There is a special heaviness to my anticipation this year. I look in the mirror and I see my formerly eternally youthful face has finally caught up to my years and fairly accurately represents those years. One of my worst flaws, top three at least, number one at times, is my vanity. Truthfully, it is borderline narcissism. I want to be young and beautiful forever and I want everyone to think so. If you find that this is too much sharing with my outside voice...recall the whole purpose of this project is to put my inner ramblings down on paper-you were forewarned. You entered at your own risk. Judas Iscariot in the reflection betrays me and breaks my heart and oh how she sneers at me all the while. The wrinkles and crinkles from all the years of what I believe a friend of a friend would call unfettered joy no longer fade as the smile does. The loss of collagen and a genetically low level of elastin leave peaks and valleys permanently etched around my eyes and lips. I won't even tell you about the things my body is doing to truly disappoint me. It is sufficient to let you know that I've been chasing an elusive unattainable body ever since I was 14 and my 20 year old self dies a little inside everytime she remembers I never appreciated her.
And that's just the lead blanket that is presently laying over me...There is something deeper and darker catapulting me toward birthday destruction this year. I have spent three years in a bit of a coma following the epic Christmas of 2010, known in closer circles as that epic Christmas before the Christmas to end all Christmases, or better known in my head as, F--k that I'm outta here Christmas when I finally left my then husband. Finally. There's a certain measure of numbness that one swaths herself in whilst walking through a lengthy divorce. I was deep in it, and looking back...I'd have to say pleasantly so. Going through the motions has an elegant ease, even a poetry to it that you can only, as is the case with so many things, appreciate in hindsight (ugh so cliche). The muscle memory carries your numb self through the steps as you accurately navigate your way through your uber mundane life. You do, you don't think, you most blessedly do not feel.
I woke up sometime in the middle of 2013. I don't know how or when to be precise, probably because it was the narcotic kind of sleep of the chemically dulled - even if those chemicals are naturally produced by your own body in response to your own circumstance. It takes a long time to wake up from that kind of sleep. You wake in levels. Degrees of realization that you are still here and you aren't exactly a robot leftover of the zombie apocalypse that you overestimated the end of your marriage to be. The problem with waking up is that you are now susceptible to insult from all manner of emotion. Most recently my insults have come from parents of the students that I teach.
Ideally, we aren't supposed to tell stories outside of school; realistically, I've had a few doozies and while I keep a lot of secrets there are some that I have trouble hiding inside. This week, I returned to my job to two letters written to the school board whose sole purpose was to castigate me and call for my removal from my job, without saying it in so many words. "Prayerfully" and passively dressed up to seem holy and righteous, from two sets of parents who weren't satisfied with the "B" that their students should have been so lucky as to receive. I can take that, I can deal with that. You aren't going to please everyone. These ladies have been tearing me up for the better part of five months, now. I don't teach. I teach too much. I teach too fast. I am too smart and can't bring it down to the level of ninth graders. I have not prepared the students to succeed. I don't care about the students' success. I want to see them fail. I refuse to take responsibility for their education. It is death by a thousand paper cuts. They sting and annoy at first, but hundreds of insults later and I begin to look like the idiot who deserves these insults. No rational human being could be so dogged in their insistence that a person needs to be reprimanded, reformed, and fired if necessary, if there weren't some real problems.
I have watched in agony as I am painted into a corner by the cruel brushstrokes of ineptitude and hatred. Slowly and painstakingly removing the facts, and replacing them with a bitter taste of gossip on the lips of influential parents in the swamp like pool that is private education. The truth about me is that I love education, I don't necessarily think I have the "teacher calling" but education is near and dear to my heart. I want to see students work hard and learn and earn good grades. I want to see them form good habits that they can bring to college and the work force. I want smart, talented kids not to make the mistakes of ignorance that I made in my youth. I work hard, for little reward, but reaching just one and drawing out their best can make it all worth while. My disaffection this year stems from the fact that I don't think there is a one of them that truly wants to achieve anything but the minimum which equates to keeping their parents off their backs.
Finally this week these parents in their letters to the school board attacked me to the core of who I am. One went so far as to say that I lacked the proper ethos to teach at the school where I am employed and implied that I do not embody Christ-like behavior. Stabbed in the heart. Not even by Judas. By a stranger. You don't even know me. I would love to show you some NOT christ-like behavior. Oh how I would. And how I could. Because you are most certainly correct that I am a black hearted sinner, full of hatred, foul languages and improper desires. In a different life, in a different situation, if the doors slid in a slightly different direction and pace, I would let you know just how not like Jesus I can be. But so is she. And so are you. And so is he. We all fall short of the glory of God. I hope there are a few things that people around me know: one of them is that I kinda suck as a human being, another is that I love Jesus and the last one is that I want to do a great job at whatever it is that I put my hand to. The most important part of that factoid sandwich is Jesus. So, it should not come as a surprise to you that this last round of libel has just wrecked me. I can't really fight against that kind of insanity.
In light of this, as I'm hurtling headlong toward (insert age here), I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. I need a change of pace. I need to, now that I'm wide awake, be myself and be appreciated for it. I have two and a half more weeks in which I will be blindly zooming (sic) toward disaster hoping that miraculously my eyes will be opened just in time to steer myself in the direction I "SHOULD" be going with my life and avoid the sudden calamitous end of this year of my life beginning yet another one where more of the same misfortune rules my days. I don't know why I put that kind of ridiculous importance on the day i finally decided to slide out of my mother's birth canal. But I do.
Here's to weathering the storm of January 27th and making some importantly difficult decisions with eyes wide open regardless of the day.
From the Indigo Girls...serious throwback to back in the day...
"There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love's perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love's recovery."
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