Wrap your head with this material...

 For Christmas, I found my first silver hair, then more and more and more of them. They're hard to detect in the ash blonde surrounding them, but they're there. I saw them in the fluorescent hotel bathroom in Mexico. I have two reactions. I am elated at the idea of winning the hair lottery with first a beautiful color of blonde hair followed by the best color of gray.  And I am thrown by the idea of not being blonde and the way it chucks my identity around like I've just found myself in a rock tumbler. 10 years is what it takes to go gray. 10 years bouncing around, aging to old.  What if you don't recognize me or think I'm beautiful anymore? What if it means you don't know me? And the most bizarre is the idea that I don't know this self I am set to become. I'm the person who still jumps off cliffs and dances and blares music.  How do I reconcile that concept of self with a silver haired woman? I'm not cute and quiet and docile. I don't bake cooki...

 We're in Mexico. The kids are watching TV. "Is that a soap opera?" "No, it's The Smurfs!"  

 I'm writing again and it's good to be in another world in my mind. I build it from scraps that interest me. A sound wave I ride into another 3D world created by sounds themselves.  Climb a tree with giant knots and consider how your foot fits into its crooks and know the reds in its bark even though you never left the library. I smell the cedar.  Anywhere's exactly where I needed to be for the story to come free. Sometimes I hunt factoids and digest them instead of weaving them in. Sometimes, I put them in a box to save for wrapping up just right in story and language. Tissue paper placed just so, box-lid laid down slow. And don't forget the bow. This tale I'm weaving is becoming a scarf over my head protecting me from thinking too much about the unraveling world around me. I will pull you in, give you a cup of hot story tea, and you'll drink down the magic wending its way through these threads. I have lost myself entirely here and good riddance too. Attachment...

 I wonder if I can delete myself from existence. I wouldn't have thought so but since deleting social media and then losing my job and not checking email, not needing to do things, I kind of wonder. My days have no bustle to their beginnings now, no one needs a thing. I made whole life plans that grew and built and tumbled just as quickly and it made not a dent in the world of downward turned heads, necks not even sore from staring at phones. I never bothered to tell most people I wanted to move, I was interviewing for jobs, I was thinking of leaving my life. No one ever knows what's happening with me now other than the people who live in my house and obviously there are days when they don't either. They have their lives and I don't need to share what is happening in mine. I watch theirs turn like the pedals on bike spokes and I sip coffee, watching. Sometimes the quiet and anonymity of that feels good, freeing, calm. Other times I realize that my quiet affects no one. ...

 Shelves full of books full of pages full of lines full of letters full of punctuation full of space and ink and wood fibers and glue and stain. the brain folds like this gray matter full of cells full of fluids full of dendrites full of electrical impulses full of chemical reactions full of neural pathways full of axons reorder the axioms reconnect the s  p   a   c   e s  the letters  the words the books the shelves  it becomes a new space, a new idea, an entire brain of story is electrified on every shelf I think of this swishing my head side to side under water every bookshelf has a world of currents, an infinite potential flow of ideas flashing across time and space I tuck a few into the folds of my mind Wrap my head with this material and spend a time with it or hopefully a lifetime

 I do this activity with kids where they choose three colored pencils blind and then we take them outside on a slow walk and then a journaling spot to find where the colors are. Today I did the activity too. Examining my colors, the blue not quite cobalt sends me squinting to the sky. Where in the depths of light trapped by that dome is this exact hue?  When I hold the pencil up to it, the sky is at once within my grasp and an unreachable horizon extending away from the sharpened tip, blending into now, my phone case... the refuse of an old newspaper's print. Indigo, Inego, An Ego A royal purple filled with pride. Ancient garments worth so much in their day for finding a way to dye cloth this color. It's at my fingertips, the fuzzy floral petals' veins brushed through...undersides of petals undersides of rose petals, pink rose quartz is too easy an answer. It must be in the pinks of my own flesh. Live tissues healthy with nourishing fluids and blood. Pink, pink like cartoon...

 There's a tiny hole, just big enough to put a pinky through. The fabric of my life is wearing a bit thin, loosening to let my skin out and let me find a new shape. It's tiny, but unraveling goes quick. There are just 21 days of work left before I'll need to rip the rest of the way loose and decide how to patch myself up into whatever is next. I feel the tugging of quantum strings pulling me in a variety of directions, some resonate louder and stronger while others, a drawing constant hum. I'm afraid of ending up naked, no job at all, forced to live in my own skin and remember how it feels beneath a summer sun. The sun will feel good but standing naked feels too vulnerable. I've avoiding facing the 19 days as a need to say goodbye when I'd rather simply ghost. But today, now that there is a spring warmth on my skin, that tiny hole feels like it will grow to be enough. I will grow to be enough for whatever comes next and the patch will fit just fine. Or I'll ...

What I've loved about my job is the ever-expanding sense of kindness I feel and the joy at interacting with kids, person-to-person, mentoring them and feeling like an aunt or an older cousin. I've grown more from this job than any I've yet had.  But as much as I love it, keep growing from it, I also need something...different...in my life. More than me, my family needs something different. The itch for change has been scratched too softly and has grown to a larger-than-life rash. Healing will have to begin soon. So I have decided not to return in the fall. It hurts to say goodbye and I lie to myself about not coming back for a beloved student's senior year, nor others' sophomore years. I do not allow myself a countdown because that would be to admit it will end and I've always been the kind of girl to ghost a gettogether, not the kind to say the proper series of polite goodnights.  When I travel to my hometown there is a social routine in The Goodbye in which pe...

I teach a sex ed course to 8th and 9th graders. This week, we covered female anatomy and puberty and such. When we got to the Fallopian tubes, the kids couldn't stop calling them fallafel tubes.  An aside, a couple of years ago, my then six-year-old son had determined that he was going drive a fallafel truck to visit his friend. So I pictured him all cartoony in my fallafel tubes on the way to gestation, hatching his plans. This gave me the giggles and I couldn't stop picturing female anatomy as a production line for fallafel.  From there, I mentally devolved into terms that I also don't like or have made fun of, like vaginal barrel which I think should forever have '...of monkeys' attached to the end. As in, 'vaginal barrel... of monkeys' (terminology especially apt in pregnancies with multiples).  Then I accidentally had my adult filter off and told them about how menarche, the term for a woman's first menses sounds, to me, like the meanest butterfly. ...

 Gavin asserted at dinner with my dad that he knew the other  b-word.  My dad goes, "You mean like what I am?" And as I was explaining he meant because he was born out of wedlock, Magnus goes, "Oh yeah, boomer" When we were scrolling through the news about the insurrection in D.C. Gavin saw the acronym GOP and asked what it is and I told him it was the republican party or "Grand Ole Party" and Magnus goes, "Oh, I thought it was Grumpy Old People."

You know that music they play in massage salons that's all zen and watery? Sometimes when I hear it, I think about screaming, "No, YOU , calm down!!" 

Things that give me a sense of plenty: an empty drawer, closet, or bookshelf. Spaces you could fill whenever. A beautiful day where you don't take advantage of the weather, instead playing piano and not  taking a moment to notice the warmth of the sun on the back of your neck. Perhaps in those days I am a moon person.  Yesterday was like that. Christmas day, but without the family obligations of getting dressed up or making elaborate dishes or carting presents here or there. In past years, that's made me sad. I've felt the loss of the hubbub of all those people, felt the loss of that rush you get being with people who make you so excited and amped up like my cousins and family did when I was a kid. As an adult, I haven't been able to get over the loss of that as all the cousins have moved on to do their own thing and my own family has unraveled and become a set of beautiful scraps I examine in individual pieces.  But this year, nearly everyone spent Christmas in in a so...

 The morning of the last online class day before Christmas break I usually let my students choose fun activity. They can choose creative writing, Christmas carol around the school, or play games. One year a group of kids picked caroling and two of the boys performed this for the stoic Math teacher. They even had a sweet beat they played on the lockers for it. This year with online learning, it was hard to imagine how we would carol. But have no fear, the kids figured it out. By conspiring with classmates, they got the meeting code to crash another class. My class went to Spanish and sang Feliz Navidad (badly, and I mean  badly). Then we just stayed and played the Kahoot that class was playing and that was super fun. Then in my last class of the day, the boys from last year performed a dramatic poem that was imaginative and fun and a little strange, and dang, do I love to know someone's strange. I feel like it's a reflection of belonging when someone can let their weird spread ...

 I was about to type in a text to a friend a few days ago that said 'oh shit, here comes the guilt and panic.' but then autocorrect changed to it 'guilt and penis' and I decided to consider it an omen and not get myself quite so worked up. Just the next right action. What do I need to do right now? 

I want to sleep beneath the skin of a pond stare at boat bottoms, gliding above me, lay in the muck looking up. Or perhaps I wish to hide in a cabin quiet snow piled around melting it in a pot on the woodstove BUT no, that would not work.  I cannot thaw yet.  I require torpor. I need to dig beneath the earth and feel it press around me its scratchy jabs abrading my flesh the raw of it matching my inside with my outside. The pounding of the living stepping above me-- pause my overactive mind. Beneath the pressure of life above my thousand stinging emotions quelled, I'd know know like, I think I've known before. What I am, and how to live... when I wake from hibernating beneath the earth.

I faced a colossal thing. I looked right at the fact that I'd been pretending in my life for too long and needed to take my marriage off of autopilot. I had to stop letting my deep, wide self float in stagnant waters. I was lost. I was so completely certain of how it would all go. I knew exactly what my husband would say and do and how slimy I'd feel. But then that wasn't what happened at all. He somehow still loves me, wants to fight and grow and build a thing that is all our own, brick-by-brick, daily. Doesn't want to tell me, but show me that it is true.  The colossal thing is telling the whole truth about years of holding back. And we've both done it. It could have started as a kindness, a priority. There's no need to say everything after all. But then it became a withholding. He found something I'd written and it wasn't about him. And yes, I was holding back. Ripping off a scrap here or there of what I might have said, who I might have been... and ...

 Thankful today that I am well that my kids are well A cup of coffee by myself and snuggled my dogs this morning when my husband smiles and hugs our son while he stretches on the floor when our son plays drums The moment when I said, "oh fuck this" about my son hating math because he already got it and wanted to move on, and we did multiplication instead so he could be challenged by something new Figuring out how to teach kids with dyslexia to love literature and books Teaching a gifted boy to play piano and telling him "tough stuff" when he didn't want to do a challenge, the relationship where you can push a kid is gold Teachers Teachers who assign their students to take photos of their pets doing homework  Teachers who do puppet shows on zoom Teachers who make Tik Toks Teachers who cry when school goes online Teachers who love, love, love their kids Teachers who hug Teachers who screw up and parents who shut up when they do Teacher friends Teacher friends who ...

The other day I had my leggings on inside out. I thought they'd had pockets in the past, but couldn't find them.  Once upon a time I got a new refrigerator and had the cleanest refrigerator in all the land. And that was the last time my whole fridge was clean at once.  My son thinks people come in three colors: black, white, and red, with red meaning "redneck." My husband had a dream that he was punishing our younger son's noncompliance with belting out Seal's "Kissed by a Rose" at him whenever he refused to do something or pouted and grouched. He dreamed that he told me and I said what a great strategy it was and how I wondered if we could have his teachers try it. And when he was telling me this I was thinking, "that sounds like an excellent technique I should try."

 I saw one of those stupid trucks today with testicles hanging off its rear bumper and just wished I'd had a diaper to put over that fucking thing. Nursing babies is a problem in society but that jackhole can drive around with fake balls hanging off his vehicle. OK.  What the hell is the matter with people? Perhaps I need to keep a set of adult diapers in my car from now on.

 Last night my 7 year old told me I'd make a great emotional support dog. I asked him what made him think that. He said he could picture me walking around all day telling a kid he could do it and encouraging him. As both a teacher and a mom, I can't imagine a better compliment.