Homecoming
The last week I spent with my father offered new challenges; he didn’t, after all, qualify for a home care program, so we had to determine a way to pay for his care, using some money he’d hoped to keep in Greece for his eventual move back there. There were other legal and financial challenges that needed to be sorted out. In the end, when we left, my father was sitting on the couch where he’d been spending his days and nights, sobbing. But, he also thanked me—and I am not sure he’s ever done so before. The drive home was bittersweet; the warm, sun evaporated into thick, cool fog before our eyes; we started the drive in shorts and t-shirts and ended it in sweats. But, it was also so lovely to be home; I teared up when we got to the kennel and our dog greeted S with his usual leap into the air, and she almost fell backwards.
My last day in Ohio, I got a call that my dear friend G had died. He was in his 80s and still teaching until, a couple weeks earlier, his health had declined to the point that he couldn’t anymore. He was old, and he had begun to suffer, but I wasn’t ready to let him go. “I know how much you loved him,” my friend said. “I didn’t want you to find out over e-mail, but I’m also afraid, now, that you won’t be able to safely drive home.”
But I did, and S transitioned back into school relatively smoothly. The first week proved to be more challenging for me. There were tensions with co-workers that needed to be aired out; they did, but doing so was exhausting. When we learned there would be no public funeral for G, some of us who knew him well found ourselves weeping together over the news; we had wanted some way to get closure, though of course we also wanted to respect his wishes. A former student who recently dropped out of school came by to say goodbye, and ended up weeping in my living room for hours. I was glad to have had the time to talk with her, to hopefully play some role in pulling her through her depression (though I’m not sure I helped much), to give her a blessing for her new life across the country—but again, the conversation took what little emotional strength I had left.
I was so tired by Wednesday night that I felt utterly numb, unable even to think straight. I did probably the stupidest thing I could have done—I got very drunk with a much younger friend who is a good listener and also very funny—and who can drink as much as me with even less obvious effects.
Last night the stupidity of this decision became clear when I completely lost my mind last night. I’d worked for 12 hours straight, and in the midst of the day had been a crying jag with another friend of G’s, a challenging conversation with a co-worker, and a phone call from an agency I’d tried to contact more than 10 times while in Ohio, finally getting back to me. When I got home, S’s college buddy told me she’d refused to do her homework. When I questioned her about what was due, she was confused, so we went online and realized she had a test on material she had not yet studied. I lost it, shouted at her, told her she needed to be more responsible. Of course, my temper tantrum only sparked the same behavior from her. Needless to say, no studying got done.
I realized I was feeling the same kind of helplessness and rage I’d felt before my summer retreat. It’s no wonder; while the outcome was manageable, I’d been fighting a completely bureaucratic health care system and dealing with my cranky father for two weeks while also essentially home-schooling my kid. Of course something relatively small was going to set me off. Even S said, reasonably, that this was only one test in one class and I didn’t need to get so upset about it. “If you have that attitude you’ll NEVER pass high school or reach any of your dreams,” I yelled, which, now that I am typing it, totally sounds crazy.
Today was a decent day overall. I felt my students were finally excited about their community-based research projects. I had one of those conversations during which I realized our office had already accomplished some important goals. I got to see both of S’s college buddies together in one place and sit briefly with them while I ate a late lunch. It felt good to take a break. So, while S was having a horse lesson, I decided to go through a pile of “not pressing” papers on my desk, including my student evaluations from last semester.
I braced myself; I knew last semester was comprised of some of the worst months of my adult life, and that I’d spent much of the semester angry and scattered—but I had no idea just how bad they would be. Prior to reading them, I had been informed that a student was fighting the grade I’d given him; I was relatively unconcerned about this until I saw just how bitter my students were about everything, in both classes. My first reaction was to be defensive, but within a half hour, I realized that their criticisms were right; I really had not taught well, at all, last semester, and I’d known this was the case even as I was in the midst of it. I reviewed the facts; I had worked through a lot of my anger, self-doubt, and frustration over the summer and was, once again, a teacher who cares about her students. I’d also spent some of the summer getting organized and even read about ways to overcome my usual scattered methods of time management (though I didn’t realize how badly these problems were effecting my students, I did know I needed to improve these skills in order to a good job directing the new community engagement office). Finally, I’d been working on ways to separate my personal and work life so that S’s issues or my dad’s illness aren’t bleeding into my work or becoming excuses for why I can’t be effective. I left work feeling like I had handled this blow well. I made the decision to make an appointment with my supervisor to talk about the evaluations and tell her what I’d been doing to prevent another semester like last spring.
Then, I got home and promptly went to sleep. I slept deeply until K, S’s horse teacher, called to say they were done and that S wanted to talk to me. “Can I go to the Homecoming dance tonight at 9:30?” S asked, “Pleeeaasssee…”. I went over all the obvious reasons why she couldn’t: no dress, she was in trouble for not preparing for her test, etc. And then I relented, because I was honestly too tired to deal with her whining. They got home, and when I heard them opening the door I felt tears coming to my eyes; “I can’t do this,” I thought to myself. “I really am in no shape to be a parent right now.”
S bounded in and immediately went upstairs to search for a dress. K sat down and told me S had told her that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore about anything because everything stressed me out. “I don’t want to make her cry or yell,” she’d said, which immediately caused me to burst into tears.
Suddenly the faces of all the students I’d not served well went through my mind, literally, and I cried harder. I thought about G, who had been my mentor--how much he'd loved his students, how he'd never gotten lazy or frustrated, how his pep talks had always involved the question, do you care about your students?--and when I said yes, he'd say, then you'll know what to do.
I felt like, in the last few months of his life, I had sorely disappointed him--even though, of course, he had no idea that I'd had the worst teaching semester of my career.
“I don’t think I can do this right now,” I said. “I just can’t hear anything else about what I’m doing wrong.”
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” K said. “I just think you need to talk to her, that’s all.”
And so we did talk. I cried the entire time, but S was calm, just petting the dog, who was lying still for once. I apologized for yelling, she apologized for not trying her best. She said she wanted to go to college but I’d scared her into believing maybe she couldn’t; I said that she would need to work harder but that one test was not going to ruin her life.
“I think you’re just stressed out about Papou, and about your friend dying,” she said, maturely. She sighed. “I know how that feels, because remember, I was close to Honey, and first she got sick, and then she died.”
“That’s true,” I said. “And you weren’t yourself for quite awhile. But still, I need to be able to handle those things and still be a good parent.”
"G was important to you," she said, patting me on the shoulder. "I know that. He was teaching you to use that press. Maybe you should try to get that going again and you'll feel better."
It should have been comforting to hear her say that--but currently, the old press is in storage (due to some remodeling on campus), and no permanent home has been designated for it. During my last conversation with G, we were strategizing about how to convince the administration to care about it as much as we did. There had been no conclusion, and no goodbye. I didn't even know for sure if he could trust me to do what he'd asked me to do two years earlier--take over the press because he couldn't run it anymore. "I'm afraid I forgot how to run it," I said. "It's been in storage for a whole year now." I felt, again, like I was nothing but a disappointment to everyone.
Luckily, we got interrupted then by her friend, who came over, had dinner with us, and then, on her way out, accidentally let the cat out.
Suddenly, we found ourselves in the dark, in the rain, weeping and calling her name. I irrationally thought, “I don’t think I’ll survive if we don’t get this cat back in the house. If she gets lost or hurt, I’m going to have a really hard time believing that there’s not some kind of evil force out to get us right now.” As if my dad’s illness, G’s death, my former student’s depression, and my bad evaluations-–three of which I couldn’t have controlled, and one of which I need to simply learn from and move on—somehow indicate I’m a bad person, or especially cursed.
At one point, after over an hour of searching, I decided to drive around—and realized my car keys were lost. In the same moment, I also realized just how disgustingly messy our house had become, and felt, again, like a total failure. It’s been a long time since I felt shame—I have somehow managed since becoming a parent to let that feeling of guilt and self-hatred go and learn from each mistake, and then just move forward—even in the worst of last spring, I felt grief and anger and maybe even, at times, enough guilt to make me realize I needed to change my behavior—but never shame.
But there it was again, that old demon. I’d spent so much time in counseling on it over the years. I thought it was gone, but it was gripping me again, and I felt like I couldn’t face anyone at all.
And then, suddenly, I found myself standing quietly right next to the cat, and caught her. S was overjoyed. She immediately wrapped her in a blanket and cuddled her. We dried off and warmed up. She took a bath and got dressed for Homecoming. She looked stunning. I found the car keys. And we still had a half hour to spare before the dance started. We talked about things she could say to the people who were there and made a plan for what she would do if she got anxious or angry or bored and wanted me to come—and the next thing I knew, she was walking into the dance, handling her high heels more gracefully than I could have never managed, at 16 or any age, for that matter. I watched her, moving slowly but confidently toward the door, her purse casually thrown over her shoulder—she didn’t look like my nervous, awkward kid at all, and in that moment, I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Irrationally, I thought, what if she gets smart enough to realize how badly I’m fucking this parenting thing up, how I’m not really a good teacher or person?
I got home and started to clean house—and then I stopped myself and realized what I needed was to sit, to center myself, because only silence and stillness were going to get me past my self-hatred and back into my right mind. Only prayer was going to help me to see clearly what I could and could not control about my life, and how to move forward. Only meditation was going to help me to be glad that S was, on this particular day, handling life with more grace and confidence and maturity than I was. The voices were there, saying, nothing you do will make up for how badly you fucked up last year; S will be calling you in about 10 minutes and there’s no point in trying to work through this now; you totally cursed yourself when you admitted to yourself that you didn’t want her to become a better person than you are; but I just sat and listened to them and, eventually, things got quieter. I started to cry from the deep places—not from shame, but from grief. And then the crying dissipated, and I felt like studying a spiritual text. On a whim, I picked up, instead, Anne Lamott’s book _Traveling Mercies_, which I hadn’t read since 2005.
It turned out to be exactly what I needed. The way she writes so vulnerably and openly about her struggles with parenting and her spiritual path have always moved me—but now, I think, they resonate so much more deeply. She is, after all, a single mom who decided on a whim to keep her baby, not having a clue about what she was getting her self into, as well as a sometimes reluctant, sometimes enthusiastic, Christian and spiritual seeker.
I laughed and wept and got through half the book before S called, at 11:45. It touched on every theme I was struggling with this week—aging parent, resistant, refusing-to-work kid, dead friend—the beauty and transcendence of grief, the importance of working within rather than trying to escape its depth, its raw suffering.
I was so into the book that it wasn’t until I was pulling up in front of the school that I realized the dance was going to be over in 15 minutes, and that S had been there for almost three hours. I could see her standing there by the door, alone, leaning into the glass and squinting, waiting for me. I saw in her for the first time my 16-year-old self, who traveled a narrow road between confidence and terror at every moment.
I had connected with that girl briefly while I was in Ohio—by chance, S and I had driven by my old high school right before the Homecoming game, and I’d seen the high school band students excitedly gathering in front of the school, in the exact same place and with the exact same uniforms we’d had when I was in marching band. I’d immediately, inexplicably, started to cry, but now, seeing my daughter at the front door, I realized why. I was remembering how, on Friday nights, when dusk was falling and I was playing my scales, getting excited about the upcoming game, I managed somehow to believe that anything was possible, and instead of great confidence or great terror, I felt a strange sense of peace. From her posture, I could tell S was feeling the same way, even though she was alone.
When I asked her how it was, she said, “Alright.” She described how she had told several people about her cat-capturing adventure. She said that several of her peers had laughed at her “cat-turing story—get it, mom? Cat-turing.” But, it hadn’t been perfect. She’d run into a boy who had treated her badly last year, but she’d figured out a way to ignore him by imagining donkey dicks hanging off his forehead. And nobody had asked her to dance.
“So, basically, here’s what I’m hearing you say,” I reviewed. “Instead of panicking when you saw that boy, you found a way to manage it and handled it perfectly. You had conversations with your friends and made them laugh. It wasn’t amazing, but you stuck it out and did what you could to have fun. Is that right?”
“Right,” she said, adding, “these damned shoes aren’t comfortable at all.”
“I’m so proud of you,” I said. “Do you realize how much more mature you are now than you were even a few months ago? Remember the spring formal? You only made it through the first hour, you had no idea what to say to people, and you refused to go unless I was a chaparone. And this time you went by yourself, stayed for almost the entire three hours, and had appropriate conversations with people.” And then I did start to cry a little, but only a little.
“You’re such a lesbian,” S said, smiling and shaking her head.
“And you’re such a straight, 16-year-old girl,” I said back.
“You’re my lesbian mom, the only mom I’d ever want.”
“You’re my straight daughter, the only daughter I’d ever want.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“OK, Mom, let’s go home so I can cuddle my cat.”
My last day in Ohio, I got a call that my dear friend G had died. He was in his 80s and still teaching until, a couple weeks earlier, his health had declined to the point that he couldn’t anymore. He was old, and he had begun to suffer, but I wasn’t ready to let him go. “I know how much you loved him,” my friend said. “I didn’t want you to find out over e-mail, but I’m also afraid, now, that you won’t be able to safely drive home.”
But I did, and S transitioned back into school relatively smoothly. The first week proved to be more challenging for me. There were tensions with co-workers that needed to be aired out; they did, but doing so was exhausting. When we learned there would be no public funeral for G, some of us who knew him well found ourselves weeping together over the news; we had wanted some way to get closure, though of course we also wanted to respect his wishes. A former student who recently dropped out of school came by to say goodbye, and ended up weeping in my living room for hours. I was glad to have had the time to talk with her, to hopefully play some role in pulling her through her depression (though I’m not sure I helped much), to give her a blessing for her new life across the country—but again, the conversation took what little emotional strength I had left.
I was so tired by Wednesday night that I felt utterly numb, unable even to think straight. I did probably the stupidest thing I could have done—I got very drunk with a much younger friend who is a good listener and also very funny—and who can drink as much as me with even less obvious effects.
Last night the stupidity of this decision became clear when I completely lost my mind last night. I’d worked for 12 hours straight, and in the midst of the day had been a crying jag with another friend of G’s, a challenging conversation with a co-worker, and a phone call from an agency I’d tried to contact more than 10 times while in Ohio, finally getting back to me. When I got home, S’s college buddy told me she’d refused to do her homework. When I questioned her about what was due, she was confused, so we went online and realized she had a test on material she had not yet studied. I lost it, shouted at her, told her she needed to be more responsible. Of course, my temper tantrum only sparked the same behavior from her. Needless to say, no studying got done.
I realized I was feeling the same kind of helplessness and rage I’d felt before my summer retreat. It’s no wonder; while the outcome was manageable, I’d been fighting a completely bureaucratic health care system and dealing with my cranky father for two weeks while also essentially home-schooling my kid. Of course something relatively small was going to set me off. Even S said, reasonably, that this was only one test in one class and I didn’t need to get so upset about it. “If you have that attitude you’ll NEVER pass high school or reach any of your dreams,” I yelled, which, now that I am typing it, totally sounds crazy.
Today was a decent day overall. I felt my students were finally excited about their community-based research projects. I had one of those conversations during which I realized our office had already accomplished some important goals. I got to see both of S’s college buddies together in one place and sit briefly with them while I ate a late lunch. It felt good to take a break. So, while S was having a horse lesson, I decided to go through a pile of “not pressing” papers on my desk, including my student evaluations from last semester.
I braced myself; I knew last semester was comprised of some of the worst months of my adult life, and that I’d spent much of the semester angry and scattered—but I had no idea just how bad they would be. Prior to reading them, I had been informed that a student was fighting the grade I’d given him; I was relatively unconcerned about this until I saw just how bitter my students were about everything, in both classes. My first reaction was to be defensive, but within a half hour, I realized that their criticisms were right; I really had not taught well, at all, last semester, and I’d known this was the case even as I was in the midst of it. I reviewed the facts; I had worked through a lot of my anger, self-doubt, and frustration over the summer and was, once again, a teacher who cares about her students. I’d also spent some of the summer getting organized and even read about ways to overcome my usual scattered methods of time management (though I didn’t realize how badly these problems were effecting my students, I did know I needed to improve these skills in order to a good job directing the new community engagement office). Finally, I’d been working on ways to separate my personal and work life so that S’s issues or my dad’s illness aren’t bleeding into my work or becoming excuses for why I can’t be effective. I left work feeling like I had handled this blow well. I made the decision to make an appointment with my supervisor to talk about the evaluations and tell her what I’d been doing to prevent another semester like last spring.
Then, I got home and promptly went to sleep. I slept deeply until K, S’s horse teacher, called to say they were done and that S wanted to talk to me. “Can I go to the Homecoming dance tonight at 9:30?” S asked, “Pleeeaasssee…”. I went over all the obvious reasons why she couldn’t: no dress, she was in trouble for not preparing for her test, etc. And then I relented, because I was honestly too tired to deal with her whining. They got home, and when I heard them opening the door I felt tears coming to my eyes; “I can’t do this,” I thought to myself. “I really am in no shape to be a parent right now.”
S bounded in and immediately went upstairs to search for a dress. K sat down and told me S had told her that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore about anything because everything stressed me out. “I don’t want to make her cry or yell,” she’d said, which immediately caused me to burst into tears.
Suddenly the faces of all the students I’d not served well went through my mind, literally, and I cried harder. I thought about G, who had been my mentor--how much he'd loved his students, how he'd never gotten lazy or frustrated, how his pep talks had always involved the question, do you care about your students?--and when I said yes, he'd say, then you'll know what to do.
I felt like, in the last few months of his life, I had sorely disappointed him--even though, of course, he had no idea that I'd had the worst teaching semester of my career.
“I don’t think I can do this right now,” I said. “I just can’t hear anything else about what I’m doing wrong.”
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” K said. “I just think you need to talk to her, that’s all.”
And so we did talk. I cried the entire time, but S was calm, just petting the dog, who was lying still for once. I apologized for yelling, she apologized for not trying her best. She said she wanted to go to college but I’d scared her into believing maybe she couldn’t; I said that she would need to work harder but that one test was not going to ruin her life.
“I think you’re just stressed out about Papou, and about your friend dying,” she said, maturely. She sighed. “I know how that feels, because remember, I was close to Honey, and first she got sick, and then she died.”
“That’s true,” I said. “And you weren’t yourself for quite awhile. But still, I need to be able to handle those things and still be a good parent.”
"G was important to you," she said, patting me on the shoulder. "I know that. He was teaching you to use that press. Maybe you should try to get that going again and you'll feel better."
It should have been comforting to hear her say that--but currently, the old press is in storage (due to some remodeling on campus), and no permanent home has been designated for it. During my last conversation with G, we were strategizing about how to convince the administration to care about it as much as we did. There had been no conclusion, and no goodbye. I didn't even know for sure if he could trust me to do what he'd asked me to do two years earlier--take over the press because he couldn't run it anymore. "I'm afraid I forgot how to run it," I said. "It's been in storage for a whole year now." I felt, again, like I was nothing but a disappointment to everyone.
Luckily, we got interrupted then by her friend, who came over, had dinner with us, and then, on her way out, accidentally let the cat out.
Suddenly, we found ourselves in the dark, in the rain, weeping and calling her name. I irrationally thought, “I don’t think I’ll survive if we don’t get this cat back in the house. If she gets lost or hurt, I’m going to have a really hard time believing that there’s not some kind of evil force out to get us right now.” As if my dad’s illness, G’s death, my former student’s depression, and my bad evaluations-–three of which I couldn’t have controlled, and one of which I need to simply learn from and move on—somehow indicate I’m a bad person, or especially cursed.
At one point, after over an hour of searching, I decided to drive around—and realized my car keys were lost. In the same moment, I also realized just how disgustingly messy our house had become, and felt, again, like a total failure. It’s been a long time since I felt shame—I have somehow managed since becoming a parent to let that feeling of guilt and self-hatred go and learn from each mistake, and then just move forward—even in the worst of last spring, I felt grief and anger and maybe even, at times, enough guilt to make me realize I needed to change my behavior—but never shame.
But there it was again, that old demon. I’d spent so much time in counseling on it over the years. I thought it was gone, but it was gripping me again, and I felt like I couldn’t face anyone at all.
And then, suddenly, I found myself standing quietly right next to the cat, and caught her. S was overjoyed. She immediately wrapped her in a blanket and cuddled her. We dried off and warmed up. She took a bath and got dressed for Homecoming. She looked stunning. I found the car keys. And we still had a half hour to spare before the dance started. We talked about things she could say to the people who were there and made a plan for what she would do if she got anxious or angry or bored and wanted me to come—and the next thing I knew, she was walking into the dance, handling her high heels more gracefully than I could have never managed, at 16 or any age, for that matter. I watched her, moving slowly but confidently toward the door, her purse casually thrown over her shoulder—she didn’t look like my nervous, awkward kid at all, and in that moment, I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Irrationally, I thought, what if she gets smart enough to realize how badly I’m fucking this parenting thing up, how I’m not really a good teacher or person?
I got home and started to clean house—and then I stopped myself and realized what I needed was to sit, to center myself, because only silence and stillness were going to get me past my self-hatred and back into my right mind. Only prayer was going to help me to see clearly what I could and could not control about my life, and how to move forward. Only meditation was going to help me to be glad that S was, on this particular day, handling life with more grace and confidence and maturity than I was. The voices were there, saying, nothing you do will make up for how badly you fucked up last year; S will be calling you in about 10 minutes and there’s no point in trying to work through this now; you totally cursed yourself when you admitted to yourself that you didn’t want her to become a better person than you are; but I just sat and listened to them and, eventually, things got quieter. I started to cry from the deep places—not from shame, but from grief. And then the crying dissipated, and I felt like studying a spiritual text. On a whim, I picked up, instead, Anne Lamott’s book _Traveling Mercies_, which I hadn’t read since 2005.
It turned out to be exactly what I needed. The way she writes so vulnerably and openly about her struggles with parenting and her spiritual path have always moved me—but now, I think, they resonate so much more deeply. She is, after all, a single mom who decided on a whim to keep her baby, not having a clue about what she was getting her self into, as well as a sometimes reluctant, sometimes enthusiastic, Christian and spiritual seeker.
I laughed and wept and got through half the book before S called, at 11:45. It touched on every theme I was struggling with this week—aging parent, resistant, refusing-to-work kid, dead friend—the beauty and transcendence of grief, the importance of working within rather than trying to escape its depth, its raw suffering.
I was so into the book that it wasn’t until I was pulling up in front of the school that I realized the dance was going to be over in 15 minutes, and that S had been there for almost three hours. I could see her standing there by the door, alone, leaning into the glass and squinting, waiting for me. I saw in her for the first time my 16-year-old self, who traveled a narrow road between confidence and terror at every moment.
I had connected with that girl briefly while I was in Ohio—by chance, S and I had driven by my old high school right before the Homecoming game, and I’d seen the high school band students excitedly gathering in front of the school, in the exact same place and with the exact same uniforms we’d had when I was in marching band. I’d immediately, inexplicably, started to cry, but now, seeing my daughter at the front door, I realized why. I was remembering how, on Friday nights, when dusk was falling and I was playing my scales, getting excited about the upcoming game, I managed somehow to believe that anything was possible, and instead of great confidence or great terror, I felt a strange sense of peace. From her posture, I could tell S was feeling the same way, even though she was alone.
When I asked her how it was, she said, “Alright.” She described how she had told several people about her cat-capturing adventure. She said that several of her peers had laughed at her “cat-turing story—get it, mom? Cat-turing.” But, it hadn’t been perfect. She’d run into a boy who had treated her badly last year, but she’d figured out a way to ignore him by imagining donkey dicks hanging off his forehead. And nobody had asked her to dance.
“So, basically, here’s what I’m hearing you say,” I reviewed. “Instead of panicking when you saw that boy, you found a way to manage it and handled it perfectly. You had conversations with your friends and made them laugh. It wasn’t amazing, but you stuck it out and did what you could to have fun. Is that right?”
“Right,” she said, adding, “these damned shoes aren’t comfortable at all.”
“I’m so proud of you,” I said. “Do you realize how much more mature you are now than you were even a few months ago? Remember the spring formal? You only made it through the first hour, you had no idea what to say to people, and you refused to go unless I was a chaparone. And this time you went by yourself, stayed for almost the entire three hours, and had appropriate conversations with people.” And then I did start to cry a little, but only a little.
“You’re such a lesbian,” S said, smiling and shaking her head.
“And you’re such a straight, 16-year-old girl,” I said back.
“You’re my lesbian mom, the only mom I’d ever want.”
“You’re my straight daughter, the only daughter I’d ever want.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“OK, Mom, let’s go home so I can cuddle my cat.”
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