Blog

I was eight years old the first time I went to the beach. It was in Mexico. Since then I have been to beaches in Hawaii, California, Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, New York, and now Alaska.

I guess most people don’t frequent the beach on snowy, windy days. I wonder why, because the colors are fantastic with sea foam and clouds and giant flakes falling from the sky. I was on the very tip on the Alaskan Spit yesterday. On the map, it is the thinnest of lines into the bay.. There is coal on the beach from coal beds that lie in the ocean. Pieces wash up on shore. I picked up a chunk of it, drenched from the sea. It’s hard to believe that something that cold could ever burn so hot.

The most interesting thing I saw was a graveyard for ships. All sorts of old boats, broken, sea-battered, and marooned in a ragged line. It was just a drive-by, but my imagination exploded. I want to go back and walk in the shadows of these ships and take photos and weave stories and paint pictures.

I am staying with a friend and her family. They made me welcome signs and have done everything to make me feel at home. It is so nice to be in a place of so much love. It makes me think of my own family in ways and reflect back to the days of quick pasta meals and board games on our little kitchen table. I guess I never believed how fast those years could go.

I was thinking about how you never get time back, when my brother called. I haven’t talked to him much since my sister-in-law died. He forgot that I was going to Alaska. He got out his atlas while we were on the phone and said, ” Oh, here you are. I see you!” It made me laugh and feel optimistic that he is able to make jokes. I promised him that I would come over and clean up his answering machine for him when I got back.

While I was writing my blog this morning, there was a loud sound like falling bricks and moving furniture and the bed shook for a second and then it paused and then again for a few more seconds. Then I heard the kids say, “Earthquake.” So I just lived through my first earthquake.

I guess maybe it was more of a tremor? I don’t know about much about the technical differences. I just know that those tectonic plates are shifting around and sometimes it reminds people that there are forces all around us doing their thing. And if you really think about it, every moment is kind of a gift.

On this trip, I am making an effort to breathe and look and listen. I have known for a while that I have been ignoring what I need and what I want. Coming here was a step in listening to my heart. I just hope I am brave enough to keep trusting in the messages that are coming my way.

When I first got into teaching, I considered going to Alaska. I talked to a recruiter, looked at finances, read books, talked to people who had lived in Alaska. In the end, decided to not move with a toddler to an isolated place without any friends or family. And over the years I have realized that I am more of a city girl than a rustic girl, but the dream of going to Alaska has never faded.

So my first ever adult spring break destination trip, Homer Alaska. The mountains and ice and water and snow are just like the pictures. I could not get over the way the water and ice make amazing swirly patterns. It reminded me of dropping a bit of blue into a gallon of primer and dipping in a stir stick and watching the magic unfold. And then I saw the road, like a black ribbon cutting into all the shades of white and blue in the world. I wondered what it would be like to drive for hundreds of miles surrounded by all that white and blue.

If I had to go home right now, I would say Alaska is breathtaking, but fortunately it is just the beginning of my stay. Cannot wait to see all the majesty ahead.

I am writing this blog post from a hotel room in San Francisco. It’s raining like hell and I am thinking about all the times I have been in this city before. I remember the first time; I was thirteen. I’d come on a family vacation to visit my Aunt Martha in El Cerrito. She took us to Chinatown and Pier 39 and Muir Wood. My cousin, Patricia drove my brother and I all over in her little Mustang with 80’s rock jamming. We went to the mall to see E.T. IN THE THEATER. It was one of the best vacations of my life.

This time I am here on this trip for professional reasons. San Francisco was just to be an airport hop, but delay after delay has me in the city overnight. I am exhausted, but I have been awake doing A WEEK IN REVIEW in my head.

I told my class on Monday that I was coming to California. At first they were outraged. “No. You can’t go. Who is our sub? When will you be back? Are you coming back? Are you ditching us for DisneyLand? It’s dangerous in California…what if you get shot?” I assured them I would be back and that I didn’t plan on getting shot. Later, during math, one of the boys came up to me and said, “I got you, Miss. I will make sure these homies stay tight. Promise you’re coming back?”

This boy. I can’t say his name, but he is kind of remarkable. He is the kind of student teachers want to strangle. He does very little in the way of academics and falls asleep. He doesn’t have any boundaries and will ask me things like, “Have you ever been in jail?.” He isn’t always nice to other kids, but expects everyone to share with him and treat him like a king. He is disrespectful to adults and if they call him on it, he hates them for life. I watch him run the room. I am not going to lie, sometimes he reminds me of every prison movie I have ever seen. The guy in the yard everyone watches with a mingle of fear, respect, maybe jealousy.

Under all his bravado, this kid has had serious trauma. He watched his own mother catch fire when he was six years old. He threw a bowl of dog water on her to put the fire out. He saw his little sister get run over. He has seen people stabbed and shot. He has dealt with more trauma and death in eleven years than some people see in a lifetime. His academic skills aren’t great, but he is first one to notice if someone in the room is crying. He will stand up for the underdog in a fight. And he will try to make things right if someone goes against his “code.” For example, this week in school he didn’t like how I was being treated by a couple of students, so he made them write me letters of apology. He checked the letters over and sent them back for rewrites. Part of me was amused, and also a little touched that I have entered his circle of protection. I am a little worried about how much power this boy wields, but I do know, no matter what, this kid is a survivor.

Anyway, when I left, all the kids said goodbye and wished me a safe trip and told me not to get killed. I assured them that I would be fine, but travel can be triggering for me. I think it is hold over from losing my parents in an accident. I was worried about Charlie this time. Like would he notice if something happened to me? Who would take care of him? Would he think I abandoned him? Maybe it’s easier to project those feelings on a cat than the people in my life that I love.

It is tempting to blow off why I came here and enjoy what this amazing city has to offer. There used to be a restaurant in Chinatown that you could enter from the alley and be given fresh, hot fortune cookies. My students would love that! But today I am heading up North. The Cascades. The Redwoods. Hoping the weather doesn’t delay my travel anymore. Doing my best to put down my worries and see what the day holds for me.

I never know if 3 am is late at night or early in the morning. I just got done reading about Cardi B on Wikipedia. I didn’t realize she was so established. In my defense, I don’t listen to a lot of rap, but my students are obsessed and one of the reasons I cannot sleep, is because I am trying to reach them.

I only have fifteen students, but only seven students who consistently are on task. Overall, skills are far below grade level and there is a lot of behavior. A lot of trauma. In my experience of trauma, my instinct is to smooth things over, not rock the boat, work on fixing everything and everybody. But my students are the trauma survivors who fight. They are edgy and alert and hit first and ask questions later. I walk around the room trying to get them to read about Rosa Parks, or the phases of the moon. They ask me what kind of Takis I like best and what I grub on when I get my food stamps. I tell them that I don’t need food stamps and I can tell that some of them are confused by that statement.

One of the things my class does is argue over which one of them is my favorite student. I always tell them I don’t have a favorite, that I like them all. And that’s the truth. Sort of. There are some girls who never give me a bit of trouble and I love that they do everything I ask and get started on their work and are so nice and freaking quiet. I have a boy who is so bright and asks questions and is always thinking. I have another boy who is like a giant St. Bernard puppy, big and happy and always into everything, but so cheerful and positive. Then I have another boy who might be destined for a life of crime, He is street-smart and tough and thinks he runs the room. He makes my life hell sometimes, but he gets people and reads emotions and is a survivor and I freaking love him, no matter how much sleep I have lost over him.

This week one of my students asked me if her clothes matched. She told me that she thought she was ugly and she hated her body. This kid is adorable and I told her that I thought she was beautiful. She shrugged and said, “If you say so, Miss.” She gave me a quick hug at the end of the day and said, “Thanks for being my school mom.” And it almost made me cry, because I know how much this kid works at everything. And I hate that she is another girl in the world with a poor self-image. And then I lost sleep overthinking about her. Because really she is sorta my favorite.

Even though I have been teaching a long time, I have never had my own classroom before. I have always taught in situations that brought kids in and out of my room all day. Over time and through art and writing and listening to their conversations, I’d get to know them. Along the way, I have had students who have carved their way into my heart and I will run into them or get an email or a friend request on social media, and it is awesome to see how they have grown up. This year being a classroom teacher has brought more challenges than I can possibly name, but I have really learned why teachers say, “my kids.”

Every day, I wake up and say, “Give me the strength to get through today. ” And I look for jobs to take me back to art. I crave creativity. My soul NEEDS it. I spend a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to just write for a living. My computer. My cats. The radio in the background.

March is the time of year when the end of the school is near. The promise of summer is so close, and the thought of fall so far away. I don’t really know what took me to this rough bunch of kids on the East side. And I don’t know what comes next. But I do know that I have learned and stretched myself in ways that I never knew possible. No matter what comes next, these kids will be forever etched into my heart.

In the fall, my friend asked me to paint the alley side of her garage. She wanted it to inspire hope. I thought about hope for a long time. When I googled hope, I came up with symbols of rainbow and breast cancer pink ribbons. I wanted something else. I started with a tree. I had recently painted a tree at a coffee shop and loved how it turned out. Right next to the garage was a large tree stump. I think old trees are kinda mesmerizing and I think the promise of taking root and growing in one place is hopeful.

Then I painted in a girl looking toward the horizon and the sun beyond the mountains. My friend told me after I’d started the mural that she used to stand looking at the mountains as a child imaging that a band of Indians would come over the horizon and sweep her away from her small, dark life. I didn’t know that when I started painting the mural, but it didn’t surprise me. Sometimes I sense pain without being told.

I haven’t finished the mural yet. It’s been a slow project for me. I usually have a mural project waiting in the wings, so finishing one quickly gets me to the next. But for whatever reason, it feels like taking slow deliberate steps is the right way to approach this wall. I painted in lots of color for the sky and fields, but it is still missing something.

I woke up yesterday morning and heard my sister-in-law’s voice on the radio talking about grief. I wonder how long that spot will run on the air. Her service was yesterday, in the church that used to be a roller rink. I have so many memories of the rink and arcade games and birthday parties and suicides (drinks with all the sodas mixed together) and the music that shaped my youth. I know the space was a gymnastics academy before a church, but in my mind it is the roller rink. Sometimes I have dreamed that I show up to skate and there is a funeral going on. Weird, right? Almost like knowing that one day, I’d be there for a funeral.

Through this whole journey, I haven’t known what to say to my brother. Losing my parents unhinged him, and his wife was the force that helped ground him. Losing her is like losing his will to live. He looked good and held himself together during the service, but I know him well enough to see the frayed edges and I’m not sure what comes next for him. I hope he finds peace and comfort in knowing that she isn’t suffering. I hope that he is able to see the light and faith that his wife lived her life with.

After the service, I took a look at the wall. I’m ready to finish it now. I am going to add wild horses running in the field. Freedom. Hope. They will be for my sister-in-law. Fly high, honey. You will always be loved.

One of my favorite things growing up was the summer reading program. It was six weeks on Tuesday and Thursday and we got a colored sheet of paper to keep a log of the books we read. I say we because my brother, the boy next door, and two of our friends, went to the program faithfully every week throughout our childhood. I don’t know if any of them remember it as well as I do, the library was MY JAM. School was okay, but the library was the one thing that I really, really loved.

The summer between second and third grade, I discovered the Charlie Brown collection. Each year of the comic strip, Peanuts, was bound in a hardback book on the bottom shelf on the south wall. I was familiar with Peanuts. It was a comic strip, I read everyday while I was eating my cereal and on Sunday it always topped the colored portion of the pull-out comic section. I’d bring the paper in, hand it to my dad and he’d hand me out the comics. We had that ritual until the day he died. That summer after discovering the Peanut books, I read every single volume. I was too little to do an in depth character analysis, but I poured over those characters and really got to know their personalities. If you want to see me geek out ask me about Charlie Brown and his complex relationship with Linus van Pelt. In fact, I would love a third cat to name Linus, but that would put me in crazy cat lady territory and I am not ready to make that leap.

Anyway, it is no secret, that I am really struggling professionally. I am good at relationships with kids, but hate discipline. I don’t want to fight with kids to do the right thing. When I was teaching art, I had high engagement because kids wanted to be there and they wanted to do all the things I was asking. Not that I didn’t have jackwagons, but overall, kids were excited to see me and to do the projects. I went from 98 percent engagement to mmm…thirty, maybe forty percent engagement. Reading and writing and math are hard and I have a lot of students really struggling. And the shit–and I am choosing that word deliberately–I am asked to teach them is not engaging or captivating or relevant. And they don’t care. And you know what? I get it. I get why they don’t want to do it. And part of me agrees with them. And even though I have a rebel inside my heart, I rarely let her come out to play. But something about being right here, right now, has brought that rebel to the surface. She is loud, crabby and in my face. Lucy van Pelt is yelling at me to make a move. And she is not taking no for answer.

Messages come in all kinds of ways. Even though I am hesitant to make such a bold statement and want to be wishy-washy as Lucy would call it, and use words like maybe and probably and might, I know I need to leave the classroom.. I have known it for awhile and I have had all sorts of excuses related to retirement and salary and all that jazz. But honestly, the path is there and I just have to be brave enough to trust and have faith that I can take the next step in the journey.

For a short time, when I was a little, little kid, I shared a room with my brother. He was a one of those lucky people that could fall asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. My mom and I had a deal that if I went to bed at the same time he did, I could get up when he fell asleep and watch TV with her. Mostly I remember Carol Burnett doing the Tarzan yell and Johnny Carson laughing. When I was old enough to read, I’d read late into the night. Mom would yell at me to turn off the light, so I used the same lesson she taught me and turn off the light and wait until she was asleep and turn it back on. For a long time, I just thought my sleeping problems were just a life time of bad habits.

At some point, something changed. I can actually pinpoint the time frame. When I was fourteen, my uncle had a stroke and we spent many, many days for the next few years driving to visit him in facilities in different parts of the state. During my childhood, my brother would sleep on road trips, but I’d read unless it was too dark, then I’d stare out the window trying to count the white highway dash lines, listening to my mom and dad talk about semi interesting gossip. But after my uncle got sick, I started falling asleep in the car, almost immediately. I thought being in the car all the time finally taught me the fine art of road trip sleeping. But I also started falling asleep other places–like during school and movies. I wrote that off as staying up late to work on homework. That continued to be my pattern for decades. Weird sleep patterns at night, but unable to stay awake when I sat down for an activity. It made for embarrassing moments. One time I fell asleep in a college lecture and my friend woke me up and I screamed like I was being attacked, causing the entire room to turn to look at me. The professor said, “My lectures don’t typically inspire such horror.” Another time I punched a man on an airplane when his cell phone ring woke me from a dead sleep and my arms flailed out in a startle response. If a video was taken during these moments, I’d have a hilarious reel.

I mentioned my sleep difficulties once to a doctor during my twenties. She told me that I was just a young mom and it was normal to feel tired all the time and that I needed to not nap and go to bed at the same time every night and only sleep in bed, not read, or write, or watch TV in bed. My daytime sleepiness got so bad that I couldn’t drive to thirty minutes without getting really sleepy. And I started taking naps in weird places–like the mall, and the book store, or a random park bench. I started making fun of myself, saying I was in training for my life as a baglady. But at night, I continued to be restless and I’d wake up all night, reaching for my cell phone to check the time and then checking my Facebook, or playing a game on line, before trying to get back to sleep.

I suspected that I might have a real problem one day at school. I was doing a weaving unit and I sat down with the yarn and the kids would have to come to me if they needed me to tie or cut more yarn. It was chaos–twenty five kids with yarn–picture kittens learning to knit. And I DOZED off, probably just for a second, but I jerked awake to a little girl in front of me asking for blue yarn. Soon after, my daughter looked up the symptoms for narcolepsy, and read them off to me. I had EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

The big marker is cataplexy. Cataplexy is physical collapse during strong emotion. Some people have cataplexy so strong that they fall over, or can’t move. Mine is super mild. I feel it when I laugh hard. It’s like my body is having weird muscle spasms. I just thought that’s how my body felt when I laughed really hard. I didn’t know it was an actual medical condition. I went to a sleep doctor and I did the sleep study.

He thought I’d be a slam dunk narcolepsy patient, but I woke up 134 times during the course of my sleep study, even though I don’t have the typical signs for sleep apnea. The doctor said my uvula was a little long and blocking my airway when I slept. He said that it didn’t rule out narcolepsy, but I had to try a CPAP, to see if it improved my sleep. SO I gave the machine a try. It didn’t help at all, just made my face cold.

What actually did help was just knowing that I had TWO legitimate sleeping disorders. My sleeping issues weren’t from Johnny Carson, reading, or even blue light. My erratic sleep habits were because my body couldn’t stay awake or stay asleep. Even though I was a little sad that truck driving school is off the table forever, it was a relief to know the root of the problem.

In a lot of ways I am really lucky. My cataplexy is mild. I’ve never fallen over or become paralyzed. In fact, I’d bet money that I’m the only one that notices the weird muscle spasms. I can tell when the sleep attacks are coming and I can get to a safe place to nap. The lucid dreams have given me hundreds of story ideas. One day one of those dreams might be the next bestseller…

I can’t speak for all educators, but this teacher right here loves SNOW Days. It makes me almost feel sorry for teachers in Hawaii. Maybe they have hurricane days? Right now I am bundled up in my Snoopy pajamas and the softest blanket on record, looking at the window. I can really only see the sky from my bed and it’s white and gray and looks cold. I have a lot on my mind today. Some people make a to do list; I make a “let me overthink this list.”

1. I realize that if I never went back to work, I wouldn’t even care. Perhaps that’s another reason I made the change so late in my career. It’s so much easier to let go when you don’t have a good hold.
2. I need a beading needle. That requires putting actual clothes on, scraping the ice off a windshield. The Honda doesn’t have that much gas in, so I would also have to get gas. Why do I always need gas in the worst weather? I could take the truck. Should I really drive across town just for a beading needle? I could also get a few groceries.
3. I wonder if my brother is awake. Should I call him? Wait for him to call me? If I do go out to get a needle, should I physically go check on him? Help him take down the Christmas decorations? Maybe check on his gun situation and slip the ammunition in my pocket?
4. I am listening to the radio. My sister-in-law just came on with her hospice commercial. That’s irony. She finally found a job she loves with grief counseling and now she is possibly facing hospice.
5. How do I talk about what happened with her over the weekend?

Trisha woke up on Saturday. Her tube was removed. The brain bleed damaged her gag reflex and she is in pretty severe danger of asphyxiation. Normally, in these situations, a feeding tube would be inserted, but because of the risk of infection, nothing has been done about a feeding tube. She could handle small sips of water, so that’s what she is doing. She can talk, but it is slow and hard, and very difficult for her to make herself understood. When the tube was removed, hospice came in, this was not what the family was expecting. The hospital is saying if cancer treatment stops then she will die. Oncology wasn’t available for consultation over the weekend. The strokes and brain bleed have left her partially paralyzed and the gag reflex issue makes the rigors of chemotherapy almost inconceivable to imagine. But yet she has not given up. The fight is on.

To be honest, I am more worried about my brother than her. When my parents died, he sort of lost his mind. He went to a dark place and Trisha really stood by him and helped him through all his stages of grief. She is his whole world. I think she knows that he will not be okay without her and it is keeping her in the game. As far as the next steps, we are all just taking it moment by moment.

The sun is starting to sort of filter through the clouds, bringing a bit of light that is almost warm. It feels like hope.