Channeling June Cleaver

I am not a patient person. A statement which will come as no surprise to you if you have spent more than 10 minutes in my presence. When I was contemplating teaching as a profession, I was actually concerned about whether I was patient enough to last in a classroom with children. Interestingly, in the classroom is the one place where I seem to have endless patience. I'm not sure how or why but since it enables me to be successful at a job I love, I don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I only wish that same trait carried over to my house.

I love my children a lot and think they deserve a great mom, one who gives them hugs and kisses, makes their boo-boos (physical and emotional) feel better, and disciplines them calmly and rationally. I can generally manage the first two, but the last eludes me far more often than I'd like to admit. I have definitely yelled at my children and just last week had to leave my house when I found myself about to take Christmas away from TR (seriously). The worst is that often it is not even that their behavior is worse than normal, but that I am more tired and stressed out and have lost whatever limited patience I have. Lowering my stress level has therefore helped greatly and I don't think I have completely scarred them yet, but I wish I could show my own children the same side of me I showed my class.

Of course, in school all I had to do was work with my students so it was easy to figure out their quirks and be proactive in handling all their behaviors. At home, I juggle kids, laundry, dinner, cleaning and, occasionally, writing. In some ways, it was easier when I was working since I spent far less time with them and it's hard to get to frustrated in only 2-3 hours a day. Still, I know there are parents out there who manage to get through their lives without yelling at their kids and I'd love to know their secret, because I'm sure they want to yell often but have someone found a way to stop themselves. Anyone willing to share is welcome to do so. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to use tools from my classroom in my home and hope that helps.

Oh, and do I really want to be June Cleaver? Of course not. Still, the thought of having all of life's problems solved in 30 minutes is definitely appealing. I have a few I'd love to run by the writers right now.

Timing

You have probably noticed I am not writing every day. I actually come up with a lot to write about throughout the day (I have a list in my mind that would keep me busy for several days). Unfortunately, by 7:30 pm when TR and AR are in bed, I'm completely exhausted and incapable of putting together coherent sentences without significant effort. I tend to get a second wind around 8:30 or 9, but if I write then I don't finish until 11 pm and then need to detox a bit so suddenly it's midnight and I'm pretty much out of luck if I want to get more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep.

Someone told me once that the secret to truly successful people (the CEOs of the world) is that they need less sleep than the rest of us. I believe it. Note I said NEED less sleep, not GET by on less sleep. This is a crucial difference. I have spent much of the last 9 years getting by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep, but I am certainly not doing my best work and, really, most of us aren't. I am jealous of those few who actually need just 5 hours of sleep and so are in top form no matter how many times their child wakes up because they're cold or teething. (Actually, I assume they are getting less sleep because they are working long hours, but you get the picture.)

I'm hoping when Christmas is over, and I'm not out shopping for stocking stuffers at 10 pm so that I can leave AR at home, things will be better. I have so much useless information to share with you all and I know how sad you are not to be hearing my inner ramblings.

I, however, am going to do the unthinkable and try for 7 hours of sleep tonight. I'll need it since I will be trapped in the house tomorrow with vacationing children on a rainy day while men are finishing up some work. So excited. Did I mention they'll be turning off the water to the whole house for at least part of the day. Yay!

Admit it, CEOs, you're jealous.

Missing

I miss my life. I miss my friends. I miss coffee at Sureia on Wednesdays. I miss my semi-regular book club. I miss our old holiday traditions. I miss the metro.

Life is good out here, but it doesn't yet feel like mine. I want everything to be just like it was a year ago. Except that I don't, really. What I really want is everything I love about here and everything I love about DC at the same time. That's not too much to ask is it?

Yeah, I know. So for now, I'll just keep missing that life and figuring out how to make this new one fit as well as the old one. It only took 20 years to get that life in DC, right? Piece of cake. Sigh.

I miss my life.

Christmas in a small town

This holiday season is probably the first time it has really hit home that we are not in liberal land anymore. The first hint? When AJ shared that he learned Silent Night in music class that day. I was a little thrown, I admit, not just a Christmas song, but a religious one at that. I confess I did speak to the principal about it. Interestingly, she assumed we don't celebrate Christmas, and that's why I was bringing it up. I said we did, but knew that not everyone else does. She was very understanding and, frankly, I didn't ask for a lot. I was mainly raising it for future thought. We left it that she would talk to the music teacher about a less religious choice.

The big hint? That would be the great big manger sitting in front of the courthouse on main street. Apparently, as part of Christmas in Old Town, you can dress up and get your picture taken in a living nativity. I think it is meant to provide an alternative to the whole Santa photo op and is actually a pretty neat idea. My neighbor mentioned her daughter wanting to get a photo and raised the issue of the location, she knew I would have noted it. I said I wanted to get a picture to show friends in DC. She said "yes, we love Jesus out here" with a lot of conviction in her voice. This reminded me of my conversation with the principal. The idea seemed to be that you would only find something wrong with it if you didn't agree with the sentiment expressed.

This makes sense to some extent. After all, if everyone is Christian then a manger in front of the courthouse doesn't matter. It is only the existence of non-Christians, be they atheists, Jews or Muslims, that makes any of this an issue. I can't say I would have a problem with it if I knew for a fact that no one else would mind. So from one angle, loving Jesus, or perhaps not loving Jesus, is at the heart of the problem. If the nativity is only for those who already love Jesus then fighting to keep it in a location you find important makes sense, regardless of who you offend, because it doesn't matter, largely, what those who don't believe in Jesus feel.

I think, however, that it's not just for those who already love Jesus. I firmly believe a nativity scene can be significant even for those who will never see Jesus as a savior. Whether someone is a true believer or not, his existence and teachings can have a huge impact on them, and the nativity is one of the reminders we have that he was here and had something to share. Also, teaching others how to live better lives was his goal and Jesus probably knew you seldom bring about change in anyone by first offending them. Similarly, people who are busy being upset about the location of the manger will be far less likely to take in the simple beauty and message that a living nativity can offer. And isn't the message what really matters, not where you see it? Keeping that location feels a little to me like winning the battle but losing the war.

For now, however, I will choose my battles and heed my own advice about not offending others while seeking change and simply enjoy Christmas in my small town.

OMG, school is important for getting a job?!

Note: So I wrote this on a rampage and I stand by what I said, but do feel like I should add a caveat. The issues I saw with my students do exist, but I want to be clear that this was not all the students with whom I worked. Many of them were just as focused as their peers elsewhere and had the support system to get where they needed to go., They, however, are generally not the ones struggling years later. I'm writing here about a specific segment of the student body, not the whole thing.

DCentric is doing a hard-hitting series this week on the unemployment gap that exists in DC. They have made incredible discoveries, including the fact that unemployment in Ward 8 is 26.4% and in Ward 3 is 2.8%, and that this difference is likely caused by a skills gap between the two populations. Equally startling is the fact that the high percentage of Ward 8 residents with a criminal record contributes to its high unemployment numbers. Seriously? How is this even remotely considered news? Who living in DC doesn't know that someone with a college degree and no criminal record is going to have an easier time getting a job than a high school drop-out with a drug record? Who living on this planet doesn't know this?

I find this one of the most frustrating aspects of DC, the ability of people endlessly to research and discover the source of the city's problems without ever actually coming up with a solution for them. In part, I believe, this stems from a stubborn unwillingness to assign any responsibility for change to the people needing the help. Yep, I said it, I am a card-carrying liberal who believes in personal responsibility, as in fact most of us do. We just don't believe in personal responsibility without public support.

When I was teaching in DC high schools, I had a lot of students who would talk about going to college. They knew exactly where they'd go, what they'd study while there and what they'd do after they got their degree. In the meantime, they'd skip school at least once a week and never crack a book. (There's the lack of personal responsibility.) Here's the thing, however, they knew they were supposed to go to college in order to have a better life, but they didn't have the foggiest idea of what you had to do to get there. (That would be where the public support comes in.)

In high school, everyone of my friends and I knew our GPA and what that meant for our college hopes. We knew what SAT score we needed for the school of our dreams and spent our free time in activities that we enjoyed, yes, but that also would look good on college applications. My students often had no idea what their GPA even was, much less what it meant for their future. I had one student who was in her 4th year of high school but was still a sophomore, since she skipped so much school that she had yet to complete enough classes to equal two full years of school. When she announced to me in March that she'd miss me after she graduated in May, I was shocked. I assumed she knew she was only a sophomore, but she didn't. While we were explaining to her that she had at least two more years of school before graduation, if she attended consistently, she just kept saying, "but I've been coming to high school for 4 years." In her mind, it wasn't what you did in the building that mattered, simply that you were there, at least some of the time.

To give her credit, she did do more than many of her peers who simply stopped coming all together, so it was an accomplishment of which she could be proud in its own way. It would not, however, earn her a degree. She was not alone in simply failing to grasp how the day-to-day decisions she was making would impact her future. While I and my friends were being socialized into college prep, these students were socialized into high school dropout. There was often no one to make sure they were read to every night when little, or tell them to turn off the TV and do their homework, or help them with the math problem they just couldn't understand. They generally didn't hear their parents talking about their college days with their friends or visit their offices and see the jobs that these degrees earned them. They probably didn't hear about how hard they worked in high school to get into that college and how you can't take it for granted. A high school diploma is earned, not given, and grades good enough to get into college are even harder to earn. But all they knew was that you went to high school for 4 years and then college. As the reality of the work involved set in, a lot of them gave up.

Is this their fault? Not really. They are indeed victims of their surroundings and they need help. First, they need teachers that not only care about them but are honest with them. For example, nothing drives me more crazy than a teacher putting a sub-par piece of student work on the wall. When you put student work up on your classroom wall, you are telling them you are proud of that work and want to show it off to the rest of class. I have seen teachers do that with work that is full of spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and is generally sloppy. Is this what you want students to think is an acceptable level of work? I'm all about making students feel good about themselves, but I don't lie to them and I don't let them think I believe them capable of less than they are. I tier my work like crazy, so a student may only have to write a one paragraph essay instead of the two pages everyone else is writing, but that one paragraph will be perfect.

Second, they need someone to show them what life is like for the middle class. Most of my students had never been to the museums or the White House or the Capital. They didn't know how to act in a restaurant or store. Polite and respect were often dirty words. To be polite or to act respectful, to them, seemed to acknowledge someone as better than you or give them power over you. They couldn't do that and, coming from where they are, I don't blame them. But they need to learn that everywhere is not like where they live. They might as well have been on a different continent for all they knew about what happened outside their neighborhood. I actually had a conversation with one class that was shocked to learn that blacks were in the minority in the United States. They truly believed that whites were the minority, and that we were all rich. (They were always incredibly disappointed to see my old car that was definitely not high-end.) They just couldn't fathom life outside of their small neighborhood. Bottom line, you can't strive for something you can't visualize.

Finally, they need for people not to make excuses for them. At the end of the day, their lives will only change if they are willing to work to make them change. We can feel sorry for them and want everything to be better, but only they can do it. The longer we let them get away with behavior we wouldn't tolerate in our children or our peers, the greater the disservice we are doing them.

Birth and Life

A year ago right now, AR became an official member of our family. I've spent the whole day mentally retracing the longest and most complicated delivery I had. Truly, from beginning to end it was a disaster. They hadn't taken me off Plavix early enough so the anesthesiologist wouldn't do an epidural, which meant I did natural childbirth while stuck in a bed unable to move because I was hooked up to a ridiculous number of machines monitoring my heart. I did natural childbirth with my first three and let me tell you that it really only works when you get to move, otherwise it is like being on the rack. All the pain, and nothing to help distract you from it or make the process move along more quickly.

I did have intravenous painkillers but 10 hours into labor things weren't progressing and I began to tell the doctors I thought something was wrong. It just didn't feel right, it felt like pain not contractions. Two hours later they finally listened to me and did an ultrasound. (Perhaps because I was begging Craig to make them stop, or maybe it was all the blood?  Yes, that was sarcasm.) Turns out AR was sunny side up and had his head thrown back instead of chin tucked down. In other words, he was going nowhere and the pain I was feeling was the placenta tearing away from my uterus. Can you say emergency c-section? Actually, by that point all I wanted was for the pain to go away so I was completely fine with it. They whisked me away from Craig and suddenly we were in an OR. At that point, they put me under general anesthesia, which, on top of the pain meds, made AR's breathing a little dicey so Craig got to wave hello to him as they then whisked him off to NICU for a check-up. He was born at 9:25 pm, but I didn't get to meet him until 1:30 am on the 3rd.

The funny thing is, despite all the pain and craziness, all I kept thinking all day today was how happy I was that we both were there to go through all that together. It seems so strange to remember that at 16 weeks my doctors were pushing for me to terminate or that I had a conversation with our minister about what we wanted from the church in terms of ceremony if we didn't make it to 26 weeks. A close friend officiated at Aaron's baptism and when talking to the rector of her parish said it was especially important to her to be present because there was a time when nobody knew if either of us would even be here to have that day happen.

Craig and I call AR our agent of change all the time, and he is. It was his arrival that led us to completely change everything about how we lived our lives. In part this was the fact of him, we simply didn't fit in our house any longer. But mostly it was all that happened before he joined us that brought about change. You can't go through an experience like that and emerge without taking a really good look at what is happening in your life and what your true priorities are. The absolute most common statement I got from other moms when I told them we were moving out to Warrenton was "my husband would never make that commute." And I get it, Craig wouldn't have made it for years either, but it was actually his idea that we look out here and he was the one who kept things focused when I periodically panicked. Apparently, as I told one mom, you almost lose your wife often enough and it's amazing what suddenly becomes doable.

AJ was our first and the one who made us parents, and AR is our last and the one who made us understand fully just what a precious gift that truly is. What could you possibly give a one year old that would match that?