the selves we answer to

These are her hands, snapping beans she grew from her garden.

Yesterday would have been her ninety-sixth birthday.

My grandmother played a huge role in my formation of self. I am lucky enough to say this: not everyone has a grandmother so good (let alone two, as I do) to love so fully and to know that her influence has made me into a better person. She was an easy feminist, one who wore the label comfortably, as if there were no other way to be; she gardened, and when she did, she planted the edible plants, while her husband cultivated flowers. She also loved to look just so, which involved a lot of tweedy skirts, gold, her hair set the same, clip-on earrings, costume jewelry. After she died, my son, who was all of two, layered each piece on his half-naked body and spun circles in the living room. My grandmother would have loved to watch this. She read a lot; I often packed up books I'd finished to send to her.

My grandmother was an educator. She was, in fact, an educator of educators. She and her husband, my grandfather, wound up teaching at an extraordinarily conservative college in Michigan, one embroiled in scandal in the recent decades, this place so stodgy, it surprised the whole of our family that these two very liberal professors would end up in its halls. She taught elementary education, supervised student teaching, though she didn't talk about it as much as she might have sung the praises of Suze Orman (my grandmother: a social liberal; a fiscal conservative) or talked about the white cat who became her companion when my grandfather descended into the fog of Alzheimer's.

These are my roots: dirty, tangly, and subtle. She wouldn't have written a blog about teaching, but she read my near-daily letters faithfully, looked to the mailbox when they came. She was willing to hear my stories, my constant questioning of who I was and where I fit into our cosmic stories.

I wish she were here now. I wish I could tell her all of the things I'm thinking this summer, the fabled hardest of our training, where I put my forehead on my desk and think, I cannot move forward. I cannot scratch out one more yellow bead on this paper, I cannot. She would tell me I can, matter-of-factly, and then I would.

When I was trying to decide if I should leave teaching high school to get my MFA, a death-bed-test* dream of mine, she said I should stay. It was 2008, and Suze Orman was worried. The applications were nearly a hundred dollars each, and I cast my net wide, terrified and hopeful. I did it because I had wanted it since I was young, and I needed to give myself this thing and soon: I knew I needed to do it before having children because that was when life became tethered to questions more important than my former and future self. Two new selves came into the world, my daughter and my son, and perhaps my grandmother was predicting those two when she told me to stay teaching high school. The principal somehow loved me, though I was doing a stand-up job, and I loved my students. I loved it. But I needed to do this other thing more.

(* Many of the harder decisions in life, I try to ask myself two questions in the making: Would my younger self feel proud of this move? Would I regret doing or not doing this thing if I were reflecting on my deathbed?)

So I did. And when they came, I stayed home with my children, which was something my younger self never would have imagined me doing--it could not have passed that half of the test. I never thought I'd be an elementary teacher either. Could never have predicted that, but one can't predict what one falls in love with.

Steady as I go, I call up the Marjorie within myself. I loved her so much I placed her name at the center of my daughter's. I am more emotional than she, so much more impulsive. And I'm doing one of those hardest things this summer, which means I need to strip away layers of my self to make it through. Not each and every last, but instead, find a way to balance the emotional impulsivity with a kind of steady grace, something she gave to me, and I want to pass along to my children--my offspring and my students.