Bad Teacher

You:

Me: I know more than a few ELA nerds, but does anybody know the backstory?

English and literature were just about the most boring possible subjects anybody in the history of the world could ever be subjected to ... is how I felt. Until ...

I was in highschool and learning about gerunds¹ (I know ~ that’s So last year 😒), and (still randomly) remember ~ with acute clarity ~ that time the teacher stumped the entire class when she asked us for the past-tense of “flee.” (No spoilers.)

And then came the moment ~ that monumental event after which all other (English / grammar) events would be marked as ‘before’ or ‘after’.

It was sophomore year. I was in second period English (because that’s what we called All of our English classes back in the day.) It was the second-and-a-half year of my crippling crush on [an unnamed person²]. And also the second week of my going steady with one of the school's fairly popular and genuinely kind-hearted star football players. I'd clearly given our relationship a fair chance ~ so thought my still-a-child mind ~ but I could not overcome my infatuation with the aforementioned [not so genuine, not so nice dude.³] So I began writing a break-up letter.

I began writing a break-up letter

in my second period English class

and my teacher - who wasn't too keen

on the misuse of my time - took possession

of my letter

and read it

aloud

to the class.

Terrible, right?

It gets better.

After reading the letter aloud to the point I'd reached before confiscation, which got to something like, "I'm sorry, but I'm still in love with"...

... Actually, it might be worth noting here that I was, at the time, not only not fairly popular but rather the target of a great deal of disdain from the actual real-life mean girls who hunkered like hyenas³ and moved through the school like a brood of ... help me out here. What's an animal that likes to torture its prey for (school) days and (school) days before letting it die? In any case, those girls tormented me daily as the [aforementioned jerk] was (publicly, anyway) going steady with a member of their [cult].

Oh, and it might also be worth noting that [jerk-face] liked me before he fell in with the [horde of regina georges], and actually continued to [string me along] for most of those aforementioned two-and-a-half years. The [girl vulture clique] knew that and never missed an opportunity to deride me.

But I digress.

After reading the break-up letter aloud, 

she asked the class to correct my grammar.

One. sentence. at. a. time.

Hold on.

Still gets better.

After the class finished correcting my letter to the point I'd reached, she asked them to fiiiiniiiish the letter. So that group ~ which, should be noted, included one of the [&^$@ clan] ~ finished one of the most horrible possible break-up letters that anybody in the history of the world could ever have to read.

… Did I already tell you that my [dysfunctional attachment to] [blech!] was a secret crush? Because that wouldn't be exactly right. [(Dingle-berry dude's) (vile, actually) (exploitation of my affection)] ~ that was the secret! Everybody in the school knew the name that would follow "still in love with" ...except maybe for Bobby, the young man superstar so truly undeserving of such a public mockery.

Side Note:

When I started this, it was supposed to be humerous.

I still believe it can be.

Maybe.

Once the teacher and my classmates had completed their studious work on my letter, she returned it to me with slashes, commas, parentheses, and general notations, all in red, so that I could now pass the better-ized version of it to the intended recipient. You may aptly deduce the sheer unnecessity for that.

It changed me.

For the remainder of that school year, every time a friend (I should say the friend; there was only one) passed me a note, I returned it to her with my corrections in red. Lol before lol existed. I was the only one laughing. I moved to another town before the start of my junior year.

It’s a little bit like one of those classic MCU storylines, right? There I was, a child-like girl with a yet unrealized skill. ... One traumatic event containing all the imperative parts of speech and I became another (better-ized) version of myself. 

From meek to (grammar) monster 

at the drop of a perfect passive participle.

Gosh, that got weird. 

Glad that part is over.

Get ready, here comes humor.

Don't pass me any notes.

You won't like me when

you pass me any notes.

L. O. L.

I have become the Bad Teacher

1. I think "learning about gerunds" is an actual gerund, but I'm not positive, so did I learn??

2. My name-calling is for entertainment purposes only, because,

3. I genuinely harbor zero ill about any of this, but, you know, humor helps a hurting heart.

Bonus #. You can assess every bit of my grammar if you like, but I'm a grown woman now and I write what I want.

What You Can't Not Write

Foreword
I’m about to tell you something that I’ve only said out loud one other time. It’s very deeply personal, maybe more than I should share with anybody, really, but especially with people who may not even know me. Also, though, I’ve not shared this because (I believe) my greatest fear in life is that I will cause harm or hurt for another person ~ and sharing this could hurt some folks on a very deeply personal level. Holding it, though, is also causing pain and if I’m really weighing it out . . . (I believe) sharing this will do more good than harm.

I.

I’ve never really understood children. Even when I was one of them, I didn’t exactly know how to be one. I was never the girl who daydreamed about a future life filled with children of my own. My sister was the one who had the names for her seven lovely (eventual) children by the time she was 11 or 12 years old ~ which I did not understand. As it turned out, my sister was only able to have one little girl ~ and my experience has been not at all what I planned or expected.

(I believe) it goes without saying that a person who doesn’t understand or necessarily plan to spend time with children may have a very difficult time playing with them.

"If I've had any nameable ambition, it's been to not hang out with kids. 

It's really not that I don't love them.  The Lord knows that I do love them ~ particularly my own.  I just don't understand them.  Don't know how to play with them, for sure." Ambition, 2015

II.

(Eventually) I had six grandbabies, all quite lovely surprises, but still, I had not planned for them. To say I was intimidated by the prospect of playing with them would be an understatement. Once, I tried to duplicate a game with one of them that I’d seen the parents playing ~ and I accidentally bit the kid. Hard enough that we both cried. It would have been a great excuse to quit trying so hard, but instead, with some minor adjustments, I learned how to play in a way that worked for both kid and me. Mostly, it was just about spending time together marveling at the world around us. Eventually, I was at a certain kind of ease when I was with my g’babes.

In other words, I gave up my ideal, overcame my extreme reluctance to hang with children.

My Little Box of Cupcakes

III.

And then we lost one of them. 
It was as if someone took a corner of the universe and ripped it from heart to hilt.
It’s a pain that’s deep and lasting and spirit-changing.
Because I either don’t want to or can’t say any more about that,

"I lost a nearly four-year-old grandson this year in a tragic accident.

God bless his momma and his daddy and his cousins and all his other grandmas and grandpas, all his other family, all those who knew him and know the void he's left behind." Antithesis, 2017

Suffice it to say that I retreated entirely ~ from most everyone I loved, but especially from my grandbabies. It was neither intentional nor obvious (to me) until years had passed. I did not fully realize I'd done it before I could look back with some measure of clarity on the years I'd left barren of any real and lasting memory.

IV.
Imagine now that this is a paragraph all about the comeback. It's not complete. It's not graceful. It's not without fear and trepidation. But it's here. It's come this far.

I have come this far.

V.

Recently, I answered a plea (or a conviction) to assist with the little kids at church on Sunday mornings. I'm starting as a floater and only once per month. Baby steps. On my first day, I began in a room full of nearly-four-year-olds, and specifically with a little girl who was having trouble separating from her dad. It took a minute (for me) but I finally sat on the floor and took his place in playtime. Next, we went to the tiny table to glue eyes, etc., to a paper face.

It was odd the way that she kept looking at me, and especially the way she noticed my hair. [I'd left in a hurry (slight dread) with wet hair and it was expanding as it dried.] "Your hair is crazy!" she said, and later I remembered a story I've told about my mom's second cousin who visited us once when I was six or seven years old. She was a hitchhiking hippie, and had a little bag full of tiny treasures she'd collected along the road, and she let my sister and me each pick something to keep. I remember all of that pretty keenly, but the height of that memory is of her hair. We were sitting together on the floor, and she was asking questions about our daily lives and seemed genuinely interested in our answers ~ and she had this wild, unruly hair that framed her face and from which I will always swear a light was shining. In that moment, she was the most like a real, live angel that I've ever met.

Back to baby girl ~ within minutes of her exclamation, I was called to assist in another class (of actual-four-year-olds.) I told her that I'd thoroughly enjoyed our time together and regretted having to leave and that I hoped I'd see her again.

"Are you dying?" she asked.

Three times I asked her to repeat because I could see no context for her question and I was sure I wasn't hearing her correctly until she said, "When you die, you go to Jesus."

Conclusion

This isn't the ending I thought it would be. In fact, it's only as I was writing that last part out that it fully dawned on me: this isn't about me. This is about what and who we are to the children we encounter.

The real conclusion is yours to write.

Happy Broken People

"The only way out is through."¹

In 1998 ~ a year following a particularly traumatic one for me ~ I read a (fashion) magazine article titled something like, "10 Things That Happy People Do." I remember Only One of those things. 

Happy people deal with their difficult emotions. 

Old School (aka I am the OG)

Now, I was born in 1970 and grew up in the culture just beginning² to take mental health both seriously and personally (meaning we have some measure of responsibility and control over our own mental health.) I didn't grow up hearing much talk about such things, let alone being intentionally taught how to process [anything, emotionally speaking], how to cope. And somewhere along the way (the 80s³ would be my guess) a sort of pop psychology developed which insisted that the best way to deal with difficult emotions was to ignore them, pretend your way out of them, act as if, etc. (Whole Other Story) 

By 1998, however, I'd learned that ignoring emotions (and more to the point, their source) would only prolong the pain and difficulty of it ~ that if I tried to run from it, it would chase me, would haunt me (probably for the rest of my life.) I'd also begun to realize that doing so was keeping me from knowing what it was to be truly happy in life. I was pretty sure I wanted to be happy, and it appeared the only way to get there was to work my way through [difficult emotions.] 

To be super clear, the "difficult emotions" on which I would practice this “new trick” were the result of a particularly dark traumatic event (another story, another time), but I applied that "Happy People" principle and downright wallowed in the depths of it. I thought and I felt and thought and felt and so on and so on until it's difficult to imagine there could be an emotion left to have. While I do still experience some residual effects of that year, I also feel relatively healthy and clear about it all. 

Higher Learning

Listening to a podcast⁴ this morning, Jonathan Fields referenced the contrast between pop psychology and “positive psychology.” He said, “The year is 1998. The gathering is the American Psychological Association… The newly elected president, Martin Seligman, says, “We have looked at psychology in the history of the practice as the quest to take people who are in pain, who are sick or ill, who are potentially broken and make them whole, bring them back to baseline, bring them back to the place where they don’t feel that level of suffering anymore. But…” [and positive psychology] starts to evolve and all of a sudden people feel like they’re given permission to dive into this because for generations, psychology didn’t really value the part of the human condition that was about that less tangible feeling of being connected and hopeful and possibility oriented and positive and alive.” 

The point of all of this is to tell you that they had it straight in ‘98. Happy people deal with their difficult emotions. This is certainly not to say that I am happy⁵ all the time, or that I aim to be happy all the time, or that anybody should aim to be happy all the time. But dealing with their stuff is one thing that happy people do. Bet. 

Because I'm Still The OG⁶

Sometimes it happens in fits and starts, but I’ve yet to stop practicing what I’ve learned (for the most part) or attempting to learn “new tricks.” I’m currently learning⁴ that happiness is more a side effect of other pursuits such as meaning and purpose ~ some of my favorite subjects anyway, so gravy learning, that!! 

Happiness is attainable, though, and something for which we have a measure of control and responsibility. I’ll never be the expert for how we get there, but I can absolutely and confidently assert that we can get there. 

(But often enough,) the only way [to it] is through.

1. Attributed to Servant of Servants, Robert Frost

2. This is a fairly broad, interpretive statement on my part

3. The idea that ignoring emotions is a good idea developed long before the 80s ~ but that's when I began to do it (on purpose)

4. Fields, Jonathan, host. "How To Feel More Alive" Good Life Project, #780, 29 January 2022, goodlifeproject.com/podcast/how-to-feel-more-alive-the-2022-plan/

5. If I had the time and space right now to do it, I’d launch into an entire thing about the difference between happy and joyful because there is a difference.

6. Can you believe I just learned what that means?!

6a. Don't judge