A Surprising Connection

I was on the phone with a parent before break, the student seemed "off" and sad and I just wanted to check in and make sure he was okay. The mom shared that house sister had COVID, and it delayed their break trip, plus they were all testing every morning. The mom said he was like, "How do I know I'm okay?" And she said, "one line. On this one you want one line," and then said she joked with her husband, "unlike all the other times!" 

I said how the home tests remind me so much of pregnancy tests. And then... 

She shared that they had gone through fertility treatments to have their (older) daughter, and it was awful, and they were told that they wouldn't have another and then a few years later my student made a surprise appearance. 

But you know what? She didn't say "miracle." She didn't say "and it was all worth it to have the children we were meant to have." And when I shared that nothing worked for me, she did not say anything obtuse about adoption (I might have mentioned that didn't work either) or what I didn't do. She said I make a difference in kids' lives, and I shared how much it used to bother me when people were like "your students are your children" because my dream was never to have 10+ thirteen-fourteen year olds at once with learning and behavioral difficulties, but it is a place to put my energy. 

I said, "mothering is a verb, and I do it differently and then go home to my cats and my wonderful husband."

It was a moment that left me feeling connected and understood. Our experiences were different, but with a thread of commonality. 

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy! 

The Upside of Teaching

I was talking with someone recently, and she asked me, "it seems like the last couple years everything about teaching has been hard...do you still enjoy it? Is it still bringing you joy? 

Oooof. That stuck with me. Because I realize, as exhausting as things have been (especially since the pandemic hit), I could totally stand to share some positives. Because even in the crap slurry that has been the past few years, there are soooo many good things. 

Before I get into those, I do want to mention that I am not alone in feeling the exhaustion of life as a teacher right now. There are countless articles that help me to see that I am not crazy, I am not a negative nellie, that this is a pervasive issue that is countrywide and causing a significant issue with teacher retention and teacher shortages (which further make things difficult for those of us who stay). And, it's been an issue for a while: see this post from The Cult of Pedagogy in 2019. Irony...I bought that book Fewer Things, Better  but haven't had time to read it yet. I feel like when I have time to read, I need it to be an escape.

This is the cover of my neaToday magazine from the National Education Association: 

One woman says: 

And then, there's this: 

Yikes, that all sounds so dire. 

I can say that I fall in the "No effect" category. I have no plans to leave teaching, or to retire earlier than planned. I really do love it. But there's definitely problems in the way the United States views and uses teachers. 

So what are my positive things? The stuff that fills my bucket? Let me give you a taste of some things that have happened just in the past month or two: 

• When a parent thanks me for understanding and advocating for their child.
• When a student turns to another student, new to Resource Room, and says, "I didn't love Resource at first either, but this year I have had my best grades ever and I really think it's because of Resource -- it helps me so much!" (I might have teared up a bit)
• I have amazing colleagues who are also my friends, who teach me things, who are there when I need to walk into their room, close the door, and cry, who know what it's like to love your job even when you're feeling totally underwater and frustrated with the systemic aspects of it. 
• When a student lights up in the hallway and yells, "Hi Mrs. T!" 
• When I run into students in public and they ACTUALLY WANT TO TALK WITH ME and tell me they miss me, even when they were perhaps...challenging...in the classroom. 
• When I run into a parent in the grocery store and then find out I'm invited to a summer graduation party for a student I had in 8th grade, four years ago
• When I have a student with many behavioral challenges who can truly be infuriating but then will stay after school with me to get work done and then asks, "Are you going on the D.C. trip?" and when I say, "Oh, unfortunately not this year," looks STRICKEN and DISAPPOINTED and so I know there is a connection there underneath all the prickles and eyerolling! Huzzah! (but also I cannot acknowledge this one bit because it will kill the moment) 
• When parents say in meetings that their child is successful because of the combo of pushing and support that I provide
• When I feel like I'm all negative nellie and then another teacher tells me that I'm "a ray of sunshine, you always seem so happy and positive" and it reminds me that I'm not a black hole of negativity after all
• When a student finds my room to be their "safe space" and stops in throughout the day
• When other teachers say thank you for all the work I do as lead special ed teacher and one even speaks up in front of our new principal who starts July 1 and says "I just want to thank Jess, because she does so much for our department and she really goes to bat for us." 
• When students start using silly phrases that I use to be ridiculous, like calling Google Classroom "googly classroom" or a computer a "compooter" and they correct me when I say it the regular way...
• When a student "gets it" and you can see that lightbulb light up as they realize they understand something that was hard before

There's so, so much. Maybe even more than is on this list. It's what makes the exhaustion and the feeling wrung out worth it. 

I am so thankful for break. I need this so much, because it helps me restock my patience and my energy. It helps me stop and breathe and make lists like this that give me perspective. I do have work I have to do this week, but I actually managed to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING school-related from Friday through today, and it was GLORIOUS. I did see an email come in, but I IGNORED it. Even though it felt weird, it was a good reminder that I do not have to be accessible 100% of the time. I can take time for myself. I can make myself whole again and have a strong end to the school year. I really do think that the pandemic has taken normal teacher fatigue and exponentially magnified the impact. 

So thank you, person who questioned if teaching still brings me joy -- you have given me a tremendous gift in this reflection on the positive moments that sustain me as a teacher. 

I Do Exist (sort of)

Well, look at that -- it's April. 

This is probably the hardest year I've had in a long time. I have been just submerged in school and related stuff. Like, I make it to the end of the week, and then suffer a migraine for most of the weekend, just in time to start again. 

I feel spent. I feel like a husk. I feel like I am giving and giving and leaving nothing for myself. 

Some of it is my own doing -- I signed up for the SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) New Leader's Week of my own volition. I am just starting Week 8 of 10, which is crazy. It's a lot of work online, and then a 2 hour Zoom call on Sundays. Well, Sundays except Easter and Mother's Day. 

It is amazing work. It is exhausting work. It's work that I thoroughly enjoy, although due to my depleted state this past week it was particularly difficult. Well, it was difficult for a few reasons: 

1) The week was on "Doing Gender," a deeper dive into gender roles, binary/nonbinary, gender messages throughout our lives, and then intersectionality with how our identities can be racialized. (So, um, real light stuff.) 

2) It brought up all kinds of things for me for my experience with puberty, with my childbearing years being anything but, with not achieving the role so important to our society (bonus: I got to talk about pronatalism! Woop woop!). About my body in general. About surviving an abusive marriage. About self-worth. About celebrating who I am today, but also going down a winding whirlpool of sadness about all I endured to get here. There may have been some crying involved. 

3) NOT TO MENTION I realized that last week was the five year anniversary of my culminating mental health crisis. Of the emergency room visit where Prednisone mimicked a heart attack and then I basically lost my ability to wear my mask of "I'm okay, everything's okay" and had to be driven home and then I couldn't get anxiety meds and lived in a horrific state of fight-or-flight response for 4 straight days. Amazing how the body remembers these things before my mind does. I felt weepy, and especially exhausted, and had increased anxiety (oh hello, flutters) all week. Still feeling a little of that. 

So, um, I am wading through the serious muck, determined to get to Friday and the first full day of break. Good gracious it is so sorely needed. I hit a breaking point in the past couple days and was like, "What's going to happen is going to happen during school hours. I am going to take care of myself at home right now." Hard to do when I'm in the midst of IEP meetings, but I did it. I have a challenging (but not tooooo challenging) puzzle going, I'm reading a twisty book. That's another way I know I'm overwhelmed...I have been wayyyy slowed down in my reading. I have not been giving myself the care I give others. So I am slowing down a bit. And trying not to feel guilty about it.

I've missed this space. I am slowly catching up on reading and commenting. I've missed you! I hope that this spring is kind to you. The world is in a very dark and twisty place right now, and that also adds to the feeing of being underwater...but at the very least something I can do is give myself kindness. And spread it around as much as possible. 

Want to read some #Microblog Mondays that might not be a rambling stream of consciousness backed up from weeks and weeks of time away from blogging? Go here and enjoy! 

March 17

Five years ago I went to the eye clinic in the hospital, got a diagnosis of scleritis, and underwent a battery of tests because of scary comorbidities that thankfully I didn't have. 

See scary eyeball amongst festive St Patrick's Day attire?

Five years ago today is the start of the end of our parenting journey. It is the beginning of the end that took place from March to May -- from autoimmune flare to donating a nursery. 

But then, with the grief... Relief. So it's a funny anniversary. There's sadness, but also letting go of the pursuit of something that literally turned my body against me. And without that, I would not have my beautiful life today. 

I am not grateful for the scleritis, for the loss, for the pain. But I am grateful to have survived it, to be thriving in a life I really couldn't have imagined back then.

The Power Of My Story

I had a (masked) massage today, and it was glorious. Wonderful because of the anti-stress self-care, but doubly so because of my friendship with my massage therapist. She's funny, and sarcastic, and real. And seriously talented; I feel like I have a new body when I leave her sessions. 

I used to be a silent massage person, but I so enjoy our conversations that we end up chatting the whole time, even as I'm blissing out.

Today she told me that a client recently related a story about someone close to them who was struggling to conceive, and she uttered, "I mean, they could just adopt." 

My friend/massage lady immediately said, "Oh no, you really don't want to be telling people that. It's not an easy option, here's my friend's story..." And then told her all the things we went through. She said, "I actually tell your story a lot."

It made my heart so happy. That's what I want -- not to be some sad cautionary tale, but to be a story that helps others to see a different perspective, to understand people in their own lives going through the hell that is infertility a little better, to help people going through it feel less alone. 

We ended up having a whole conversation about adoption, that brought up new (or maybe clarified) realizations for me:

1) I really feel that our non-religious status hurt us. 

2) We were really, really uncomfortable with any situation where the only barrier to parenting was money. That we could parents only because we had more money. 

3) We started wondering about why there weren't more services to keep families together, and realizing how much privilege went into being a prospective adoptive parent. 

4) We hated the idea of the private option. Things started feeling... predatory.

5) I started feeling like if I wanted to be successful I would need to quit my job. I didn't want to give that up for the possibility of being a parent. I really, really wanted to be a mom, but I didn't want that to be the entirety of my identity. Especially if it didn't work out... Then what would define me?

6) I felt guilt over that -- did I not want it enough? But I also felt strongly that I didn't want to give up myself. I felt there was more to me than possible motherhood, even as it consumed me. And I thought (and still think) that it's an awful lot to put on a child to be the center of your identity, to be the reason for everything. 

It was a moment where I could look at this, five years later, from a perspective of having a life after seeking parenthood. I could look at it objectively and without the heavy clouds of fresh grief. It's crazy to me that it was exactly five years ago that my eye started flaring up and I faced the beginning of the end of that life and the beginning of a new life. March through May marks the period of my Survivor-versary. 

I'm pretty damn happy with where we landed, how my story has evolved, and how it's used for a good greater than me.

"Call Us What We Carry"

Oh hello. I think if I were to do a "one word check-in" activity with you, where we go around in a circle and share a word that sums up how we're feeling, what we're bringing to the space, mine would be 

OVEREXTENDED.

That aside, I realized on Saturday that I had Young Adult Book Club Monday, and I hadn't opened the book that I chose from the two options -- "Call Us What We Carry" by Amanda Gorman. I read it in a day and a half and will reread it and digest it over and over. It was INCREDIBLE. 

She is such a gifted poet, but also quite the historian, and her word play and finesse with language is just amazing. The book is really about the impact of COVID, and grief, and resilience, and connections to other moments in history. It has a whole section that gives voice to the anger and disappointment in America felt by Amanda as a Black woman. It is so freaking powerful. It also has so many passages that for me rang true for my own grief and resilience in my parenthood/CNBC journey. Instead of explaining, here are a couple of my favorites, emphasis mine: 

From "Lucent" (p. 60)

"What would we seem, stripped down
Like a wintered tree.
Glossy scabs, tight-raised skin,
These can look silver in certain moonlights.
In other words,
Our scars are the brightest
Parts of us. 

*  *  *

The crescent moon, 
The night's lucent lesion
We are felled oaks beneath it,
Branches full of empty.
Look closer.
What we share is more
Than what we've shed."

From "Good Grief" (p. 29)

"All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it, instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in its sea. 
Despair exits us the same way it enters --
Turning through the mouth. 
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues. 
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know. 
What we carry means we survive, 
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone, 
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine."

From "Pre-Memory" (p. 78)

"Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory
becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt
again, becomes free. Empires have been raised & razed on
much less. There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous,
as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained &
unexploded. Grief is the grenade that always goes off."

She's incredible. And only twenty-two years of lived experience! I can't recommend this book enough. 

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy! 

Risk Factors

I went to a new gynecologist today. I hate going to a new gynecologist, because of all the explaining and forms that don't have enough space for the trauma my reproductive system both received and inflicted. 

But, when your current gynecologist is in international news for biologically fathering quite a few children with his own sperm while telling parents that it was from a university sperm donor, even if that happened in the 1980s, you need to find a new practice. (Seriously. I can imagine he never thought a service like 23 & Me would exist in the future, that people looking to see their ethnic heritage would find out that they're actually 50% unethical doctor.) 

So I went on a colleague's recommendation and went to a new practice that I was assured would not be led by a Sperminator nor be a shrine to pregnancy and breastfeeding, like one practice I briefly went to at the tail end of infertility treatments. It was a very pleasant building, lots of lilac purple and gender-affirming signage. 

But man oh man, I hate those forms. I stopped listing all the IVF-related surgical procedures individually and just labeled it "2010 - 2015 -- oodles of egg retrievals, hysteroscopies, perincentesis due to OHSS." Somewhere I have the complete list, but I don't think it's necessary anymore. I list my hysterectomy, my ectopic laparoscopy, my laparoscopy in 1999 that was exploratory to rule out endometriosis (the male doctor didn't find any, so he told me "some women just have pain" and dismissed me. I found a new doctor.). I hate listing two pregnancies and no live births. I did find my blog useful in looking up the dates, which I'm grateful to say I don't hold all the time anymore. I found my camera roll helpful in remembering exactly when my hysterectomy was (2019). 

After writing it all out, I got to explain it again verbally. I was already exhausted from the forms, so I got teary. It's just so much to hold when you have to recount it all at once. 

But, it was interesting, because I asked about getting an ultrasound of my ovaries as part of my exam since I am worried about ovarian cancer given the massive amount of hormones I've pumped myself full of and the insane number of follicles I've stimulated in a relatively short time. I expected her to possibly pooh-pooh me and maybe humor me but make it clear this was my anxiety talking. 

Instead, she said, "That's perfectly reasonable. You are right to be concerned. Make sure you get a mammogram regularly and we can baseline your ovaries and check them. That's perfectly rational." 

WHAT THE HELL. I mean, I know I'm not totally nuts to be worried, but it was somewhat sobering to have my fears validated. Not catastrophized, but validated. 

PLEASE ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT CHECKING YOUR OVARIES if you've done a fair amount of follicle stimulation during infertility treatments. It's worth the ask. I will take all the peace of mind I can get. She also said that most breast cancer cases are people who have no family history, and to be vigilant about checking my breasts and even if I've had a recent clear mammogram call if there's anything fishy. 

I really enjoyed this new doctor. She took me seriously, no one in her staff said anything stupid, not even "did you think about adoption?" I may have verbally vomited all over the ultrasound technician, but she was empathetic and not judgy at all. It's always fun to be asked when your last menstrual period was and then reply "early spring 2019, before my hysterectomy." It's weird that the only thing they can look at is ovaries, and for some reason it was hard to find them. I guess that's better than finding them right away because they're ginormous and tumor-y? 

One more advice piece I got -- Vitamin D3. Take it. It's apparently vital for immune function and helps fight against all the cancers I'm most scared of (breast, ovarian, colon). Good for bones too, can't absorb calcium without it. I always mean to take it and then am terrible about remembering, but she recommended Vitafusion gummies. If I have to pretend it's candy, it will be easier to remember. Makes total sense. 

So, get your boobies checked, get your ovaries checked, get a gynecologist who doesn't share DNA everywhere, and then contemplate taking a nap after your appointment because it was so emotionally exhausting. Or, go grocery shopping the day before a snowstorm after because the stress of that experience will take your mind off things, ha. Having a good doctor is everything. I'm so glad I found a new one.