This parenting thing

"The Mask of Motherhood by Susan Maushart...warns young couples talking excitedly about becoming parents that they are in for the best and the absolute worst time of their lives."

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Oh how true this famous line feels some days. Okay--many days. Parenting of one (or more) small critters is a bit of a bi-polar rollercoaster ride. There's really nothing you can do to prepare for it, and no well-meaning advice can quite do it justice. The "good" moments are so amazingly deliriously wonderful--and when it's "bad" it's so incredibly awful, and draining, and no doubt shaving years off of my life--bad. Really. And you never know from one moment to the next which version you're going to be experiencing, and when. There's a reason why preschool sounds so attractive at times....

"I have never felt more moments of pure, warm bliss than I do sprinkled throughout every week with little family. And I genuinely relish them, bask in them, luxuriate in them. I process every nanosecond of joy...because those moments feed me. They have to. The rest of the week is a big bunch of physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting bull puckey. Because as intense as the radiant joy can be, I have also never been more frustrated in my life than I am every single day..."

Really. Some days, parenting a small child can be more frustrating than even my absolute worst days of substitute teaching (or student teaching) ever were. Seriously. (There are days when I would trade my dearly beloved child for a position working in a state prison for violent offenders because it would actually be less frustrating/stressful.)

"If parenting was all playing and tickling and teaching I’d be ALL over it. But it’s not. It’s planning and whining and cleaning and cooking and getting several times at night and staying intently focused all day and ignoring impulses to direct energy into personal needs (sleep, bathroom, showering, exercise, quiet, books). And I don’t like that. I just don’t."

The tickling and teaching are the fun part. Sitting outside on a sunny afternoon watching my son play in the front yard is fun. Going for walks over by the river and finding ladybugs, rocks, bottle caps, pine cones, sticks, and worms is fun. Climbing all the stone steps at the Japanese Garden is fun. Reading books together in bed every night is fun. Seeing the world anew every day through the eyes of a small curious critter is so fun it's amazing. But unfortunately mixed in with all the fun is a good heaping dump-truck-load of endless whining, irrational resistance, incredible neediness, the need to do incredibly unpleasant but totally necessary things all the time (enforcing personal hygiene with a small child definitely tops the list). To keep doing, and doing, and doing, day in and day out, whether one feels like it or not with the vague hope that it will pay off sometime. It's the ultimate gamble, really. To put in a ton of effort and time into something so utterly unpredictable as another human being, not knowing how it will all pan out. The ultimate act of faith, is the raising of a child, through all of the darkness and lovely despair, and the radiant hope.

(Quotes from: Parenting ambivalence, 28 July 2008, Naptime Writing) http://naptimewriting.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/parenting-ambivalence/)

On teacher films

A lot of “teacher” movies have come out in the past couple of years. As a rule, I don’t watch them, for the same reason that doctors don’t watch “medical” shows, and lawyers don’t watch “legal” dramas; I know I would only be bemused (at best), disappointed (more likely), or possibly outraged.

Although there are some good movies out there about teachers, that capture some of what it means to have this calling, even the best ones fail to fully convey what this profession is about. Most don’t even come close to hitting the mark. Most paint the educational landscape with a broad brush and tend to perpetuate stereotypes about teachers and students. Watching some of these movies, you get the impression that anyone could walk in off the street and teach. Or that teachers are saintlike people who have no life outside of their job (unsustainable).

What you don’t see in these movies is what life in a classroom is really like, what students are really like, or how amazing/difficult/rewarding/frustrating/demanding being a teacher of real people is. You don’t see the reality of what it’s like to work in a dilapidated building with no supplies or materials. You don’t see the million individual moments of heartache, triumph, and small personal victories. You don’t get to know any of the key players as people. Instead you usually get stereotypes of students, and stereotypes of the adults who choose to work with them.

I also think that these films socialize the public to continue to require teachers to be “self-sacrificing heroes in their schools [who] arrive early, stay late and reserve little time for themselves or their own families. They pay for supplies out of their own pockets and barely survive on measly salaries.” The perpetual lack of political will to fund education and make it a real priority in this nation, no doubt depends, at least in some part, on this fairytale mythology of who teachers are and what they do. (The other piece of the puzzle, no doubt, is that as much noise as you hear about “family values”, the welfare of children and families really isn’t a priority in this society. Teachers don’t make a product, they play an important role in directly molding the futures of human beings. Kathleen Melville says, “One expert featured in American Teacher described educators’ work in a way that really resonated with me: ‘Teachers make thousands of decisions a day, and they don’t do it about an abstract idea. They do it about the life of a child. You can’t imagine anything harder.’ “

Amen.

Teaching, if it is about anything, is about growth. As Kathleen Melville puts it, “In their brilliance, their frustration, their apathy and their curiosity, my students demand that I become better every day. I must become better at thinking, relating, performing, deciding, planning and responding. And so every day, I try to listen and learn, experiment and explore. I engage, regularly, in an intense and exhausting process of getting better.”

Quoted material from: Making a ‘Thousand Decisions a Day', Kathleen Melville, Teaching Tolerance, December 20, 2011