I have been hovering between two worlds for the better part of this early, quiet morning.  The threat of a snow storm had swirled around the hallways of school most of the day yesterday and, last night, the weatherpeople (I feel like they should have their own origin story) kept finding their way into my phone, pinging me with their alarming upgrades from threat to watch to warning.  “Anywhere from 2 to 18 inches” was the ominous mantra.

But I can’t stay in this space for long.  I have to place my feet firmly onto the cold floor and I must know which path I am on today.  Teacher me or mom/wife me.  Each has a very different rhythm and pace, and each requires an approach from a surprisingly different angle.  While I have always known that the sounds and smells of the spaces clearly marked these worlds unique, it wasn’t until this morning that I considered how very different I am within them.

As a teacher, I am in charge.  I am in control.  All of the variables are set by me until the throngs of 7th graders infiltrate…and then I am warrior-coach: readjusting, deflecting, supplementing, zigging and zagging from moment to moment, responding to the students’ thoughts, writing, commentary, movement.

But at home? I am at ease.  I am sitting, with little tension, absorbing the energy as it comes, retreating if necessary, otherwise, embracing for sustenance.  I am intricately ensconced in the vibrations of the four other beings in this world (five, if you include the dog) and the effect that they have on me is all encompassing.

I check the closing list one last time, trying to decipher the patterns.  I breathe deeply the energy of this in between space, wondering if the me that inhabits these two disparate worlds can be fused into one, complete Amy.

 

At 3am I am awake.  Wide awake.  At 4:20am my alarm will go off, prodding me out of my subconscious and inevitably awakening whomever is lying beside me (in our home, that could be two of our three kids, the dog, or, occasionally, even my husband).  But at 3am, I am awake, crafting a list…a list of the potential writing territories for today that will not threaten to rock me out of my world and leave me contemplating history, the future and my purpose in this life.  A list of “easy” things to write about that will roll effortlessly out of my head, through my fingertips and onto the screen with minimal soul searching.

1. Guitar.  I love my guitar, even though I cannot play an F chord or a B chord or really any chord that requires my small, untrained hands to bar anything.  But I love my guitar and I love the simplicity of sinking into music that I am creating and, for a few moments, I can be the rock star that I was always meant to be.
2. Yoga. Just writing it makes me breathe easier.
3. Walking.  Even with my dog, who barks at everyone and everything, pulling me out into traffic to chase the passing cars and forcing me to be ultra-vigilant about passing runners, cyclists, and, his favorite, motorcycles.
4. Warm fires.
5. Easy friends.
6. Understanding that transcends words…

(Crap.  I have found myself circling back around to the things that make me question and contemplate.)

I am four, maybe five, years old.  I am walking with my father.  I think that we are going to the playground or, maybe, to watch my brothers play basketball?  I have no real recollection of the season or of the circumstances, but what I do remember is that I reach for my father’s hand, he gives mine a quick squeeze and then releases it.  No words, no explanation, just a squeeze of acknowledgement and then gone again.  I am struck by how much this feels like rejection.  There were other moments when I reached for his hand, either as a young child struggling to keep up with his adult gait or as an adolescent looking for some warmth from an otherwise lukewarm man…each time, the same response:  a quick squeeze and then release. Each time, a confusing sense of rejection that I didn’t quite understand.

As I grew into an adult,  this became a dance we continued in our long distant phone conversations.  We always seemed to connect and yet he was always just outside of my reach.  I’d know that he was there, I’d feel his hand tighten around mine, even from hundreds of miles away, and then the distance would return.  My father had a stroke when I was in my late twenties and then died a few years later.  In the years between the stroke and his death, he stopped releasing my hand.  He was present in a way that I had always longed for and I even was able to hold his hand, literally, for longer periods of time.  In fact, in the days before his death, I sat and held his hand as he drifted in and out of consciousness, very much aware of how far we’d come since that brief moment when I was a little kid.

I am so much like my father; there are so many ways that my life mirrors his.  There is so much work that I have done to avoid being the worst version of him…but  I worry that I, too, am the one who lets go of the hands that reach for mine.

We are constantly invited to be what we are.”― Henry David Thoreau

I truly believe that we don’t change all that much over the course of our lifetime.  Instead, I think that we become our truer selves.  As we evolve, we reveal just that much more of our essence; we don’t move closer to something outside, but rather we emerge more fully, until, perhaps, we are complete and whole and transparent.

Some days it is terrifying to acknowledge that the twelve year old me is not all that different from the forty-eight year old me.  For the most part, I have moved past the memories that make me grimace, stepping more often into moments that elicit a small smile.  Occasionally, I’ll pick up the wrong coat and slip comfortably into old habits and engage in long-ago conversations, but the coat just doesn’t fit so easily anymore.  And it definitely doesn’t match my shoes.

 

 

I have spent the better part of today dancing around the things that don’t get said.  Or, in this case, written.  I have written in my notebook, on my phone, on an ipad and now here, in bed beside my sleeping child. I have crafted phrases and lines and moved words around to get them just so.  But I could not get them to fit, to settle onto the page.  And none of them are ready for public consumption.  They’re just not ready.  But this feels like a copout.  I feel like I am on top of the treetop pole and I just won’t jump.

When I was 19, I was hired to be a camp counselor at a fabulously hippie camp in Ithaca, New York.  Part of our staff development training prior to the campers arrival was a “bonding” trip to a ropes course.  I was uncomfortable and afraid of heights.  Full disclosure, I was uncomfortable in a harness that was clearly designed to enhance my derrière (which I was constantly trying to avoid acknowledging even existed) and then haul said derriere up a pole with witnesses having an optimal vantage point.  But I did put on the harness.  And I did climb to the top of the pole.  And then…I climbed back down.  I couldn’t do it.  I had gotten up there and raised my body to full standing height and all I needed to do was jump.  Everyone was waiting.  And cheering.  And watching.  But I couldn’t actually let my feet leave the tenuous safety of the pole and trust that the skilled counselors below and fate would ensure my survival.  I couldn’t do it.  So I climbed down.  I failed.

I am almost 49 years old tonight and I still feel like I’m on top of that pole.  So, I’ll leave the title of the unpublished blog here, to remind me that tomorrow I can try again. Tomorrow I can jump.

The blog that still hasn’t been written:  ““I need inspiration…Partners.”

 

Writing workshop time in my classroom.  Twenty-three seventh graders look at me, waiting for  inspiration to begin writing or, at the very least, waiting for a push in some direction.  Prompts and invitations have started our class for months, filling their writer’s notebooks with seeds that I tell them will one day grow, if they choose to give one the nourishment it requires.  But first, they have to see what’s hiding in there. They have to go mining.

Mine your notebook, I tell them.  Find the word or phrase or idea that has potential.  Sift through the writing like sand and find the nugget.  Uncover the treasure.  

So today, attempting to model what I want my students to do, I open my notebook. I see my words.  My phrases and ideas. I’m sure there are some nuggets, some treasures, hiding in there, but what I notice most is what is missing:  the words I haven’t written; the words that wait and seem to hover just over the page. What has not gotten onto the pages of my writer’s notebook are the words that need to be pushed out forcefully, like Elizabeth Bishop has shown me.   

What happens to the stories that we never tell?  What if, one day, we reveal our true nature? I worry that there is some balance or symmetry to the universe that will be irrevocably altered.  Or, maybe, we all have our stories that hide, until the words trickle out between the lines of poems and in the backgrounds of photographs. Maybe there are always things lingering in the periphery.  But, perhaps, it is finally time to put those stories and poems out there and see how the universe adjusts.  

I’m not sure what makes me think that the words on the screen in front of me–words that I am writing through an intricate system of neurons and biochemical transmissions which somehow allow me to get the voices from my head onto a screen for others to read–are worth reading.  By anyone.  Ever.  It strikes me, right now, listening to my own words reverberating in my skull, that it must take an incredible amount of courage and  narcissism to be a writer.  And, as I continue to rewrite and try to clarify, I am highly aware of the fact that I am, essentially, having a conversation with myself right now.  So why do I think anyone would ever want to participate in this dialogue (monologue?)?

I have two very clear memories from high school that illustrate my complex relationship with writing.  One was when I tried to pass off a trite, fairly horrible, poem as my own.  It was a poem that had somehow gotten passed around by overly angsty teenage (mostly) girls, revealing the mysteries of true love.  It had that painful combination of Seussian rhythm and rhyme, coupled with platitudes about fate, destiny and “being complete.”  There was no attributed author, and I thought it was clearly better than anything I could have written, so in it went, to our elderly  English teacher, Mrs. Kassberger.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who tried to pass this thing in…there were three of us standing in front of Kassberger’s desk that afternoon, looking at the same poem on three different papers with three different names attached.  I had two choices:  come clean about my foray into plagiarism or hold fast to the lie that got me there.

The other defining moment came a year later.  I was a junior and had finally, after eleven years of public education, encountered a teacher who didn’t think that everything I wrote was a perfect work of art.  In fact, she did the opposite.  She told me my first writing piece was, “Good, for a first draft.”  While I could have dismissed Ms. Gingold, I did not.  She was different.  Day after day, she showed me she was different:  in how she spoke, how she moved through the classroom, how she noticed everything, even if she didn’t say a word.  She was smart and she had high expectations and, most importantly, she seemed to see through my bullshit.  She seemed to be the first person to actually see me.  Clearly and completely.   I wanted her to react to my best writing the way the others had all reacted to my mediocre writing.  I wanted her to tell me that I had created something wonderful.  A perfect work of art.  A story worth reading.  And then, one day, she did.  Simply, tersely, without any emotion whatsoever, she said, “Amy, you should submit this to Meadowlark (our school’s literary magazine).”  Then, she handed me back my short story.

I still vacillate between these two versions of me…or, more accurately, I hold both of them inside me at all times.  As a veteran teacher of 17 years, I try to be more Gingold than Kassberger; I try to see my students, each one, for who they are and who they want to be when they turn their words over to me.  I try to make them believe that their words matter and that they are writers when they write.  I suppose that in publishing these “First Words” here, I am embracing both the student and the teacher in me…and hoping that there might just be a writer in there, too.