The Third Post

Wow. It took me too long to get to this third post. Sorry about that, Stacey. I kept thinking of things to write and having no time to write them. Such is the life of a working mother. Actually, maybe that's the life of ALL mothers.

My pregnant 8th grader is due to pop in a couple of weeks, and I have been thinking about mothering a lot when I see her in the hallways. She is old beyond her years, far beyond what one would expect from an 8th grade girl. Last week, I offered to let her read What to Expect the First Year as her independent reading book. She shyly took me up on the offer, stopping in with her unzipped backpack in hand so she could secret it out of my classroom.

There's no hiding her belly, though. It sticks out through a hallway of middle schools: the boys dressed for an away basketball game, ties just barely knotted; the girl in their cliques at lockers, their eyes communicating everything with just a slight flicker of their mouth in a snicker; the adults, who can't quite figure out what to make of her. A few girls befriend her, and I am grateful to them, grateful that they can reach outside themselves.

I see her, and I think of myself at that age and I think of myself at 29, which was when I had my first child. I was barely ready for the sea change that a child would bring to my life, to our life. There is so much I want to tell her in these weeks before she delivers, but I can't figure out how to say it all. I can't figure out how to distill it all into something simple...something an 8th grader can absorb. Because, for all her maturity, for all the grace with which she is handling this, she is just a thirteen-year-old.

Of the impending Sunday malaise

There are good and bad parts of being a teacher. One of the bad parts is the Sunday malaise. Most Sundays, around noon or thereabouts, I start to get this awful, sinking feeling about the coming week. It was really bad when I was single, and it always sucks more when you hate your school/administrators/whatever. However, even when you like those parts, it seems to hit. When I had a boring textbook publishing job and I sat at a desk all day and could go out on weeknights, I didn't seem to get it as much. It is also always much, much worse when you have papers or tests to grade.

It's also worse after a long vacation. You are sort of excited to go back: maybe you missed your students, maybe you look forward to the routine again, maybe you look forward to wearing something other than pajamas. All the same, you also dread the routine: the waking up early, the making-of-lunches, the squirrelly kids who are out of practice with the desk-sitting, seeing the other faculty who are sort of lame, the getting home and rushing and early bedtimes.

The Sunday malaise looms, and it is only Saturday.