Not a Wasted Word

When we bought our house I wanted very much to incorporate the lower unit into the bigger whole. I wanted a real bedroom and a second bathroom. I wanted a living room and a dining room, and a wall between where I slept and where the family hung out. When I think of how different mornings would have been with a baby and toddler with that downstairs space it makes me kind of crazy (they would have been very much improved).

But now, 7.5 years later, I’m not sure sure we need those extra square feet. Yes I still want a real bedroom with four walls, and yes I still very much want a second bathroom (even a half bath would be so great), but I don’t want that space as much as I used to. I wonder if the space we have is enough.

It’s hard to get a grasp on what “enough” looks like in America, where our perception of it has been distorted by the “bigger is better” mentality that has dominated our cultural narrative since, well, the founding of our country.

I find what enough feels like for me changes with the company I keep. Most of my friends are in a similar economic situation to me, but one bought her house with her MIL’s help (her MIL lives in a unit below) and it’s much bigger and nicer than mine. I find that when I leave her place, I am much more inclined to believe that we need the “master suite” our downstairs unit will provide. I was recently at an old’s friend’s house which is probably twice the size of mine, and has been totally renovated in a very chic, modern style, and I went home hating pretty much everything about the house I live in.

But I read enough minimalist blogs and articles to recognize that I don’t need the space and stuff that most messages would lead me to believe. I also know that I’ll never be content if I let what others have affect my appreciation for my own life. The sheer amount of space, and stuff stored in that space, that our house already provides for four people (two of whom are children) is totally insane. There is no way four people need what we already have, and we’re going to borrow a ton of money to utilize more?

But otherwise that space will just sit there. Which certainly informs our decision. We would rather rent it, but we’ve been burned so badly that we’ll never feel comfortable doing so again. Does that make it okay to take more than we need?

This idea of enough has been permeated a lot of different lines of thinking. How many nights a week of down time are enough? How many hours at the dojo are enough? How many months of swimming lessons are enough? How many field trips chaperoned are enough? How much money raised for the PTA is enough? Enough means something different to everyone, but it feels like right now I have no idea how to answer the question for myself.

I’m trying to be more aware of these questions, so that even if I can’t answer them, I’ll get closer to a resolution. I may never know how much of something is enough, but maybe I can narrow the field so that the different possibilities feel manageable.

How do you define and determine enough?

So I’m on week two of a total news fast. I’m not looking at anything, not even reading headlines. I have no idea what is going on in the world. And since I’m not on social media, I don’t even know about the cultural touchstones that bring people together. This past weekend my husband I watched Parasite (SOOOO GOOD! DEFINITELY SEE IT!) and I mentioned that it was a big deal that it had been nominated for Best Picture and that if it won it would be first non-English movie to win Best Picture and he informed me that the Oscars were actually last weekend and that it had won. I had no idea that I even missed it, or who had won anything! (So happy Parasite won – that is awesome.)

And I have to say, after I grappled with the fact that I’m so isolated at my job that I don’t even happen to participate in conversations about the Academy Awards in the week after they happen, I realized I don’t really care that I’m missing even the fun stuff, and I am even more intent on staying away from the news, at least for a while longer.

I don’t know what it is about me that I can’t handle social media, or I guess any media, while others thrive participating in it, but I guess it’s who I am, and I believe if I accept and honor who I am, I will be happier for it.

So I’m not planning on returning to the news anytime soon. Right now I’m content being ignorant. Maybe after a more time away I’ll be strong enough to read a little something here or there, but right now I need to take a break. And I’m honoring that.

I’m super depressed about the state of things right now. The Republican party, after acquitting a president that openly asked a foreign power to meddle in our election, is more popular than it’s been since 2005. The president himself is more popular than he’s even been during his presidencu, with half of the population saying he should be re-elected. The Democrats are flailing around trying to find someone to unify their base, while admitting that’s all but impossible when they don’t really have a base, but many different groups that identify as Democrat for different reasons. Trump is almost certainly going to be re-elected this year, with a strong economy and record-low unemployment rates. The past four years, in all their misery, will ultimately be looked back on as not that bad, because Trump will surely unleash untold horrors now that he’s been acquitted, and especially after he is re-elected.

All of this feels almost certain. A part of me knows I shouldn’t think these ways, that I should be hopeful for a different outcome. But another part of me wonders if that hope will just make the fall that much harder when it happens. Will I be more prepared for the nightmare that is Trump being re-elected in November if I assume it will happen? Or will the bleakness of that assumption make it harder to face the reality once it’s come to pass?

In the meantime I’m disengaging for a while. No more TPM. No more NYT. I just need to step away, because reading about it makes me so incredibly depressed. I haven’t felt this bad in ages. This kind of hopelessness is a dark, deep hole, and I don’t know how to get out.

All this winter, I’ve watched my students be out of school for a week or more and come back looking like death warmed over. Some years everyone’s coughing all winter, some years everyone’s blowing their noses for months, but this year seems to be all about the really, really, bad bout of something.

I have thanked the forces that be that my family was making it through the winter relatively unscathed. No one had even missed a day of school for being sick yet! (Only my husband had gotten anything that required he stay home.) Then, this weekend, it finally hit us.

My son was fine Sunday morning. In fact, I was planning a biking riding get together at the local park when he suddenly said he didn’t feel that great. An hour later he was in bed with a fever.

That fever hit 103.5 and stayed around there for THREE DAYS. He had a cough and stuffy nose right away. He didn’t start throwing up until 24 hours into it.

I already had a cough when he got sick, but it got so much worse on Sunday evening and by Monday I felt awful. I never had a fever or threw up, but I still have an awful cough. I haven’t been able to take time off of work yet, we’re short subs and I’m about to lose my 7th graders for a week (before a week off after President’s Day – so for two weeks), so I need to be at school right now. Luckily today I almost felt normal.

My husband took care of our son for Monday and Tuesday and he was amazing. I’m very lucky he can take time off so much more easily than I, and that he’s so good at comforting our kids when they are sick. My son has been calling out for his dad every night this week when he wakes up (though he doesn’t mind if I go in to help him).

So far no one else in the family has whatever horrible bug my son got. My husband isn’t feeling great today, and is very nervous he got it, but I’m hoping he just has my cough and not the awful that my son had. But even with only my son sick, and my husband able to stay home to take care of him, this week we’ve all been in survival mode. Every day I’m literally counting the hours until I can go to bed.

I hope by this weekend we’re all well again. In the meantime…

Wash your hands everyone. Wash. Your. Hands. Whatever is going around this year is ROUGH.

Thank you all for your thoughts and ideas about living abroad. The summer option is obviously a good one. We spend some time with my extended family in St. Louis every summer which is very important to me because it’s our kids only experience with extended family and I want their cousins to be important to them. But even if we still went to that we could probably manage four weeks every summer. While the cost of flying internationally on a yearly basis feels daunting it’s obviously less than the cost of losing my position and making much less somewhere else when I come back. It also negates the need for my husband to take a leave from his job, which he’s not super interested in doing. It’s definitely a start.

We can’t travel abroad this summer and probably not the next, but maybe then we could start. My daughter will only be 12 at that point so we’ll still have quite a few summers left. And while four weeks a year will never be as effective as one entire year for my fluency, it’s certainly better than nothing.

And yes, I recognize money isn’t everything and no one looks back and wishes they had made more. But I sometimes wonder if people don’t wish they had picked a job with more earning power. Living where I do, with the cost of living as high as it is, I definitely wish that most of the time. But maybe I’ll feel differently at the end of my life. Maybe by then what I earned will feel like enough, plenty even.

I was in a funk this week. I couldn’t manage to show up here, even though I tried. Yesterday was especially hard. I spent a ton of time putting together a set of stations for my block day and my second class shit all over it. I left school feeling like a failure and wondering why I keep trying to do this when it never seems to get better. It was demoralizing.

I was supposed to go to martial arts last night but I also had to take my son earlier so he’d be ready for his next belt test. By the time I got them both home and fed I really didn’t want to go back to the dojo for a 7pm class. Without my own test coming up it was easy to tell myself I could skip it. In the end, it was only because I can’t go to my two classes on Saturday that I pushed myself out the door.

And of course I was glad I went. We practiced all the new green belt techniques I am so excited to learn. And it was nice to focus on myself during class and talk to other adults afterward. I even had a conversation about my day where I recognized that I’ve had far fewer days that feel demoralizing this year, which was part of why it was hitting me so hard. I left feeling better about everything.

All that to say, I was reminded again that I’m almost aways glad when I go. And I supposed I’ve learned that lesson enough times that I rarely let the voices that urge me to stay home win over. Instead I’m more inclined to listen to the voices that tell me to just go.

Just go.

We’re having big talks about the house right now, trying to decide what our long term strategy will be. It’s making me think a lot about what our ultimate goals are. Do we really want a bigger house? Do we want the space to entertain? The only thing we’re sure of is that we want that unit to be functional on its own, for our kids, or our parents, (or maybe even us!) one day. Maintaining that functionality is what is making all of this so difficult.

But it’s also making me think of other things, like if we’ll ever live abroad. It’s something I very much want to do, but the longer I stay at my job, the less certain I am that I’ll ever have the cojones to leave. In teaching when you leave a position you take a pay cut. There is really no way I can take a year off and not sacrifice hundreds of thousands of dollars over the remainder of my teaching career.

Is a dream worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

The main reason I want to live abroad is to become truly fluent in Spanish. That is something I desperately want to do. I also very much want my kids to live away from the United States for a little bit, for a number of reasons. But I will readily admit that my main reason for wanting to get away is to become truly fluent. And one of the main reasons I want to become truly fluent is so I can use that fluency in my career.

I think a lot about just waiting until I’m retired to live abroad. But if I don’t achieve that goal until the effective end of my life, did I actually achieve it at all? If the reason I wanted to achieve that goal was to improve my professional capacity and I accomplished it after I am done working, did I really achieve that goal? I’m not asking these questions because I believe the answer is no; I’m honestly not sure what the answers are.

It’s frustrating to feel stuck in my current position. It’s frustrating to feel like I don’t have a lot of options. I know I feel these restrictions because of my own assumptions, and I’m ready to admit that my assumptions might not be based in actual fact. Generally when this quagmire pulls me into the muck, I set it down and walk away, believing that when it’s time to make these difficult decisions I’ll know what the right answers should be. (Or recognizing that I a future me will need to make these decisions, and I can let her handle this difficult shit.)

I also recognize that these are first world problems and the world is on fire and it’s stupid to get pulled into the muck when all around me planet is self-destructing. It’s just stuff I think about, questions I wish I knew how to answer.

The principal at my school sends out a weekly email to the staff every Monday morning with a list of everything that will be happening during the week. At the bottom of the list there is a shout-outs section where she thanks different staff members for going above and beyond the week before, with a sentence or two about what they did.

I never make it on the shout outs section. Never. Even when I did the professional development that everyone seemed to appreciate. I doubt I’ll ever get onto the shout outs section. I’m sure there are other teachers who don’t make it onto the shout out section either. I think it’s good to recognize people in those ways, but it’s also a way to make those who never make the cut very aware that they, well, never make the cut.

I was thinking the other day about how proud I am of the work I’m doing in my Spanish classrooms this year. I’m a pretty damn good teacher of middle school Spanish, and the way I teach requires a lot of patience, energy, enthusiasm and dedication. Most language teachers don’t teach this way because it requires the instructor to be more vulnerable, to trust the students more, to follow their lead and help them produce characters and stories in the language that engage them. I’m really proud of the way I teach, and I think what I’m doing in my classroom is pretty awesome.

I’m also aware that I will likely never be recognized for any of it.

No public school teacher goes into it for the glory. We don’t do it for the money or the respect. Society generally doesn’t regard us very highly – we make far less than other professionals with similar amounts of schooling. Many people believe that they can do our jobs as well as, if not better, than we can (we were all students once, right? We all know what teaching entails!) And of course the famous refrain: those who can’t do, teach. I mean that, right there, says it all.

So yeah, I didn’t become a public school teacher for the recognition. And yet? It’s hard to reconcile my efforts with the appreciation I’m given. Middle schoolers aren’t exactly the most empathetic, aware subset of humans. It’s hard to find a group that is less self-centered, actually, and that is saying something of the only species on Earth that can navel gaze.

I suppose most people go through life not feeling very appreciated by their colleagues, or in their profession. The world is full of people going above and beyond without anyone recognizing their efforts or accomplishments. And I will do the same. But I wonder if this age of social media has made that lack of recognition all the more glaring, because we get to see all the people that ARE recognized for what they do. Some are paid millions of dollars for doing the same thing as everyone else, but with filters and sponsors and paid-for posts. I mean, if someone can be famous just for playing Fortnite, surely I can expect a little recognition for my efforts in the classroom.

Or maybe everyone has always felt like this, and it’s just part are of the human condition.

I used to think I wanted to create something that would outlast me – some piece of media that would carry my name and efforts farther than I could otherwise reach. I have jettisoned that desire – I know it will only cause me frustration and grief – but I suppose a small remnant of it remains. I will probably work in my district for my entire adult life and when I retire no one will care because all the people I originally worked with will be gone and my students will be grown up and it just won’t matter to anyone that I’m not there anymore. It’s hard to accept that, but it’s also important that I do.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I went back and looked at the March Photo Challenge that I posted in 2012 on my old blog, and I decided to re-post those pictures here, because why not? So here is the prompt page and the first 11 shots…

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•