Memory Chain

This past weekend I started a semester-long workshop with an organization called the New York City Writing Project. This organization focuses on how to teach writing to middle/high school students through a teacher-to-teacher dialogue and exploration of practices (Wow--imagine that--teachers being the "experts" on the subject of teaching!) and under the premise that in order to teach writing you need to write.

I haven't been writing. Not on this blog, not academically...I have had a sort of writing paralysis and it has made me depressed because I *like* writing, either here, academically, or in general. I walked into night one of the workshop eager to jump-start my writing again. I needed to, for both personal and professional reasons.

The first activity they did this weekend was called the Memory Chain Writing Exercise. It's a warm up activity to get the students' brains thinking where the instructor gives out a word and you write a chain of your memories that emerge from that word. It could be used in any class/any subject to start moving the students moving towards the writing process. In a science class you could use a word like "periodic table of the elements" (well, that's five words, but you know) and see what memories emerge. The goal is to give yourself time to let memories form from the word and then to let your stream of consciousness run with it. It's NOT a word association exercise (as in I say "report card" and you say "grades"), but and idea generating exercise. This is how mine went:

The word given by the instructor was "playground:"

I have a lot of playground memories given that I have a 4 and 2 year old and live in a large city where playgrounds rule, so my brain sought out one memory that stood out. One day this summer I took Nico and Alexandra to the Vanderbilt Playground (our fave). It was super hot, so they wore their bathing suits to play in the sprinkler/water areas. I watched them run around, and then I saw her--Alexandra--and her leggy, long, beautiful self. She had on a Hello Kitty bathing suit, regular bottoms and a tshirt top, but she was so stunning. She had a golden tan, her quad muscles had light definition, her little butt was so cute, her long limbs climbed and hung and wiggled as she swung from a piece of playground equipment, and a look of joy just shone from her face. And in this moment I saw her as 4 year old girl, then a tween, then a teen, then a woman...It was a moment that transcended the actual moment and her beauty and potential just floored me.

Then I remembered the Creative Playground in Sterling, Virginia where I grew up, and the summer before middle school when I "went with" Steven Patrick for about three weeks. We would meet at the Creative Playground, which was a maze-like structure of wood, and hold hands while sitting secretly enclosed in one of the alcoves of the maze. That was it. Our hands would sweat in the summer heat, but it didn't matter. We just held hands and talked and giggled as long as we could until we were forced out of hiding by friends, siblings, or an intense game of tag. He was a cute kid with freckles and dark hair. Later on, maybe even only a month later, the social hierarchies of middle school would divide us--him being cool and only dating popular girls and me being pretty mediocre and not worthy of "going with," but our summer hand-holding had ended before then. But I remember it was sweet and exciting, like my world was changing but I wasn't sure quite how.

Then I thought of Steven Patrick's dad, whom I never met. He died sometime during our youth--was it middle school?--and I remember it being the tragic sad background story that perhaps made Steven's freckles a little cuter and him more appealing. But I don't know why his dad died, or how, or when, or how Steven and his family dealt with such an enormous loss when the kids were so young. As an adult and a parent now, I feel for the kid Steven was back then, and his mom, and his siblings (brother and sister? can't remember for sure). And I remember how it was never discussed, except in hushed gossip in the halls, and I wonder how Steven dealt with all that when so young.

And then I think of my dad, and how awkward it was losing him when I was 22--an age when we were these pseudo adults. We were out of college and on our own but still so naive as how to navigate many of life's difficult experiences. Friends and peers didn't do much better for me at 22 than we did for Steven in middle school. Death of a parent was still too weird to talk about at that age.

And then I thought about my dad, who's been gone now for 16 years this spring. And how my real memories of him are fading and how the only memories remaining strong are those backed my photographs. Even the traumatic memories, like seeing him in the hospital having just died, have gained a haze to them--a dreamlike quality that almost calls to question, "Was that actually real, or was that some movie I saw?" I mean, of course I know it was real, but it's losing clarity around the edges, seeming cinematic and very far away.

And then I cried. Yep, right there in the stupid first night of the writing workshop. Not a sobbing, ugly cry, but my eyes watered and when I had to turn to my partner I got all choked up telling her my memory chain, and then I made her cry. God....Luckily she was the only person in our 20+ group to witness this (I certainly didn't want to get labeled as the freak who cried on the first night of class), but my last note on the page was:

Shit! How'd this get so heavy?

And I came away from this writing with two lingering ideas:

1. You never get over a loss like losing a parent or a loved one. The day-to-day gets easier, holidays get easier, and life goes on, but then, out of the blue, it hits you hard. Like it did for me that night. You're simply never done grieving.

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2. When teaching writing, I think we need to be aware of these emotional moments for students, too. Writing can be deeply personal, and as teachers of writing (and I believe ALL subject teachers are teachers of writing, not just English teachers) we need to understand that writing can make a student mad, sad, nostalgic--a whole range of emotions. I am not sure if you can devise up with a universal strategy to deal with these situations when they arise, but an awareness that writing might provoke something unexpected is a good place to start.

Love the Life You Live

This was our holiday card this year. As we decided on a photograph, we worried that our friends and/or family would find us twisted human beings for putting our scouring/crying kids on a card to be sent to the masses, but we were surprised at the amazingly positive response we got from nearly everyone. And, amid these responses, our choice of photograph grounded me in some deep thoughts about our life and our little family.

Last spring my close friend Julia Beck Vandenoever, of Julia Vandenoever Photography, spent a grey spring morning with us in Prospect Park. Adam was ridiculously hung over from a good friend's bachelor party the night before, I was cranky because he had been out to 6am the night before our family pictures (!), and the kids were just...Well, a one and a three year old. Needless to say, anyone who dared hold a camera up to take images of us as a family was a brave individual that day, and Julia did it with grace.

When we got the images back, I was thrown. I blogged about it here, but suffice to say we looked amazing--like photos of fake families that get put in frames (but much cooler, of course). I never like photos of myself, but I liked these. Wow. And there was such a great variety of all combinations of the four of us.

But, like every busy family, the photos were taken in April and by December they all still only existed on the computer. When we went back to look for a holiday card shot, I laughed--heartily--at the many photos of either one, or the other, or both of the kids crying. They sulked, scowled, cried, and ran away from Julia during the shoot, but she kept shooting. And it's those photos that I love the most: the ones of my kids being the little pissers that they are every day. She truly captured who they were, at those ages, in images. I'm not sure every photographer would keep shooting, or that every photographer would present those images in the final edited version that the client gets, but I am so thankful Julia did.

As much as we all try to get our kids to smile, be cute, look like little angelic model children, I think we all know that our kids can be difficult, challenging, or downright intolerable. I'm so thankful to have images of some of these less-than-perfect emotions documented. There were many a beautiful photo of them as well, but somehow they didn't resonate in me like the cranky ones.

And maybe I am twisted to put it on a Christmas card, but, as my friend James said in a text to me proclaiming his love of our card, love the life you live.

And I do.

Regift Boomerang

For those who know me well, you might know that I am an avid regifter. It's shameful, I know. Not one of my best attributes at all. But, if I am given something and I don't like it, I am not the type of girl to hold onto it and wear/hang/put it out in obligatory fashion when the giver comes over. I usually stash it in a drawer and then give it to someone else. Sometimes as a present, but more often as a simple offering because I like them and I think they would like my unwanted gift. Maybe they do....Or maybe they regift it to someone else. I don't know.

I do have a shred of sentimentality in me. If the gift truly means something or is symbolic in some way and I don't like it, I still hold onto it. I'm talking more about the regifting of common everyday gifts here, so let me make the disclaimer that I'm not completely heartless.

But, for example, I have received a proliferation of items that depict my first tattoo--Picasso's hands holding flowers drawing--throughout my life. I got this tattoo when I was 18 years old, and while I don't loathe it now, it no longer feels like me. However, the stuff keeps pouring in: erasers, pencils, coffee mugs, notepads, posters, stationary. Most of it is from my mom (bless her heart), but sometimes it'll come from someone else. I smile when I receive it and stash it in a drawer to regift it.

This past weekend we attended Adam's Aunt's funeral. Aunt Marilyn was the best recipient of my regifts. She accepted all gifts with pure joy and thankfulness--an earnest joy and thankfulness. She was a very simple woman who appreciated simple things; she was also single her whole life, and I feel that when gifts came to her she truly felt part of a family and loved. I cannot begin to explain the large number of gifts that were given to me by my family that were recycled to Aunt Marilyn, and she loved each and every one. In fact, at the luncheon after the funeral and burial, Grandma Watson (Marilyn's mother) explained to me how much Marilyn loved a throw blanket that Adam and I had given her years ago for Christmas. Well, that was actually a gift my mom and stepdad had given us, but in a small apartment that already had three throw blankets, we didn't need another and regifted it to Aunt Marilyn. Grandma said how once Marilyn was wheelchair bound, that throw blanket was on her lap 24/7.

Aunt Marilyn had been in an assisted living facility for the past eight years. There wasn't much to clean out of her room, but Adam's mom, Marcia, came up to me on Saturday and handed me a mug of Picasso's hands holding flowers and said, "This was in Marilyn's room and we thought you should have it." Marcia didn't know that I had given the mug to Marilyn (or if she did, she didn't say), and she definitely didn't know that the mug came from my mother about nine years ago at Christmas. But now the mug is back in my hands, and, since it is a relic of Aunt Marilyn and symbolizes the hilarity of my regifting boomeranging back in my face, the mug is now safely situated in our cabinet where it will stay.

I guess when I regift comes back at you, it's the universe's way of saying you're meant to keep it.

Rest in Peace, Aunt Marilyn. I'll drink my coffee and tea from my mug, which was your mug, which is now again my mug and think of you.

Parent Teacher Night

My body may have been deep in my crappy Ikea couch tonight, but my mind was at my the high school where I taught the last ten years where my past colleagues stayed at work until 9pm to host parent teacher night.

My first parent teacher night in Bushwick was when I realized how important this night was to figuring out my students as people. Seeing who my students went home to at night peeled back layers and layers of who they were and they made so much more sense. I feel very strongly that so much of us comes from our parents--the good and the bad--and that once you meet someone's parents you truly begin to understand their quirks and neuroses. When you observe how the parents dress and how they carry themselves, once you hear how they speak, once you watch how they beat or berate their kid in front of you for the bad grades, once can realize that their kid has them more duped than he had you, once you see a single mom cry after she reads her son's college essay about her....Wow. So much is said by both words and body language on parent teacher night.

I miss that window into my students' worlds.

Because now I teach adults. They may mostly be one year older than my prior students as freshmen in community college, but they are no longer wards of the NYC Department of Education and they are paying for their education. After the first day of class, I stood in my empty room after my students left and made mental notes of which parents to call when I realized, "I don't have anyone's phone number!" Several times I have wanted to call when a student was absent, or if s/he did something amazing, but I can't.

It's so strange!

But I also realize how--developmentally--it's important. It's time for personal responsibility to kick the f*ck in finally. Now my students have nobody to fail but themselves in this attempt to secure their human capital through education and a degree, and it's high time they know that. Nobody's checking on you, so check yourself (before you wreck yourself, as Ice Cube would say).

And, as a control freak, it's time for me to let go, too. Grow up, my students. And welcome to the harsh, and often rewarding, world of adulthood.

Occupy Wall Street

I have yet to go down to Occupy Wall Street. I guess I have been trying to solidify why I would go before going; I want to make sure I understand my own stance in relation to others and I want to be able to articulate that stance intelligently before placing myself in the public sphere. Maybe it's too calculated for most, but in my pragmatic mind that's just how things work.

But as I have negotiated my personal angle on this, a few photos on facebook--posted by friends and family--have pushed me solidly into believing that I *do* agree with the protests and, to use the Occupy Wall Street creed, I *am* part of the 99%. These photos are above.

What really strikes me about these personal diatribes that folks feel the need to post is the immense lack of critical thinking skills in their words. Yes, I understand that you busted your ass in college and worked four jobs to pay for it because SO DID I. Yes, I understand that you live below your means because SO DO I. Oh, but your solution to massive unemployment and a tanking economy is for all the unemployed in the country to work at McDonald's or pick crops in Alabama? You think it's that simple? And, obvious in your statements, you assume others haven't worked their asses off to get where they are, even if where they are currently is laid off, or under a pile of debt, or homeless? You think that some folks have a fall from the middle class grace they were trying to climb into?

Dig deeper my friends.

I will occupy Wall Street because I know that I have lived a privileged life. I came from two middle class parents who worked their way up into the middle upper class. My dad was college educated and employed my whole life; my mom had an at home daycare b/c she did not have the same education. We always owned our modest houses in safe communities. I have never been without clothing, food, shelter, two parents, and a good to great school. I am White. I have many class privileges and race privilege in an incredibly classist and racist society. I realize that there are structures in place in society that make it harder for others who have not had my sort of life to succeed. Amid a recession, those structures are even more discriminatory. Although I am not suffering currently (knock on wood), I realize many people are.

I have seen and worked within classist and racist structures as an educator. I would NEVER send my own children to the high school where I taught for ten years--a school full of poor Black and Hispanic kids that struggled with test scores, attendance, and school violence--but I worked HARD to try to catch my students up (academically and socially) so they could function in the mainstream--White, middle class--world and break the cycle of poverty they were born into. A few kids are able to break it, but most are not.

You think if you were in the situations that plague the bottom of the 99%, you'd be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps? You think living in a homeless shelter your freshman and sophomore year, coming to school in dirty clothes b/c your clean ones were stolen while you slept, being hungry all the time b/c you can't eat breakfast at the shelter b/c you leave for school before it's served and travel one hour by subway only to get to high school after the free school breakfast is served wouldn't derail your upward mobility? Add a variety of factors to that, like uneducated parents, incarcerated parents, dead parents, fear of being shot at in your neighborhood after dark, not having a washing machine to wash your clothes, not having a winter coat, not going to the doctor, not attending any sort of pre-school...I mean the list is endless when it comes to the obstacles faced by the truly poor in our country. You think you could overcome such obstacles? Maybe you could. Most likely you couldn't.

It doesn't sound like either of these folks with these signs faced those obstacles.

It doesn't seem like they are able to see beyond their own experience.

I will always remember the shame I felt--as an American--the first time I traveled to Bushwick, Brooklyn, for my first teaching job in 2000. Bushwick, at the time, was the neighborhood you were "most likely to be shot at random" according the The New York Times. I rode the B39 bus from downtown Brooklyn through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, and into Bushwick. When I got off, I was shocked. There was trash all over the streets, prostitutes still lingering at 7:30am, crack vials and needles and dog shit all over the ground, boarded up houses with sketchy folks standing in their doorways, empty lots with burnt out cars, mattresses, trash piles heaped up taller than me. I had arrived in Third World America. Most folks like me (read White and middle upper class) will never see that. Everyone should.

I will go to Occupy Wall Street for the bottom of the 99%. I have been lucky in this life. Although statistically speaking I am part of the 99%, I will go because there are others whose lives are so complicated by poverty and race and the solution is not for them to get a job at McDonalds or to become a migrant worker. If only it were that simple. And those folks are most likely not at Wall Street because they're working three jobs, or struggling to find decent daycare, or waiting in an emergency room because they had a miscarriage and don't have a doctor...The options are endless. But if you see me at Wall Street, it will be because I am there for them. I want there to be more options in our country than McDonald's and migrant farming for many of my students.

The inability of many Americans to see this and to care about anyone besides themselves is, and will continue to be, the cancer of our society.

Reading

Did any of you ever watch "The Great Space Coaster" on morning TV before school when you were young? And by "you," I mean the 37 year old crowd out there that might match my age demographic. Anyhoo, on this show was this guy called Speed Reader. He could run around in super short runner's shorts, tube socks, and sneakers (and maybe a tank top?) and he would read, read, read. I specifically remember he did a handstand on a stack of newspapers at and would read the headlines in the one second when he was upside down. I thought he was awesome, and a mobile version of my physically handicapped dad.

My dad was a prolific reader. We went to the library weekly, he would check out literally 8-12 books, and read them all in that week. It blew my mind, even as a kid. Now, as a professor of reading/writing it really blows my mind. How did he read that fast? I mean, really, how?

But I have been channeling my dad lately since I have acquired this new commute. Twice a week I schlep out to Kingsborough Community College to teach my Freshman Composition course. Three days a week I commute to Bryant Park in the city. The past ten years I have worked two subway stops from my house which does not even warrant pulling out a book. While I should use my commute to grade, I have decided to allow myself that time to read. And it is glorious.

Since September, I have read seven books:
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Unthinkable
Girl in Translation
There's no Jose Here
The Kid
Blindness
The Help

And I am back in love with reading. Not that I have ever been out of love with reading, but it's hard to carve time out of your day to read amid the grind of job, kids, grading, socializing, laundry, etc. But I feel a new sense of connectedness to my books. I have even chosen to read over watching TV some nights--imagine that!

But this has all made me think of my dad more. I wish I could ask him what his reading strategies were (he had no commute--how did he read so much?), how he became such a big reader, and all the questions I poke and prod my students with in order to better understand others' reading approaches. Instead I guess I'll just have to model his speed reading behavior to my kids so that one day, when they look back for memories of me, these memories will be of me with a book on my nightstand, in my backpack/purse, in my hand and want to do the same.

Happy Birthday to Nico?

Today is Nico's birthday. I am not sure why, maybe because two seems so much more grown up than one, but I have been very excited. I stayed up last night and wrapped his presents, hung our Happy Birthday sign, and told the story of when Nico was born to Alexandra and Nico when I put them to bed. After the kids and Adam left this morning, I laid out all his presents on the kitchen table. Adam and I met at 4pm at his office, got tiny cupcakes (the same cupcakes that my friend Nicole Macrini brought to the hospital when I had the boy), and went to get Alexandra together so that we could pick Nico up as a family and have an amazing night together.

The night would include: happy family dinner, sweet walk home, presents that would include Nico squealing for glee with each gift and Alexandra not getting jealous, cupcakes and ice cream, fast baths, painless bedtimes, and great photos to document all the super cute moments from that linear trajectory of the evening illustrating what a great little family we have.

But his is what happened instead:

Alexandra started whining that she was too tired to scoot to the Chinese restaurant after picking Nico up, so Adam put her on his shoulders. Nico saw her on his shoulders and started crying. We tried to distract him to no avail ("Look! A bus! A dog!") and his crying turned into full-blown tantrum that necessitated us stopping on the side of the sidewalk, letting him out of the stroller, offering him daddy, mommy, walking, carrying, stroller, backpack--anything to get him to stfu--but nothing worked. He slumped on the stroller, hysterical, writhed on the ground, and walked around aimlessly while screaming.

Then we got to the Chinese restaurant (it's en route to home) and Adam decides to go in and get take out (Nico is on my shoulders at this point somewhat consoled but intermitedly crying, Alexandra is back on scooter, Adam is pushing stroller). Alexandra realizes that we are not going into the restaurant b/c Nico is crazy, and she throws a full-blown-I-should-be-locked-in-an-asylum-tantrum. I only saw the beginnings because I left them to start walking home, but I heard them coming from about a block away as I got home b/c her screaming was so loud.

So we get kids in house, where they literally tantrum for the next 30-45 minutes, including slamming my hand in a door, throwing food, knocking heads on ground, and other insane tantrum behaviors. I start drinking beer. Things. are. not. good.

Nico finally stops. Alexandra stops about 20 minutes later. They eat hot dogs, bunny crackers, and corn for dinner. Bath (Nico throws tantrum #2 then falls asleep on changing table). Bed.

Holy crap.

No presents, Adam and I eat Chinese food after they're in bed, I have another beer, and now we'll eat cupcakes without kids. Totally sucky night. And for some reason, I'm just sad that Nico didn't get to have presents and cake on his birthday, although he doesn't know he missed out.

God, parenting is exhausting.