December 22: Happy Things

Helen said she thought my job would be incredibly hard but potentially rewarding.

It is. Every year it is. Each school is hard in a different way and rewarding in different measures.

Some places made me feel like I was doing God's work, like the school filled with refugees. That was the same school where I met the mom would would eventually be Maeve's godmother. And the same place where I met John, who grew up to be the young man who lived with us in 2013 and 2014 and kind of changed me forever without meaning to and then he went and died of a preventable genetic flaw instead of how we all thought he would, of a drug overdose or getting shot or pushed out of a car over the edge of a bridge into the icy water.

Some places were easier than that. Not as hard but not as rewarding. But the last school brought Maggie into my life and I'm still writing beautiful letters of recommendation for some of those students.

Names stay with me over time. Some of them, I know their stories after our time together. Efi went to college and is a film maker. Grant is deciding between some very prestigious universities and the Naval Academy. Bao is friends with me on Instagram and has a chow chow and a tall boyfriend. Joe and his wife just had their first baby. Pete lost both feet while jumping a train and now owns a boat off Vancouver Island. Rachel is happily married and works with the elderly as a social worker. John died. Arlanda died. Greg died.

My public school retirement system sent me a letter this summer letting me know I'm eligible for retirement in 15 years, but that it would be better to wait for 17 or 18 years. How many more names? How many more terrible colleagues and stories you have to laugh at so you don't cry and kids you just want to take home and let them take a long hot shower and moms who yell at you and moms who cry and moms who never answer the phone and wondering how Jack is doing out there in the world, hoping that this year will be easy or that kid will graduate or this family won't leave and people telling me my job is a vocation when really I think it's just a job, a hard job, a job that nobody who has anything else to do should ever try to do because it obliterates you while I watch my spectacular young co-teacher with the incongruous Hispanic last name but the blond hair and pale green eyes burn to a crisp while I stand there unable to help him except to tell him he's phenomenal and it's time to go, go somewhere easier where the rewards are greater and the challenges are fewer because baby, you don't have to work so hard getting so little back don't waste what you have on a school that doesn't care but some of them, him included, want so desperately to stay because they were broken and put themselves back together and want to make this true for others and it's such a delicate dance between saving yourself and saving the world one person at a time and sometimes kids even die on you.

Don't teach.

Or if you do teach, teach all the way.