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So I’m reading Tell the Wolves I’m Home and the main character wonders, “how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible?”  I got to thinking about this.

A while back, spending time with family, I kept thinking, “what’s the purpose of this life.  There’s no purpose, it’s just effort to not be sad, effort to deal, effort, effort, and all for nothing.” I knew I needed perspective, but I didn’t know where to get it.  I wish that I had the kind of family that brings one solace, instead of the kind that sends one searching for solace.  Alas.  Now that I’m reading about the Wolves ( I still haven’t quite figured out the title, but doesn’t it maybe suggest a solace-less family?), I wonder how many good things rest on the shoulders of my solace-less family of origin?How many good things rest on the traumas that I wish had never occurred?  Who would I be if I had not fought like hell for my little piece of solace–?

Well, I wouldn’t have met many of my best friends through my incest survivors group.  I wouldn’t have helped many of my students find the therapy or solace they needed when their families were making them wish for death.  I wouldn’t be as wise as I am (although this wisdom is off and on, as I can tell from my thoughts when I’m with my family of origin).  I wouldn’t appreciate the good days as much as I do.  I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time in therapy.  I wouldn’t have waited until I found the perfect husband (lack of trust kept me single for a long time, and now I have fh [fabulous husband]).  I know there are a ton more small things…and it’s funny to think they “rest” on this “solace-lessness.”  For rest is a kind of solace, no?  So there you have it.

leaving teaching

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Is this really some kind of coconut festooned with this joyful yet tentative message?

I am in the last week, possibly the very last week, probably the very last week of my schoolteaching career.  It makes me sad.  I have also started an online course for dealing with fibromyalgia.  These two things have me facing some of my sadness–that I’m kinda sick, that I’m not really a good teacher anymore, that I might become kinda poor after this, that I am standing before the unknown.  These things make me sad.  It makes me sad to think that I went into teaching to try to be, as my professor said, “an agent of change.”  And for a time I was.  I did good work.  And then came the NCLB and the high stakes standardized testing, and the distrust of creativity in the classroom, and the push to teach non-fiction rather than fiction, and, and, and mean parents, and lawyers, and program improvement and on and on.  And all of that makes me so sad I can’t help but cry.  And I think it’s very possible that the only way to move toward happiness (not that that’s even the right goal,I think it’s betterness I’m aiming for) is to acknowledge how sad this is.  And how much I wanted to help these kids and how I did for a while, and now I feel that I’ve failed.  And so I will try to walk away with my head held high and look toward betterness.

through the window

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through the window I see you

In the holding pattern before school lets out…fibrofog-end-of-the-school-year-teacher…I’m so tired.  At the end of the day my mind says to me, “I’m not functional”  It’s different than disfunctional.  It’s non-functional.  So I don’t get much done but work.  I’m  living in my little unconscious dream of hard work and later chips and wine and books and tv.  Waiting, waiting, to come alive again to myself.  Underneath all of this dissociated blahness, though…something is happening…the unconscious keeps spinning its web…doing its thing…and I can see little shimmers of my awakened self, just over the sill.  Just there.  Over there.  I, awakened, feeling great, finding the new path, just over there.