At one school today, a girl handed me a typed packet
Her writing, she asked me to read.
Frank, clear references to sexual abuse
more than once, more than one person
and also other hardships
but clear forgiveness.
Positivity
I love my family, she said.
She said she wrote it with her counselor.
I am not worried that she is not receiving support.
I am honored that she offered it to me to read.
At the other school we talk so much about connecting to kids, having a connection
no definition. I know and I do not know exactly what they mean.
I wrote her back a letter to say she writes beautifully and thank you.
Language as simple as 10 and as honest as 22.
She smiled.
Who am I to? But who is anyone to?
I wonder why she offered it, if it was so deliberate, if she likes me or thinks of me as a person, not just a robot in the front of the line.
They did their homework quietly, and I glazed over
wanted to cry with rage
A person, not an abstract person
did that
to
A Child, not an abstract child
That beautiful girl, big like I was, poised beyond her years
but full of attitude, seeking fairness, acting exactly her age.
How Dare....
How, can I discipline this girl when she is rude to me?
To make school a place where rudeness is denied, maybe, is to make school unreal.
And real language, real emotion, lies outside the wide hallways and back with that, and whoever those Hims are.
Compassion, sympathy,
Can I treat her like normal, like average, thriving, happy? and make school a real world where she is really okay?
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Body
I have been thinking about my intestines. They started aching again today. They had churned every day since before I got here, but stopped, two weeks ago, with antibiotics one doctor prescribed and another seemed to think were useless. Said anxiety was tying my stomach up in knots. oh lord, how humiliating, please don't call this Irritable Bowel Syndrome? it makes me feel old and silly, though the pamphlets sound just like me. Stomach-twisting anxiety onset around the age of 20, set off by stress and sugar but ultimately irratic. emotional but real. This is the second time in 10 years I choose to see a diagnosis as a viewpoint. I wish I knew enough about my body to know what to do with this rejection, I wish I had a doctor I could really really trust. My guts flared up with a phone call of scary ambiguous tests, sent from new york. must find new doctor here, ended up with two, one a specialist and one just-someone-general-to-next-time-call. I am assuredly without cervical cancer now, thank goodness, but I'm still not sure even what category of thing is wrong.
I am thinking about my belly. he grabs at it, and I am no longer ashamed. Is that comfort with other, or comfort with self? For years now, I worry, when I get old it will get bigger, I will be one of those inflating old women, not a fragile one whithering away. But for now, it is always the same: I work all the time, I lay in bed all day, I eat too much sugar, I renounce sugar, I drive everywhere, I bike everywhere, but always it stays the same. I am not one of those bodies that rapidly changes.
I am thinking about my identity- it stung when my supervisor said "you are clearly a person who has a lot of stories about themself". Why does that feel like an insult? It is definitely true. My birthday book page said "you are a person who identifies more with what you do than who you are." Across the country from all the things I've done, at a school with high regard to being, this feels like a flaw and feels hard.
I am thinking about my home- tuesday he will move out and I will put all my fabric in color order on my shelves. Nesting. I will organize all of my dry goods in the kitchen. I will put my drawings and tools in the basement. This is the last try, I think, of making it feel like I really live in this house.
I am thinking about my childhood, my freaked out strange analytical child-brain. Just like the children I see every day here, one could not imagine I would be how I am now, but in retrospect it looks inevitable. I am alarmed to be proud of my privileged education, but earnestly grateful for the educators and parents that left me not afraid to be analytical or to be creative. It is the 6 year old illustrating her word problems who, 22, chooses to teach art and math.
I am thinking about my city- nostalgia for memories I once felt so detached from, or even scorned. Ache for the walk across 65th, yearning for the cold pavement and the taxi (ew, really?) to 90th and park. The subway uptown. The bus across the park. Is it just because so many people I miss have returned there this year? Is it just because I can't go for the weekend? I wonder, a lot, what it will feel like to be back there three weeks from now.
I am thinking about my family. I feel not so disconnected from them when I am far away. Signing papers for legal matters I don't understand, and realizing yet another universal obvious: these people are all getting older, and there is no reason to believe I can't know them honestly, and that they wouldn't like me if I told the whole truth. I want(ed?) to see myself as a reject from inherited high society, but that does not make sense with how I aspire to other relationships. I do not believe in cutting ties. The story I should tell about myself, how I want to think of it, begins with those immigrants I know so little about, four generations back. The American dream, lived out through three generations, and me, steeped enough in it to not just take it for granted, but to be cynical of it. to see it as wrong. Meeting so many families, I start thinking about my identity shaping as deliberate shaping of my branch of the family tree. Rich-white-assimilated-jewish-liberal-american heritage, just in being alive I am taking that story someplace. I think about my friend with artist/educator parents. I think: perhaps I will have a daughter like Emma. Perhaps she will have friends like me.
I am thinking about my culture. There are many families like mine, there are parallels. I am part of something, a lot of things, a lot of stories. What a case of american individualism... only in a childhood, city, era like mine could I have believed there was nothing jewish about me. I saw it happen to my friends who moved far away, feeling Judaism through its absence. My best friend at either job is the only other jew I know here. Her mother has a haircut just like my mother's. We don't talk too much about religion, but we both want all the teenagers to sit down around the table together, and somewhere deep in our common aspirations for our work is that something I can't articulate (yet) that we both got from our families. This is not all good, this cultural heritage, but it is also not all bad. And more important, it is unavoidable. If I am struggling with being myself without my context, perhaps I am resisting those less deliberate parts of myself, the things I was born with, the things programmed in to me.
I am thinking about my country. Another obvious realization: the story of America did not end my junior year of high school. I can imagine how this year might be phrased in my history textbooks, and, like everbody it seems, I say 'yes, yes, oh wow, what will happen on tuesday? Do you think he will? Do you think we can?'
I am thinking about the planet. This is how I strive to think. I wish I had a better way than reading, but thats what keeps me going right now. It is fucked up how revved up I get by analysis of bad things to come. Dad's copy of 'Hot, Flat and Crowded' makes me scared but inspired. My gut has said, since I was very young, that something is very wrong. I am still seeking information that fits my alarmed disposition. I did a lot of that last year, in that last phase, and so it feels comforting to learn about big earth problems. This is slightly twisted, but maybe also useful.
On tuesday Kerry moves in to his own bedroom downstairs, and we elect a new president. Is a new era about to begin? I have asked this question many times in the past year of my own life, and the answer is always no. Rachel, you can't name a distinction between today and tomorrow, you can't put your fist down and say 'today it will be easy again.' or 'today I am ready and restless, today it will be hard.' the phases will bleed together, sadness and happiness will each bubble up and quiet down. I want to see my story as no different from THE story, and so the must be, there has to be, some real importance of the big question right now- who will win? This is important to the big picture, and I am wondering what effect it will right away have on me. There are a lot of big questions right now, I feel scared of the things I am realizing, they don't feel unusual enough. The yearn to synthesize is not knew, but the interest-pool has grown. I am struggling to keep up.
I am thinking about my belly. he grabs at it, and I am no longer ashamed. Is that comfort with other, or comfort with self? For years now, I worry, when I get old it will get bigger, I will be one of those inflating old women, not a fragile one whithering away. But for now, it is always the same: I work all the time, I lay in bed all day, I eat too much sugar, I renounce sugar, I drive everywhere, I bike everywhere, but always it stays the same. I am not one of those bodies that rapidly changes.
I am thinking about my identity- it stung when my supervisor said "you are clearly a person who has a lot of stories about themself". Why does that feel like an insult? It is definitely true. My birthday book page said "you are a person who identifies more with what you do than who you are." Across the country from all the things I've done, at a school with high regard to being, this feels like a flaw and feels hard.
I am thinking about my home- tuesday he will move out and I will put all my fabric in color order on my shelves. Nesting. I will organize all of my dry goods in the kitchen. I will put my drawings and tools in the basement. This is the last try, I think, of making it feel like I really live in this house.
I am thinking about my childhood, my freaked out strange analytical child-brain. Just like the children I see every day here, one could not imagine I would be how I am now, but in retrospect it looks inevitable. I am alarmed to be proud of my privileged education, but earnestly grateful for the educators and parents that left me not afraid to be analytical or to be creative. It is the 6 year old illustrating her word problems who, 22, chooses to teach art and math.
I am thinking about my city- nostalgia for memories I once felt so detached from, or even scorned. Ache for the walk across 65th, yearning for the cold pavement and the taxi (ew, really?) to 90th and park. The subway uptown. The bus across the park. Is it just because so many people I miss have returned there this year? Is it just because I can't go for the weekend? I wonder, a lot, what it will feel like to be back there three weeks from now.
I am thinking about my family. I feel not so disconnected from them when I am far away. Signing papers for legal matters I don't understand, and realizing yet another universal obvious: these people are all getting older, and there is no reason to believe I can't know them honestly, and that they wouldn't like me if I told the whole truth. I want(ed?) to see myself as a reject from inherited high society, but that does not make sense with how I aspire to other relationships. I do not believe in cutting ties. The story I should tell about myself, how I want to think of it, begins with those immigrants I know so little about, four generations back. The American dream, lived out through three generations, and me, steeped enough in it to not just take it for granted, but to be cynical of it. to see it as wrong. Meeting so many families, I start thinking about my identity shaping as deliberate shaping of my branch of the family tree. Rich-white-assimilated-jewish-liberal-american heritage, just in being alive I am taking that story someplace. I think about my friend with artist/educator parents. I think: perhaps I will have a daughter like Emma. Perhaps she will have friends like me.
I am thinking about my culture. There are many families like mine, there are parallels. I am part of something, a lot of things, a lot of stories. What a case of american individualism... only in a childhood, city, era like mine could I have believed there was nothing jewish about me. I saw it happen to my friends who moved far away, feeling Judaism through its absence. My best friend at either job is the only other jew I know here. Her mother has a haircut just like my mother's. We don't talk too much about religion, but we both want all the teenagers to sit down around the table together, and somewhere deep in our common aspirations for our work is that something I can't articulate (yet) that we both got from our families. This is not all good, this cultural heritage, but it is also not all bad. And more important, it is unavoidable. If I am struggling with being myself without my context, perhaps I am resisting those less deliberate parts of myself, the things I was born with, the things programmed in to me.
I am thinking about my country. Another obvious realization: the story of America did not end my junior year of high school. I can imagine how this year might be phrased in my history textbooks, and, like everbody it seems, I say 'yes, yes, oh wow, what will happen on tuesday? Do you think he will? Do you think we can?'
I am thinking about the planet. This is how I strive to think. I wish I had a better way than reading, but thats what keeps me going right now. It is fucked up how revved up I get by analysis of bad things to come. Dad's copy of 'Hot, Flat and Crowded' makes me scared but inspired. My gut has said, since I was very young, that something is very wrong. I am still seeking information that fits my alarmed disposition. I did a lot of that last year, in that last phase, and so it feels comforting to learn about big earth problems. This is slightly twisted, but maybe also useful.
On tuesday Kerry moves in to his own bedroom downstairs, and we elect a new president. Is a new era about to begin? I have asked this question many times in the past year of my own life, and the answer is always no. Rachel, you can't name a distinction between today and tomorrow, you can't put your fist down and say 'today it will be easy again.' or 'today I am ready and restless, today it will be hard.' the phases will bleed together, sadness and happiness will each bubble up and quiet down. I want to see my story as no different from THE story, and so the must be, there has to be, some real importance of the big question right now- who will win? This is important to the big picture, and I am wondering what effect it will right away have on me. There are a lot of big questions right now, I feel scared of the things I am realizing, they don't feel unusual enough. The yearn to synthesize is not knew, but the interest-pool has grown. I am struggling to keep up.
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