I told myself (and others) that I’d start writing again if they will. And then I thought about how I miss writing regularly and how I think I was happier and more aware of myself and my life when I was writing on a regular basis about it. My students have to journal. The prompt today is to write about something that still makes them laugh when they think about it. Alternately, they can write about the mood that they are in.
I am in a bad mood.
Maybe it’s grief. It’s probably grief. My cousin passed away a month ago of triple negative breast cancer. She had fungating tumors, and she couldn’t feel her feet, and she was in agony and had been on pain medication for years, and she wanted to live more than anything. At her memorial, one of her friends said that she just wasn’t thinking about the logical parts of living and life anymore. Maybe the drugs she was on prevented her from seeing what was real– that the cancer wasn’t getting better, that it was spreading, that it was in her lungs, her liver, her bones.
She’d had her sternum removed when it first showed up in her bones. I didn’t know you could live without a sternum. I can’t stop thinking about what breathing would feel like without a breastbone.
She was my guide through my own cancer, and her committment to doing all of the “right” things– cutting sugar, moving her body, cutting dairy, cutting soy, cutting gluten, taking all of the supplements lalala– made me feel like a failure because I’d think often about how if life was going to be short, then I was going to eat some fucking ice cream. But if I thought ice cream might kill me and take me away from my family, wouldn’t I swear it off right away? (I do not know.)
There are moments from her last day that still come to me in flashes. The orange light of the morning as she stopped breathing, as we watched the pulse oximeter trend downward to show a lowering heart rate and oxygen levels until it read “error.” Her mother’s face as she felt for a pulse and finally said, “That’s it. She’s gone.” And did I break down right away? Did I sob? I do not remember. In a blink I was walking toward the cemetary down the street from her house and saw a deer that looked at me with some kind of intention and then bolted away, and how I wanted the moment to be meaningful, but deer are just everywhere around there.
And maybe my bad mood is that I don’t love being a librarian like I thought I would. I don’t like how the kids are loud or rude or dismissive of me. I did not think I’d be a shushing librarian. I wanted something like a vibe that I would create, but as it turns out, I can’t force a vibe in a place when the people in there come with their own perspective. I want them to want to read more, and I find myself mad at the kids for not wanting to pet the books like I do.
I’ve been working in education for 27 years, and I’m tired of it. I wanted to have something like distance from the heaviness of some of the kids’ lives by deliberately not connecting with them, by not reading their writing, but maybe just having time to chill and hang out with them without having to assess their skills or reflect on mine. I’ve only been at it for a month, but it’s more of a grind than I wanted it to be, and I guess I’ll see how it all goes, but yesterday sucked, and I am not looking forward to tomorrow.
And maybe I’m in a bad mood because I accomplished the thing that I said that I wanted to do. I finished my librarian endorsement in a year when it usually takes two, and I did it while I was teaching full time and being a mom, and I liked the idea of possibility in the work, that my life might look different. And it does, kind of, but has remnants of the old because I’m still teaching half time, and I am mad at myself for liking the old parts more than the new parts.
And maybe I’m just like this every autumn when I realize I’m trapped in the school year until June.
Things that make me laugh:
- The scene in Throw Mama from the Train in which Danny Devito talks about his coin collection.
- Kate McKinnon’s SNL skit about alien abduction.
- Remembering the time that when I was a teenager, I refused to hold anything for my mom in Wal-Mart, and when her arms were full of items, I turned a popcorn bowl over on top of her head. She looked like Marvin the Martian, and she couldn’t see enough to set anything down to take the bowl off, and I knew that I was going to be in so much trouble when I eventually took the bowl off of her head. She had to stay calm because we were in public, and it was so mean, and it was so funny.
