 

The "high school decision" (drum roll and a poem)

She wants to go to EHS.
For all the wrong reasons.
I don't even care anymore.
I've been driving her,
hither and yon.
What's 4 more years?
Three more, if I'm lucky.
She'll have wheels.

I don't think I'll give
The boys a choice.
I'll funnel them where
I want them to go.
Whichever school is close
And has a bus.

Now we wait.
I clicked the button.
Application sent.
Forms will be mailed.
Horse and pony show
Of her awesomeness.
But is someone else
More awesome?
How many slots of awesome
Are there?
Can you tell me?

All of this...
Stewing...
For what?
What's the point?
I'm not sure.

I suspect the same thing
That happened in middle
Will happen again.
The friend(s) that she followed
Will not be the friends of
The future.

Can't we figure this out
At a school that offers
A bus ride?

Happy 20 years of marital whatever-this-is

I don't want to jump the gun, but provided D and stay married until Wednesday, we will "officially" celebrate 20 years of marital "bliss."

We unofficially celebrated in May with our 6-day trip to Quebec, Canada, which seems a lifetime ago. Our goal was to stay married until our official anniversary.

I think we've got a pretty good chance of making it until Wednesday.

I remember as a teen looking at my parents' marriage and thinking, "Geezus, it is so boring." To my teen eyes, there was no passion, no romance.

My teen eyes were right.

A long marriage is a whole, whole lot of boring. Of tedious. Of thinking to yourself, "How in the world have we tolerated each other for this long?" It is sprinkled with occasional bouts of "I cannot stand this person at all" and "I am so thankful I have this person in my life."

Every once in a while, if you can somehow find enough energy, there are sparks of the passion that got the two of you together in the first place, but those are hard to find during any kind of sports season when you are driving someone to practice or a game 3-4 times a week.

Most conversations that D and I attempt to have are interrupted by G wanting to say something highly important right-that-moment about poop or a video game.

We are entirely too tired and antisocial to actually want to "go out and do anything" on a weekend. That whole "date-night concept" is not really for people who don't enjoy going out much.

If my kids ever ask me the "secret" to a long marriage, I think I would tell them that to have a long marriage, you have to keep your mouth shut a lot.

You have to realize that the whole "grass is greener" phenomenon is bunkus. Other situations appear better, but the reality is that that other person who seems amazing enjoys sports WAY more than you and would have a game on the television ALL THE TIME and would EXPECT YOU TO EAT AT SPORTS BARS. That other person likes to shop ALL THE TIME and would EXPECT YOU TO GO WITH HER.

A long-term marriage requires that you still consider the person you married your friend, and in spite of all his/her annoying personality quirks, you know that the person you married is going to be there come hell or high water.

By the time you reach 44 and 48 years of age, you want someone who will go with you to your colonoscopy and find the mupirocin when you have an infected hang-nail, not someone who will take you dancing every weekend.

Having and continuing to want a long-term marriage is looking at what you started with and being thankful for and proud of what you've built together---the family, the camaraderie, the wealth when you started out with nothing.

So....here's to Wednesday, to 20 years, to looking at life through middle-aged eyes and finding that marriage may be a little dull but not so bad after all. 

The voices inside my head

A perfect storm of stress and hormones made the voices appear again, those insidious thoughts that come from the depths of my id, the thoughts that make me cringe because they are so not me.

When I say "voices inside my head" someone might erroneously think of a schizophrenic who hears voices and thinks they are real. The horror of intrusive thoughts for me (and other people with OCD) is that they appear and I know good and well that they aren't my intentional thoughts. But they are in my head, nonetheless, so I worry that they ARE my real feelings and that I'm so dense that I'm not even aware that that is how I must really feel.

At least for me, the voices sound like me except more rough and angry.

What "the voice" says are things that are the horrible, nasty, cruel things I might say if I had no conscience or empathy or concern about hurting others. Basically, it is like having an anonymous disgusting person launch Twitter attacks inside my head all the time.

That may be the most troubling thing of all.

If you cannot imagine what these voices sound like, I can give an example:

Me, seeing a classmate of N's who just happens to walk by and for whom I have no real opinion whatsoever:
My thought: "Oh, there's so-and-so."
The voice: "What a bitch."

Such a comment by "the voice" might be ascribed to potentially any female who just happened to walk near me in the grocery store. No one has to "do" anything to me.

There are worse things that "the voice" says, but I try to dismiss them very quickly by reminding myself that those are nonsense thoughts.

When I noticed these thoughts, I was reminded of John Green's interview about his latest book, Turtles All the Way Down, and his interview about his OCD. He said he's a terrible detective because he is so in his own head all the time that he can't notice much in the world outside him.

I have not read the book yet, but I have to wonder about the title, which is based on a philosophical and cosmological concept which goes back to Anavastha. Although it can relate to God, I think it is meant to describe what it is like to have OCD. 

Anavastha means unstable or absence of finality, hence the turtles standing on turtles all the way down, forever and ever. What I visualize when I picture these turtles is what I imagine my mind to be when I am in an obsessive rut. There is no bottom to obsessive thought.

This concept relates, too, to the fact that scientists still don't really understand what causes OCD, although they know it is in the deepest parts of the brain. What is the cause? On what does OCD stand?

Turtles all the way down, of course!

Trying not to be a complete b*tch in class

My poor college professor.

I really feel for her having to manage my "chip-on-my-shoulder for not being a traditional school district teacher self" in class.

I know she recognizes the psychological self-imposed "drama" of me already having a MAT, having gone through the state internship program, having classroom experience under my belt, and taking a class with people who do not. She knows I feel a bit like an 8th grader in a class of 4th grade students.

On the positive side, I am certainly learning a lot as a result of the text: The English Teacher's Companion by Jim Burke.

I ran headfirst into my weakness as a teacher, which is that I suck at grammar. I can write well, but don't ask me to define an appositive, an adverbial clause, or to succinctly explain when and why to use a colon over a semicolon.

My professor gave us a list of grammar terms and asked us to rank them in terms of how well we understood them. I gave a "1" for everything, which basically means I've heard this term but could not explain it to you or anyone else. 

And I felt compelled (because I cannot shut my big mouth) to say out loud that while I do understand the importance of "doing grammar," I do not necessarily agree with the importance of expecting students to be able to explicitly name an adverbial clause or a gerund.

A classmate (who happens to also be middle-aged and has a freelance background) responded to me that I (actually, she said "you," but I don't know if she meant "you as in me" or "you as in the general you")  will never be a great writer without understanding the rules of grammar. I understood her comment, but I'm not sure I agree (and I think I also might be a little insulted that she suggested I could never be a great writer, even though I know this is true).

I'm not sure I believe that Hemingway or Steinbeck or Bronte or Austen or Garcia Marquez or Roth wrote or writes from a place of analyzing whether this gerund clause works better than this other gerund phrase in those direct, explicit, scientific and clinical terms. Maybe they do?  Who knows?

I think that to be a great editor, a person probably needs to know the rules of grammar really well. And I realize now, as the editor of my students, that I am lacking in that department. Although, I think there are probably a lot of editors who can't recite all the rules of grammar.

Maybe this is why I've never aspired to write the Great American Novel?
But I don't think so.
I think it is because I have nothing of fictional merit to say....
I think it is because I have no great imaginative spirit that drives me to write in that way....
I think it is because I don't want to put the time into writing like that....
I don't think it is because I couldn't define a compound complex sentence if I tried.

Maybe the stick up my butt is because I subbed 3 days this week with a class of MMD students and worked with them on writing narratives? Maybe it is because even if I explained to these kids what is a subject and a predicate and called them by their official grammatical names, these kids cannot write a sentence better than what my 2nd grader can?

Maybe it is because I only see my students at the cottage school one day a week and think the value of having a class discussion about a text and analyzing it together is WAY more critical than spending that 65 minutes discussing how to write a sentence with an appositive in it and specifically bashing them over the head that it is an appositive.

I suspect I may have come across as a bit of an asshole, but I fully recognize that this was in large part because I recognized in myself my glaring weakness as a teacher: the grammar thing. I have never been able to understand the grammar thing, although I certainly understand it better now as an adult than I ever did as a kid. I could not diagram a sentence to save my life as a kid.  As an adult, I can do it just slightly better than "meh."

And I guess a part of me is also going off the chain right now because what follows are the instructions to the class for next week's homework:

Read Chapter 8. Type 3 text-dependent questions about grading that you encountered in the reading and include page number. 

As a writer and a teacher AND A STUDENT AT THE MOMENT, I am confused by this question. What is she asking exactly?  Is she asking me to type 3 questions I had in my head about grading as I was reading or is she asking me to type 3 questions that the author asked about grading that I "encountered" as I read and, thereafter, reflected upon. Is she asking me to type his questions or my reflections??? Or both?

That "encountered" is a tricky word, I think. When I think of encountering something, I think of meeting it in a dark alley. It brings itself forward to me, which suggests it would be a question someone else asked that I met in a dark alley....or in this chapter. I mean I even looked up the stinking definition of the word "encounter" to try to figure it out.

So I emailed her and asked.

Sometimes it is hard not to be an asshole, and I try to remember that when I think about students who sometimes are asked to do things that just seem so confusing or tedious.

Getting my head back on straight

I am finally getting my head back on straight from this graduate class, and I am feeling a renewed sense of "I do NOT suck."

I suspect I will always have a chip on my shoulder, a feeling of "I am not a real teacher because I haven't taught full-time in x many years," until or unless I do teach again full-time.

But what I have begun to realize for myself is that I have a tremendous amount to offer students because I haven't been in the classroom full-time for 13 years.

I have done a lot in those 13 years, including being a professional writer. It matters a great deal, I think, that I have real-life experience in interviewing, listening, writing, editing, and networking with people outside of the school world. For the most recent article I submitted, I interviewed some local "big-shots" in the community, one of whom told me I'm a fun interviewer.

I'm not the type of person to be awestruck (I don't care who you are or what amazing things you've done, you have had an occasion when you've had poop streaks in your underpants), but I admit that it made me feel pretty good to have someone who has created a millions-of-dollars enterprise offer that compliment.

I have taught for the past 5 years in a setting that has given me a tremendous amount of freedom. I have created my own plans from scratch, and I have taught very difficult texts to students. I do it well, and I know it.

I have taken close to 20 additional hours of graduate class beyond my master's degree in literacy and instruction.

And I substitute teach, which is trial by fire if there ever was such a thing.

I will still be tremendously glad when this class is over, but my attitude and self-esteem have improved.

Your brain is not within your control

The counselors at the boys' elementary school frequently do activities with the students to help develop their character and improve self-regulation.

G recently came home with this paper:

It is am important reminder for him of what is and is not within his control. He often likes to think that he can control others and gets frustrated when he can't.

When I asked him about it, he talked about Wilda Rudolph and how she had to control her mood when things didn't go her way.

I felt compelled to remind him that how for him and for me, it can be hard to control our moods and that is why we take our medicine. We are the types of people for whom controlling our moods can be a challenge. Like Wilma Rudolph, we have to use assists to help us out. She used leg braces and did therapy and had massages for years, and I suspect that she also dealt with pretty intense pain even when she could use her legs to achieve in the Olympics. The stories of our inspirational figures often leave out just how much unbearable pain and frustration they had to deal with even in the midst of their great accomplishments.

As much as I like that we promote self-regulation among kids, and we probably should do so more among adults, it is a bit of a fallacy to tell kids that they can control themselves. They should strive to do this. We should give them logical consequences for when they can't.

But if I had to complete this chart, the word "mood" would be written half inside the circle of control and half outside.

The fallacy that we can control our brains is one reason why people fight so hard to admit they have mental health issues.  They believe they should be able to control their brains, when the hard reality is that the brain is just like any other organ of the body.  It doesn't always work the way we want it to. A kidney may not remove toxins as it should. A pancreas may not produce as much insulin as it should. A heart may not beat as fast or as regular as it should.  And a brain may not pick up enough serotonin as it should.

But our identity, our spirit, our personality comes from our brains, and we cannot even imagine that we can't make it do exactly as we wish when we wish for as long as we wish.

I have not yet asked him what he means by "the demons" in what he cannot control, but I find it interesting that he used that phrase. I suspect he means actual "demons." He is knee-deep in intrigue about horror movies right now and would give his left leg if we allowed him to watch "It." (That ain't gonna happen.)

But for anyone with a mental health struggle, they know their demons aren't the dementors of Harry Potter fame, although they do suck the happiness out of one. The demons are inside, not floating around in the dark and fearsome skies. There are ways to quiet the demons, but they never go away. They don't fly off back to Azkaban, never to return.

It takes a long, long, long time to accept that the demons are real, are there, have moments (or years) of quiet, but can, do and will reappear when you least expect it. So like Wilma Rudolph, you ice it, and use heat on it, and take your pain meds to reduce inflammation, and you rest, and you still achieve, but you don't do it without assists. Those assists just get lost somehow in the story.

What? No....wait. My baby is actually eight?

Dear M,

I don't care if you grow to be 6'5" and 230 lbs, you will always be my baby.

I cling to every snuggly moment with you, even though I see that it won't be too long before those gangly legs and arms have a heft that I can no longer comfortably hold the weight of.

I try to pay attention to those big front teeth sandwiched in between the tiny nubs of baby teeth when you talk to me about important 2nd-grade stuff.

I enjoy watching you come downstairs in the morning wearing your Guardians of the Galaxy underpants and holding your Papaw pillow, your hair in 14 different directions, and your eyes still heavy with sleep.

I know these days are numbered.

You are still adamant that you like and want the "same thing as G," even though I suspect it won't be too long before you admit that you like what YOU like much more instead....whatever that actually happens to be.

You often say you want to read silently to yourself at bedtime, but you are content to have me or Daddy sit next to you as you do it. You point out funny things you notice or something unusual so we can at least have some notion of what you are reading and whether you know what is going on.

Of my children, you are the only one who pretty regularly likes the vegetables I give you, especially if they are of the squash family and slathered in butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar.

When I think of your personality, I call you my "Indian chief" because I don't think you are going to fit into a similar mold as your sister and brother. I'm not sure what you'll end up doing in school or in life, but I suspect it will be something that keeps your body busy and not just you sitting behind a desk every day.

I love your current mop-of-hair style. Daddy makes comments about your "wings," but I like all the weird contortions your naturally wavy hair makes. I play with your hair at night as you are trying to fall asleep and am astounded by how long it is when I pull out the curls to their full length.

You've already had a friend stay the night and your big family celebration with G, so today's celebration will be just us with you opening up the small gifts from Mommy and Daddy. Oh, and your "8" cookies, which have become a tradition.

Even though I often think I have no clue who you are because you are so intent on being a carbon copy of your brother, I know that you are super polite, always holding the door for others. You are sweet and sensitive, sometimes coming off the bus and telling me how you got tears in your eyes when you read a book about a dog who was missing a leg. You are, thankfully, so easy-going as to make my life much easier, especially since your big brother is not easy-going in the least.

For the rest of my life, I will always be thankful I got my bonus baby, and that he is you.

Love you,

Momma