The Bitter Cold Puts Me in a Funk

I wonder when (and how) one truly heals from one's childhood.

At what point does a compliment become a compliment and not a delusion (because if they really knew me they wouldn't think me wonderful at all)?

How many times must my husband tell me (and show me) that he loves me before I believe him?

When will a disagreement become just a disagreement and not further proof that everyone hates me and no one respects me (and why would/should they anyway)?

How can I be good enough for me?

I am 32 years old, have been married to the same adoring man for 10 years, have a beautiful daughter, am well respected at school, write a decent poem every once in a while, and still, still I am not comfortable in my own skin.

Still I feel lonely in the mornings.

Still I feel like a fake.

Still I don't see what they see. I can't.

Or won't.

I wonder what I get out of this bondage.

(Right after publishing this post, I found this at PostSecret. This is exactly what I mean.)

On a Drastically Lighter Note

Oh, here's one to give you goosebumps:

by Ashley Thalman

And am I the only person who thinks this is would be the coolest T shirt?

It's by a cat named Beauchamping.

I must be delerious, as I am now speaking in Beatnik.

both via my favorite NYC blog, A Cup of Jo

And yes, I am quite aware at my vain attempt at burying my last post in a pile of cheese and white bread and beautiful pictures. At least I admit my shortcomings. Sometimes.

Secrets and Bile

I have three younger sisters. I haven't written much about them because, well, I am ashamed of one of them, am I am ashamed of how I treat the other two. (I will identify them by their initials because it seems horrible to expose both their secrets and their names to the world.) D is the youngest and is the subject of the photopoem here.

My mother describes her as "going through a very hard time right now," but my mother is purposefully obtuse when it comes to things like this. D is a straight-up drug addict. She has been for at least a few years. She started smoking pot when she was 14 (given her first dose or whatever you call it by another sister, M), and has taken just about every drug I've ever heard of. She's 22 now, no job, living with M until the end of the year when M's charity and patience run out, pregnant, not taking care of herself, shacked up with baby daddy #2 who also seems to have no job, taking any number of prescription and nonprescription drugs. She had a baby 2 years ago who was born with a heart defect (the jury is still out as to whether her drug use caused the defect, but it couldn't have helped things, now could it?)

He died four months later. His life was short and unbelievably painful. All I can hope is that Jesus is real and that He has him in His arms.

D was high at the funeral, wore an extremely low-cut dress (you have no idea) and no bra, and had the baby's portrait tattooed on her arm. I cannot begin to describe the white-trashiness of it all. If I sound callous (and I know that I do), the reader must realize that I have lain awake countless nights worrying about D and her life. I am rewarded with lies and the spewing of venom behind my back. Like any true addict, it is impossible to know if anything she says about anything is true. One would be advised to assume not. She has stolen from every member of our immediate family and possibly at least some of our extended family. She preys on my middle sister, N. I have accepted the fact that she is a sociopath, a hopeless liar and a hardened addict. I have let her see my daughter once since the funeral and don't plan too many more visits. I don't want my daughter to know people like that. Lest anyone think I am too too judgemental and holier-than-thou, let me list the drugs that she admitted to me, the most goody-goody person in our family, that she took while pregnant the last time: marijuana, cocaine, meth, ecstasy, percoset, percodan, oxycontin, vicoden, and alcohol. I have the sneaking suspicion that I have forgotten something. Oh yeah, xanex. Oh, and by the by, these are things she took AFTER she knew she was pregnant, and AFTER she knew he had a heart defect.

I ask you, can I be faulted for my venom? Or my shame?

I have literally devoted my life to making life better for children. My principal consistently places children with emotional problems in my class because she knows that I will care for them and help them as much as I can. And I do. I seek whatever help the school district can provide, I teach them whatever skills I know, I show them that some adults can be trusted not to disappoint or abandon, I encourage them, I listen to them, I discipline them, I care about them. It makes me sick that someone I know, much less someone I am related to, can be so self-centered so as to so harm a child, and an unborn one at that.

My husband and I tried for over five years to get pregnant with our beautiful daughter, and she is so, so precious to us. I, for all my creativity and imagination, cannot fathom the choice (yes, choice - an addict can and should seek drug treatment the moment they find out they are pregnant if they have not done so for any other reason) to not do everything on your power to make your child's life as good as it can be.

My sister D thinks that I think that I am better than her. Well, she's right. I do think that. And I don't apologize. I just mourn.

Becky

Goodness. So long has passed since my last post that I hardly know where to start. I have been incredibly busy with teaching, having a two-year-old, trying to do all (all!) of the housework in the 4 exhausted hours between getting home and going to bed, and helping Darling Husband list various of myriad collectibles on ebay and craigslist in anticipation of leaving this tiny house sometime next year, if the economy improves at all and I can secure a teaching position in the new (warm!) city in which we have already purchased a home (I am yet to see said home in person, but it is beautiful in pictures and stories!). In short, I am buried in paperwork, housework, motherhood, marriage and planning-for-the-future.
So. While I have had time to compose bits of essays while driving to and from school listening to NPR, I have not had time to write anything down in a long while. I have stolen these few minutes while the baby is napping and I am not (though I tried), while DH is flipping between a football game and the Yankees game in the living room (can't wait to have an office, bedroom and bathroom where I will not have to hear the TV), while laundry silently waits for me (can't wait to have a laundry room upstairs (can't wait to have an upstairs) instead of a washer in the kitchen and a dryer in the garage), while dinner waits in bits and pieces in the freezer and fridge (can't wait to have a fridge in the kitchen instead of the garage - black, thank you very much, not that hideous and perpetually smudged stainless steel that people seem to go for right now), while piles of grading wait for me across town in my classroom. But who cares about all of that. The work, as they say, will still be there in the morning. Someday I'll be caught up. Someday. Anyway, all of that is boring. I want to write about Becky, since I can't stop thinking about her.
First of all, I have no reason to think that her name is actually Becky. That's just the name that leaps into my mind every time I see her. I see her nearly every weekday, sitting on a short brick all underneath a pedestrian overpass a couple of miles from my house, on one of the city's busier roads, watching the people pass by in their cars. It's the people she's looking at too, not the cars themselves. I know this because we have made direct eye contact many times as I drive by, having just taken off from the light. If I pass by full speed, of course, eye contact isn't possible, but I can still tell that she is looking into the cars. I wonder why she's there every day, Summer and Winter. I assume she is homeless, but of course I don't know. Occasionally I pass by earlier than my normal time and she hasn't quite reached her spot - she'll be walking with her backpack and sometimes a giant gas-station coffee or soda. She always has a pleasant expression on her weather-worn face - not a smile exactly, but certainly not a frown or grimace. She always sits in the same position - palms resting flat on the wall on either side of her hips, legs pressed together to the knee, feet swinging out to the side from the knee to a 45-degree angle, slammed together, then apart, repeat, repeat, repeat. She wears a filthy red baseball cap and usually the hood of her Carhart jacket up, but not always. Her hair is brown and kind of curly. She could be as young as 30 or as old as 40. It's hard to tell because she has that ruddy, outdoor-living sort of look to her skin. I would imagine that she looks a bit older than she is because of it.
But I don't know. I don't know her, though I somehow feel like I do. I want to. Every time I pass her I feel an urge to pull into the bus pull-out and talk to her. Why? What would I say? What would I ask her? What right do I have to assume anything about her? I'm nobody to her, and she's nobody to me. But somehow my humanity reaches out of my body to meet hers somewhere in the the air between us. It's crazy, I know. But I worry about her when I don't see her there in her spot, even for one day. And if she's missing for three or four days, like she was about a month ago, I imagine that something terrible has happened to her, that she's been assaulted or worse. Truthfully, I am never going to stop and talk to her. It would be too strange. But I still check her off my mental checklist every day. Becky's there. Check. She's made it another day. Check. She still looks happy. Check. I'll look for her again tomorrow. Check.

Unpaid Time

I haven't written in a while, partly because I have been sleeping somewhat better, but mostly because when I have been getting up I have been working on things for school instead of my blog (though I must admit I positively cannot get on the computer without checking in on facebook and reading Ruth and Susan's blogs). Speaking of Ruth, a dear blogfriend of mine, her daughter's farm wedding was absolutely magical. I know that there was a lot of planning, preparation, and worrying, and it all paid off. Lovely.
So school is getting closer and closer, our first in-service day less than a week away, and the kids' first day less than a week after that. I have been going into school every day since Tuesday, and plan to go in every day until we start next Thursday, just to get my classroom moved (why-oh-why must I be such a packrat?), and organized (thank goodness for clear plastic tubs), and set up. I changed grade levels this year, from 1st to 4th, and while there was a lot I enjoyed about working with young children, I am very much looking forward to working with older kids again. I student taught 6th grade and was hired as a 5th grade Science-Social Studies-Health teacher, then moved to 1st grade to fill a need at our school. I am not sure I am cut out to be a primary teacher. I get frustrated with the brevity of their attention spans and their general inability to do things independently. I love them. They're adorable. They try (mostly). They're smart. But the getting "lost" on the way to the bathroom gets old. The coloring on everything in the classroom with markers gets old. The tiny pieces of paper all over the floor at the end of every day gets old. The picking of the noses gets old. And the whining gets very old. With a young child of my own (my baby girl is about to turn 2!!!!!), I owe it to her to not be fed up with small children when I get home. And when she gets to be in 4th grade, why then I'll switch to 6th or Kindergarten. I don't really care - just something different from her. I owe it to her! It's unfair enough to have to share your mom with a bunch of other people's kids, but for her to be worn-out and tired of talking to kids your age when she gets home would be a tragedy!
Long story short-ish, I have been working on things like a parent welcome letter outlining my educational background and experience and our curriculum; a statement of my policies on homework and daily attendance and behavior and late work (To be frank, I'm strict. Got to be. It's better for the kids and its better for the parents. And its better for me because in day-to-day interactions with the kids, I'm very nice. There has to be a balance, or the more entitled parents will try to walk all over you. They still try, but if I can show them a policy statement that they signed, it leaves little room for argument. I've learned this from experience.); activities for the first day, like a classroom and textbook scavenger hunt, a get-to-know-each-other questionnaire, a partner interview sheet, and a classmate name game; and a daily points/discipline log. There's always more to do, but I've never had this much done this early. It feels good.
Well, hmm. Can't decide if I am getting tired or if my eyes are just getting tired of looking at this screen. Either way, its a good time to log off.

Summer Break-ing Point

That time of year is here again - no it's not some little-known holiday, and I already had my birthday. No, it is thinking-about-getting-ready-for-school-to-start time. It happens in the month before school starts, and fuels trips to the second-hand store (because I just need BROWN dress pants with or without pinstripes and maybe they have a cute top and hubby gets a lot less upset about those receipts than receipts from Kohl's and J.C. Penney's); mad lesson-planning while baby is sleeping (I ALWAYS bring home my teacher's manuals over the summer. If I didn't, I'd just be begging my principal to let me in my locked-down room to get them); classroom arrangement both in my head and on sheets of notebook paper (I have that overhead projector now, and I'd like to try a Socratic-like semi-circle this year, but HOW do I get 28 desks in that arrangement while still leaving room for a free-reading area and a teacher-team table? hmm); closet rearrangement (I WILL wear all professional attire this year. No jeans. Except on Fridays, maybe. And possibly Gym days. And I HAVE to start wearing jewelry every day. Hubby has spoiled me with jewelry and I hardly wear it because I am half-asleep in the mornings and besides, I can't turn on the bedroom lights to look through my earrings when hubby and baby are sleeping, can I?); and hours and hours of thinking about classroom details and how-I-will-be-a-better-teacher-this-year (since I'm teaching 4th grade this year, the kids could file their own homework assignments under their name and I could easily grade each student's work every few days. Fourth-grade parents are going to expect progress reports - should I do them every week? I could never keep up with that. Every two weeks? yeah, that sounds about right. No. Wait. A. Minute. I think we are going to have that new grading program this year where all the parents can check grades online whenever they want! Agh! I better make sure I grade every assignment the day it is turned in! I'll be there until 9:00 every night! Oh no! OK. Slow down. I am sure it will be explained to us more-or-less fully during in-service, and if I just keep up on things it will be OK. No need to stress right now. Whew).
Well, there you go. That's how it starts. Three weeks and counting. But you know what? At least I care. At least I think things through before I do them. At least my kids know I care about them and their learning.
As soon as I stop thinking about school in the summer, I'll know it's time to retire.

Pictures and Words, and How they Transport Me

So I am probably not going to write much tonight, because though I have been up for almost 2 hours, I have spent most of that time posting 80s rock videos to my facebook profile, catching up on the blogs I like to read, and, of course, looking at various pictures of beautiful clothes on the internet, thanks mostly to links provided by the aforementioned blogs. It's really an exercise in futility, the looking at the clothes, because though when other people see me they see this,
when I am trying on beautiful designer clothes in my mind, I look like this:

Naturally, there is a disconnect here (and yes, that is my gorgeous daughter in the picture with me, and no, I am not expecting a second child. That is my stomach. Yeech), and the clothes I would like to look good in either do not look good on me or do not even come in my size. Because in NYC and LA size XL is quite a bit smaller than in, you know, America, and besides, they are usually sold out of XLs pretty quickly anyway, so I'm thinking MAYBE I'm not the only one in this sailboat I have affectionately dubbed The Delusion. (Because you know, you have to name your boat. A boat with no name is bad luck, and then nobody wants to get on it with you.)

Anyhoo, I will NOT bore you or myself with another late-night diatribe about my weight problem and the who/what/when/where/and why of how I came to have this problem. (Me/fatty-fatty-two-by-four/since grade 6/wherever I am/hormone imbalance&emotional eating&laziness&business&sugar addiction (I'm NOT kidding)).

Mostly I'm just laughing at myself about this other world I enter when I sit at the computer at night. I am no longer sitting in my 900-some-odd square foot house, surrounded by too. much. stuff. My husband and I are packrats, you see - I collect pieces of paper (you never know when you might get audited), books (I like to read them again), and clothes (I WILL get back into that dress, someday, if I get mono and can't eat for a month or two); he collects, well, collectibles of various sorts and sizes and sells them here and there. No, once I enter Blogtown I am walking down the street in Manhattan, well-dressed, of course, admiring others who are similarly bedecked. Or I am on a farm, in a bright yellow-and-white kitchen, sun-filled and sparsely furnished with antiques. Or I am in South Africa, looking across the too-wide plain under the too-big sky. Just anywhere but here, in my too-small house with too many things in a place that gets way, way too cold and dark in the winter.

But I digress. I am probably not going to write much tonight. because I just thought of another 80s song for facebook and I still have a couple of places to visit in Blogtown before I try again to sleep.