All About Angst

While I'm away and taking a break from writing, I hope you'll take a look back and read something you missed, or forward to a friend...Denise James


All About Angst: A Face of Race, Write Your Life, Alice-Not-in-Wonderland

More on Authentic Happiness

In our short four-session class on Authentic Happiness, our teacher Ben tried to give us a smattering of the related philosophies.  One of his favorite’s was Dr Martin Seligman, a promoter of positive psychology and author of Authentic Happiness and Flourish.  Seligman advocates well-being through the acronym PERMA:

    Positive emotion (I thought of the palm reader telling me to smile more)

    Engagement

    Relationships

    Meaning or purpose

    Accomplishment or achievement

Through my writing I’m finding so much of what Seligman says we need.  Certainly I’m feeling a deep sense of engagement with the writing and with what it requires both practically and emotionally.  This blog is the first time I’ve made a commitment to myself and kept it.  While I pretty much always keep all my commitments to others, I don't keep my commitments to myself.  This is a first.

I feel a sense of relationship and connection because I'm more connected to all of you who are reading — even those I don’t know elsewhere in the world. In addition to the regulars in Russia, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany and Chile — recently there have been a few in Hungary, the Palestinian Territories, Australia, and the Philippines — though I seem to have lost connection to my readers in the UK. Still, your emails and comments let me know we are connecting.

Given that I am tech-challenged, for me there’s a great sense of accomplishment at having created a blog — and at seeing the numbers rise. (Sixty posts thus far, 6500+ pageviews!)

And when it comes to meaning and purpose — well, I do wonder if looking back is actually helpful.  Does it makes sense to rehash what was and what wasn't?  What do you think?

For more on authentic happiness, our class watched a TedTalk by Brené Brown, a research professor, on the power of vulnerability.  It's full of insights about hurt and shame and how our society doesn't deal well with negative feelings.  Every time I listen to it, I get something good out of it.

And speaking of listening, my therapist recently gave me some profound advice on how to improve the way I relate to my newly adult children. 

    “They want your engagement emotionally, not practically."  (Translation: They’re generally not looking for my advice.) 

    and her most valuable insight —

   “During this period of transition, you need to have BIG EARS, small mouth.”

That is great advice.

I've decided that for me there is value in looking back.  Until I understand, acknowledge, celebrate and/or mourn the events of my past, how can I fully move forward?  Through this writing I'm going to try to do what Brené Brown says in her talk  —  

“Lean into the discomfort.”

Maybe in your way, you will too.

The Turnaround

To fully understand and perhaps appreciate this post, you need to have read Falling Short Part One and Part Two...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
I'd been gone from my class for over a month. My world was now consumed with breastfeeding, changing, bathing, and loving two babies. We were planning to move out of the city.  Things were in flux.

When the phone rang I was surprised it was Judy Budd, my principal.

"You'll never guess who marched himself into my office today." she said. I could hear the grin on her face through the telephone.

"Who?"

"James Walker."

James did everything in his power to avoid the principal's office but he inevitably landed there.

"James ?" I asked in shock. "Why ?

"He said,

'If you don't move me outta that room I'm gonna get in big trouble.' Can you believe it?"

I couldn't. I could not believe it.

"What did you do?"

"I moved him into Cindy DeJoie's room."

I smiled from ear-to-ear. Cindy was called "the drill sergeant" by the rest of us. If anyone could keep James in line — it would be her. She was young, tough, caring. A great teacher.

"You have to hand it to him," Judy said instructively, "It was a pretty mature thing to do."

So. There was hope for James Walker after all.

And for me.

Stuck

I wrote this piece a few years back.  I forgot about it.  I just came across it.  It still seemed relevant.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Why is it that whenever I have this great brainstorm — this real revelation that I feel will open the door to all that I desire — I find out that someone’s already had that same enlightenment and it’s no longer a big deal?  Why is that?  That never happened to my sister.  She’d have these incredible light bulbs go off — have a spectacular idea that no one was doing.  It was pristine — still undiscovered.  But she didn't act on them.  She just talked about them, got you excited, and then after a while, when you realized she wasn't actually going to move on her idea, then you’d start to read about it or hear about it on TV or be startled when it was the cover story on some magazine touting the idea as the next great thing. 

This happened a lot over my lifetime with my sister.  First it was personal shopping and doing errands and things for other people who were too busy to do these things for themselves.  Then it was bag lunches and gourmet take-out.  She was convinced that people were sick of the same old lunch stuff and if you packed a good old-fashioned bag lunch and went to an office building and offered them for sale, you couldn’t go wrong — a few years later the box-lunch craze took off and is still a staple of office meetings, field trips, etc.  Whenever I saw her ideas realized by someone else, it hurt me.  It hurt me that she didn’t act on what she intuited…which is why when I was finally resting at the end of my Nia class at the Y — after a challenging body movement session patterned after different martial arts genres, after I’d moved muscles I didn't know I had and was thankful to be meditating at rest on my mat, thankful I’d made it through another class and gotten some exercise for this out-of-shape-over-weight body — that the idea came to me … STUCK.  That would be the name of my book!  The book that I’d been thinking about for years and years and years.  The collection of creative non-fiction that I’d been writing but never doing anything with. 

This fall I was laid-off from work and I thought, "Now’s the time.  Now’s when I should work on that collection of my writing and put those pieces into some kind of order that makes sense."  But organizing them was the hard part.  What unites them?  What’s the thread that weaves through them, other than they’re about me and my life experiences.  And then there it was …"stuck.”  They were all about being stuck in a place that trapped one from moving forward — toward happiness, fulfillment, contentment, satisfaction, pleasure.  It seemed it wasn't only me that had these issues.  


I’d recently been on an informal women’s "retreat" and though I’d met these women a year ago, I barely knew them — save for knowing the most intimate fears of each.  That’s what happens in one these gatherings — you get a chance to open and unload the absolute best and worst you have to share and you get feedback and nurturing and a kick-in-the-butt and whatever else you might need because that’s what we’re all there for.  And then, you all leave and drive or fly back to where you came from and hole up for another year, stuck in the life you’re living and not really making progress.  


Oh, there are always one or two women who have made progress.  And that’s what you yearn for.  Someone else’s success at this life could translate to yours!  You might get the encouragement or the insight you need to make that difference.  But often you don’t.  You keep dreaming about it, pining for it, pondering why it isn't, complaining about the state of things that you can’t seem to change.  SO when I thought of the title STUCK — it seemed miraculous to me; as if I’d found the key to open that long closed door that weighed massively in front of me my whole life.

Charged with this new energy, sure that this title, this title alone would propel me toward the finish I’d long hoped for — I raced to the computer and Googled “Amazon” and typed in “Stuck” and not the first entry, but the second was:

“STUCK:  BREAK OUT OF YOUR EMOTIONAL PRISON AND GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE by John Volkmer   Dog Ear Publishing, LLC (October 25, 2006)

Book Description: STUCK! is a manual with easy-to-follow steps and exercises for those of us who feel trapped in a negative condition which blocks us from moving forward and experiencing an exciting and fulfilling life. Some of the feelings associated with this negative condition may include: I just live day by day and don't make any plans for the future. I don't experience joy in my life. I almost never finish anything I start. I have relationship problems. On some days, nothing is right…” 

Hmmm.  My great revelation was taken.  Teasingly Amazon asked, “Did I mean unstuck?” and that yielded not one, not two, but more than ten Unstuck manuals for how to get things done in one’s life.  Forget my book, I should forget writing, I should just be reading to make things happen.  Finding out about “Stuck” I felt stuck all over again.

Still stuck or unstuck, books or no books, it was up to me.  I had the power or lack of it to make things happen. The thought was paralyzing.

It’s been two days since I began writing this — two days more of being stuck.  I can’t use that title or its reverse.  I’ll have to abandon the idea and find something else to propel me forward, push me to writing what I want to say what I feel will help me and help others.  I don’t know that it will but it seems as if telling your story can produce wonders.

Take Jessica Seinfeld.  She wrote a book, Deceptively Delicious, about sneaking vegetables into your child’s diet — something many, many, many of the reasonably good and nutritionally motivated moms know and do.  A celebrity wife writes the book, it's promoted, and before you know it, she’s on Oprah 1,500,00 copies later!  Why didn't we do that first?  Come to think of it, apparently someone else did — was it copyright infringement?  There was a legal brouhaha.  The other mom’s book, The Sneaky Chef, got some attention — but not a million in sales.

How tough can this book business be?  
In some ways, tough.  Very, very tough.

Mothers and Daughters

Dr. Annie Cotten, a lovely older woman I know who is a licensed marriage and family therapist, shared with me one of her research questionnaires.  Whether you're a daughter or not, perhaps you'll be moved to answer these questions about your relationship with your mom.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

List the event in your life which triggered the most positive (best) event in your relationship with your mother. What specific behavior occurred? How old were you then and where were you on this occasion?

It was the first time I was home from college.  My mother and I went shopping. I was 18 and driving my mother’s yellow Bonneville on Rte 17 in NJ and we were having some conversation when she said, “I think people should live together before they get married.”  I almost drove off the road!   When I said in shock, “WHAT ??”  she said that living together was hard enough and it was better to find out how you really got along BEFORE you got married.  

It FLOORED me.  It was very contrary to her earlier pronouncements when I was in high school that a man and a woman could not sleep in the same room together without having sex — no matter how I tried to convince her that in fact this WAS possible, she just didn't believe it. 

Though I’d always known my mother was forward-thinking, that moment I realized my mother was far more open-minded than I had given her credit for and it made me see her in a very different way.

Now explain the event in your life which triggered the most negative (worst) event in your relationship with your mother? 

I was always disappointed that my parents did not help me financially even though I had been through some very tough times. I had a brother who was constantly a drain on them financially throughout my life — since my tweens. They barely helped me with paying for college, they didn't pay for my wedding.  They didn't even offer us assistance when my husband was unemployed, we had twin babies, and I wasn't working.  Though we never asked, a number of family and friends on both sides sent us money to tide us over.  

When I was in my mid-forties, my mother asked my sister (who was 7-1/2 years older and much closer to my mother) what was I still hurt/angry about all these years later and my sister mentioned this lack of financial support.  My mother’s response?  “Well she never asked.”  When my sister (who lived in California) told me this over the phone, I was infuriated.   I never asked?  I never asked because my brother’s continuous legal issues taxed them so, I felt I couldn't ask.  I didn't want to be a burden. But I expected their help when I needed it; they were the parents, the adults.

Though I never had this experience with my mother (my sister was the conduit of this information) and I never brought it up — it changed how I felt about my mother.  Within a few years my mother developed dementia. I fought for legal guardianship (as my sister was too ill to do this and asked me to) and my mother came to live with us for two 
years until her death but it never seemed “the right time” to bring it up.  


It still hurts and hurts worse to know that my own children may want something from me that I am not giving them.  I hope they ask.  I hope I respond.

Adventures at Finch - That's Entertainment!

Julie was not someone I expected to meet at Finch. In the class behind mine, she had a languid sexy manner that made you think she would meander her way through life mesmerizing you with her Midwestern drawl and her inquisitive way. From Ohio, she was a New Yorker at heart.  She loved,loved, loved Manhattan. She loved the hustle, the bustle, the buildings, and the people.  She loved art, the theater, and fashion.  From the time we became friends, she was forever dragging me to see plays, concerts, movies, or art exhibits — one after another. 

Uptown to the Whitney, the Frick; downtown to Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and Greenwich Village — where we heard Melissa Manchester sing in a small bar with a stage.   In 1971 Manchester had been hired by Barry Manilow and Bette Midler (whom Julie saw on Broadway in the now-famous Clams on the Half Shell Revue) to be a back-up singer, but she was still trying to strike out on her own.  We were close to the stage and I kept saying how small her hands and fingers were.  But her voice was enormous.

1974 was a stellar year for us — January in particular.  From the balcony of the Morosco Theatre, we saw Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, and Ed Flanders in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Three remarkable actors embodying the angst of Eugene O’Neill. Clive Barnes, the theater critic for the New York Times wrote, "This is a landmark production that people are going to talk about for many years. " The cast's portrayals of these flawed and tragic characters was so powerful that people were actually holding their breath during the soliloquies.  I remember thinking, “This is what it means when people say, ‘It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.”

After a seven-year-plus hiatus, Bob Dylan decided to return to the stage and perform with The Band.  One of the concert dates was on Julie's birthday at the end of the month and she was determined we would go. "The tickets were hard to get.  Had to mail in a check and it was a crap shoot.  I mailed the check at five minutes after midnight and didn't get the damn tickets.  A friend knew someone at Madison Square Garden who got us tickets."  Alan Bershaw wrote,  "Over five million paid mail orders were reportedly sent in for the 650,000 tickets available over the course of the [43-day] tour, making them the most in-demand ticket in the history of rock music."   The music was incredible; Dylan was incredible, but what I remember most from that night — it was the first time people lit and held up their Bic lighters (these had just come out in 1973). Everyone holding their flame high to create a sea of tiny flickering lights in the surrounding darkness of that massive arena. 

Here's Redford on our street

Later that year, next to one of the magnificent buildings that was a Finch dorm was the location of a film shoot for Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford on the block!  It was the office where he works at the beginning of the film, a CIA front.  We were all scurrying around, hanging out on 77th Street to catch a glimpse of him and when we did  — he was short!  

After I graduated from Finch and Julie went back to Ohio, I still went to see plays.  In 1976 I saw Equus with Richard Burton.  My sister was a huge fan of Elizabeth Taylor and even though he wasn’t with Liz at the time (he was in a marriage with “Susan”) I still thought it would be great if I could get his autograph for Donna — so along with crowds of others, I waited at the stage door after the emotionally harrowing performances of this disturbing play. [He won a Special Tony for his performance in his limited 14-week run.]

The mob scene was so great that when Burton came out of the door (with publicist and whomever else in tow) people started surging, and he was quickly engulfed by bodies straining to get a glimpse, a touch, a smile. The throng pushed him into a tight channel of humanity between the theatre and his waiting limo. All of a sudden I found myself smashed up against him, face-to-face in the mob. At first I couldn’t say anything because I was so shocked at how short he was!  Only inches taller than me! I was trying to get over my frozen state when he looked me straight in the eyes (his piercing green eyes) and said in his unmistakable Welsh voice, 

“We simply can’t go on meeting this way. Susan wouldn’t like it.”  

And I simply melted. If it hadn't been for the crush of bodies keeping me upright, I probably would've slid to the ground. And then, before I could think to say anything, anything at all, New York’s Finest — mounted on horses came jostling in to break up the crowd and get Sir Richard (well, not-titled yet) to the door of his limo (Susan inside) and whisked away. 

Jules, thank you.  For Melissa, Dylan, Redford, Burton, Warhol — and so much more.

Adventures at Finch - Skating

We’d been ice-skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park. I wasn’t very good at it, weak ankles, but it was fun trying to sail around in the cold crisp air. Liz and I were walking back to our dorm at Finch College on 77th between Park and Madison, wrapped in hats, mittens and scarves.  Liz had her skates slung over her shoulders.  We were almost at 77th St when we saw a very pretty, petite woman walking our way.

“Oh my God, that’s Julie Christie!”

“NO! I can’t believe it!  Let’s talk to her!”  Excitedly Liz and I skipped alongside. 

“Hi Miss CHRISTIE!!! We’re such big fans!” we gushed.

She smiled saying, “Why thank you very much. And where are you off to?

“We’re headed to our dorm, we're in college.” and pointed to Chalk House as we rounded the corner.

“And I am going here,” she announced as she headed for the canopy of the apartment building caddy-corner to ours. The front of the building was lined with limos and very well-dressed folks were getting out of those limos in jewels and furs.

“What’s going on?” Liz asked boldly. 

“A fundraiser. For the next President of the United States!” was Julie Christie’s pronouncement.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“George McGovern of course!” and she steered toward the door and away from us.

We were completely star struck. We could hardly think of one movie Julie Christie had ever been in!  Giggling at our good fortune, we waved goodbye and ran into our dorm to tell everyone. Wow. Julie Christie on our block.   Julie Christie across the street.  

“We have to crash that party,” Liz said with determination.

“Are you kidding?”  I couldn’t believe she even thought that was possible. "There’s a doorman. We don’t have an invitation.”

“We’d have to get dressed, REALLY dressed,” she said ignoring me as she opened her closet door and began searching through her clothes and pulling out her dressiest dresses.

“GEEZ, you’re serious!”

“Yes I am.  Now stop sitting around.  Go get changed.”

I was not believing she meant it. I mean we didn’t even know which apartment!  


I had this chocolate brown midi-dress (which I loved) with a Mandarin collar and a gold and red embroidered dragon on the fitted bodice, with long sleeves and a full skirted bottom that twirled when I spun around.  With heeled boots it was the classiest thing I owned.

“You need jewelry,” Liz directed, “lots of gold jewelry. Borrow some.”

So I went next door where Julie, Peggy and Kathi dumped out their jewelry boxes and plied me with wide hoop earrings, gold cuff bracelets, and chunky rings.

As people gathered in my room watching us put on make-up, someone threw me their long brown suede shearling coat.  In 20 minutes we were ready. I looked the part and Liz did too.

We headed back down, out the front door, across the street. The reason we kept going was that everyone was at their windows watching us. No one believed we could do it.  Not even me.  The first hurdle was to get into the building.

The doorman opened the door.

“The McGovern party?” I said in a questioning voice.

“Eleventh floor." and he waved us toward the elevator. We got in. 


When the elevator door shut we whispered in disbelief, "I cannot believe we got in this building!!!"  and we were laughing when suddenly the elevator doors opened and we were IN the apartment.  No hallway, just in the apartment where someone was waiting to take our coats and hang them onto an already-full garment rack that had been placed just inside the door.  We quickly sobered up. A waiter soon offered us glasses of champagne which we took and sipped, as we slid into the main room. We were trying to lose ourselves in the crowd.  We edged further into the room by a railing, looked down into the sunken living room scouting out the room — looking for Julie Christie. There she was, in the middle, surrounded by people. 

“We have to go and talk to her." Liz was firm.  "We have to." 

So we slowly inched our way toward the knot of people clustered around her waiting for our break.  "Hello, Miss Christie — remember us?” 


We tried to stay totally calm. 

“Well that was certainly a quick change,” as she recognized us from the street.

“We crashed the party!”  We were trying to chat with her easily when I burst out, “God! Is that Maximillian Schell over there?”  (So much for easily.) 

“Yes it is,” she smiled.

I was trying hard to say something meaningful. “I LOVED Fahrenheit 451!  What was it like making that movie?”

“Well, you know it was Oskar’s [Werner] first English film. (No, we didn't know.) So it was a bit difficult for him.” 

We couldn't believe she was talking to us and telling us this stuff!  We couldn’t believe our good fortune. It was beyond belief.  Then we noticed someone with a camera snapping our picture with her and then whispering to someone, who then turned to whisper to someone else.

“Uh-oh — we gotta go — someone’s gonna figure out we don’t belong,” we stuttered. 

As we turned to go, she quickly said, “Now I can’t vote here, because I’m not a citizen — but you can.” 

“Oh, we will!” we called back, as we headed for the elevator to find our coats and escape out of there.

“No one will believe us. No one." Liz said as we scrambled into our coats.  "How can we prove we were really here?”

Quite fortuitously, a waiter walked by with a tray of empty glasses, headed for the kitchen.  “Let’s each take a wine glass!” and so we did.  We each took an empty wine glass as the waiter walked by and after he turned down a hallway, we shoved them in the deep pockets of my borrowed winter coat, took the elevator down to the lobby and went back into the cold, crisp night. 


We were both pretty silent as we crossed the street and headed up to our rooms. People had been waiting at their windows — on watch to see when we would emerge from that building (after having hidden in the lobby or been kicked out by the doorman). We drifted upstairs as if we were skating on ice. Quickly people were surrounding us, trailing behind to hear what happened, now a small crowd. 

“WHAT HAPPENED??!!” everyone asked.

“We talked to JULIE CHRISTIE!” we said in unison.

“You DIDN’T!!” people yelled.

“We did,” we said smilingly — as we each reached into the pockets, held up the wine glasses and watched their faces drop.

About Finch

It was 1971 and I was more than halfway through what started out to be a glorious first year at Northeastern University in Boston.  I’d gone there because it was a co-op (work/study) school — you went to school for five years (“middlers” were between sophomores and juniors) and graduated with two full years of work experience on your resume.  Along with getting an education, I’d be able to work and earn my tuition.  It seemed a great way to get an education. 

Being the first  in my family to attend college, I didn't feel I had anyone I could go to for help.   I soon idolized my RA (a junior!) who took me under her wing and provided me with her affection and guidance.   One day, all of that changed and I transitioned from our dorm counselor’s pet to her pariah.  Soon my happy life turned into a tumultuous mess I 
couldn't navigate. For months I was miserably unhappy and looking to transfer.

One of my mother’s dry-cleaning customers mentioned this girl’s school in Manhattan: Finch College.

“Dotty, you should send your daughter to Finch.  Tropicana orange juice’s daughter went 
there. The daughter of IBM’s chairman went there. Tricia NIXON went there.”
I wasn’t crazy about the all-girls thing but there was appeal to being smack dab in the middle of Manhattan.

When I went for my interview, I found it even more appealing.  I met with the Registrar and Director of Financial Aid who was standing in for the Director of Admissions.  She was amazing in every way — smart, funny, thoughtful, practical, just someone I really wanted to be around and learn from; someone I immediately looked up to and felt, this is where I should be.

Early one Sunday morning, my parents brought me to this 77th between Park and Madison to start my new life.  It was the start of my sophomore year.   I headed down to the cafeteria. I had worked in the cafeteria at Northeastern and had to eat dinner at 4:30 before the mess hall opened and the masses arrived.  The joke in our cafeteria was that the meat was the same every day, it just changed color — from brown to tan to gray.

When I entered there was no cafeteria; but there was a carpeted dining room with real artwork, crystal chandeliers, Spode china on the tables, and a chef in a white apron and a big white hat (yes, a chef’s hat!) asking, 


    “Miss, would you like Eggs Benedict or Eggs Florentine this morning?”

     And that is how I ended up at Finch College, where I didn't belong.

Falling Short - Part Two

Home in our apartment, flat out in bed with belly protruding, I could tell exactly when it was 3:20 because the phone would ring and it would be one or more of the girls from class calling to tell me what a mess the day had been.

“The teacher was fighting with the boys!”

"Jabbar fell asleep in class!"

“No one did their homework!”

“Karim was climbing on the cabinets!”

“She let us have SODA!”

Things were falling apart. My replacement was a brand-new first-time teacher who had just graduated in December.  She was young and green and they were eating her alive.  Even my colleagues (when I pressed) reluctantly told me the kids were "swinging from the rafters." 

The calls went on day after day. Shamefully, I began to avoid answering the phone after three o’clock. I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want to know what was happening.

What was happening?  Why were they acting up?  Why weren't they behaving as they had learned to behave?  What had changed?

Just one thing.  Only one thing had changed.

I was gone.  And with me went all that I'd worked so hard to instill. All they'd worked so hard to achieve, all that struggling, all that striving.  Turns out they didn't do any of it for themselves, they did it to please me.  I failed to teach them that they should make the most of their skills and talents because of what it would mean to them — I didn't know enough to teach them that.  Everything they did, they did out of a desire to please their teacher. And once the teacher was gone, so was the behavior.  All I had accomplished was to make them loyal to me.   

All they had gained under my tutelage soon fell by the wayside.  

It would take me decades to figure out how NOT to make that mistake again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the conclusion to this tale in The Turnaround

Falling Short - Part One

It wasn’t until I was forced to leave teaching and go on bed rest that I found out how I had failed my students.  Though I'd tried to impart to my class all I had learned from my teachers there was a fatal flaw…and it wouldn't become known to me until it was too late to remedy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was inevitable.  In two weeks I would have to stop teaching and go on bed rest.  Though my principal Miss Budd had made every accommodation she could to make it possible to stay, my doctor said if I continued working I'd be endangering my twin pregnancy.  

Twins often came early, premature and with complications.  To minimize the risk to their physical well-being you had to make it to at least 32 weeks to avoid respiratory distress syndrome (lungs not fully formed to support healthy breathing). Thirty-six weeks was even better.  At 36 weeks they’d still be premature but more fully developed.  If I was going to make it to either of those milestones I had to stop working and go on fairly complete bed rest.  I’d contracted shingles, had gestational diabetes, and my doctor cautioned I couldn’t put it off any longer.  I had to quit.

Though I hated to admit it, truthfully, continuing to work had been tough. In spite of my colleagues pitching in and helping out, even with the kids being so good, working was taking its toll.  I’d thought I was doing such a great thing by eating fresh fruit and drinking juices five or six times a day — until my fasting test showed I had gestational diabetes.  I needed to cut down on the sugars and monitor my blood five times a day, twice during school hours.

I couldn’t leave the room and hike down the stairs to a faculty bathroom every time so, I decided to make it part of the day’s lessons. The kids could track the level of my blood sugar and plot it on a graph posted on a bulletin board in the room.  They could compare and contrast how I was doing within a day, day-to-day, or week to-week.  They liked recording the number, plotting the point, drawing the lines, making predictions.

In those days the high-tech glucometer was a hand-held gun that allowed you to stick a disposable needle — a lancet — in the machine, shoot yourself in a fingertip, press to get a drop of blood, then stick a litmus-like tab of paper in the blood, slide the paper tab into the meter and wait for the reading to register and appear digitally.  Then you had to write down the number, carefully place the lancet and the tab in a safety bag for disposable.  Twice a day the kids would gather around my desk while I went through this ritual.  The boys couldn't wait to hear that trigger pop and see the blood slowly emerge —  the girls held back and cried.  They were convinced that it was hurting me.  I tried reassuring them, laughing even, but after awhile my fingertip pads were marked and sore and I couldn't laugh it off.

The day had been particularly long. I'd been standing on my feet too much (carrying the weight of twins) and cramming it in so the kids would have as much as possible in their heads before the dreaded “test.”  There was no telling who would come in and replace me. It certainly wouldn't be an established teacher — they’d all be in jobs already.  I was stressed and worried and felt guilty and adding to my anxiety that moment, I was teaching my absolute least favorite subject in the world…math.

I sent the next group of three to the board to work out some multiplication problems.  Class clown James was trying my patience by sauntering up to the board and doing what my mother would call “lolly-gagging.” The other two students quickly did their calculations; we checked the math, they sat down.  James was standing there with his trademark grin on his face and fooling around with the chalk.

“James," I said impatiently, "just work on the first set of numbers.  Just look at the first numbers to multiply.  What’s 3 times 4?”

He jerked around grinning, giving me what he thought was an endearing look.  


“I don’t know…” he drawled and everyone burst into laughter.  Grinning and laughing, James was enjoying the comedic moment.  

I wasn't laughing — I was livid.  If I'd told him once, I'd told him a hundred times. He had to memorize those times tables.  


I had spent months trying to get James to work to his potential.  Praised, cajoled, reasoned, given him a hug, a kick in the pants, anything I thought might work.  Despite his poor grades, to me he was a smart kid.  There were glimpses of his intelligence but the only role models he saw around him in his neighborhood were non-productive adults.  The three "D"s were part-and-parcel of the adults he knew outside of school — drinking, dealing, and drugs.

“Class.” 


Everyone turned to me, still laughing, but curious about the tone in my voice, not one they'd heard.

“Class.  Are you laughing WITH James or AT James?” and James turned to the class — still enjoying being at center of it all and still laughing when they called out loud and clear “AT HIM !!”   


The smile disappeared from his face.  He got angry, turned to me with fury in his eyes and said, “I didn't know that because I thought you asked me, What’s 4 times 3 !!”

And at that I put my hands on the board and moved my head forward and back as if I were bashing my forehead into the blackboard over and over in sheer frustration. The class thought it was hysterical.


I turned to him.  “James.  If you don’t know that 3 times 4 is the SAME as 4 times 3 — then I give up. I GIVE UP.  You say you want to be a pilot?  What do you think that control panel in the cockpit is made of?  Dials with NUMBERS.  NUMBERS THAT REQUIRE MATH.  Did you think the plane was gonna FLY ITSELF?  SIT DOWN.  I’m through. I wash my hands. No more talks, no more trying to get you to learn, no more sessions after school — I'm DONE.”

The class had gone quiet. James had taken his seat.  He had a steely look on his face.  His eyes were filled with bitterness.  It was a terrible way to treat a student. It was awful.  I was awful.

After that, James stopped talking to me.  He was in class but he wasn't present.  He didn’t act up but he didn’t look at me and he didn’t speak to me.  I tried pleading. I don't remember but I hope I said I was sorry. I do remember saying to him, “James. You can’t keep this up. I’m leaving in a few days.  Please.  Is that the way you want to say goodbye?”


But for those two weeks he just avoided talking.  Maybe on my last day he might have mumbled "goodbye."  I don't remember.  I only remember I left feeling I’d fail him.  

Soon it would get worse.