My Real Life

My monkeys are all on the cusp of new ages. February brings a change of age for all of them, and even though the big joke in our house is “Wanna see Mom cry? Talk about us growing up and leaving!” the “growing up” part is actually…well…growing on me.

Let me brag a little first, and then I’ll get to the point.

This month will see Monkey Girl turn 21 and in the beginning of the second half of her junior year in college. She’s almost done with her nursing program, working at a physical rehab facility and doing the job she was born to do. She’s the president of her sorority, she has good friends, and she’s happy. Not all the time, because she’s human, but she’s figured out how to “adult” and she’s doing pretty well at it.

Next week, Monkey Boy turns 18. We just had his Senior Night for his high school hockey team and he plays in his last high school games ever over the next week. He has a job and has applied to colleges and is making decisions that will follow him into adulthood. He has good, solid friends. He’s mature. He’s responsible. He’s growing into the man that I had always hoped that he would.

As of this blog post, Baby Monkey is now 16. He gets his permit next week and will start driving. Baby Monkey is 16. I needed to write it again because it’s still hard for me to grasp. The kid who made daily costumes for himself out of construction paper is 16. But while he’s no longer parading around Target in a Batman costume, he still remains true to himself. He never does something to follow the crowd. My quiet, sweet, hilarious boy has found his friends and is living his life, as always, on his terms.

And by the end of this month, Tiny will be 11. He wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye when I started this blog, and yet, here we are. Next year he will be in middle school, changing classes, using a locker, and changing for gym. He’s still the most sensitive of the monkeys, but man oh man, is this kid a love. He never wants to see someone with hurt feelings, tries to be kind whenever he can, and makes me want to wrap him in bubble wrap to protect him from a world that has shown him, on more than one occasion, that kindness isn’t always returned.

I used to really struggle with the monkeys getting older. I missed having babies in the house. Missed the innocence. Missed the firsts and dreaded the lasts. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not a big fan of the lasts, but I’m realizing that with lasts comes a different kind of firsts. Last day of high school leads to the first day of college or the first day of whatever path your child chooses to take. Last night in a dorm room leads to the first night in a new apartment. Last time I drive them somewhere leads to the first time they drive there all by themselves.

But there’s something else. And it’s something that is so good and so unexpected for me. And that is how much I enjoy hanging out with these monkeys as almost grown-ups. We have real conversations about things that don’t include cartoon characters or silly songs. It turns out, we all have the same sarcastic sense of humor, and we laugh together…a lot. We talk about world events, the books they are reading for school, sports. We have group text chats. They have different perspectives on some things than I do and I love hearing them explain how and why they came to their conclusions. I really like the people they have become.

Oh, and…

WE DON’T HAVE TO ACCOMPANY THEM TO THE BATHROOM.

Listen, I do sometimes long for those little faces, snuggling those little bodies, and hearing those little voices. But I’ve made my peace with the growing up because there’s joy to be found in this space, too.

The leaving? That’s one I’m still coming to terms with and think it will be awhile before I get there. I don’t love not seeing Monkey Girl for months at a time, and I’m not looking forward to Monkey Boy leaving in the fall. Even Monkey in the Middle is spending more time out of the house with marching band and jazz band and pit band and movies with his friends, etc, and I miss having him around. I miss them when they go away. A lot. I know, I know…it means I did my job and gave them wings to soar and blah blah blah blah blah, but I don’t like it.

Like I said, I’m not there yet with the leaving. And having Tiny means they aren’t all going right away anyhow.

But the growing up? It’s not so bad.

The world is covered in ice today, and the trees that have stood brown and bare and ugly since the end of November are suddenly sparkling and shining and brilliant.

Everywhere you look, people are sharing photos of their yard, their street, their neighborhood, and captions all relate to the beauty of what the picture shows.

And they aren’t wrong. It is absolutely beautiful.

Yet, as I stood outside, today, looking at the blinding reflections of the sun off of the branches, all around me, the air was full of the sounds of the branches, crackling and groaning under the weight of the ice.

That beauty is heavy and it threatens to bend and break even the strongest of branches that have held their own for hundreds of years.

As I stood out there, looking around, I began thinking about how heavy the metaphorical beauty we wear in public can be and how it so paralleled the weight of the ice on the trees.

The ice is like the facade we show to people. The happy Facebook photos. The silly Instagram posts. The funny tweets. That public face we show to the world where we pretend like everything shines, like we are always smiling; that we are always radiating patience and goodness.

I was thinking how heavy that can be to maintain. The time we spend in figuring out just the right word to make the sentence perfect, or the amount of times we retake a photo until we are satisfied that people will look and approve.

It’s heavy. It’s a heavy weight that can pull down on our minds and hearts and souls until we bend. Until we break under the pressure.

And we might bend. And we might break.

But the hope is that our core…the older, brown, solid wood that hides beneath the gleaming ice…can stay strong. That we can weather the storm and shake off the momentary glitz and glamour, and go back to the true us.

And that we can learn to love our true selves enough to share that with the world

Our knots and decay. Our good and our bad. Our beautiful days and our ugly moments.

That’s the real beauty. Not the fleeting moments that we crafted or had to capture before they were gone. The every day. The ins and outs. The ups and down.

Those things are beautiful because they are relatable. They are the things we all have in common.

They are the human experience and there is nothing more worthy of sharing than that.

Because the ice? It will be gone tomorrow. But those trees? They’ll last so much longer, and it’s the imperfections in those bare branches where the true beauty lies.

We dropped Monkey Girl off at college today.

When I started this blog, Monkey Girl looked like this:

Needless to say, she doesn’t look like that anymore.

She’s 18 and grown and as of today, gone.

Not for good, obviously, but if you’ve gone to college yourself, you know that, while you will come home again, it will never quite be the same.

I miss her.

I went to put a dish in the dishwasher and found that it was full of clean dishes and immediately called out for her to empty it, because that’s been her job for the past ten years. But she’s not here tonight.

I miss the way she would call out “Marco!” when she would get home from work or school to find out where I was in the house. Or, she’d yell it when we were at the store and got separated. I’d yell back “Polo!” and she’d come and find me.

I walked by her room on her way to mine, this afternoon, and realized she had left her light and her fan on. I turned them off and smelled the strawberry scent of the air that is pure Monkey Girl and wondered how long before that scent goes away.

I know that, tonight, she won’t be coming in to lay on my bed when she comes home from work or hanging out with her friends and updating me on her day.

I just miss her presence, tonight.

And I know it will get easier.

I’ll always miss her when she isn’t here, but it won’t always ache.

She’s gonna love college. She is going to make friends and have fun and learn and grow and be independent and is going to do everything that her father and I have raised her to do.

She has already texted that she had made some friends and was enjoying their company and having a good time, and that made me so, so happy to hear.

It’s going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. She’s already fine.

I know I’m being melancholy and dramatic.

But tonight, I’m gonna wallow a little.

Because she was my first baby.

And I miss her.

I’m not sure what it is about a good dystopian story that grabs me.

Whether I’m reading it or watching it, the stories always make me stop and think.

Maybe I love them because they let me think that, as bad as things are here, in the real world, they aren’t THAT bad.

I know part of me is attracted to the idea of having to be creative to get by. Saving money, making do with what you have, etc. 

I also love books about the depression, so that speaks to that piece of it for me.

Regardless of why, the books that I tend to devour the fastest are those about a post-apocalyptic world. Or a world that is like ours, just different in some intangible way.

I do the majority of my dystopian reading and watching in the summer. It just feels like the right time for it.

I just read the “The Selection” trilogy in two days. I picked up the next two books in the sequel series this morning and will read those as soon as humanly possible.

One of my favorite YA dystopian series was the “Life as We Knew It” series. Loved books one through three. Wanted to throw book four out the window.

When I finished reading them, I was ridiculed by my friends because I immediately put together an apocalypse bin in the basement with some canned goods, a first aid kit, and a few other items, in case the moon accidentally did get hit out of orbit by a passing meteor.

On Netflix, I loved “The Rain,” and “The 100,” “3%,” and am currently obsessed with “The Society.”

So, anyway, with a month and a half left of school, I am looking down the barrel of two months of sitting at the town pool, hiding my face in a book so my students don’t have to be embarrassed that their teacher is ten feet away from them at the community pool.

That means I have time. Time to read. 

And time to watch, as, instead of listening to music, some days, while I work on the yard and the “garden” I have Netflix playing on my phone. 

So, suggestions, please.

While the majority of the dystopian fiction I’ve read is young adult, I’m not entirely tied to it being only for teens. Adult dystopia can work, as well.

I need titles, friends.

Of books or shows I need to see that are dystopian in nature. Books I can get from the library. Shows or movies have to be available from Netflix or free on Amazon, as I don’t have Hulu.

Feed me, people!!!

Yes, in keeping with the theme of the latest anthology I have contributed to, “Will Work for Apples,” this is a post about teachers, but really just about one teacher, in particular.

Mrs. Carol Tribus, life-changer.

I was a good student in school. Not a great student, but a good one.

I definitely had the brains, I just didn’t always choose to apply them in an academic way.

I was the kid who teachers would say “If she would just use her powers for good and not evil, there’s no telling what she would be capable of.”

Studying was just not my jam, and I spent more time trying to get out of it than I did actually doing it.

I had good teachers, growing up.

Teachers who were fun, who were challenging, who were engaging.

I had a really solid educational background, I just didn’t choose to be everything I could be with it.

My biggest downfall, however, was math.

I get math. I love math. I am INTO math.

I just don’t have the kind of math mind where I can do it all in my head, or I can see the problem and then immediately see the answer.

It takes me a minute, and I need to write it down.

Because of this, my math grades were usually B’s, instead of A’s.

Respectable grades, no doubt, but not where they could have been if everything wasn’t always based on how fast you could get it done.

And then 8th grade Algebra rolled around and I wound up sitting right behind Michaela and I spent the entire year passing notes and drawings to Michaela and talking, instead of following the copious notes that Mr. Rutkowski was writing on the board in his unmistakeable, all caps, handwriting.

I earned a C that year, in Algebra and my parents said no way was this going on my permanent record, and that I would have to retake the course as a freshman.

I was not pleased, but what choice did I have? In those days, the parents made the rules, not the kids (in our house, the parents still make the rules, but I know way too many homes where the opposite is true) and so off to Algebra I went for the second year in a row.

Enter Mrs. Tribus.

Mrs. Tribus started off our class on the first day of school by calling out a long, rambling math problem that we would have to solve in our heads.

Fantastic. Exactly the thing that I struggle with, and this is how day one begins?

Turns out, that was how every day began in her class.

“5 plus 7 times 3 minus 20 divided by 8”

And hands would go up and kids would be shouting out answers with glee.

And I would sit there. Silent.

Some days, they would be short problems, like that one. Sometimes they would go on for a full minute before she would stop and call for an answer.

A few weeks in, she kept me after class for a second and said that she noticed I never participated in that part of class.

“Yeah, I’m not good at math. This is my second time taking this course, and I still don’t get it. I can’t do the math in my head like that,” is what I told her.

She told me that it was too early in life to decide I wasn’t good at something and gave me some tips about how to do those types of problems in my head. Visualize them on the paper, think of your ready math facts, etc. She said that the next day, she was calling on me for the answer whether my hand was up or not, because she knew I knew the answer.

I literally didn’t sleep that night, worrying about the stupid math problem at the beginning of class. I played sick in the morning, but my Mom was a teacher, and so if there was no vomit actually coming out of my mouth, I was going to school.

I had her class at the end of the day, and it was all I could think about.

Note…teacher’s bring their own experiences to their classrooms…I never poo-poo or say a student’s anxiety about an upcoming assessment or lesson is silly. It’s real. I know of what I speak.

When we got to class, everyone was ready for the problem, and I was terrified. I missed the first few numbers that she called out, so I definitely didn’t know the answer. I think she saw the panic on my face, because she suddenly stopped and said “Hang on, I lost my place. Let me start again.”

This time I was ready, and I followed and kept the numbers straight and by the end, had the answer. I knew it was a soft ball question, not as hard as the ones we had worked up to at that point, but I didn’t care. I knew the answer.

I raised my hand and she called on me and I confidently said the answer. And I was right.

It may seem like a small thing, but I can’t even begin to tell you the difference it made for me.

I didn’t always raise my hand, and I didn’t always get the answers right. But I tried. And I used her methods and tips and tricks, and it started to come a little easier to me. I started to enjoy math again, and started to look forward to the end of the day.

When I had questions, I would ask for help, and she would show me that I was on the right track, just needed a shift in my thinking.

When I would get back a test that I had done well on she would write “I”m so proud of you!” and if I didn’t do as well, she would write “See me” and she would show me what I had done wrong so that I could do it better next time.

Throughout the year, my confidence built, and I remembered everything I had always loved about math. By the end of the year, I found myself turning around and helping the kid behind me when he was stuck, or leaning over to whisper how to solve a problem to the girl across the row.

I got my math groove back. And I earned an A in the course.

For the next two years, I had a different teacher, as I took Algebra II and Geometry. Totally different kind of math, and I earned a B. This, too, was an excellent teacher, but spacial things like Geometry and where to put the furniture in a room, are just not my thing.

Example A: Every room in my house.

Senior year, I took Trigonometry and wound up with Mrs. Tribus as my teacher again. And as we learned foreign words like sine and cosine and tangent, I rocked it.

And when I didn’t, she helped and guided and gave me confidence.

She asked me to help kids who were struggling, and I did.

And my best friend and two cute boys were in that class, and although we chatted and passed notes and giggled, we also learned. We learned all of it.

Toward the middle of the year, Mrs. Tribus asked me to stay after class and asked what I was planning on studying in college. I told her that I was going as a vocal and piano performance major and she said that was wonderful, but wondered if I would consider at least minoring in math.

Excuse me?

Like, make math a main course of study in college?

I said that it honestly hadn’t crossed my mind, and she told me that I had a wonderful math mind and that she actually saw me as a math teacher in the future.

What?

Me? A math teacher?

She was adamant about it, and I said I would consider it.

I ended up with an A in Trigonometry, that year, and went to college and majored in Music and minored in Education. After freshman year, I started to think about what I could really do with a music degree and switched to music education. Because once she put that idea about teaching in my ear, I couldn’t shake it.

Then, I began to see music programs being cut all over Ohio, where I was in college, and self-preservation won out and I switched to history education, and never looked back.

But, math never left me.

In my first teaching job, it was a residential school and I taught all subjects to a group of high school girls.

My favorite thing to teach them?

Math.

In my first long-term teaching position, I taught social studies, but then got moved to science and taught that for five years. My favorite topic to teach in science? Chemical equations, because, math.

I have now been teaching history for almost more years than I can count (okay, I CAN count them, because I rock at math), but when someone leaves an Algebra worksheet in the copier, while my copies are running, I complete the worksheet. I love to help with math homework, until I can’t, because math is super different today than it was when we were in school.

But the teaching? That’s all her.

Yes, yes, I come from a long line of teachers.

But I never thought of it as something I could do, or even as something I wanted to do. Until Mrs. Tribus said it was who I was. It was what she saw in me.

And you know what? She was right.

It 100% is who I am.

I love my job. I love the students, I love the subject, I love the people with whom I work. I love the moments, every day, where someone gets it. Where someone tries. Where someone fails, but they pick themselves up to do it again. I love everything about teaching.

And I truly believe that I was led to this profession by Mrs. Tribus, so this is my public thank you to her.

I’ve thanked her before.

When Kim and I graduated, we gave her a picture frame that said “The Wind Beneath Our Wings” because she inspired us both so greatly. Mrs. Tribus was invited to, and came to, my wedding. We play Words With Friends against each other (when I remember to open the app). I teach with her niece in the same school where I earned that C in Algebra, which propelled me into her class and her into my life.

So, yes, I’ve thanked her before.

But I’m not sure you can ever really thank a teacher who makes a difference in your life enough.

So, thank you, Mrs. Tribus. And just know, that my story is most likely one of a hundred stories of students whose lives you changed for the better.

At 47 years old, there are quite a few things that I can say with utter certainty.

I don’t like coffee.

I do like super hero movies.

I will not eat liver (even with fava beans and a nice chianti).

I’m devastated by the near-end of Game of Thrones.

I love teaching 8th grade.

Oh, my friends, 8th grade is my niche.

I love those kids, their quirks, their drama, their chaos.

And so, I wrote a little something about how much I enjoy 8th grade, and someone liked it enough to put it in an anthology about teaching.

Remember how much you all enjoyed the first anthology I was a part of?

I Just Want to Pee Alone?

(If this is news to you, go ahead and click the link and buy the book…you won’t regret it)

Well, Will Work for Apples is put together by the same brilliant mind that brought you IJWTPA.

It’s a collection of 39 essays about teaching and teachers.

It is written by parents, by educators, by homeschoolers, and by people whose lives were changed by that one teacher who believed in them.

Some of the stories are heartwarming, and some are hilarious.

My particular essay is about my love for 8th grade and some of the unforeseen issues we’ve run into on our 8th grade trip to D.C. It’s a testament to 8th graders who just roll with the punches and make the best out of every situation.

I sincerely hope you buy it, read it, review it, and tell people about it.

Amazon

Nook

Kobo

iTunes