Ugly Like Me...

No regrets, just relief...and fall

August is a little over halfway done. I keep waiting for the panic to set in. Between all the Back to School commercials and friends talking about setting up their classrooms something is bound to push that Oh No What Did I Do? button soon and send me into a panic. And yet, I feel nothing short of relief about deciding not to go back to teaching in the fall.

I keep looking at the trees, guessing which leaf will turn red first. I keep picturing walking through Tamaques Park with my little boy wearing matching plaid shirts. I keep smelling banana bread and asking Zoe what she’s going to be for Halloween. I don’t know mommy. Please stop asking me.

I keep imagining walking Zoe home from her 1^st day of 1^st grade. All of these images. All of these cravings. And not one of them has been of my classroom. I can’t quite reconcile if this is surprising or not.

In June I decided I wasn’t returning to my classroom in the fall. All the fighting. The politics. The physical requirements. Trying to get from class to class, holding onto walls. Breaking up fights. Teaching drained me to the point where I had nothing left for my family by the time I got home. I would come home, try to get more work done and head to bed when my husband got home. Having MS, something had to give if I was going to preserve the better parts of me. I had to be honest with my limitations, even if it was scary financially. Do I want to live a healthier life where I’m present with my family. Or do I want to make more money to the point of exhaustion?

I didn't want them  only remembering playing on the floor by the couch where I collapsed in the evenings. It sounds like it is obvious which course I would choose, but finances are scary. It isn’t easy taking a financial hit or giving up a job that so many of my friends would die for. I had a hard time reconciling that in my heart. Also, how would that cut hurt my family? There is a whole other level of stress that comes with financial struggles.

Being home has been stressful and chaotic too, but in a different way. I’ve been working from home freelancing with two kids. Writing while bouncing a 35 lb 2 year-old on your lap is tricky. My 6 year-old is actually harder than my 2 year-old. She is needier; Mariah Carey specific in her demands. Neighborhood kids always running through my living room; right after I finally contained the mess that was there from the morning’s play time. Handling conference calls with kids screaming that someone punched someone in the head. Whaaaaaaa. Working from home while working at home is a 2 for one—you are doing two jobs at once. It gets tricky.

It hasn’t been lounging on a beach in the Caribbean like some would think. But that said, I’ve  noticed differences in my health. I’m not as tired as I was teaching everyday. Some days are harder and I have to push through, but when I was teaching I was constantly battling a crushing fatigue, all the time. I haven’t had that since I left teaching.

And I think I’ve started to get a rhythm going. It’s hard, but like any other job it gets easier after being there a few months. You get your own system of managing things. I know when to give my son a bath to minimize the chances of him hopping out of the tub with soap in his hair. I know when he won’t go down for a nap to go ‘mail something’ at the post office. He falls asleep on my lie of a mail run, I pass the post office and continue around the block back to our house and carry him up to his room and lay him in his big boy bed.

Leaving teaching has allowed me to explore another level of teaching—teaching my kids. I spent so much time teaching other people’s children. Since I left teaching in June, I’ve had more time to teach my own children. I taught Zoe to tie her shoes. We sit and read chapter books. I helped teach the Vacation Bible School she attended.

I’m figuring it out, slowly but surely. And just in time for Zoe to start 1^st grade. And for fall. And changing leaves. And flannel shirts. I don’t feel any remorse about giving my notice. Only relief. I'm not scared about this next chapter, just excited...in a very calm sort of way. God is good.

 

 

Wednesdays with Rainy...

She read something I wrote floating around in the Facebook atmosphere about a little boy named Mikey who lost his fight with Leukemia at just five years of young age. It was about his mother and her light even in this darkness. It was about me trying not to lose my shit as I picked up the phone, knowing what news was to be delivered. Our little Mikey is now an angel,  she said at the other end.

The problem with experiencing tragedy is that other people will in some way make it about them. I didn’t want to cry when Kristin called to tell me he passed because I didn’t want her to have to console me in her darkest hour.

So I wrote about it, Angels Up There, Diamonds Down Here. Even posting that made me feel like I was making this about me.  I felt ashamed hitting the publish button.  I knew people would console me in the comments. After that click, I drove home in the rain, shut off all portals of technology and climbed into bed with my babies. I held them closely as I stared zombie-like at the shadows that were thrown on the pink walls by Zoe's lamp, a fashionista holding a purse. I took my bitterness out on her. I wanted her, this dumb reflection, to leave the room. Tears would fall. I'd robotically wipe and then stare again.

When I was ready to plug in again, I found an inbox from a woman who had lost her daughter to breast cancer. Her name was Lorraine. She confessed that she cried when she read what I wrote.  Her words were comforting. I felt compelled to write her back. I felt compelled to know more about her daughter. I felt compelled to know her. I knew by her letters that she felt the same way about me.

That was February when we first met in cyber space. It is now August. And every Wednesday Rainy drives up from the house she shares with her partner, Deb, down the shore. We cook. My house smells like home when Rainy is around. I pay attention and learn. We go to Home Depot and pick out patio furniture. I lose my shit on the disgruntled or indifferent (can’t tell which) cashier. She walks me through breathing exercises in aisle 3 so I don’t explode. We lose Meatball and find him in the bug spray aisle. These are our Wednesdays.

Rainy teaches me how to cook and how to breathe properly using my diaphragm. She lends me books about God. She makes me get out of the house and focus on the scenery and not so much the chores of that day; the chaos of the inside that most parents, not just women, know; the flour on the floor and the mound of clothes waiting to be carried into the basement to be washed. We go out on her best friend, Ellie’s, boat. Rainy is fearless and jumps over the edge and floats in the water.

She lent me a book once called I Don’t Do Crazy Anymore.  In it, the author who lost his granddaughter to cancer talks about how the opposite of love isn’t hate, it is fear. Don’t don’t don’t live your life in fear. It spoke to me. Since my diagnosis I teeter between feeling like I have nothing to lose and this panic-filled place where I fear what will happen to me next. I fear a wheelchair. I fear a misdiagnosis. We mucked up, you really have cancer Mrs. Utitus. That’s why Rainy is so good for me. The worst possible scenarios don't affect her in the least. I study how she does it. How she strips herself of the fear. I stand next to her and try to replicate this within myself and try to LOVE.

One of the reasons she’s so fearless is because she lost Jess. She has been through the worst, losing her only daughter to Triple Negative Breast Cancer at just 36 years of age.  What could possibly hurt me now?,  she asks me matter-of-factly. The other reason is the signs. Rainy was a mess when Jess first passed. That was until the signs came. Little celestial taps on the back from Jess, reassuring her mom she was still around.

Rainy went to see John Edwards looking for answers. He told Rainy she had to give Jess a chance to speak to her. He asked her to close her eyes and ask Jess for a picture. Don’t tell a soul what you see, he instructed.  She closed her eyes and saw a feather.  She drove home cursing at herself, “A fucking feather? How will Jess ever work with that?”

The next morning Rainy was at the sink doing dishes. Deb was late for work, running around searching for her jacket. She pulls one out of the closet and sticks her arm through it. Something is pushed out. Annoyed and late she shoves the object in Rainy’s hand and runs out the door. Rainy looks down to find a feather, the end of a dream catcher, in her hand. One of the strands had broken off. One lone feather survived and rested in her hand. She sat on the floor and cried.

Jess spoke. And Jess speaks to her still. These little whispers of signs took away Rainy’s fear and replaced it with a vigor for life.  She is non-judgmental. Fair. Objective. Funny. Doesn’t hold on to resentments. What’s the point? she says.  Her life is full of all the good stuff and void of all that is petty.

I don’t have cancer, but I do have MS. In some ways I think Rainy feels like I was put in her life, a daughter of sorts, to look after. To cook for. To guide. When my legs aren't working well, she is up and down the stairs for me. She cradles my children like they are her own.  She has two sons, but she tells me how very different they are from daughters. Daughters are temperamental and tricky. Us women are complicated folk, but even when our daughters are temperamental, they are us. They are carbon copies, DNA maps of their mothers.

Complicated, but the fine details are so intimately us. Our beauty lay in our intricacies. I guess I’m complicated enough for Rainy to take on? Maybe complicated enough to get her too? Having my own daughter, I get what she felt for Jess. I won't ever pretend to fathom what she felt when losing her. Whatever the connection is,  I get how Rainy makes me feel, even when I'm in the darkest of places. Rainy makes me feel the sun. She helps me see the light. Rainy takes away the rain.

Yesterday was rough. A tooth that needed to be root canaled, a baby who was burning up and vomiting. But it was a Wednesday. Rainy came. We made meatloaf and mashed potatoes. We listened to the oldie station on Pandora. Tony came home early. Despite the chaos, it was one of those warm, cozy days; the kind where you wear fuzzy slippers and pullover sweatshirts. The kind you have in the fall where the house smells like stuffing. My favorite kind of day.

Nothing beats these Wednesdays with Rainy.