I Didn't Expect Today

This godawful election is finally over, and like a lot of people, I didn't expect it to end as it did.

And I really didn't expect how quickly I would need to deal with my own feelings about it—my shock, my dismay, my acceptance, my grief—so I could help others deal with theirs.

It's my job, and I was honored to do it, today, of all days.  This day.  But I didn't expect it, so I wasn't ready, and I probably wasn't very good at it.

What took me aback?

I didn't expect to hold teachers while they wept.

I didn't expect to force the words, "You must get yourself together.  Because you must be your best, regular, uninjured self when you receive your students."

I didn't expect to tell them, "You must prepare yourself.  For children who are repeating what their parents say.  For it being their truth.  You must prepare for conflict and confusion in conversations."

I didn't expect to be angry.

I didn't expect that a night of restless, limited sleep, divided by bleary-eyed iPhone news updates, would leave me so ill-equipped for the emotional upheaval in myself and those around me.

I didn't expect a low-grade headache and stomachache all day.  That my eyes would fill with tears unexpectedly, quickly, and without warning.

I didn't plan to have no words to describe my swirling emotions.  There isn't a word that gathers it up, all together: fear + shock + dismay + betrayal + disgust + loss of hope + insistence upon hope.  Is there?

But I do insist upon hope.  I do.

And I believe things happen for a reason.

So there is reason in this.  Maybe not rationality, or logic, or anything that resembles predictability--but there must be a reason for all of today's unexpectedness.  And I will seek to find it, and seek to understand, and seek to accept.  And hope.

Modern Poetry and Quotes

My sophomore year of college, I reluctantly enrolled in “Modern Poetry.”  It was required for all English majors.  Obviously.  It was also the only class I had dreaded:  I’d always found poetry—the kind written by real poets—to be hazy and nebulous, and had never been able to penetrate what seemed a special, secret language found in poetry.

When the class started, I learned the poetry we would study wasn’t “modern” at all, but rather a study of very un-modern poetry.  The most “modern” poet on the syllabus was sixty years dead. 

Okay, then, I thought.  Whatever. 

The point, I discovered, was to show us the progression of poetry over time, and how it influenced poets who were writing in more modern times.

So: We started with Beowulf, then made a multi-century jump to John Keats, then spent time with Ralph Waldo Emerson, then Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, and W.B. Yeats.

Studying these greats, I finally understood.  These poets!  So, so good!  Some of their one-liners were breathtaking, in the literal sense:  I would read a line, stop, breathe, not breathe, think, and re-read.  These lines, written some 200 years earlier, spoke to me.  Me.  A scrappy but lost college girl who was trying to manage college and a looming life. 

I now recognize that I connected so thoroughly with these poets because of their simple way to encapsulate something real, something true, and something universal that everyone can understand.  In fact, I now identify my connection with these poets as the beginning of my ongoing love affair with quotes.

Many—most?—people love quotes.  They speak to us.  They are simple, one-line zingers that capture a collective reality, something we’ve all felt or can understand. We hear a quote, and we think, Yes!  We think, Someone understands.  We think, See?  I’m not alone. 

Let’s go back to the original masters, the ones that spoke to me so many years ago from the pages of a Modern Poetry textbook. 

Yeats: 

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Emily Dickenson: 

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

Forever is composed of nows.

Emerson:

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Right?  Those words?  Those thoughts?  How something said a century ago can still apply to us, today, here, now? 

I imagine these expert poets, penning these truths so long ago, with charcoal and ink-dipped pen.  And still, here, today, they speak to us with their essential truths.  We still share them, pin them, post them, and Tweet them.  And most of all, in this modern world of ours, we learn from them.  

A Little House

Amanda Seyfried’s song, “Little House,” is a beautiful one about love and loss and… oh, geez, I don’t even know.  Something deep and important, probably.  But when I sing along, I’m not thinking about meaning; I’m just remembering one particular little house.

When my sister was a junior in high school, she went after a wayward basketball during a heated game against a league opponent.  She collided with their point guard, a feisty bundle of sass named Lisa.  My sister’s knee got all torn up—“blown out” was the term we used—and she crumbled to the ground, all grimaced and clenched.  Lisa stood stock-still, the ball resting between her inner elbow and her ribcage. The gym was quiet.  My sister rode on the team bus home, because that is what one did.  The emergency room doctor shrugged his shoulders and prescribed something to help her sleep.  My parents took her to an orthopedic surgeon the next day, who gamely went inside her knee to tie things back together again; she determinedly dug herself out of the whole thing with crutches, an ugly brace, and weeks of physical therapy.

Not long after the surgery, Lisa called my sister to apologize, a move I found to be ballsy and kind.  Unnecessary, too, but that’s what made me admire it so.  After all, everyone knew injuries happen frequently in sports; bodies collide, and thus there are broken bones and ripped tendons and torn ligaments.  It’s no one’s fault.

But Lisa was sorry anyway.  That it wasn’t her fault—?  Irrelevant. 

My sister and Lisa developed a friendship over the phone.  They talked every night for a couple weeks. Lisa had the wit and timing of a seasoned comedian, and my sister gamely repeated every bit of their conversations to me.  I loved Lisa.  It was a crush by proxy.

 

Lisa’s parents invited our whole family for dinner; I was giddy with excitement.  Lisa had a whole gaggle of brothers and sisters, and I loved big families who made lots of noise and laughed a lot.  I pictured them all living together in a huge, fancy house with high ceilings and big, open rooms for everyone.  One of Lisa’s sisters was my age—JoAnn.  She and I played basketball on opposing eighth grade teams.  She was full of spunk just like her sister.  I imagine us as best friends.  Forever, probably.

We set off late in winter, the time of year when the sun sets before dinnertime.  My father drove, squinting at a ragged scrap paper with an address scrawled on it.  We pulled into a short gravel driveway.  Then, it was I who squinted.

The house was tiny.  Tiny.

Three rooms, unless you count the bathroom.  Four, then. 

The kitchen and living room were one.  The three girls slept in the second room; the three boys slept in the third.  I don’t know where the parents slept; maybe the couch, or with one of the kids.

 

I couldn’t have called the place charming.  It was anything but.  It was a house hard at work to contain a fire-y family of eight.  It was cluttered with stuff.  The rug was frayed and tattered, and smelled like the black Lab that slept atop it.  The corners were dusty and dirty.  Paint was muted, peeling.  There was a clock on every other wall that was stuck in time, batteries and cords not working.

But it didn’t matter, not one little bit.  When we knocked, all eight of them met us at the door with hugs and handshakes and laughter about basketballs and busted knees.  I felt like a queen who’d been invited to a very important and exclusive party. Lisa’s family found cleverness and humor with the simple and the stupid.  I felt my ribs crack-y from laughing. 

We had lasagna.  Vats of it, it seemed.  It was so gooey and cheesy that some mozzarella flopped down on my chin and flung sauce on my chest.  The garlic bread was that delicious frozen grocery store kind—drippy with salty grease and piles of parsley and garlic.   There was a salad of iceberg lettuce, chopped carrots, red-ish imitation bacon bits, all mixed up with Kraft French dressing.  We ate together, all of us squished together, the six of us and the eight of them, brought together only because of a wayward basketball, and I thought the house might pop with all the personality and joy.

I hated leaving.  I’d never been in such a small space where there was so much love.

They came to our house a couple times, and we to them a few more times, and then time and life’s stuff faded the family friendship into a memory.  But I’ve never forgotten that house.  It was as small as anything I’d ever seen but oh, oh so big.   

When I’m old, I want to live in an itty-bitty little house, just like that one.  I want it to only be big enough to fit me—and anyone who wants to come and help me fill it up with happy laughter and lasagna for dinner.      

Urban Meyer and Taylor Swift: Lead Singers

The Ohio State football team lost to Penn State last night, an unexpected and frustrating turn of events.  Scrolling through Twitter this morning, I found myself irritated—not about the loss, but about some reactions to the loss.  Some people feel like they need to say nasty things Coach Urban Meyer, in spite of this being only his fifth loss in five years and his first true road loss in five years.  Catch that? The first true road loss in five years.

Gawd.

“Don’t worry about Urban Meyer,” my husband tells me.  “He can take it.”   

My husband knows a thing or two about athletic leadership.  He is an athletic director, overseeing a large middle school athletic program, and has coached football at various levels for almost twenty years.

“I think of it like a musical act,” he said.  “It comes down to this:  Who’s willing to take the microphone?  Or, better, who has to take the mic?” he asked.  “Like Taylor Swift.  Is she going to let anyone else stand up front and sing the loudest?  Hell, no.  She knows it has to be her, because she knows she can do it the best.  That doesn’t mean she won’t make mistakes—she will—but is willing to risk it because she wants to be the one making decisions.”

“I guess all lead singers are leaders, aren’t they?”

“And the best leaders are lead singers.  They just can't… not be in front.  That’s what it’s like for Urban Meyer."

So, in thinking about being a leader, that’s the thing to consider when reflecting on our work: “Am I acting like a lead singer?” 

If the answer isn’t a simple yes, it’s time to re-evaluate.  Because you have be the lead singer in any leadership position--leading a family, leading a class, leading a team, leading a school.  You’ve got to plan, organize, and rock the performance—a performance that happens in front of critics, day after day.  And you’ve got to lose, too, and take what is said about you, and get up, and do it again. 

Urban Meyer will be alright.  He’ll be back with the microphone next week, front and center, leading the next encore-worthy performance. 

Enough is Enough

I hope that every woman in the country is thinking about the speech Michelle Obama gave in New Hampshire this week.  She was speaking to all of us, and she did it with class and dignity, with a raw and vulnerable voice that radiated her depth of feeling. Watching her, I literally trembled.

She said a lot of really important things that we should all think about.  Not just in this election, but always and always.  Forever. 

She said, “…This isn’t about politics.  It’s about basic human decency.  It’s about right and wrong.”

She said, “…I feel it so personally…the shameful comments about our bodies.  The disrespect of our ambitions and our intellect.”

She said, “…I can’t stop thinking about this.  It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.” 

She said, “The men that you and I know don’t treat women this way.  They are loving fathers who are sickened by the thought of their daughters being exposed to this kind of vicious language about women.”

I avoid writing or talking openly about politics at almost all costs.  My political stance is mine, and I keep it very private, for two reasons.  One, I have a job where it would be inappropriate and irresponsible to voice my opinions.  Two, I cannot bear to argue with people I care about—about issues I care about. But this is different.  As she said, this isn't about politics.  It’s about being a woman, and mother, and teacher, and role model.  It's about being these things together, and standing up for ourselves.   

The First Lady said, “…we simply cannot endure this, or expose our children to this any longer—not for another minute, and let alone for four years.  Now is the time for all of us to stand up and say enough is enough.”

That’s what she said.  Enough is enough.