Tag Archives: anxiety

My Mother and Lessons in Grace

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If you come right down to it, summer has never been my favorite season. I don’t mind the heat, and I love the sandals and the dresses, but eventually everything gets kind of murky in all the long hours there seem to be. I always start off excited for the freedom, but then I get a bit lost in it. Even when I make myself plans like reveling in all the reading and writing I can’t do during the year, even then, I get a bit lost.

But lately I’ve been grateful for my mother. It has taken most, if not all, of my growing up years to understand what a phenomenon she is.

I remember when I was very small hearing my dad refer to her as pretty, which, at the time, was very shocking to me, because she was my mother. I expressed my skepticism, and she looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “You don’t think I’m pretty?” “Well, no!” I said. My parents just turned to each other and laughed like grown-ups did. I remember being very offended. (Turns out my mom is beautiful.)

And I asked her once in high school if she worried about us when we were out late, and she said breezily, “Oh, no, I just start planning your funerals.” At the time I thought this was her way of saying no, of course not, but it occurred to me, years later, that it was actually her way of saying yes, of course.

I like to tell these stories, but they do nothing to communicate the steady, everyday effect she has had on me. Just now, I happily, willingly, practiced my cello, and yesterday I changed out of sweatpants into shorts before I took a walk in the heat. These small acts seem unremarkable, but they took years of dedication on the part of my even-more-stubborn-than-me mother. I have moved out now and she takes great care to invite me over for dinner at least once a week, and text me often to meet her to take a walk.

And it occurs to me more and more as I tell her all my worries, and try her patience with my tears, that she has never once offered me the easy way out. She has always, insistently, offered me the way in: make yourself go, make yourself write, make yourself read, make yourself eat well, make yourself pray, and always make your bed. Her cures for my ailments never offer a break from life, but instead life itself. She is the one who suggested I write a paper to present at an academic conference in the middle of my first year of teaching, for no other reason than because I could. Her perennial lesson is to use what’s been given you. Read the book because it’s good, and wear your hair down because you can. You’ve been given hands, feet, a brain, a home: use them, use them, use them.

Grace is hard. To accept good things, to lose the world and gain your soul, is painful. I thought that I learned this in college. But now I am beginning to think that I will be learning it over and over again, with fresh pangs, for the rest of my life.

I have been given freedom: take it up, like a cross, and use it, use it, use it. Thanks, Mama. I’m learning.

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First Year Teaching and Unpaid Debt

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I’ve been making notes for this entry since last October. At first I was going to wait a few years to actually say this stuff to the internet-at-large, but I can’t help myself: here we go.

I planned to write a long list of advice for first year teachers, like the one I wrote a year ago when I finished college. But I discovered within about two days of becoming a faculty member alongside wonderful people who wanted to see me succeed, that for every piece of advice there is an equal and opposite piece of advice. So basically, even with the best support system in the world (which, including my parents and former teachers and friends who are a phone call away, I may well have had) you’re going to have to figure it out on your own in the moment, or you’re never going to figure it out at all. And that’s absolutely okay. So that’s what I have to say about that.

But if not advice, what? I guess just a rambling reflection, which is mostly what I do on here anyway. I have grown and changed this year perhaps more than I have in all four years of college. Every day that I have taught, without fail, I have felt both very young and very old. A while back, at play rehearsal I turned to a coworker and said, “There’s five years between me and them, and ten years between me and you, but I feel so much closer in experience to you.” “Yup.” she said. “Weird.” I said. And yet I cry at Caldwell choir concerts, because they inevitably make me feel seventeen again, and while there is something precious about that feeling, it is not quite comfortable either. But being in-between is most of what life is, so this is absolutely okay too.

Looking back I think I went through most of first semester in a bit of shock. I remember one day in September when Lisa came around to take attendance, I told her with a mix of bravado and desperation that they were all present, though I hadn’t even bothered to count them, much less look at my roster. I would doggedly stay up late into the night, making powerpoints and organizing notes, feeling my heart turn to heavy iron whenever a new email appeared unexpectedly in my school inbox. On the rare occasions that I was in a context other than Caldwell, I still couldn’t manage to talk about anything other than school and my students, no matter if my listeners were interested. (Still not great at that, but I’m getting better. I’m becoming more normal again.) Here is a somewhat-exact excerpt of notes I kept for myself throughout that first semester:

Sixteen-year-olds are adorable.

Sixteen-year-olds are little turds who don’t know that teachers have feelings.

At least I haven’t cried in front of students yet. That’s a victory.

I love being observed. It’s the freaking best. It makes me feel safe.

Almost-literal blind exhaustion sometimes hits while driving home.

I stay up late because I want time to myself before I go in the next morning.

It is so hard to get up in the morning. SO hard.

Why does my life have so many binder clips in it now?

Is it going to be like this all year?

IMPORTANT: That day sixth period worked quietly. 11/6. Let it be remembered. [Note: I actually wrote a poem about this day. It’s called “An Ode to My Students’ Silence.”]

But I survived. And stayed marginally sane to boot. I kept in touch with friends who were also first-year-teaching, because the front of a classroom can be a starkly lonely place. It is good to feel as if you’re in the trenches alongside someone else (and now that I’ve briefly taught World War One, that’s an especially vivid metaphor). I watched all of Boy Meets World, and though I remain doubtful that it’s really very kosher to regularly assign essays on a whim at the end of class just because the topic pertains to an issue in your favorite students’ lives, I was reminded that even in the world of nineties sitcoms, it is still possible to be a truly fine teacher and that doing so doesn’t center around making your students happy. And then late one Sunday night in November, when I felt just awful, I found this:

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I’m not typically a big charts and stages person, but this is absolute it-gets-better gospel truth. Believe it, cause it’s real. By December, according my notes at the time, I had “all warm fuzzy advent feelings after seeing them sing and getting gifts from them and having them treat me like a real human being and not just a grade machine.” Things were looking up. I was going to be okay and so were they.

In fact, there are a few students to whom I wish I could write individual thank you notes for encouragement they didn’t even know they gave. Highschoolers can cause more pain than they know–but their kindnesses, even unintentional and very small kindnesses, can bring so much joy. The times a student has gone out of his or her way to actually make my day better, I have usually cried (though not in front of them.) And it was a fairly normal but unexpected thing one single student did way back in early December that made me decide not to up and quit when I was feeling a bit desperate.

Really perhaps the thing I have learned most thoroughly this year is the thank you note thing: the value of appreciation and expressing gratitude. When I was a sophomore in college I wrote Dr. Brown a thank you note once and she made a huge deal out of it in front of the rest of the students, and said that sometimes she felt like Christ healing the ten lepers with only one coming back to say thank you. I thought this story was hilarious–I adored Dr. Brown, but she was comparing herself to Jesus, for goodness sake–and would tell it over and over to my English major friends. I no longer think it’s funny. I know exactly what she meant. When you teach and you care that you do it well, you are fighting on the front lines of humanity. You’re teaching the human mind to reach its potential, holding out the world in your hands, trying to get the faces in front of you to comprehend it, to feel their own smallness. There’s so much pressure to get it right, but when you do get it right, often nobody notices, and this is discouraging. To give more than you take, that is what every good teacher does, but no mere mortal can give out of a dry well. We all need water.

So, knowing that, and knowing what I know now especially, I want to shyly and belatedly be grateful to the people who taught me. I didn’t know what it took, and even if I had, I’m not sure I could have understood.  Thank you. Thank you for what you did for me: for crying with me, for laughing with and at me, for graciously thinking it was endearing when I told you bluntly that your class was “not my happy place,” for reading picture books aloud, for letting me run to your room in tears when I first discovered Billy Collins, for handing me that mysterious and wonderful envelope before the New York trip, for letting me sit on a desk during your planning period and just talk and talk and talk. And thank you for what you did for all of us: for heavy worry, for long patience, for giving us the best of what you loved, for volunteering to be Atlas with the world on his shoulders and believing it to be worth the trouble, for finally entrusting each of us to Jesus when it was all that you could do.

I see it a bit more clearly now. Second semester, when my responsibilities began to pick up pace, and when my heart learned to hold on anyway and smile in the wind, I started to care less about what my students thought of me and more about the students themselves. And I didn’t know that in a job in which I was supposed to be the helper, I would routinely feel so helpless to really love them well. So unable and weak. They need so much charity and compassion and help. I know this because I need this things too. I know this because, in our need and inability, we are the same.

Despite all of the doing and learning and trying, the appreciation and the lack thereof, I am discovering a secret which probably most teachers who’ve gone before me know. Education, when you really try to do it right, is debt. An extensive and painfully shining web of unpaid and often unacknowledged debt. We’re all bound and knotted together by it. We give and are given to over and over again, then march off triumphantly into the sunset, as if our spoils are our own, while the ropes of debt tug at our heels. Some days I can’t keep straight who is demanding restitution from whom. There is a colossal owing, and we, none of us, can possibly pay it back. And this, I think, is where education all goes bad or is hatched, where we begin to ceaselessly demand the pound of flesh from one another, or relinquish ourselves to the waist-high waters of grace.

This has been a long and meandering entry, but really there is one reason I have written it: I am preaching to myself. I am saying: “Alice, you feel as if you’ve worked hard and given much, but what you have given is that which was first given you. Your deficits are deep and wide, but they have been filled by a love that is deeper and wider. Your debts have been cancelled by the great Forgiver of debt, the Payment himself. Forgive your debtors as your debts have been forgiven. Look at the world and look at the hands that hold it and remember that you are small. See that your Lord is large and great. Love with liberty and with joy.”

Oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be. Let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Lessons from Cinderella and Jake Barnes

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I’ve watched a lot of movies since the beginning of college–most of them alone, on a computer screen. I like watching things this way. I feel free to criticize or adore whenever and however I want. I get to watch on my terms. Funnily enough though, when I give myself that choice I almost always choose criticism. I’ve gotten in the habit of quietly dissecting and improving and making-over most everything I watch. But last weekend I went and saw the new, live-action Cinderella with my family. I put my feet up on the empty theater seat in front of me, and let the whole thing carry me away.

It’s a beautiful movie shot in all the color you could wish for and told with complete openness. It looks at grief and joy and meanness and hope and tells each bit as straight as it can. I loved the end: when Cinderella is found because the sound of her voice carries out the open window and her unasked-for forgiveness makes her stepmother sink down and lean against the banister of the stairs with the weight of it. But I think the moment I loved the most was when Cinderella walks into the ball. She has arrived a bit too late for comfort, and she comes down the stairs by herself, with no one to announce her. Strangely, what was most evident to me was not that she is beautiful or hoping to find Kit, but that she is walking into a room alone. I have walked into a room alone, you have walked into a room alone–some days it is the bravest thing that we do. She descends with all eyes on her: nameless to all of them and probably already loathed by every woman in the room. Step by step she approaches the bottom of the stairs, and she has no idea what will happen when she gets there.

Then, late this past Monday night, I found myself on a little mental jag, when I should have been going to sleep. I lay in bed and thought about Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises: where he begins, and where he goes, and, most of all, where he ends up. He pines over Brett, letting his own physical inability to have her smash the side of his face down in the dirt and pummel him with punches again and again. He lets his wounds, real and imaginary, take him over and he throws away his self-respect and his aficion for bullfighting by letting Brett have, and ruin, the hopeful young Romero. But that’s not the way he ends: after everything that happens in Pamplona he literally goes into the sea alone, washes, and comes out clean.

And that’s when I thought of it: Jake’s like Cinderella. Perhaps this is silly and those of you who love Hemingway or fairy tales more fully than I do are looking askance, but let me try to explain.

When Brett sends for Jake, he signs the wire with love and loyally goes, but somehow he has unhooked her from his soul: he eats more than he drinks as they have lunch together, and the last image of the book–the raising of the policeman’s baton–means that Jake is willing to seek manhood and courage and meaning wherever he may have them, and lay the wounds of war and love to rest. This is him walking into the room alone, perilously free of the self-pity and self-sabotage he has had to protect him for so long.

All the good stories tell the same truths (this is why I love literature) and the principles which motivate Jake and Cinderella at their best are very near to one another. Though community and closeness and hands that hold onto yours are very important, there are things that can really only be learned alone. To walk into the room, to “have courage,” to “be kind,” to “get to know the values”: these are ultimately acts chosen by, and affecting, the individual soul.

As I have been thinking about this I keep remembering that this sort of independent bravery is  what I want for my students. The ones of whom I’m the most proud are the ones who are able to love their classmates without being swayed by them, who have found their own feet and are learning to stand on them: to walk down the steps, to raise whatever baton they’ve got.

But then I laugh, because really, who am I kidding? If I am telling the whole truth, I must admit that this freedom is what I want for myself–not to follow the scents and sights around me but instead, to be prepared to be separate, to be new and be different, to transform instead of conform. I want to be willing to find goodness and meaning outside of where the world has told me it must lie, and, though strange eyes may look on, to allow myself to be cut from a different cloth.

Permission to Fear

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I am home for a snow day today and absurdly grateful for it.

I have been thinking quite a lot about fear lately, and but I am having a very difficult time marshaling my thoughts. I don’t know why fear is so hard to talk about, because everybody is afraid. Fear is probably the most universal emotion–even those who’ve hardened themselves to love and to hate still know fear. Almost every bad and sinful choice any of us ever make is a result of letting fear rule us.

Maybe the reason I don’t like to talk about fear is that I know that I shouldn’t live in it, and I am ashamed that I do. I am ashamed that I am frightened to say certain things or to talk to certain people. I am ashamed that I let others’ opinions matter so much, even when I know they are wrong. I am ashamed that sometimes today and its small, assorted burdens terrify me like nothing else. “You are too intelligent and privileged to be afraid.” I tell myself. “If TSwift and Florence can shake it off, then so can you.”

But sometimes I can’t. More often than not it seems the walls of my heart are eggshell thin and the weighty little fears of the day crush in through them and paralyze and panic me. And then there I am, along with Paul, not doing what I will to do, but instead doing what I hate.

So I’ve decided that I’m just going to be scared. I’m giving myself permission to be afraid, for my face to blanch and my mouth to get dry. When fear shows up I will not try to push him out. Instead, I will send him to sit in the back corner, and speak to him often. I’ll say to him, “I will let you stay, but you must know that while you have the power to make my knees shake and my voice stutter, you have no power over my will. Do your worst. Smash my heart all the way down into my stomach. Force me to taste my own bitterness all night long. You are mortal and weak. And when I hold you up to the light of the Gospel I can see right through you.”

And then, with fear sitting on a straight-backed chair in the corner of my chest, I will go on doing. To be frightened is to have the opportunity to be exhilaratingly brave, so with a fist-sized lump in my throat I will go on speaking. When I become too scared, I will laugh. We are told that perfect love casts out fear, so while I wait for perfect Love to do just that, I will serve Him who gives me “that grace to begin.”

Time

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Time has become my ultimate enemy. Not the great hooded figure whom Shakespeare fears, standing and cradling his massive scythe, but instead his nasty, pockmarked little cousin who crouches on the floor and counts out the hours like currency. He carries a scythe too: it’s small and sharp and with it he kills sleep and he kills joy.

Okay. Well then. Now that that ponderous metaphor is out of my system, we can move along.

Really, though, I am staging a rebellion against minutes and deadlines and ticking second hands. Or trying to, at least. This semester has been too much for me in some ways. I was secretly triumphant last week when my alarm clock gave up the ghost and I blissfully slept an extra hour and a half.

I’ve just had a nice long car ride full of no obligations (i.e. a little computer that will no longer hold a charge) and friendly company, so in the spirit of my revolution against the pressure of the hours, I’d like to propose the following amendments to my own manifesto.

-Don’t antagonize sleep. When you go to bed in the wee hours and are still not able to rest, don’t pull out your computer again to do a little more. Be patient. Wait.

-When the number and scale of responsibilities frighten you, pray over your hours.

-Eat meals at the table. Try not to bring your work with you.

-Remember it’s only little old you and your little old worries. And God is very great.

-Take long baths.

-Place diligence over deadlines. Think of whatever your mother would say.

-Remember that you love to write and read and talk. Don’t let yourself twist God’s blessings into burdens.

-Wage war on the passive voice with courage. Go forth and do. Do the next thing.

The notes above are obviously intended for time immemorial, but it’s also worth pointing out that this is Holy Week. The hours of this week have great import for life and death and death-in-life and life-in-death. So I will pause, and worship, and remember Him who is eternal, who created time and came down to enter it Himself, who knows that it too may be redeemed.

 

Rest

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I don’t remember when I made this decision, but I decided not to do any work this weekend. I decided, instead, to rest. I had a sleepover with one of my best friends, I made myself eggs at midnight, I had a date with a four-year-old, I watched The Descendants, I began to make color-coded revision plans, I talked to my sister, I drove down I-80 to pick up another close friend, I went to church, and I had people over for dinner and made grits and green beans. It has been good, but I have discovered that rest takes quite a lot more effort than I’d thought.

I was not happy all weekend. I may even have cried and whined more than usual. I worried about my undone work and occasionally wondered if every hated me. I didn’t even have any good hair days. But I was unable to hide, to push my fears off till later. When you choose rest, you rather frighteningly give leave for the important things to become important, and for the urgent and its ilk to fade into the background. I was forced to admit the futility of my own action and inaction in the face of my God’s dying and rising.

I had to really listen to my friends, because there was nothing else to do. I had to listen to the spaces between their words, to feel their fears in my own gut. I had to sit alone in my own silence. I had to pray. It is easy to write, but I find it so hard to pray. When I pray there is no chance of impressing my audience, no chance for applause, only a dreadful promise that I will be loved, and I will be changed. This ripping feeling in my chest, I think, is resting in the Lord.

On Saturday I sat behind the pulpit in the chapel with little Tamagn, and read Dr. Seuss to him, he told me that he did not like “this house.” He was frightened that the robed figures in the stained glass windows would come alive and speak to him, and he was frightened of the sounds which he knew might swell from the pipes of the organ. I am sometimes afraid in God’s house too. I am afraid of the One who made me, who loves me though I betray Him. Such power and faithfulness is more than I can comprehend, so I busy myself with all other things. I pretend that the noise with which I surround myself keeps me from Him, when really it is my heart, sodden in its own fear.

But Jesus is awake and Jesus is alive. When I am silent, He shouts and it hurts. Those pipes and those bright figures in glass will not remain always still. The “great sloth heart” is moving. It knows it will find rest only in its Maker, and that “all else is trifling,” as the puritans pray. Because of Him, I write to you tonight with still hands and with raw newness in my heart.