Things to do by 30: Challenge 4: Love Someone So Much It Breaks Your Heart

Love someone so much it breaks your heart.

When I first began making my list of Things to do by 30, I knew I needed to include something about love on there.  You see, I’ve lived until almost 30 and never truly had my heart broken by love.  I’ve felt bitterly devastated, broken into tiny pieces, mournful, and achy, but I’ve never felt like romance had ever broken my heart the way it would if I’d truly felt the mad love they say we should feel. 

But how could I write that down?  First off, the implication of experiencing that meant falling deeply in love, and then having it ripped away.  Which I was not down for.  And secondly, the fact that it’s what an ambiguous “they” says “should” happen automatically means it’s something I should be cautious about aiming for.  Lastly, love cannot be planned.  I’ve known that from a very young age; you cannot plan when and how and if you will fall in love and how the love will go. 

So I didn’t put it on my list.  But I knew it was something that should (the real should, not the they say it should kind of should) happen in my life, and felt pretty certain that living until 30 without feeling that was wrong. 

And then I had a classroom emergency.  It was after the moments of kneeling on the floor next to a student I adore who had overdosed on painkillers by the second hour of the day and was having a seizure in my arms on the floor of a computer lab; after having a class watch as I told him, “just keep breathing, baby” over and over as he struggled to do so; after my first call to 911; after feeling his jaw lock shut stronger than my now spit-covered fingers could ever pry open; after I saw the police take over the situation and hold my boy’s head and get my class to the library; after the paramedics pulled up to the curb and my only coherent thinking was “I thought he was joking.  Save him.” on repeat; after composing myself before the library doors where my stunned class waited for me; after walking in and seeing their faces and losing my voice and having them hug me; after all of us sitting in islands for a couple minutes before I got chess from the librarian and we pressed ourselves into little worlds together around two tables; after sobbing in my mentor’s arms and then getting through the rest of the day…after all of that, as I stood before my stove at home baking brownies for my whole students I would see the next day I realized I loved so much more deeply than I could ever have realized before that day. 

I do love madly- my mistake has simply been was thinking that kind of love had to be romantic.  What I need to do by 30 is realize the point actually is to love deeply the whole time I am here, from the time my feet hit the ground until they go back into it.  Right through the 30^th birthday, without it being a mile marker of anything more than a piece of cake.  And to be ok with the fact that the nonromantic love might break my heart even more than a significant other ever possibly could, because the week after having an ambulance carry away one of MY kiddos has ripped my heart open wider than feels comfortable.  More open and more aching and more of a chasm than could possibly be managed and filled and taken care of.  I spent the week dumping love into every one of the 117 I had left in my classroom, knowing with aching certainty that some hurt just as much as the one we were missing, knowing that I couldn’t possibly love them enough to take that away and having that break my heart just as much as it already had been. 

Needless to say I also slept a lot the rest of the week.  And I gave my dog a lot of hugs.  And I texted my mom, who told me that my heart would adjust and go on and I would be a better person.  And I wanted desperately to be around people, but not to have them talk (which is hard to invite people to do).  And I’m still waiting for my heart to shrink back to size, or at least to stop feeling like a floppy, stretched out balloon in my chest.   

The truth is, maybe after my brother’s death I didn’t think I could feel that intensely again, or I’ve actually spent effort in not doing so.  Regardless, it was altogether new, yet ultimately very familiar to have the heartbreak in my house.  Maybe it’s been with me all along; a dormant, shadowy beast that somehow makes me stronger by making me feel weak. 

Anyway, here’s to love breaking my heart by the time I’m 30.  Turns out it’s happened a couple times, and as much of a better person as it can make me….I’m selfishly hoping it doesn’t happen again anytime soon. 

Transmission ended.  (Have I mentioned I also have spent a lot of time comfort watching Stargate Atlantis?)

   

Things To Do By 30, Challenge 3: Learn to Budget

3) Learn to Budget.

I am not excited about this challenge.  Mostly because I shouldn't be doing it now, at 26.  Utterly ridiculous.   But, I will confess that I want a second dog, and I need to save up for puppy and our future hobbies and needs, and that's just not going to happen unless I start budgeting.  And I hear money management is part of adulting....which don't I need to learn more about in general before 30??

So I got a calendar and wrote down all the due date for all the random things I have lurking in my life.  Loan payments, gas, electric, audible, rent, etc, etc.  I found out these crazy things, like if you want to split the expenses on two paychecks you have to set some aside from one because there are more due dates on the second.  Who knew?!  Well, Sherman said he did, but probably only because he's so particular about Greenie stashes and when they are restocked.

I also got one of those little books they make for the cards.  The ones that look like a checkbook ledger.  And I write in it now, or save my receipts to fill in there within at least a couple days.  A clerk at Safeway complimented this little book, so I know it must be part of proper adulting.

Also, here's to two blog posts on the same day after almost a year of silence.  Good thing I'm feeling far too smug about card booky to note down any complaints on the topic...

-Em

Things To Do By 30, Challenges 1 and 2: Well, read the entry...

Well, really it's challenges 1 and 2:

1) Give my number to a guy.  Just because he seems cool.
2) Draw a picture for a stranger.

I might have combined these. I might have drawn a self-portrait with my face looking as awkward as possible (thank you mirrors and images of Zooey Dechanel for helping make this possible) and holding a card with my number on it.  Above it, I might have written that it was a picture of me awkwardly giving him my number.  There might have been other notes (mostly about how stinkin' hard it is to draw hands).

I also may have made extreme eye contact while placing this folded treasure in his hand and saying, "open it later" in true middle school style, before scampering off with my friends to drink cider and watch darts.  It's possible I felt incredibly brave after this.

It's yet to be seen if it actually makes me braver about talking to strangers, or ever being public with my drawing again.

One other notable events from the night: I wont Battleship....the final spot to hit and sink and end the game? I 1.

It was a glorious night at Hops on Birch.

-Em

Hormones...?

 We’ve spent a lot of time this year learning about the different stages of development our future students will go through, physically, mentally, and emotionally.  So, having been surrounded by that, I should’ve realized sooner how much of a crucial moment we are all going through ourselves as people in their early 20’s making the transition into the real world.  For myself, I’ve known about the real world in the sense that its there and will contain ___, ___, and ___ factors.  I’ve known it’s been waiting, and that with graduation I will be bumped out into it in a real and terrifying way; as a teacher, as someone who should be solid and have a stable life base to stand on for the students, I should have it all figured out by now, right?

Yea, feel free to insert a laugh track there. 

The thing is, I have practically nothing figured out.  It took me months to figure out my life with a dog in it, it’s not like I’m flexing giant change-is-easy muscles.  Plus, it’s being in a new situation and time in my life, just when I thought I had undergrad figured out, boom, here we are in grad school and I’m 5 months away from job hunting for reals.  That’s what scares me, learning to live a healthy adult life, learning how to do all the stuff I want to and having the guts to go for it without falling apart.  I have a lot to explore and do, I’m not sure what direction I want to go in, where I want to apply, where I want to live, what is really important to have where I live for my first job.  For the first time in college, I am not drooling over the idea of being in a relationship. 

Now, this is actually the topic of this blog post, because I’m figuring out some stuff about that.  I feel so up in the air right now that I want to be selfish; I want to figure out what I want without any influence or pressure from an outside obligation.  Unless it’s from Sherman.  But let’s be real, he’s requests are that we go for lots of walks and that he gets 10 Greenies a day. I just want to survive this year and wade through the possibilities of where Sherman and I will live next year, and that’s it.  In fact, when I was asked last week if I was married, I didn’t even feel an inner qualm about saying I was single. 

Granted, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I want in that regard, and while I want a family in the future, I know I am not guaranteed to ever get that.  I do not want my identity and self-esteem tied up in something that isn’t guaranteed to happen, and I definitely don’t want to be so desperate for it that I don’t wait for the right person.  I want to be completely alive in my own life, out and doing things and meeting people and laughing and loving my friends and family.  That way I figure, if I’m totally alive and available, love will find its way in when it’s the right time.

So that’s the base I’ve built up from, and while I’m disappointed my program isn’t entirely made of single men (well who wouldn’t dream of that, right? ;), I don’t feel like my quality of life is suffering from it.  In fact, what actually bothers me is that the people who are single in the group seem very depressed about it.  I was under the impression that the early 20’s were fun and flirty and for exploring the dating world.  And then my Facebook feed started filling up with white dresses and babies and I realized… whoa, we’re at that age?? 

And a lot of my friends are feeling it.  I regularly weather the transition from, “let’s go out and have fun and flirt and kiss boys!” to a soul-searching gaze and “do you think I will ever get married??”  Friday night, I had a friend tell me it was ok and fun to be single now….but by the time we’re 30…

Now, my response to her was that her self-confidence in singledom shouldn’t have an age expiration date.  She skeptically agreed, and I spent a few days frustrated that girls do that to themselves.  Later, I realized that while I deal with my insecurities over what I want for myself living-wise in the next couple years, my friends are dealing with insecurities about ever finding love.  It’s like this program is preying on our weaknesses, we get tired and stressed and fall down into pits of doubt about something in the future.  We’re all just growing up, and dealing with different aspects of it. 

In fact, one of the books I’m reading has a scientific explanation for what’s going on.  Go science!  And it’s a hormone, of course, one called oxytocin.  Turns out that men and women react different under stress.  According to Mackie Shilstone and his (her?) book, The Fat-Burning Bible,

“Men usually respond with the classic fight-or-flight behavior, increased arousal, and greater risk taking…it is now becoming clear that women more often manage stress by seeking out bonding activities…Oxytocin buffers the fight-or-flight response in women and instead encourages them to care for children and bond with other women…These tending or befriending behaviors cause the body to release more ocytocin, producing a further calming affect.”    

 After reading this, my first reaction was an epiphany about my dog.  As in, probably should have named him Oxytocin and called this blog beingawesomewithoxy.  But then I probably would’ve had a whole different set of readers.  OK, probably for the best.  It also makes sense that this year is the most social I have ever been then too.  Hormones.  It’s all making sense.

Anyway, here we are, we get stressed and men want to be all wild and crazy and women want to cuddle stuff.  Add to that the fact that the people in my program are all working in schools and intensely caring for the lives of over 100 students and it only makes sense that we glom onto the idea of love and relationships, or get dogs and cats, or feel that it might be socially acceptable to ask strangers if they want to be friends. 

Hormones.  In a way, they’ve made me on the same page as my middle schoolers, or at least reminded me to have more patience with other people’s struggles as we deal with our own interesting and complicated age.  So here’s to you early 20’s, you confusing, contradicting, cesspool of fun!

Random Bits of Friday

In class this week I read “Indian Education” (Sherman Alexie) with the two language arts classes I teach a little in.  The prompt I gave one class after we discussed it was to write for 10 minutes on the most important memory from Elementary, Middle School, and High School.

“my favorite memory of elementary was when I threw a chicken nugget at a car.”  Was one of the first responses I read later that day, and I realized there is just something inherently funny about the word “chicken nugget.” 

I am constantly amazed at the importance that a single event can pack in our lives, and the power a few lines can hold.  And because I didn’t get a chance to write during their writing time, and because my pedagogy professor recommended never doing something we wouldn’t ask our students to do, here is my ten minute response:

Langell Valley Kid Education

Elementary School
In kindergarten we had plastic cows, bright black and white, that I came in from recess early to get.  I had a best friend that the other kids teased me about being in love with.  We kept being best friends for the year anyway. 
In third grade we followed the cows to California.  I stole a turkey egg from the turkeys’ nest next door and snuck it into my room to hatch, and then I felt so guilty I threw it away.  I told mom that story recently and she gasped, told me that those turkeys were totally feral and crazy and didn’t live “next door.” 
In fourth grade I went through the self esteem crash they say happens as an adolescent and came home crying every day, sure that everyone hated me.  That summer my brother died and I stopped crying for 500 years. 

Middle School
I met writing, I went back to softball, I was obsessed with otters, I took high school classes, I was called brave for the first time ever; all three years kind of mush together.  I was happy and full of self discovery.

High School
In hindsight, I was in a protected bubble.  After Matt died, many people stepped in to watch me.  I didn’t notice, but now I know my big cousins were there, watching my back in math and science, protecting me in the hallway.  All I thought about was being totally, totally perfect.  



Why is it that we always write about the sad or melancholy bits?  Are they somehow more potent and universal? 

Anyway, here's some more class updates, mainly that.....they loved zentangles!!  See below :)


The teaser I put on the board for class today


Doing a step by step on the board


A couple students' work!  One was left on the board for us, and one I snagged before the student could throw it away (his inner perfectionist rioted at any error - even though he took on the hardest part of the tangle on his own....) and now its celebrating on the wall!


This is another journal prompt product - the question was their prompt and the responses are compiled from journal entries and class discussion.



besos y abrazos
Emma

Campesino Ghosts

When I got home for Thanksgiving Break, Mom had a copy of Translation Nation (by Héctor Tobar) waiting for me.  As soon as I read the subtitle, “Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States,” I was thinking of the potential there for my future teaching or sharing with students.  So far, I haven’t been let down, and just the references Tobar drops have had me thinking; rummaging Google images for Skid Row in Hollywood, Diego Rivera’s murals in Mexico City, and Che’s signature dashing beret and beard combo.

What really got me thinking though, was the theme of the campesino (person of the country) as he exists in the life of the immigrant.  “Los Angeles is filled with people like us,” Tobar writes, “people who have Latin American Villages and peasants hovering around their lives.”  The section goes on to say:

“There are campesinos in our dreams, on our lawns cutting the grass, in the pickup trucks next to us on the freeway, in the picture frames on the walls of our living rooms.  The peasants in the pictures might come from the age of the Mexican Revolution, or they might be twenty-first-century campesinos in villages connected to California by bus lines and extended family relationships.   We can go down below María’s family home and hear roosters crowing at sunrise from backyard chicken coops.  In the newer Mexican Suburbs of Watts and Compton, we can find stalks of corn growing in the front yards, a crop from the old country seemingly about to burst from its cage of wire fencing to populate all the other lawns, and a reminder to all that the gardener or the mechanic inside was once a campesino, and perhaps still longs to be one” (pgs 11- 12, 2005 edition). 

Now what really got me thinking here was that as I read the part about María’s family roosters, my brain immediately jumped to my time in Puerto Rico (walking along streets with the local chickens), and to my own family’s chickens roosting in the front yard.  Maybe, I thought, it is not so much the campesino that we long for, but what he represents.  Maybe it is not the campesino, but the campo.  With the exception of the immigrant who comes to work in agriculture, it seems that most end up looking for work in cities.  The homesickness that moves in then might express itself as stalks of corn in a front yard, or as simple longing for the views and sounds of a place left behind.  We miss where we came from and we are haunted by ghosts of its image.

And I say “we” because it is not just an ailment of immigration across national borders, but one of simple moves across states as well.  You see, the further I get away from home, the more I find my identity revolves around that place in the valley where I grew up.  Spanish seems to grasp this concept better than English in the way it says “I am from __” as “soy de __,” or literally, “I am of __,” because to be from a place is to be a product of it and to be a piece of it.  We have not truly left that place and we are not “from” it, we are of it and we carry it with us.  

Often, I think all of this is one of the reasons it can be so hard for some to leave a place, and yet why others do.  For me, the decision to move started in early Middle School when my parents told me they wanted me to go to college, but if I wanted it too, then it was going to have to be something that I did for myself.  And they gave me a cow.  After that, the sale of Rosie’s yearly calf went into my savings account for college and I began to think about funding myself. 

By the time I was a senior, my life pointed towards college.  I was being encouraged to go to school and get a degree for something I could always have a job in.  Looking back now, I never realized that the hidden implication of the decree would be that if I pursued that job and that life then I would be leaving.  In an indirect sense, a successful job meant going away from the life I grew up with.  And, wrapped up in sports and school, I didn’t notice for three years what it meant.  When I did, it felt like a decision I had never made and I noticed my own campesino ghosts for the first time. 

Now, I say all this merely to discuss a challenging part about growing up, one that my classmates who chose to stay in our hometown made much sooner than I did; what do we do with our home when we move away and into our own lives?  To me, this seems to be at the heart of many immigration struggles our nation faces today as cultures struggle to find a way to simultaneously assimilate to a new country, and to keep a grip on where they are from.  The product is the first and second generation “American,” still not yet totally sunk into that identity, but far enough in to be unrecognizable to grandparents.  In schools this manifests as the cafeteria tables that end up divided racially, the tables that the staff stare at wondering about the cliques, or the segregation, or why those ____ kids always only sit with each other.  These groups are a totally new creation (which, tada!, is the point of Tobar’s whole book) and no one totally understands what to do with them.  How much to adopt?  How much to move away to?  How much to move back?  How much to keep?

As a future English as a Second Language teacher, I see the struggles as ones that all immigrants and first and second generation students, and school systems are having.  I will have students that I need to get producing English successfully enough to be a productive and satisfied part of society, but at the same time I need to support the students’ first language and culture.  Just like students from rural areas struggle with identity in deciding whether to stay or go, ESOL students struggle with identity in deciding how much of their new country to adopt.  All of us are haunted by some kind of campesino ghost.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to any of this, just a lot of questions about the way we long for our ghosts.  I tried to ask Sherman how he felt, and what generation removed he is from his southern Chihuahua roots, but he only woke up long enough to give me a disapproving look… probably for writing blog posts and not lesson plans for my work sample next week.  Yep, the work sample I’m so nervous for that I’m avoiding lesson plans by writing two page blog posts.  However, I refuse to be made to feel guilty by someone who eats enough stuffing from his toys that I often feel as though I am gathering brown teddies bears on our walks.  Not a chance.    

Goodnight all!

Y, para que sepas; soy del valle lleno de ovejas, al lado de un rio perdido. 

Emma

Teaching and Writing

So here I am, only on my second blog post and catching up on lost time…and not going to write anything about Sherman!  That’s alright; just imagine him here, sleeping away on the couch while I clack away at the table, wide awake after a post Thanksgiving dinner nap and thinking back on earlier this term. 

What I’m thinking about is being a practitioner.  This is the way a classmate describes his dedication to continuing to actually do what he is going on to teach.  It seems so simple, but there I was a few months ago, about to be eligible to teach English Language Arts and I realizing that I haven’t done much with writing in so long!  I was thinking this as I drove into town to watch Sandra Cisneros speak at Powell’s.

Now Sandra Cisneros, she is one of my all time favorites, and of all my all time favorites, she is the one I wish I could write like the most.  Her most well known book is probably The House on Mango Street, but I’m a big fan of Woman Hollering Creek and her poetry that I’ve read so far (Loose Woman, and a few from My Wicked, Wicked Ways).  She’s spicy womanhood, creative non-fiction, narrative vignettes, and Spanglish play all in one package, so of course when I heard she was going to be in Portland I got my first ever case of star fever.  Bad enough that when I finally got to get an autograph from her I was practically incoherent….and a friend told me I might as well have asked for a lock of hair.  So much for seeming calm and cool I guess, when the only thing I managed to squeak out is that I can’t wait to teach her stuff in my future classroom, and then hand her a book with someone else’s name in it's second hand cover. 

 

(Here I am getting books signed by Sandra Cisneros!)  

 

Anyway, the point of all this is the feeling that I walked away from that book reading and into the classroom the next day with.  What a change!  After weeks (er, months rather) of slogging my way through homework and class time, my own literary life was pretty dry.  I was able to read some Tony Hillerman to escape, and maybe some subtitles lazily thrown on the TV, but I hadn’t wanted to think and talk about writing the way I did leaving that bookstore in a long time. 

 And who wants that teacher?  The one that sloths around the classroom, tired and distracted by standards and surviving… who would want to learn from her?  It’s so easy to forget that one of the best things I can bring with me is a wild passion for what I want to teach, or rather, it’s so easy to forget what that passion feels like.

 Maybe it’s not even passion totally either, maybe it’s just that teaching is so much like writing in the fact that the more you live, the better you are at it.  With that in mind, I vow to be a practitioner.  I vow that I will keep loving my content area through distractions.  I vow that I will keep letting it heal me and teach me.  I vow that I will give my passion the permission it needs to enter the classroom with me every day to heal and teach others. 

I believe in reading and writing.  I also believe in reading aloud…and Sherman believes he is tired of hearing me read Woman Hollering Creek chapters to him as I make mock lesson plans and practice for reading to a class.  Yep, cool and calm are definitely out the window. 

 

Besos y abrazos,

Emma