How do I say goodbye when I can't leave yet?

After 9 years in education, I've decided to leave it to someone else to do the work. If there is someone out there who wants to take this on in its current form. I don't want to leave the kids to this broken system, but I've decided to leave before I get sicker. 

I believe in public education in principle. But there are so many ways to be a human child, and right now, we have embraced what one of my colleagues once called "the batch processing of children."

So I have 37 days left. I'm not a countdown person...I generally see it as negating the journey. But I am counting down now. And yet, I'm still wrapped up in the stress of getting all the lessons ready, the fixing of problems, the working of 11-hour days, the Saturdays spent in the classroom. I need to start saying goodbye. I need to start freeing myself from something that is not sustainable.

So, I'll say goodbye to a few things I likely won't be doing again. Bittersweet.

Goodbye to parent-teacher conferences, where I learn about families' financial challenges, dreams for their children, medical conditions, dynamics between divorced parents and current work schedules.

Goodbye to the holiday gift project. 

Goodbye to the joy of reading a new hardback picture book to the class. ("Can I read that when you're done?")

Goodbye to not drinking water until the kids leave. Leaving the room to go pee is not an option.

Goodbye to the 5-minute lunch and the "lunch I forgot to eat."

Goodbye to trying to look graceful and teach a deep math concept to 24 people while one of them is screaming and hitting his head on the desk.

Goodbye to looking around and realizing we are all finally sitting in the same circle, and at last only one person is talking, and everyone else is actually listening to that one person. After 7 months.

Goodbye to the same questions every year ("How old are you?" "What is your favorite color?" "Are you a duck or a beaver?" "Do you believe in God?" "Do you believe in ghosts?" "Are you married?").

Goodbye to Expo marker and Sharpie and Flair pen marks all over my Target clothes.

Goodbye to hearing my name 100 times a day. 

Goodbye to handwritten cards that say "You're the best techer ever." 

Goodbye to not being able to do what I came here to do for all of you and to not being able to do what they expect me to do for all of you, which are in some ways very different things.

What made me happy to be alive today?

Smells of beef stew, from a real cow from a real farm, made by husband.

Harris School in Summer Lake, Oregon.
One of the schoolhouses I am going to visit this summer.

Sleeping just a little longer while husband walked the doggy.

Regaining my strength after being sick for so long.

Seeing an old friend and learning that all is well in his life.

Buying a big cork board for my beautiful new map of Oregon that is going to track all the old schoolhouses I've visited and am going to visit.

Eating a chicken soup lunch. It was the fourth meal I'd gotten out of the two big jars of homemade soup my neighbor brought over when she found out I was sick.

There's a fence at the golf course. Which side am I on?

I drive past three golf courses on my way to work. They all used to be farms.

The highway cuts through one of these former farms-turned-courses, and a chain link fence separates a stretch of wild grasses and blackberries along the road from the carefully groomed greens. Over the years I've seen an old man or two with 5-gallon buckets, searching the tall grass for golf balls, a pursuit similar to collecting pop cans. "Ball hawks," they're sometimes called.

The other day as I was driving home, the sun was shining and I glimpsed a golf cart and players in their regulation golf apparel near the chain link fence. With-it, organized, groomed, relaxed. Shirts tucked in. On the other side of the fence was a couple with a child, maybe 8 or 9 years old, searching the grass.  Their car, an old, beat-up thing, was parked along the highway. I had never seen them there before, and I absentmindedly wondered if there were territory disputes among ball hawks, like there were with mushroom hunters. Would the old men mind them being there?

Then I glanced in my mirror and saw the child bend over and pick something up. And I suddenly saw what I was seeing. And what I saw was that fence.

That fence creates a world of players that can be separate from the world of gatherers. That fence--completely transparent, mind you--allows those players to keep playing their game without having to fear or even acknowledge the little family collecting those stray balls.

As I drove by, I wondered which side of the fence I belonged on. There have been times in the past when I felt like I was there in the weeds, living on a very meager income. Nowadays, though, I might be able to afford to play golf if I wanted to, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to. So I imagined myself walking precariously along the metal pipe at the top of that fence, not wanting to fall into the course and learn to ignore the people in the grass, but not wanting to fall in the grass and have to compete with them for the golf balls.

And I think about all those models of revolution and reformation that could also find a metaphor here...we could stand up and tear out the fence and let it all go back to the blackberries! We could force the players into the blackberry bushes and let the family play on the course! Or tear out the fence and make the whole world one big, happy golf course!

By the time I got home, the only thing I could figure for sure is that an 8-year-old kid and his parents shouldn't have to go out and search for golf balls after school.

Is there a class for developing wisdom, patience and compassion?

Tough day. I actually googled "how to teach a child whose parent has died." Because I really don't know how to do it. I feel like someone out there must have a special training that I haven't taken yet. It's a course that tells me how to teach a child whose parent just died; a child who shouts out the opposite of whatever I say a la Tourette's; a child who pounds on the table and bangs his head on the table and screams at me when things don't go his way; a child who argues with everyone around him and talks like a baby, etc. Because I clearly don't have the training yet. I start to think things are going better, that we finally have a culture developing, but then, I realize I am out of my league, that I really don't know how to teach these kids plus 19 more plus get them all to be deep thinkers, great writers, and mathematicians. Please send course information courtesy of this blog.

Can a person become a neatnik through perseverance?

A neatnik would notice a problem here.

I have several colleagues who leave at the end of each day with a sparkling, tidy classroom. Books in their tubs, tables wiped off. No papers in sight. No sign of the 25 kids who spend their day there.

Now, my classroom is not a disaster area, but it is not neat and tidy. On my desk: marker drawings kids have given me, worksheets I should have returned to the kids, professional articles I intend to read, a plastic peace symbol bracelet and jingle bells I took away from somebody. That's the first layer. I do have some organizational systems that work, but the piles and the junk still collect on my desk(s) and tables. A 3-hour cleaning spree is required to make it look, temporarily, like I am a tidy person. And my house is pretty much in the same sorry state of affairs.

One of my colleagues told me she is OCD---that's why she is so neat. One of the other magic wand cleaning teachers told me she has a special chore she does at home each day of the week (bathrooms on Saturdays), which seems to be taking it a bit far. Another colleague excused her tidiness by explaining, "I'm a neatnik."And I wondered, Why am I not one of those? Can I become that? 

As an educator, I'm in the business of personal transformation. I'm of the mind that a person can often get better at something through passion and hard work. But secretly, when it comes to this neatnik thing, I'm not so sure. I'm imagining I have some genetic issue, or perhaps experienced a lack of neatnik modeling when I was young. But I think I want to overcome it. I really, truly want to change, I'm pretty sure. Is it too late for me? Or is it genetically out of the question, like waking up to naturally blond hair?

I don't mean I just want to change in a practical way. I don't mean the short-lived change brought about by reading a book called Finally Getting Organized, or resolving to make 2014 The Year I Get Organized, or following Alejandra Costello's How to Get Organized blog (which I do), or calling in a consultant to redo the closets. I am talking about a change of perception and will.

The change needs to happen at a deep level. I need to:
1. Notice. (Perceive.)
2. Care. (Be affected by said perception.)
3. Act. (Do something. Like picking it up and putting it back.)

Why? I want kids to feel calm in our classroom. And I want to feel calm in our house. And I want to be able to find stuff.

But it seems so hard and unnatural for me to be a neatnik.

Notes:

(1) Noticing is hard because I have trained myself to blaze on ahead to complete whatever mission I am on regardless of distractions, and then I'm on to the next mission without taking stock of my space or situation. Subconsciously, of course, the mess is noted. But a sock that has been on the floor of the dining room for a while begins to belong there somehow. Then when I slow down and notice, I am overwhelmed and pissed at myself for letting it go so far.

(2) Caring: I'm not sure I care as much as I should in the moment.

(3) Acting is hard, because when I get home I'm tired.

And you? Are you a neatnik? If so, were you born into it? Or did you become one?

Have you ever judged a neighbor?

Me? I have.

I was working on our front yard one summer, digging all of the turf out by hand and relandscaping it to attract more birds. It took weeks. At first I felt like a stranger in my own neighborhood, because I was never really home during daytime hours. It was an older neighborhood, mostly little houses from the 1920s lined up along a narrow, cracked street. People passed through on foot on their way to town. After a time, I started to fall into the rhythms of the daytime neighborhood, knowing when the postman would come and saying "hi" to the same people every day as they walked by.

And I dug away at the grass, envisioning the spiritual and physical fortification that came with manual labor.

One day I straightened up to stretch my back and looked at the tiny rental house across the street, with its sad, dried up lawn and brown flowers. New neighbors. As if on cue, a toddler appeared in the front doorway and looked at me. I had seen this baby in the doorway before. I smiled and waved. Inside, the house was dark, but I could see the baby’s mother sitting in a recliner like a statue, probably watching TV. A fan rotated near the open door. A television was blaring some ridiculous game show sounds. The baby smiled at me and started to step on to the front porch.

From inside the house came a screeching sound, and I realized it was the mother statue yelling at the kid to get back in the house. The baby’s foot froze in mid-air between the front door and the step. She backed up and started to cry. 

Seriously? I thought. We get in trouble if we want to see the outside world over there?

The next day I decided to take note of what was going on across the street, which wasn't hard to do since the street was so narrow: A youngish father figure leaves early in morning. Door opens, releasing TV sounds. Mother in chair. Sun shining. Beautiful day. Baby tries to step outside. Mother screeches. Father figure comes home in late afternoon. 

For the love of God and nature and all that is good, get off your ass and take your kid outside! I thought.

My days of blissful digging were over. I was now digging with anger and angst--not at all zen. I wondered if keeping a child indoors all day in the summer was considered child neglect. I thought about running the hose in my overwhelming yard of dirt and letting the kid play in the mud. I pictured myself marching across the street and reading that woman the riot act. (I've always wanted to read the riot act.) But mostly, I comforted myself with the notion that I would never be that kind of mother.

A few days later, the father figure pulled up. He caught my eye. I felt embarrassed for spying on them in plain sight but wondered if he knew what was going on over there all day. Maybe I should tell him? I thought. He spoke first.

"Are you the one that's been doing all the work over here?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, leaning on my shovel.

“Well, you’re pretty talented. The yard is looking great. My wife used to be quite the gardener, too. You probably wouldn’t know it now.” He looked at his house, pausing to sigh. “Yeah, it’s pretty hard for her to do that kind of thing now. She went almost completely blind when she was pregnant with our daughter. She got gestational diabetes and can hardly see anything. It’s so hard because I have to be gone at work during the day. Well, anyway, nice job on the yard. I’d best get inside.”

"Okay."

I. Am. An. Asshole.

In a fictional version of this story, I realize they need help and take mother and child to the park and get everyone in the neighborhood to pitch in on their yard. We really spruce things up. We even put in a fence so the kid can go outside without wandering into the street.

But in the autobiographical version, I don't do that. In the real version, I am too stuck in my own program to walk across the street and introduce myself. I am too ashamed of thoughts never spoken to ever actually speak to her.


And you? Have you ever judged a neighbor?

And what of 2014?

This is the year I turn 40.
This is the year I deadlift 200 pounds and do at least one strict pull-up.
This is the year I work smarter instead of harder.
This is the year I express gratitude every day.

That's all. I don't want to plan too much of this year. I want to leave room for the surprises.