my brain as a mud bath

(a photograph of a swallow's nest in the abandoned barn behind our house)

Last week we had a break from training. Our trainer went to Prague, where the fancy Montessorians met and talked about fancy Montessori things, and I spent a lot of time wrestling with my son, feeding chickens, and reading books.

This week, we're back and a glance around the room: we're haggard. I'm unsure, but I think we may have been haggard from the first day. We were told, by as many sources connected to this experience as you can imagine, that this would be the hardest of the summers, and I accepted this as fact, but beyond that, I didn't actually intellectualize the reality of it. Last summer was hard, but how does a harder summer look? Unimaginable.

But here we are, with two weeks left, and I could attempt to describe what harder looks like, but if you were asking at the end of any given weekday, it'd probably come out as a moan, a bit like that torture machine did to Wesley in The Princess Bride or some kind of hyped-up gibberish that resembles the thrill of a conversation with my four-year-old. I don't know. I show up, I write until the pads of my fingers get numb, and sometimes my eyeballs bulge a little when the demonstration we are recording involves so many intricate illustrations, I fear things will literally start blopping out of my brain and onto the floor.

And there's so much I want to write about: the racism and problematic elements in a presentation on people living in different zones, the trouble I have with the sheer weight that grammar has taken on the language presentations, but I want to be thoughtful in my concerns, so I am letting it all percolate still, along with the things I feel deep gratitude for.

Teaching is my passion. I set it aside for a few years while I focused on being a stay-at-home mother and I started a press in the meantime and I published a book, and published other things and did readings, and I taught things on a small scale, workshops and online university composition courses. But there really is nothing that compares to being in a room with a group of students who are yours for the duration, and you have the privilege and opportunity to work with these kids in meaningful ways.

A few days this week, on my long commute home (in which I binge on audio books; recommendations welcome), I drove by the school in which I teach and there was a small cluster of cars outside. These belong to the parents of our school, who have been taking down a wall in the elementary, busting out the old lunch room to expand the classroom-at-large and create a more spacious learning environment for our growing school, along with other sundry construction-like tasks. I cannot describe how moved I am to see these cars, to know their occupants are inside, including my own husband, who is now a father of one of my students (as I am a mother; it's our daughter; I am not revealing a strange secret here), and have my head of school send me photographs of those great changes, these dedicated adults giving what they can give so that our lives are easier in the coming year. I am grateful for that. I am grateful for community and for the love that comes from these physical acts and the presence, the sheer act of showing up, which is so hard when our lives are so busy. It makes me want to give back tenfold, again and again, and this is one of the many reasons why I fell in love with this school in the first place.

In thinking about these last few weeks, I grit my teeth. But I will keep doing this, I will keep showing up.