Find Your Writers

Dear High School Student,

I could write an open letter about sexually transmitted diseases.  Perhaps I could wax didactic about pot smoking.  After all if you don't take Nancy Reagan's insipid advice and say "no," you could watch yourself, from outside your body, allowing the enticing and rewarding to just float away into oblivion while you rationalize your isolated and increasingly sedentary existence.  That high deceived you.  You did not prove string theory or find Amelia Earhart last night.  It was just a video game and some Mountain Dew, and this morning your life has yet again not progressed.

I could do that, but I won't because I'm writing to you, Dear Student, about reading. What else?  Contrary to my current job description, I am, and will forever be, a teacher of literature.  Today I want to talk to you about how noble, and essential reading is.  Before you crumple up this letter, metaphorically speaking, hear me out.  Well, the hearing should be literal, the crumpling metaphorical.  Come to think of it, you are not literally able to hear me, so that is also metaphorical.  Most things are.  But I digress.  I do not mean the skill of reading.  Today I do not care about guessing meaning from context or decoding words by their Greek and Roman roots.  Let's be honest, even on my best day I don't care much about those things.  What I care about is you, Dear Reader.  I care about you, and because I do I have one request:

Find Your Writers.

You have already found your favorite movies, bands, snack foods, and youtube channels.  Your generation is adept at generating playlists and Instagram likes.  You know the exact filter you want to use on that picture of your Burrito Supreme so it looks kind of hipster, despite its corporate tool origins. I know you have opinions about all manner of things and a keen understanding of what you like and don't like.  So, find the perfect filter, post it to your Snapchat story or your Tumblr and come with me to that last frontier for some of you--the bookshelf.  

You must find your writers.  The ones who speak to you.  The ones you return to again and again.  You will share her poems with your friends when they go through a bad break up.  You will post colorful memes from a favorite chapter, and you will dream that someday you'll meet someone just like....  

Some of you have already found your writers, so you have an image right now in your mind.  Is it Augustus?  Four? Katniss? Holden? Hermione? Romeo? It should NOT be Romeo, but more on that later. Many of you have not found your writers though, and it is to you I write.  If you read enough, you will fall into the worlds created in fiction.  You will begin to see more clearly the Victorian sitting room as it is described.  You will taste the acrid smoke of the artillery fire, and when she brushes up against the sleeve of his wool coat as they share a cab, you will feel their chills.  Literature transports us, and since unfortunately the Doctor may not be coming in his TARDIS to whisk you away through all of time and space, you should start seeking your own adventures.

While the feeling of being lifted from your world into other realms is wonderful, do not read only for sensory pleasure and escape.  Reading can be a way to work through your fears, doubts, and insecurities.  A fictionalized, yet nonetheless realistic other self can be your therapist.  You cannot change your alcoholic father.  Swallowing anger and sadness poisons only your own blood.  However, find a novel that speaks in a voice like your own. If it is well-written, and so many of them are, it will help you.  You will say, "Yeah, dammit, that's how I feel!" A cynical person may tell you this is not real solace because it's just a book; it isn't real.  I submit to you that our understanding of what is real is decidedly and unimaginably limited.  When Harry realizes that the Kings Cross station encounter is happening in his head, he worries it is somehow not real.  Dumbledore reassures him: 

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”  

 Think about how much of your life every day is spent inside your head.  While sitting in class, while watching that cute girl laugh with her friends, while listening to your mom lecture you about your grades--there is a running monologue in your head.  Those thoughts aren't physically happening for all the world to see, but it doesn't make them less real to you.  They are yours, intimately yours.  Books can help you live the interior monologue of others, just as intimately as the voice in your own head because your reading voice is also in your own head.  Unless you read everything out loud, which is just odd.  You should probably see someone about that.  Instead of therapy, or writing more bad confessional poetry in your diary, try a book.  You will be pleasantly rewarded.  Find a writer whose voice you like, a writer who shares your most intimate concerns.  Then join that writer in a meditative conversation.  

Over the next few blogs I will submit to you some of my writers.  I do so in order to show you how and why writers come to be important to us.  Sometimes it is just the way their words roll around deliciously in our heads as we read.  At other times a book is yours because it came to you at a moment in your life when you needed it, and now it has become part of your heart and memory in a way that you are not willing to dismiss.  These writers are not mine because they are great necessarily, although I will fight anyone who says otherwise.  They are mine the way a particular stuffed animal was mine in my toddler bed.  They are mine the way I like my coffee with sugar and cream so it looks like a paper bag and tastes like an autumn morning.  They are mine the way my favorite jeans are mine.  The works of my writers fit. They make me happy.  I like holding them, drinking them in, and being inside them.  

I have many practical things to teach you, Dear Student, but when you love someone you tell them the truth.  The truth is I do not care if you remember the ending to Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace".  Nor do I care if years from now you remember the number of lines in a sonnet or how many metric feet are in a line of iambic pentameter.  I don't even care if you truly understand what the green light at the end of the dock represents.  Okay, perhaps I care a little about that one, but I'm willing to let it go in favor of a larger, more essential truth.  Reading enriches your life in ways incalculable, strange, and lasting.  This does not happen magically, nor does it happen with every book.  You must do the work.  You must find your writers.

My first writer for next time will be John Green.  If you have not already found him, I submit he could easily be one of your writers, too.  Unlike so many grouchy grown-ups, Green loves the place in your life where you find yourself right now--adolescence.  Until we meet again, I will sign off with a link to his Crash Course videos on The Great Gatsby because although I said I would let that green light go, I can't do it any more than Gatsby can.  Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of your as-yet-undiscovered-writers.  Besides, if you watch the videos now, you might begin to understand why John Green is one of my writers.  More on Mr. Green later.

For now, Dear Student, farewell.

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” 

--Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

So begins the film Out of Africa.  Meryl Streep portrays Isak Dinesen in her transformative journey from Europe to Africa and back again. In the film, Karen Blixen creates a new life for herself, a life she may not have thought possible. She defies expectation--a woman managing her own farm without a husband to help her. Technically she has a husband, but his interests lie more in womanizing and hunting than in farming. By the end of her journey the men in the local club who had at first shunned her, now toast her accomplishments. Their toast recognizes that the limits they had assumed bordered a woman's life were artificial. They toast her courage, to face and overcome hardships, and emerge on the other side.

That phrase--"I had a farm in Africa"--has been rattling around in my mind for the past twelve months ever since I entered a painful, terrifying period which started with the unknown and ended with my life transformed. I walked out of my old life, and holding tightly to my five children, entered a new one. While the geography of my transition was not sufficiently grand to warrant a John Williams score, the shift was no less dramatic. I thought I had entered into an abyss, the heart of a darkness I neither understood nor knew how to navigate without possibly losing my mind.  

Much to my relief, spasms and waves of relief over a long period of time, I did not slip into madness or embrace a Kurtz-like oblivion. Instead I discovered steps along a path already created for me that led to a sanctuary in the woods, a tiny cottage in the mountains.  Our time there, in that tiny house, may have seemed like hardship but it was actually Providence, complete with all of the old-fashioned grandeur of that word. On our journey, we were accompanied by angels, miracles, and the patient, loving hand of God.

Within twenty-four hours after I left my home, friends fiercely and generously surrounded me, and we were given a new place to live. While I want to publish the names of the two generous people who handed me keys and told me not to worry about rent for "as long as you need," I will allow them anonymity here. 


The seven hundred square foot cottage may seem inadequate in the abstract. Frankly, it was probably practically inadequate, too. One bathroom for six people. A potty-training boy and five females. Is that even possible? From the moment we arrived, we knew our time there was temporary. I lay awake in the small hours of the morning and stared around that tiny space while the sleeping inhalation and exhalation of five children hummed around me. Two on the futon on the floor with me. One more on the Murphy bed behind the couch.  Two more in the bedroom steps away.

I love my children, but I did not want them drooling on my pillow and kicking me in the kidneys permanently. When Karen arrived in Africa, she did not anticipate a return to Europe, but I knew the six of us could not stay here long, both because we did not want to try our friends' generosity and we needed more square footage.  

In the film Denis leaves Karen in solitude for long periods of time. She resents this...as much as any woman can resent Robert Redford dressed like this:

In our house there was no solitude. Quiet stretches to contemplate and shape a story for our future did not exist. Each of us slept with at least one other person within arm's reach. My youngest ate his meals on the floor, using his Lego board as a table. School mornings were a jumble of arms, toothbrushes and curling irons in the bathroom followed by a frantic flurry to find shoes and backpacks piled up around the base of the wood stove.  Imagine how many pairs of shoes you own. Now multiply by six. Add in the organizational skills you had when you were 13, 11, 10, 5, and 3. The answer to this math problem is that you can't find your shoes.  

We didn't have an oven, so the previously frequent morning muffins and bread puddings disappeared. Affectionately dubbed "guilt muffins" by me, baked goods were a before-school gesture that helped me stave off the feelings of inadequacy faced by so many working mothers.

Instead, cold cereal or toast were the only possible options, and the eleven year old's penchant for smoothies, while a welcome change, also meant an alarm clock of grinding blender gears all too early in the morning. Why is the smoothie loving child also the one who rises first each day?  

Human beings can make anything work with the right attitude. There are always others who have it worse than me, a mantra that has fueled my perseverance through many a dark hour. I have found anything is possible, and not just survivable, but joyful.  

Just look at it--small, but inviting and warm--a sacred refuge. Please, Dear Reader, do not misunderstand me. Space was a problem, but the place, people, and landscape were only blessings.

Did you know Santa summers in the Sierra Nevada mountains? He fixes toilets and hauls garbage cans. He has his own wolf pack since it's too far south for his reindeer. Snow white beard and generous heart, the twinkle in the eye...all are still there, just put to use in other ways. My children have gone on adventurous treks with him up hills and into rivers.  Ask them; they will tell you.

My journey was not marked by a tense standoff with a lion or an airplane flight surveying the changing landscape of the African plain. However, the majesty of Africa's animals have nothing on the enormous grey lion, who perched on our bed and lounged in our front yard. He allowed my children to pet his mighty mane while he rolled on the gravel drive.  He walked out into the night and did not return, but we shall not forget his visits and hospitality, allowing us to share his home.

There were herds of deer who ambled through the yard and up the hill behind our bedroom windows. They paused curiously, wondering what we were doing there, and then moved on.

And there were two angels.  Did you know angels sometimes reside in ordinary homes? They maintain regular jobs and the mundane details of their own lives, while simultaneously generating magic and grace, beauty and joy, in the lives of others. They alighted in my front yard and whisked my children away for ice cream one warm summer evening. They picked up my children on a roaring metal steed and rambled around the mountains, even into the river to squeals of delight. They delivered lemon cake and stopped by just to make sure we were okay. They listened to me while I rambled and unpacked the fear and frustration, questions and worries of my heart. Angels come in human form, of this I am certain.

Sometimes the Lord pushes us away from all comforts, and allows us to journey into the terrifying unknown. Far from frightening, what I found was a way already prepared. The road rose to meet us, bringing necessities and graces alike. There was little physical space but unlimited emotional space, psychological space, in which I could remake my life, reimagine the possibilities of happiness for my children, and heal from years of lonely struggle. 

"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

If I had continued to wait, not changing my life until it was convenient, affordable, and safe, I would not have changed anything. Instead, walking into the darkness led me to see that I need never fear. Ironically my favorite passage in Scripture is the verse "Be still and know that I am God." My experiences in 2013 illuminated what that verse has always meant, but I had not seen clearly. Our comfort in this life comes from God, yes, but He does not work alone. I did not need a mystical experience or radical conversion. I was shown that all around us, everyday, people do God's work in our lives. Friends. Colleagues. People from my church and community. Family far away. Sudden strangers. All conspired to guide, teach, and love me through it, and they did the same for each of my five children. Thank you. You know who you are. You have been prayed for by six grateful hearts, and you will remain treasures to us as we continue along paths known and unknown.  

“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”    
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Gertrude Louise Silveira

To tell a story about my grandmother, Gertie Silveira, is to tell many stories.  There can never be just one.  Some are goofy anecdotes about how she bought the can of Crisco, opened it at the register, drove home, and never paid for it.  Others are inspiring tales in which she and Papa didn't think twice about opening their trailer and their lives to a homeless couple. 

All stories reveal the same character trait: generosity.  My grandmother used her life to be the hands and feet and heart of Jesus.  She did not need to preach loudly or quote Scripture or ever point out the sins of others.  Instead,  she lived out the gospel in the way we are all called to do so:  through the work and actions of our lives. 

It was not unusual to arrive at Grandma's house and find people I did not know, and they were not just relatives I couldn't remember!  They were friends of friends or perhaps weary travelers who knew that a certain address on W. Hwy 140 is always a safe harbor.  There you will be given dinner or breakfast, a cup of coffee, and a warm bed with a handmade quilt. There you will be made to feel like family, whether you are related to Gertie or not.  She did not quibble over such distinctions.  

On the last day I saw her, I held my grandmother's face in my hands.  I said these important words to her:  "Woman, the happiest moments of my childhood took place in this house with you and Papa."  Ernest Hemingway once said, "Write the truest sentence that you know." Hemingway was right.  I don't know if I have ever said anything more true, and I am thankful I did.

My early childhood was waking up to the sounds of Grandma cutting, setting, and perming hair in the back porch, of sitting in my mother's lap while she and Grandma told endless stories, catching up on all of the people in our beautifully large family.  The smell of coffee and the rapid chatter as only the Avila female family line can achieve were the start to so many mornings while Dad and Uncle Kevin were duck hunting.  

As I grew my summers were spent picking blackberries on the canal in Papa and Grandma's aluminum boat.  Purple fingers, getting stuck on sandbars, loading up bucket after bucket that would become delicious, tart cobbler or pie.  We canned peaches in the backyard.  We also canned A LOT of apricots one summer when my sister, Kimberli, and I decided to see if we could pick enough of them from Grandma's tree to fill the entire surface of the pool.  It was an ambitious goal, and we came pretty close before Grandma discovered our treachery.  She later told me how angry she was, but it is a testament to her patience, her kindness, that I don't remember her anger.  I just recall picking those apricots and then canning them the next day!  I didn't know my childhood was like the romance of an old-fashioned American novel.  It was just Papa and Grandma's house--my favorite summer destination.

My second child, Claire, was born on the anniversary of Papa's death, and he never knew any of my children.  They never helped him make milk cans full of punch every July or watched his identical routine every afternoon after work like I did. They didn't get to follow him around the backyard doing his chores or receive fierce hugs from a man with a rock hard chest and saintly, quiet patience. 

However, my children were blessed with many years with Grandma.  They couldn't wait to make a bed on the living room floor with quilt after quilt--the bird one, the jeans one, the one where Mom could tell them which squares came from my shorts or Beanie Grandma's dress.  They thrilled to the smoky kitchen that meant hot, impossibly thin pancakes or finding cats Grandma saved in the backyard.  It is a rare gift to know your great grandmother that well, and I am happy they will be able to remember her on their own and not just through my stories.  

I do not know how to grieve a woman who is so woven into the fabric of my life, of the lives of my children.  I feel gratitude that God allowed her to stay with us for so long, and the only thing that lessens my sadness in losing her is to know she is reunited with the husband she ached for every minute after he was gone. 

This Christmas I will miss the endless parade of Santas around her home, but I will feel extra joy knowing that Grandma is finally home for Christmas, in Papa's arms, in the love of our Heavenly Father where I am certain she is being given an eternal reward for the life of generosity and profound love that she gave to all of us.

What Do They Teach Me?

Teachers praise the virtue of lifelong learning.  Much of what I really need to know, I have learned directly from my students.  My work has become increasingly frustrating, even heartbreaking, yet the magic of my time with students has not changed, and they teach me...everyday.

I have learned that they need me...not just to correct their comma splices or help them revise their run on sentences.  They need me to know them, to understand their lives, their dreams, their struggles.  They need me to be there everyday, to be present, and to require their presence in return.  We are a team in that room.  I've referred to it in a previous post as the beating heart at the center of the most important institution of our democracy.  A Problem Like Maria, September, 2010.

Even more, I have learned that my calling as a Christian is intimately linked to my calling as a teacher.  My students need love.  They need prayer.  They need me to be willing to give my time, talent and yes, even sometimes my treasure to help them navigate the path from child to adult, from student to lifelong learner.

I must be a candle, however small, however tenuous my flame, I must be a candle in my classroom.  I cannot merely curse the darkness.

That darkness is all around us.  It is in the grinding poverty that touches my own life and all too often engulfs the lives of my students.  It is in the clanging gong of a culture that tells them to defy authority, ignore the sacred, embrace vapid celebrity and empty violence.

The darkness has begun to move menacingly around the halls of this place I love so much.  It hovers over decisions to increase their class sizes every year, while telling them our decisions are based on "what's best for kids."  They are not numbers, units, or dollar signs. As someone who has been laid off due to budget cuts, I understand the gravity of California's fiscal mismanagement, and my rural community is no stranger to a recessed economy and shrinking opportunity.  However, those human beings in my classroom are not just delivery vehicles for ADA, and as their teacher, their teammate in that room, I am the one who must repeatedly remind those in power of that fact.

And yes, the darkness can even be seen among the people who have chosen this sacred profession.  A few can be guilty of treating it like a factory job, complete with punch card, coffee breaks and a numbness to the hearts and minds of the souls before them as maddening as a textile mill owner in the 1840s.   They are not the inconvenient roadblocks to your weekend motorcycle ride or trip to the coast.  No matter how exhausting and frustrating my day may be, I must not start to see them as impediments to my weekend.  Students know when we teach that way.  They speak up about it when we aren't around, and more importantly, they remember that we did not care enough to do our jobs.  Even while they cheer a movie day, they don't respect it.

When I am tired and demoralized, when yet another parent sends a rude email whose tone assumes I am the problem, I am the enemy, I sometimes gripe that this is a job, not a religious calling.  I say it with bumper sticker snappiness, but it belies my own discomfort because I know better.  No, I have not taken a vow of poverty and chastity, and I do not wear a black and white habit, but make no mistake, teachers are called.  We are called away from professions that reward us financially.  We did not choose cushy, respected, lucrative.  We chose challenging...no damn hard.  We chose thankless.  We chose poverty.  Why?

Because of the senior boy who breaks down and cries in a room of forty-seven other teens and does not care because he just needs his teacher to listen, to help, to calm his fears about the future rushing to meet him before he feels ready.  He needs her to tell him, "It's okay because you won't feel ready.  No one ever does, but you are...you will be...I'll make sure.  I'm your teacher, and I care."

Because of the sixth graders, posing with ear-to-ear grins in their Halloween costumes, who buzz with excitement over today's journal topic and can't stop talking because they bubble daily and furiously with creativity like a pot of boiling water, just waiting for me to drop the pasta.  Tell me about your day.  Write to me about what you would teach if you were a sixth grade teacher.  Come with me and let's learn the steps of mummification.  Let's click again on the part where we pour the brains into the canopic jar with the Egyptian head on it just because it's gross and fun and we forgot to notice we're learning.

  

Play the Mummy Maker Game for Yourself!

Because of the beautifully written phrase about her father's heart attack and the snowflakes glinting around her face that day so many months ago.  Because of slowly unfolding description of his visit to Ground Zero, noticing how quiet, how holy, that place was amid the noisy cacophony of New York City.  Because sometimes ninth grade writing can actually move you to tears.  Did you know that?

Because of the teenager, from a supposedly self-absorbed generation, who quietly offers to replace his teacher's stolen cell phone with his own, or another who brings homemade cookies to say thank you for making her look forward to history class.

Because of the conversation about ethos, pathos and logos applied to Rufus Griswold's doctored letter from Edgar Allan Poe that so unfairly changed the public perception of one of America's finest writers.  We learned together that even a contemporary A & E Biography perpetuates the myth as fact.  Let's talk about the reliability of sources, even those at school, and then let's reel together, until you ask me, "Mrs. Weigel, do YOU ever read anything and actually believe it?"  A nineteenth century literary Battle Royal may not be the most exciting content for freshmen, but why do I teach?  Because it leads to questions like that.

Taylor Mali, teacher, writer and poet, offers some wisdom:

There is the teacher I want to be.  She lives in small moments, all too far apart these days.  She lives on my Pinterest boards with philosophy I believe and try to live by, with anchor charts I want to use, with warehouses of websites I need to explore.  She's there, that Platonic teacher, and I keep leaning toward her, I keep pushing myself to find her.  I keep hoping each student sees her at least a few times this year.

I keep wishing my school, my district, my leadership, my state,  would just allow me to be the teacher I know I can be.

Won't you just let us, my students and I, go into that room with adequate supplies, with reliable technology, with numbers that allow us to really know each other?  Won't you have a clear mission, a clear vision, so I can do my job?  Won't you please go tell those factory workers that the auto industry probably could use them because this profession needs a lot more passion and a lot less selfish complaining.  Go into that lunchroom and tell them the ship needs those that will swab the decks and trim the sails, and there's the plank if you don't want to work for students.

Our students need gardeners who will tend each shoot and speak kindly, who will offer water and sunshine.

I need to light a candle, not curse the darkness.  I am trying, and it is difficult.  Please help me because if you support me and steady my hand, together we can pass the flame along and illuminate this place again.  We can bring back its life, its spirit, and we can celebrate what we have made together.

Kindle Schmindle

The Kindle offers a clean, silent reading experience. I like the immediacy of having the book I want...now.  Just click on Kindle Store, and it's the Library at Alexandria. Well, not quite that grand, but you get the idea. I like the book light popping out,  helpfully allowing reading to continue well into the wee hours without disturbing sleepers nearby. However, all too often my Kindle experience has been disappointing, even disturbing. Why? Well, there are several reasons, not the least of which is I'm afraid I'm betraying the printed page.

Let me start with the strange Kindle feature at the bottom of each screen: your percentage completed.

First of all, I do not appreciate the encroachment of math into my sacred reading experience; it leaves me queasy and uneasy.  Similar to the tense moments while I wait to see how high the mercury rises on the baby thermometer, it's just not information I want. 27% is a number. I'd rather know that Katniss and Peeta are arriving in District 11 to greet Rue's haggard community of farmers. Tell me Mr. Rochester has just embraced Jane and called her an unearthly creature. Don't say 53% and counting. By the way, I'm making up those numbers. Kindle fans, please do not click to 53% in Bronte hoping to find that scene, and then send me neurotic comments about what Gothic treasure is actually found at 53%. Furthermore, Dear Reader, I think I may have graduate literature units revoked if I acknowledge publically that I read Jane Eyre on the Kindle. Well, the more accurate term is reread since the word only meant "to stoke a fire" when my eyes first moved through the pages of Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. But I digress.

What disturbs me the most about this percentage feature is that it somehow makes reading a competition, and not just with myself.  At a recent school function, I spoke with the mother of one of my daughter's friends. I apologized for not allowing my twelve year old to attend the midnight showing of The Hunger Games with she and her daughter. (Mary is hoping her parents will relent by the time Katniss hits the theatres for a second installment). In talking about the series of books and her response to the film, I mentioned I was reading Catching Fire on my Kindle. Then, for no apparent reason, I shared that I was at 27%. She turned to me with a kind of smirk (did I imagine it?) and said "I'm at 35%." Why did it matter? To either of us? Why did I even feel the need to announce my percentage at all? Who cares? Is reading about the numbers or the experience? Character development? Rising Action? Do these things mean nothing? Am I just racing to the 100% finish line?

Something about that little % creates a feeling of inadequacy in me. It's no coincidence that the feature itself is called "the status bar." I bet that woman has hundreds more Facebook friends than I do, too. Furthermore, her blog has comments from every continent on the globe and followers who don't actually know her in the real world. Does she have a blog? I don't know for certain, but doesn't it seem like we all do? My great aunt has a blog about her garden, and my aforementioned daughter has at least three.


Blog gluttony aside, keeping track of mathematical progress through a novel doesn't even seem like something a reader would create. I bet it was generated by a tech nerd in a cubicle who wanted to garner some praise down at the Kindle factory, so he came up with the idea. He's also the type who reads the last page before he's actually on the last page. He looks at the number of pages and divides by 2 to locate see the exact middle of the book. He may even divide by 7 to give himself the number of pages he must read in order to finish the novel by the end of a week. I don't like him, or his percentage feature. He's a math boy, and he should keep his crazy ideas away from my reading experience.


My love-hate relationship with the Kindle continues when it comes to games. Thread Words. Every Word. That strange little one with the treasure chests. I love them all! However, they are digital and ever-present. It's much too easy for me to just click away from my novel and mindlessly look for a six letter word that starts with t and ends with h. I'm only human for God's sake. I want to read the detailed description of Jean Valjean as he steals the damn loaf of bread. I want to savor every syllable of the paragraphs as they unfold like drowsy summer roses, but I'm a busy woman. Let's be honest. As a working mother of five children, all under thirteen, my reading does not take place in a quiet parlour. I'm probably tackling Les Miserables while sprawled out on a toddler bed pretending to play hot wheels with my two year old. Don't judge me; he can't tell the difference. However, I can only stay focused on Hugo's prose for so long with constant interruptions like:

"Mommy, pay wif me," and "Look at big tuck, Mommy!"

Chances are I'm also dressing one of the many naked Barbie's in the Barbie bin, and desperately trying to find something that doesn't make her look like she's turning tricks. Believe me, there are not a lot of peasant blouses or baggy sweats in the Barbie collection.

I know this seems like another of my many rambling digressions, but I can bring it back around. Don't worry, Dear Reader. While my heart desperately wants to immerse myself in the fiction I so adored in my college years, my life is much more conducive to using the Kindle for mindless word games and searching on Amazon for books I'll probably never download. I successfully read the entire Hunger Games series using my daughter's Kindle, but then again Suzanne Collins is not Victor Hugo...or Charles Dickens...or George Eliot. The woman writes in fragments. Frequently.

The instant availability of these digital games lures me away from the reading I should do. Veggies are traded in for Twinkies, and Jean Valjean is poised, ready to grab the bread. He's still there on page...wait, I don't have page numbers. He's still there in some percentage I refuse to look up just to make my point. Katniss gobbled up the burnt loaf weeks ago, and the print on my keys is worn out from playing Every Word so much, but I can't seem to make the 21st Century technology of the Kindle merge with the thick, dense- with-detail novels of the 19th Century. They just don't play well together.

Parenting: A War of Attrition

This claim implies children are the enemy, and that sounds so, well, mean...and also true.  In my case, the war is being fought with boots on the ground firmly in the kids' favor.  Kid Army-5.  Parent Army-2.   Granted, I conceived, gave birth to and have chosen to continue feeding and housing said boots, but instead of writing me off as a crazy person who deserves her war, imagine my position.  I am fighting a war with an enemy I arm and fund.  I pass the appropriations bills in Congress.  I send them MREs, and I build assault rifles and fighter jets for them.  It's absurd, so let's not quibble over blame here.  I am in a uniquely disadvantageous position, militarily speaking. 

One of the places that steady, relentless parenting pays off is in church.  Sweet, grey-haired  women approach after Mass to congratulate me on how well behaved my children are.  The war of attrition means learning to modify their behavior without the laying on of hands.  I live in California, so I can't spank in public because I might be turned in to the authorities.  (An attempt to pass a law making spanking in California illegal back in 2007 failed to pass, but it is probably only a matter of time). 

Beyond the danger of someone speed dialing CPS in a parking lot, it's also that I don't want to spank them; I shouldn't have to.  I do not enjoy it, and it is a last resort, but if rare enough, an effective one.  I want to encourage in them appropriate behavior in public places.  My daughter's wonderful preschool teacher once reminded me that how they behave at home is not nearly as important as how they behave in public.  The latter is the true test.  Therefore, I am heartened when retired parishioners take note of their good behavior in church.  I can trust the oldest three to sit still without making weird noises, and that is no small victory.

The three year old still has occasional moments that try Mommy's soul, like the time I approached the altar for communion and she said, "Can I have a cookie."  Not wanting to miss an opportunity to teach our Catholic faith, I replied, "No, you're not old enough, and it's not a cookie.  It's Jesus.  It just looks like a cookie."  While this may be an admirable preschool level catechism on the doctrine of transubstantiation, it only made my daughter immediately shout "I want a Jesus cookie!"  This kind of outburst is the exception, not the norm, thank you Jesus, and when people compliment my children's good behavior, I do usually credit Catholic masses every Sunday since the womb, not to mention Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil.  Whenever they start getting antsy, I just whisper to them fiercely and with feeling while pointing at the very crucifix pictured below:

"Look up there at Jesus.  He died on the cross for you.  I bet he wanted to get down and get a drink and he was probably hungry, too, but did he quit?  No, he didn't.  He stayed up there so that you can go and live with Him in Heaven someday, so it's not too much to ask that you sit still for the next few minutes.  God only asks for an hour a week of you sitting still.  It's the least you can do."

If you're Catholic, you are laughing and nodding your head right now, and if you aren't, you probably think that is outrageous guilt.  Well, we all should feel more guilt and less selfish indulgence, thank you very much.  The Oprah-tization of our culture has meant a bit too much glossing over of the importance of sacrifice and guilt if you ask me. 

Despite the praise my angel babies may get in public sometimes, their behavior is almost never up to my standards and often, especially in the grocery store in the late afternoon after I have worked all day with teenagers and just want to get something for dinner and more granola bars and milk to get us through the school week, sometimes, they become the enemy and those aisles are a battlefield. 

There is a possibility you are not familiar with grocery shopping with five children, ages 11, 9, 7, 3 and 1.  You are really missing out on a whole range of frustration and chaos that you do not currently experience.  Come, come.  Look, look, and think of this story next time you see me.  Perhaps you will take pity.  The following details come from an actual trip to the store.  I did not invent anything.  If you listen closely you may hear the artillery and smell the acrid smoke.

Most people think the trouble with kids in the grocery store is that they ask for things.  Most people are absurdly superficial in their understanding of how deep and wide are the skills to annoy that children possess. 

Kids do not just beg for cookies and Cheese-Itz and ice cream and yogurt raisins and every item featured prominently on an end cap at Von's .  Let me just take this moment to thank grocery store market research for knowing exactly how to market to me and my family so as to completely defeat and contradict all good parenting.  If you do not believe me, check out this article on Psychology and the Supermarket.  There is a scientific reason why the Coco Pebbles are on the bottom shelf and the unsweetened Shredded Wheat is on the top.  It is no accident that Little Debbie cakes are displayed on the end of the aisle where you have to stop your cart to grab milk and eggs.

Beyond begging for treats they bicker with each other over who touched whom.  They try to push the baby in the cart while ignoring his screams.  He can't believe his sisters' nerve in trying to steer his cart.  "Who do they think they are?" his red-faced squeals and fat, pounding fists seem to say. An equally popular approach to tormenting Mom while shopping is to try to explain to me every detail of the day.  All four of the children who can talk do this at once, of course, as they be-bop behind angry cart baby and I, in various states of distraction.

One child tries to tell me a funny thing her best friend said when the cafeteria lady threatened everyone with detention if they continued to throw their tater tots at each other. 

Meanwhile, that inspires younger sister to tell me (at the same time) how much she loves tater tots.  She then continues asking if we can buy tater tots for dinner tonight, even after I've said no three or twelve times and am now two aisles further in our shopping odyssey.

Child #2 keeps asking about the tater tots with only slight variations like "Well, then can we get french fries?" 

This request is followed immediately by contributions from the seven year old who has only partially been paying attention.  She will, at this very moment,  pipe up with "Ooohh, I love french fries and you know, Mommy, they have them right over there at the deli and they're already made ...awesome!" A cheery fist pump seals her certainty that I will, of course, go buy three pounds of french fries for them.  The logic is inescapable.  Mom is here looking for food, right?  We're all hungry right?  My sister has just suggested a perfect solution, and I know they're right there because I already asked if I could have some when we first arrived.  It makes sense that mom will do this.

But don't worry, while this inane conversation continues, in fact throughout the entire previous exchange about tater tots and the cafeteria lady and the logic of french fries at 4:45 in the afternoon, my three year old has been touching boxes and asking for any number of things she sees flitting past her antsy, bubbly, rapid- fire, passionate, loving, blink-and-you-miss-it-focus.  She has been trying to
push the cart,
                     pull the cart,
                                       climb the cart,
                                                             ride the cart,
                                                                                 and play chicken with the cart. 

She has also started two likely tantrums and several perfectly pitched whines whenever you have threatened to put her in the cart.  As long as she's not in it, the cart is Scooby and the Gang's Mystery Mobile.  It's Herbie the Love Bug and Thomas the Tank Engine all combined.  However, she doesn't want to actually sit in it!  "Nooooo, I don't waaaaaant to go in the caaaaaaart."  Vowel extension is a predictable feature of three year old angst.  Look it up in a linguistics text; I'm sure it's there.

In fact, let us pause here to enter the mind of a three year old because it really will deepen your appreciation of the grocery store battlefield.  A three year old can best be understood by studying this crucial and oft used phrase,

"But I don't want to  _____________"  Insert whatever you like here:

• go to bed
• eat broccoli
• clean my room
• put on underwear
• come inside when it's raining
• go to bed
• put down the hammer
• stop watching that dancing mouse over and over and over again
• go to bed
• stay off the grocery cart

It does not matter what or when the request is, a three year old does not understand why she should do ANYTHING unless she wants to or feels like it.  "I don't want to" is as soundly argued and reasonable as any sober pronouncements from the Supreme Court.  It makes perfect sense, and it is shocking that you, Mommy, continue to think I should do anything if I don't want to. 

I don't want to go in the cart.  I want some Fruit Loops.  I don't care that they're packed with enough sugar to dissolve my teeth in one bowl.  I don't care that the fruit flavor has been sprayed on in a factory or that cereal that tastes like Pez probably isn't the best choice, nutritionally speaking.  They are at my eye level (thank you, again market research) and they are the latest image in my View Finder. 

Every second is precious and long in the life of a three year old, so simply saying "I am not buying you Fruit Loops" is not enough.  You will have to say it every time you come to the store and you will say it at least once a minute for the rest of this particular shopping excursion. 

So,  I have helped you understand where your three year old is coming from.  It won't make your strong-willed firefly less annoying; she is just now placed in sharper relief.  A clear, maddening picture of her. 

But wait, there's more.  Just like the Ginsu knives, we aren't finished yet!  Let us recap:

Child #1:  Continues to give details about friend's HILARIOUS comment  -- "No mom, this is sooo funny!"
Child #2:  Loves tater tots and wants to make sure you understand.  She's busying lobbying for tater tots while continuing to expertly scope out the store for anything else she can get you to agree to buy in your feeble state.  Her sister is not far behind her:
Child #3:  Lobbying for real live already fried french fries, "Right over there! Don't they smell good, Mom?"
Child #4 Is flitting around the store, playing with the cart and begging for sugar.

Fear not, Dear Reader, in addition to the free shipping and handling, you also get Child #5

Child #5:  Whining, reaching, grabbing, whining, screeching, smearing fig newtons into the cart cover.  Yes, I grabbed fig newtons and started feeding him.  Don't judge me.  At least they weren't Oreos, and fig is a fruit.

Like I said:  war of attrition.  It requires patience in the moment and a long focus.  To yell, to hit or do something big, bold and memorable could end the gadfly questions about french fries, but what will that create in her, later in life?  They do not understand that I am trying to meal plan for seven people while replaying mistakes I made at work and thinking about the housework and grading that wait at home.  They live in the moment.  We adults, we Five Star Generals, do not live in the moment.  We suspend many moments and responsibilities together in ourselves, and my three year old butterfly won't understand why Fruit Loops cause Mom to be so angry.  My seven year old didn't mean to make me cry and spank anybody; they're just french fries.  What's the big deal?  I cannot snap.  I have to breathe and keep coaxing and discussing and loving them into good behavior.

Scary. We wield a lot of power as parents.  The world will tell you that you don't.  They will say Rhianna and Lady Gaga and Facebook and Twitter wield all the cultural power.  Keep telling yourself that, World.  I see young people who respond to the healthy fear of not wanting to disappoint their parents.  It's alive and well in some of them, just as it was in us.  Where a healthy fear and respect of parents is not operating, I will show you drug use, sex, and drinking.  I will show you defiance, detention, and bad grades.  Harvard will not be calling, but you might awaken one night to this on the other end of the line,

"Good evening, ma'am, I am sorry to wake you.  This is Officer..." and your world immediately swirls into sweating and panic.  I do not want to live that life in a few years, so I continue to hold them accountable.  I did not buy french fries or tater tots.  I did not yell at anyone, or sit down on the pharmacy chair and weep, although both sounded appealing.  My three year old ended up having to ride in the cart.  She screamed for a bit, and then she stopped because I said I would leave the entire cart there, march all of us home and put her to bed with a spanking.  She believed me.  Would I have done it?  Yes, if I had to, but when you fight the war of attrition and you try to be consistent and firm, you rarely have to resort to such drastic measures.  They know you mean business. 

In my role as a high school teacher, I often like to say my favorite idea for a bumper sticker is:

Good Teaching Can't Fix Bad Parenting

Our culture often reviles teachers and bemoans the education system at the same time that it asks us to fix all sorts of cultural and psychological ills that come from family, not school.  The boy smoking cigarettes and glaring at adults like they personally deserve nothing but scorn was once that cute three year old begging for Fruit Loops.  If you teach him that "No" means "No" and it does so because you love him and want him to be a good person, perhaps he will not sneer and smoke outside Starbucks in a few years. 

I believe the bumper sticker is true.  However, as the mother of five children who have not reached high school yet, let alone junior high,  I'm holding off on putting it on my own car.  I have high hopes that my children will be good students and citizens far into their futures, but the war continues, and I don't want to declare a premature victory.

S'mores, Like Gold in My Hand

A Lesson in Point of View.  Too much of the time I look around my house and see mess--an Everest of laundry, an embarrassingly persistent pile of “wash by hand” dishes stacked on the counter, a full diaper pail, bathrooms that need scrubbing, a carpet of cheerios, dirty socks and toys where a carpet should be.  My point of view is often tired, cranky and self-loathing or self-pitying depending on the time of the month.  Often as I'm racing to work or frantically trying to get home from work (see Transition Words for a reminder of this chaos) I hear the voice of Katharine Hepburn in my head as she confesses in the best movie ever, The Philadelphia Story: 

"I'm an unholy mess of a girl."

When you are a mother of five who works full time outside the house, you can start to feel like a hot mess, start to resent the perky stay-at-home moms who have time to go for a walk around town in the morning, bouncing past the window with their dogs on leashes, their Starbucks cups and their cute workout shorts from Kohl's. You start to envy the women who get their hair done more than twice a year and who have the time and treasure to actually take their kids to Disneyland.  It's a slippery slope when my point of view starts to see the glass not just as half empty, but as a sippy cup tipped over and leaking milk all over the counter. 

Sometimes though, in unexpected and desperately needed moments, I’m given brief glimpses of the messiness of my life that seem pleasing and comforting, if not downright romantic. 

Yesterday was Memorial Day.  This was the detritus of my life:  Hershey’s chocolate wrappers scattered on the counter, graham crackers smashed on the floor, bamboo sticks with marshmallow stickiness, dishes stacked in the sink, wet laundry languishing in the washing machine, clean and rapidly turning sour.  Yet it was also linguica basted in beer, charcoal smoke, buttery garlic bread crusts on the high chair, Giants baseball--"3-2 pitch and Bumgarner strikes him out…"Grab some pine, meat."

I watched through the window as four children, gathered together in the back yard burying Joey’s chubby leg in the dark soil while making dirt castles and picking dandelions. 

After dinner, I saw four matching ballerina buns through my living room window, four buns perched on the top of four heads while they waited patiently over the Weber, marshmallow sticks in hand, twisting them slowly to achieve the perfect toast.  Marshmallows because, well, have you ever eaten a s'more?  If it's warm and it's a holiday, I am fairly certain there's some kind of local ordinance or maybe even a state law that requires s'mores.  Ballerina buns because Daddy threatened, “Any girl who has her hair down, doesn’t get a s'more.”  If I could use the promise of s'mores for clean rooms and speaking kindly to your siblings without my daughters weighing two hundred pounds each, I would do it. 

S'mores Recipe

Anyway, a quiet family day that ends with grilling and copious consumption of s'mores can make a girl feel downright warm and fuzzy.  The disaster of my house, the bickering of my children, the unholy mess of my life miraculously became a sanctuary from the world that houses beautiful human beings whose very existence keeps me inhaling and exhaling. 

No grand change took place last weekend.  Despite my ferverent prayers, we did not win the Mega Millions or even A Million.  Alice the Maid did not move in, nor did the DIY Network come to rescue my yard or remodel my kitchen.  Heaven knows my daughters are probably bickering like old women right now: 

"No I didn't."
"Yes, you did."
"No, I didn't!"
"Yes, you did!"
Altogether now with feeling...

"MOM!"

The plot didn't change, just my point of view.  In teaching literature point of view is essential and complicated.  First person, third person, omniscient, limited omniscient.  A novel isn't a newspaper or chapter summaries on Pink Monkey Notes; you have some work to do, Dear Reader.

Reading great literature requires an understanding of point of view.  To Kill a Mockingbird is about Scout’s point of view.  If not, it's an entirely different novel.  Mayella Ewell's novel or Tom Robinson's novel or even the memoir of Atticus Finch is not the same.  The best line in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn loses all power without point of view:

 "I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:  'All right, then, I'll GO to hell.'"  (Chapter 30)

In the hands of a naive or passive or lazy reader, those lines may not make you tear up like I do.  Okay, perhaps I'm a bit of a literary nerd, and I'm the only one who cries every time Charlotte dies or Elizabeth Bennet realizes she loves Mr. Darcy, but believe me:  point of view is powerful stuff.  If you need outside evidence, here's a link for you.  As Annie Savoy in Bull Durham would say, "You could look it up."  Literary Point of View

This blog is about point of view, and about my job.  I haven’t posted about my work lately.  Given the title of this blog, I really should.  Basically God has given me bountiful blessings this year: rehired into a job I never would have dreamed I could love so much, a new perspective on my profession, a profession I had grown too comfortable in, a point of view on teaching that had become too routine, even jaded.  My job this year renewed my practice and made me belive this is what my layoff was for, this was what God had in store for me, this wonderful new teaching life. 

Just when it all made sense, I was laid off again and rehired again.  Wonderful right?  Let's have some s'mores and celebrate!  Not so fast.  Here comes a plot twist that would make Charles Dickens proud. My district has not yet decided what position I will return to in the fall.  In fact it's looking like I will be back at my old site. They want me back at the campus I left, the “main” campus, the “comprehensive” school, the Big House. 

Now, to you, Dear Reader, this may sound like I got sent down to the minor leagues but am now being called back up for a starting position in The Show. I am Crash Davis, and I finally get to go back to the bigs.  I should not have to explain this movie reference, but I will for those of you who, in the pretentious, post-Dances with Wolves-director-of-Waterworld-Kevin Costner-era have forgotten his great earlier films.  If you want to understand baseball and watch good movies, you can't go wrong with these:



Great film, even if it's the Dodgers.

But I digress.  Like Crash, I am a veteran.  I’ve done my time in alternative education, and now I “get” to go back to the “real” school.  That’s probably what they thought I would feel.  Before my epiphany year in alternative education, it is what I would have thought I would feel.  [Someone save me from my own syntax!]  Instead, I said, “No thank you.  I’m happier here.” 

Now my point of view becomes crucial.  I can be upset, sad, and frustrated.  I can be daunted by too many students, too many preps and returning to a more stressful job.  Or, I can be resigned to see the beauty in both options.  No matter where I end up next year, and as of this writing I still don’t know, my point of view is the only thing that matters. 

It must be positive and enthusiastic because my students deserve nothing less, and life is too hard to live any other way. 

Unfortunately, my point of view about where I should teach next year does not matter anymore than it did when I was laid off the first two times.  If my point of view had any power, then in the last two years I could have just said, “Wait, I’m a really good teacher.  You don’t want to lose me,” and they would have kept me.  Silly girl.  That’s not how education works.  It’s not how life works either.  Therefore, after dutifully explaining all of the reasons why I should return to my current position next year and generously acknowledging that I would go wherever I am placed, my superintendent offered some more polite version of "Damn straight, you will, Sister, and you'll like it."

Next fall, I will still feel like an unholy mess of a girl because the daily chaos of my life won’t change. Life is messy. The s'mores my children enjoyed last night were messy.  I probably still have marshmallow squished into the couch, and I know there are still graham cracker crumbs on the floor.  They stayed up way too late on a school night, and I know at least 3 of the 5 didn’t brush their teeth before collapsing for the night into a diabetic coma. 

However, those s'mores, those moments with them yesterday, are gifts, colorful jewels.  What would my messy house and chaotic life feel like if I was suddenly diagnosed with cancer or my house burned to the ground or one of my children got sick?  Would I care about Laundry Everest or the three mystery bowls of leftovers at the back of the fridge?  Not likely.  Every messy, crazy stressful moment would be a jewel, or as Joe Banks said of the days he had wasted in worry instead of living his life, they would be “like gold in my hand.” 

If you don’t know this reference you aren’t alone, but I encourage you to watch Joe Versus the Volcano an easily overlooked romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  (Yes, Janeane Garofalo, I do wish every movie could star Tom and Meg, and you would be a lot less cynical if you embraced that philosophy, too).  Anyway, it has some of the best speeches and sweetest messages about living in the moment.  Like this gem of  a speech when Joe finally quits his miserable job and explains to his boss why:

Either way, alternative education or the Big House, each day will be a sweet, delicious s'more because I have, not just a job, but a profession I love in a beautiful mountain home in the best state in the best country in the world.  My students, my children, my husband and I all deserve a point of view that can generate joy, share love, and embrace adventure.  The Lord has not abandoned me yet, so He must have more important work ahead.  If He finds an unholy mess of a girl to be the place to start, I'm up for the challenge, and happy to be a

Teacher Still Teaching Somewhere