18 Years of Teaching

And just like that... my 18th year of teaching is complete! That is bonkers to me. I feel like my life is divided into Before Teaching and After Teaching, because that shift also coincided with the end of my first marriage and the beginning of my relationship with Bryce. LOTS of change, all at once. It was terrifying back when everything was a jumble of uncertainty and upheaval, but wow am I glad at how everything turned out. 

I met Bryce while I was finishing up my field work, and we were seriously dating while I was student teaching. We got married the year I had my first probationary position, and started infertility treatments that same year. 

I spent a lot of my early teaching days wondering what it would look like if I did get pregnant, and being a little nervous about it. How much leave could I take while not tenured? How could I balance motherhood and my burgeoning teaching career? That quickly turned to questions of how I could balance teaching and IVF treatments -- scheduling around the school calendar to try to minimize how much time I took off, knowing that I'd need sick time to get full pay during a 6 week maternity leave. 

All of this proved moot, of course.

I remember my first year split between my current middle school and the 9th grade building, and having to start a week into the year due to my ectopic pregnancy and surgical recovery (and boatloads of grief). I remember being nervous about that falling on my tenure year, until my principal at the middle school shared that he and his wife had endured an ectopic pregnancy as well once upon a time, and he understood. 

I remember years and years of painful beginning-of-the-year slideshows with everyone's family pictures and baby pictures and the feeling that we had a big hole where that should be for us. 

I also remember starting to make sure that my slideshow picture was silly, funny, and otherwise ridiculous to make up for that feeling of being less-than. 

One of my favorites

Thankfully, current administration doesn't do that godawful slideshow. Although, I feel like I no longer feel like there's a hole in my existence. Progress! 

I remember my school baby shower. I remember getting phone calls about adoption opportunities and being declined at school, and trying real hard to pretend to be a normal humanlike substance while feeling like this process was a vampire, sucking the life from me and leaving me a husk of myself. 

I remember telling everyone we were done. 

And now, I work with a whole lot of people who have NO IDEA that this was so entwined with my teaching existence. There are so many newer teachers (or new to our building) who don't at all know that I survived all that while being a new teacher, and as my teaching experience grew, so did my infertility and adoption trauma. 

I am immensely proud of my teaching career. I love my students, and I love finding ways to make learning challenging AND fun. I enjoy very much being the weird teacher. 

T-shirt to prove it!

I love that I can put my mothering energy into helping young humans become critical thinkers and better humans than when they first came through my door (most of the time). I also love that I can come home and recuperate from the stresses of the day, from the vicarious trauma that is a solid part of teaching (special education in particular), from the exhaustion of being "on" all day long. I have no one who depends on me for homework help, or who needs me to drive them to sports or dance. I also don't have the positives of raising my own children, but good gracious I am grateful that I can give everything in my school day and then come home to the couch, a book, a glass of wine, and decompress. 

I love that every school year is a little microcosm and I get to start over and do it again year after year after year. 

I love summers and having time to wind down and then gear up for that new year (and that, since I don't have children, summers are entirely for me and Bryce).

I have 12 more years of teaching ahead of me. I have more years in than I have left, which is a weird feeling. But also, I love that I've grown along with my teaching career. 18 years is a long time, and my life has changed significantly since the beginning. I love what I do. I love where my life has taken me so far, even if it is completely different than what I thought it was going to be at the very beginning of all the change.

Vacation Anxiety

Bryce and I were late planning our vacation this year. As in, we booked our August trip this past weekend. 

We are such creatures of habit. We are going to Maine, but this time we were like, "let's try something different!" 

We searched tiny houses and cottages. We looked at cabins on lakes. The things we saw that we liked were mostly, so shocking, booked up. The cabins looked fun but the words "family friendly" came up A LOT and that isn't really what we want out of a vacation. 

Then Bryce found a cottage that's on its own tiny island in a lake. The cottage looked lovely and it definitely hit the "rustic" and "quiet" buttons. However...
   - you have to paddle your things in on a canoe for 5 minutes to get there

   - there is no electricity, just a small generator to run a small refrigerator

   - you are on an island in the middle of the lake with no electricity and YOU HAVE TO PADDLE IN ON A CANOE. 

To Bryce, this sounded amazing. To me, it sounded absolutely BONKERS. I wanted to be adventurous, really I did. But this, given that I am accident prone and tend to be in the worst kind of 1 percent, sounded like a very, very bad idea. 

I tried to imagine it. All I saw was blood poisoning and serial killers. I tried to say why it was scary, but it sounded so silly as the words left my mouth. I was getting more and more worked up and started crying and then said/yelled "I NEED AN INTERMEDIARY STEP BEFORE THIS LEVEL OF ADVENTURE! THIS IS LIKE ME SAYING 'LET'S GO CAMPING IN THE SUBWAY IN BROOKLYN' TO YOU!" (Bryce grew up in the wilds of Maine, I grew up with streetlights and public transit and sidewalks. Our comfort levels tend to be...different.)

So, needless to say, we didn't book that one. Instead, we are going back to the inn in Boothbay Harbor that we have thoroughly enjoyed, and stayed at last summer for a few nights. It is familiar. There are no kids in the inn. We can avoid "family friendly" places and find a deserted spot on the rocks at Ocean Point to read and sit and enjoy. We know where the gluten free options are (and there are a zillion!). We can walk into town. We can walk to a park with a little cove that we found on our last day last year. 

It is familiar. It feels safe. Maybe it's the way the world is right now, or the stress of figuring out safe food (even if a cabin has cookware, I have to bring my own, thank you Celiac), or the need for some things to be predictable because so much in our life has been so uncertain. I feel so lame saying that I would love to do an adventure (albeit with plumbing and at least some electricity and the ability to be in civilization if needed), but I would need time to plan it properly. Which sort of takes "adventure" out of it. 

Or, we can just embrace that we love to find cozy home-away-from-homes and once we find a spot we like, we go back and explore but ultimately feel like we're in a familiar place, with familiar faces, and a certain level of predictability. I guess I'm more of a "dip my toes into adventure" person.

What do you like? Adventure, or familiarity? 

Urgent Care vs Specialist

Early in May, I had that "severely abnormal" mole and surrounding area cut out with a dermatological excision. Next to and sort of in my bellybutton. Why my body is making these crazy, homicidal cells is beyond me, but what my body did with the wound is really annoying. 

My bellybutton is not an area where I care about cosmetic concerns. It is, however, always in the dark. Always a bit of a cave situation. And so, it's not an ideal place to have a wound with internal and external stitches (ouch). 

Week before last, I decided to put a hydrocolloid Band-Aid on the wound because a) it was just NOT healing and I thought it would help, and b) I needed a barrier because wearing adulting clothes was irritating it. Going back to work has been challenging from a comfort perspective! 

Well, that was a mistake. You leave hydrocolloid bandages on for a couple of days, because they are supposed to be breathable. I took the Band-Aid off after school on Tuesday. I was assaulted with an absolutely HORRIFIC stench. Like, demons from hell were streaming out from my navel. It looked gross. It smelled gross. It hurt. I went to Urgent Care. 

They were like, "oh yeah, that's definitely infected. And it looks like a stitch popped at some point, it's a little open. (ew) You need to go on antibiotics, and we're doing a wound culture. Keep it covered but change the bandage frequently to keep it dry and keep an eye on it." I left, started the antibiotics that night, and the next day called my dermatologist's office to let them know it was funky. They could see me later that day, so I went to get checked out. 

My derm said, "nope, that's not infected. It's regular pus. Regular pus doesn't smell so good either. You have a spitting/spinning (not sure which) stitch, and your internal stitches are trying to come out. Don't cover it, and stop those antibiotics. They're a rough one that kills your gut biome and leaves you with horrible diarrhea. You're good." 

Bryce was like, "WHO DO WE TRUST?" And my answer was, the specialist. The person who sees excisions all day long. 

Whelp, I should have said URGENT CARE. 

We went on an impromptu overnight to Vermont weekend before last, and it was lovely. We went to a kickass bookstore (The Northshire), we ate yummy food, and we walked around. We read in our room. It was a good reset after our loss of Lucky. Sunday morning though, I got a call from "HEALTHCARE." I answered. 

IT WAS A DOCTOR FROM URGENT CARE. He was like, "your wound culture came back positive for staph lugdenensis." WHAT THE FUCK? He said I could stop the other antibiotic because it WASN'T STRONG ENOUGH, and go on a 7 day course of doxycycline. 

Of course. My body is tricksy, and often not in a good way. I took the antibiotics, and it's no longer tender or goopy (although to me, it still looks gross), but HOW FRUSTRATING? I called my dermatologist on Monday to tell her all about this development, and her office was a bit concerningly blasé about the whole thing. Said, "everyone has a tiny amount of staph on their skin, it's probably not a big deal." Argh. I just wanted them to say they were wrong (famously not a strength of most doctors). 

So, the lesson is... the specialist is not always right. The thing that doesn't make a mistake? DATA. Microscope slides full of goo revealing gross infections that could also turn homicidal (but thankfully didn't). 

On a good note, while in Vermont my new knee walked 8.5 miles IN ONE DAY! I hiked! I walked on hard sidewalks! It was amazing. So, at least one part of my body was doing right by me. 

Hiking at the Equinox Preserve

Not gonna lie, I'm a little nervous about having the second excision done where the other dangerous mole was on my back done in June. Although that area is not a cave of doom, so maybe it will be okay?