Boom! And there she landed. Back in the land of the unmarrieds. The world of dating.
She’s 51. Damaged goods in many ways, but the packaging isn’t altogether unpleasant. She comes with baggage, but it’s colorful and fairly easily carried.
A neon sign reading ‘available’ floats over her head. It’s invisible to most women but bright as the sun to testosterone-fueled men who don’t immediately notice the creases, nicks, and scrapes she’s accumulated over the years. Her eyes are bright and her smile is engaging.
She loves their attention and reflects it back, making her more attractive. They try to buy her with drinks and compliments, but her price might be higher than they are prepared to pay.
The twenty-somethings think she might be fun for a while but she knows they’d be unsatisfying and would use her and toss her carelessly away like so many of their toys.
The thirty-somethings are more engaging. They ply her with their burgeoning intellects, thinking she can’t see through them, but they’re wrong. Her vision is quite clear.
The forty-somethings are more appealing. She finds them attractive - the graying hair, the tiny lines worn into their faces from years of smiling...
But the fifty-somethings… they know her favorite songs. They know her taste in wine. Their cleverly crafted words make her laugh. One of them might have what it takes. Time will tell.
Today I went to the local North Shore high school to
register my daughter as a freshman. I paid for tech fees, bus transportation,
books ($78 for her health textbook alone), orchestra fees, and God knows what else. I swear they must have a
committee at that high school that makes up plausible names for new fees every
year.
All this for a public high school in the United States of America, where every
child is entitled to a free compulsory education. (Article 26 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.)
Somebody has to pay for all this mandated compulsiveness, I
guess. A free public education is actually quite expensive. The $1018.86 I paid
today covered not quite 10% of the cost to educate my child for a year. The
balance is footed by homeowners and businesses in the form of taxes and by the
way, I include myself in this group as well, so I’m actually paying a larger
share than the check I wrote today indicates.
I’m a teacher.While I don’t complain that I’m underpaid, because I don’t believe I am,
I don’t get paid during the summer. I haven’t received a paycheck since June 15
and I won’t get another one until September 15 even though I’ve been working
since August 12. I guess the payroll office has to wait until all the parents
pay their fees.
I save money all year in order to make it through the
summer, but I didn’t budget a thousand dollars for high school registration. I
asked if I could post-date the check or at least part of the check and the blond-bobbed Ralph
Lauren model across the table yanked all my daughter’s locker combinations and
schedules and forms out of my hand and told me I’d have to drive across town to
the registrar’s office to file a form requesting a deferment and I should’ve
done that months ago.
How the hell was I supposed to know that?
I said “Nevermind,” and I wrote the check, fearful that the
people in line behind me would be judgmental because they had smartly budgeted
for this event. I gathered up the papers that the bitchy lady reluctantly gave back
to me and I half-listened to her condescending instructions about freshmen
orientation. I cried in the car on the way home.
“It’s okay, Mom,” my daughter said. Even she was horrified
at the amount of money I’d just shelled out.
“Well, no, it’s not really okay because we were supposed to
go shopping for your birthday guitar this weekend and now we’ll have to wait
‘til Columbus Day before you get your August birthday present.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” she said because she's just a great kid.
She'll get her guitar and she'll get her education, but if today was any indication, this is going to be a long four years.
I’m the oldest child. I’m the responsible one. Supposedly.
I’ve spent this week in new teacher orientation with about
forty other new teachers in this district - most of them new graduates.I’m the oldest new teacher. I look at
all the bright shining faces and try to absorb some of their excitement, but
I’ve heard it all before.I know
how to behave. I look dutifully interested.
I’m not that old, but I feel my seniority. Particularly when
all those eager young teachers weren’t even born when I started my teaching
career in 1982.
As I nod and smile I’m thinking about starting over. Not
just in a new job, but in life.
While I sit and feign interest, I’m not thinking so much
about the new job as I am thinking about being single - a term that hasn’t
applied to me in forty years. I’m no longer married or otherwise attached.
It’s very strange. I thought I’d be starting over with the
love of my life, but it didn’t work out that way.These new teachers are starting from the beginning and I’m
starting over. I’m thinking about
where they are and where I am but maybe we’re not so different.
They’re thinking about their new careers and I’m counting
down the years I have left until I can retire. But we’re all thinking about the
students we’ll meet next week and how we’ll love and nurture them and help them
become the future of America.
They’re thinking about how to spend their first paychecks
and I’m thinking mine’s already spent.
They’re thinking about the grown-up lives they’re about to
lead.
So am I.
I’m thinking about the work I have to do being a loving parent
and a loving teacher and I’m thinking a lot about the future, which isn’t as
long as theirs, but holds the same opportunities.
Like maybe finding love again. That will take time. I still
have time. Being in love is something to look forward to.
I’m thinking about the really good bottle of pinot noir I’m
going to drink tonight.
If there’s one thing I know that they might not, it’s that
nothing is as important as love.
What if the beholder’s judgment is clouded by substances: legal, prescription, or otherwise?
Or… what if the beholder’s judgment is enhanced by them?
Yesterday the man I love and I agreed to split. Took a
break. Broke up. Ended our relationship. At least for now.
He told me that it’s possible that his judgment had been
clouded, enhanced, or otherwise compromised by the pain medication he had been
taking early in our relationship. He might as well have launched his fist into my gut
because his words had the same effect. After nine months of non-medicated
being together, he felt differently, and maybe it was the lack of meds?
That’s just what a girl wants to hear.
So last night I went out with a girlfriend. I’d had a few
glasses of wine. The man on the barstool next to mine struck up a conversation
- a very fun and friendly conversation. He’d had a few glasses of Zombie
Dust.
He asked for my number.
I wonder if he remembers what I look like. I wonder if I
remember what he looks like. I sort of do, but my judgment was clouded.
What will matter is, if and when we meet again, under less
clouded conditions, we have the same fun interaction that we did last night.
And if we do, then my guess is that the wine and the beer did more to
facilitate the initial conversation and less to cloud our judgment and that the
important thing is how the conversation progresses and how the relationship
grows or doesn’t grow.
So, while the loss of love is still painful, I’m letting that specific part of it go - the pain of thinking his love for me was a drug-induced delusion. It wasn’t the meds
or lack of them. It was him. And me. And the combination thereof.
Disclaimer: I don’t
hate administrators. I hate what they’re required and taught to do to teachers.
As the calendar turns a page today and heads into August,
teachers are faced with the blood-curdling realization that the beginning of
the school year is nigh. It’s not the summer-tanned faces of yet unfamiliar students
that we dread. No, nor even their accompanying parents. It’s not the smell of
school glue nor glare of freshly waxed floors. No. We love our students and the
sanctuary of our classrooms. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have become teachers.
That which we fear - the horrible reality for which no education methods class
in college prepared us - the single reason that teachers loathe August:
Mandatory days of teacher inservice.
Not even the promise of coffee and donuts eases the
trepidation we feel when we anticipate the hours sitting on a hard folding
chair in a gymnasium looking at Power Point presentations about topics that A)
anyone with common sense could read or figure out on their own in a matter of
minutes or B) we already know so well we could teach a class on it or C) is the
same thing we heard last year but now has a new buzz-wordy name.
Sitting on those butt-numbing chairs is awful enough, but
even worse are the activities that administrators plan to get us out of the
chairs. If we walk into the gym and see posterboard taped to the walls around
the gym we know we’re going to be handed post-it notes on which we will have to
write anonymous ideas and stick to the various posters boasting headings like
“biggest worries” and “best practice.” No one will ever read those
ideas. They will not be discussed again until next year’s inservice when they
will be called ‘new ideas.'
Worse than the post-it note round robin is the
get-your-blood-moving exercise that is more commonly known as dancing. Witness
the “Tooty Ta” - the most humiliating, demeaning, ridiculous thing forced upon
grown-up professionals who have countless graduate degrees and years of experience:
Just let me keep sitting on the rock-hard folding chair in
this freezing, over-air-conditioned (or sweltering hot un-air-conditioned) gym,
please.
This year, the agenda for our inservice is written in
Understanding By Design format which I find to be the most insidious,
contrary-to-critical-thinking prescription for writing curriculum ever embraced
by the education profession. I wanted to throw up when I read my welcome
packet. This is a tactic administrators use to get us to accept them as one of
us. They want to remind us that they, too, are teachers. See? They even still
know how to write lesson plans. Yay for them.
Administrators, desperate to look busy enough to warrant
their salaries, sit in their offices and plan ways to 1) keep us out of our
classrooms on those inservice days and 2) make themselves look important and
organized. They create acronyms for every single thing they can think of until
we have no idea what they’re talking about anymore because if we have to ask
what they’re talking about they’ll feel superior. This must be the reason for this practice because saying the words instead of the acronym really doesn't take more time or energy. For example: PLC = Professional Learning Community. Nanoseconds between ignorance and enlightenment.
If an acronym doesn't work (i.e.- when it's a single long word instead of a group of words), an abbreviation is used instead.
My least favorite but most commonly used abbreviation is “the
cum folder.” Do administrators live such sheltered lives that they don’t know
what cum is? I wouldn’t want to look in anyone’s cum folder, much less put
something in or take something out of it. The effort to actually pronounce the word 'cumulative' would be greatly appreciated by all.
I could go on and on but I’ll still have to go to the
inservice, which this year, since I work in two different districts, will require
seven days of my life that I will never get back.
But I have a job and I’m getting paid, so I’ll go and nod and smile and then I’ll
go home and put some alcohol on it.
The thirty-somethings are more engaging. They ply her with their burgeoning intellects, thinking she can’t see through them, but they’re wrong. Her vision is quite clear.
