Feminism Friday! The Idyllic Land of Norovirus

I wanted to write a status update (a la my friend Joan who writes small missives about her day) in the moment about this little experience, but then it seemed like I had too many things rolling around in my head. (I love Joan's status updates. It reminds me the good things that can happen in rough schools with the right person wearing her heart on her sleeve!)

We have a wreath because adults have wreaths. 

Lately I've been taking a step back, career-wise, and re-evaluating what I'm doing with my life. I worked really hard and nearly non-stop in my twenties and had a lot of stressful years. I have a lot of things I'm proud of-- a Master's Degree, many travels, much writing. Lots of stories from times spent with friends, romance and breakups, and laughter and tears. I said goodbye to my grandmothers in my twenties and I hold them very close in my heart-- their words sometimes echo in mine and I smile to think of all the skills and loves I share with them. Crock-pot cooking with whatever is in the house? Grandma Jane. Flower arranging (ah, dried eucalyptus smells so good!) and wreath making? Grandma Marilyn. I pulled out my watercolor painting supplies and have been working on those-- a skill I practiced while in one grandma's native Italy, the other's love of travelling firmly instilled in me.

The days of working 12 hours and feeling like nothing I do matters, even though I'm pouring my heart into every minute of planning, teaching, listening to, working with, assisting...lessons with children? That's on pause. And man, it feels GREAT. Teaching is rewarding, but it's become a field synonymous with levels of exhaustion akin to having triplet newborns. You love what you're doing, but as soon as one mess of poo gets cleaned up, there's another one waiting.  So a gap year of sorts was in order for me.

I've been nannying and babysitting for families in the suburbs of Denver. I love it. [Any names I use for children have been changed for their privacy. Any pics have their identity obscured because I think kids should be protected from the evils of the interwebz before they're in high school!]

Crockpot stew like Grandma Jane's

The town where I have been working is a very special place. There's a manner of frozen in time going on with these kids' childhoods! Kids walk, bike, and razor-scooter to school. They ride their bikes and take the local bus to the ice cream shop and have milkshakes before heading to the library, skateboard park, or nature trail. They play musical instruments and soccer...and the parents are in the stands or audience, cheering for their babies. In a word, it's idyllic.

After working in inner-city and OTP Atlanta for 10 years, I was left with the sinking feeling that childhood was a myth. Kids had to deal with food stamps and immigration (and they still do), and were generally learning skills (manipulation and lying) to serve them in a life that I wouldn't be proud, personally, to live. They were learning that school was about test scores and nothing more. It is incredibly disheartening for all parties involved-- parents, kids, teachers, administrators, law enforcement. Where did middle class America go?

I found it! (And I dearly wish it for every kid everywhere.)

The cul-de-sac where I've been finding myself every afternoon, Monday-Friday, has kids with swings, apple trees, scooters, bikes, gardens, friendly Fidos, and sassy cats. There are a group of little boys (ages 5-9) who play outside every day. One was using a magnifying glass (from his chemistry set!) to try to start fires. I shared, "Oh, I used to do that when I was a kid!" and he responded, "My mom said the same. It must be a rite of kid passage." Gulp. Wut? Kids talk like that here.

No Holy Grail outfits, but they looked like this. 

The boys also were playing with one of the oldest toys that any parent knows will entertain kids for hours-- a big ole box. I looked out the porch window and thought, "Oh dear. That child has a battle axe."

Box. Best. Toy. Ever. 

Yup. The neighborhood boys were demolishing a large box with their medieval (plastic) swords and battle axe. Boys will be boys, but it sure looked like fun to me. They jousted, they hacked, they smashed, they pillaged. And when the box was in pieces (and had been converted also to a dinosaur costume), they placed all the pieces in the recycling bin. One of them asked if I could try to bring a box from my house tomorrow. I promised I'd do my best. (Recycling dumpster, don't fail me!)

One of the boys noticed my State Park sticker in the windshield of my car (oh skills of observation, very coveted!). I felt that I'd been transported to a beach in SoCal-- as he put his little hands up (in a stop gesture) and said, "Whoa! Whoa! Do you go to Eldo, like my Dad? He has a sticker like that on his car from Eldo." -- yeah, bro, the hiking and climbing at Eldo are totally choice.-- Not really, I said, "Oh yeah, this is a State Park pass for Colorado. You can go to any of the parks. You've probably been to Golden Gate Canyon and Cherry Creek? But I like Eldorado Canyon too." Totally rad sticker, dude-bro.

Just painting this picture of the nature of these kids. They play outdoors. They eat actual food (one of the kiddos had a playdate, in which she searched the fridge for cherry tomatoes she'd picked from the garden (because "they'll go perfectly with our snack!") to go with the berries, cheese, and pretzels. They make their beds. They have TV time limits. They are adorable.

So why did I call this post Feminism Friday? Well, one of the kiddos (who's a girl) was having a playdate with two other friends. They carefully sat down at the table and completed their math  homework and quizzed each other over their analogies. I interrupted only to remind them at you have to say all the words that the colons stand for in analogies, or they don't really make sense. "Ship is to sailor, not ship dot dot sailor, as the colon suggests." These kids are that driven and sweet. There was no inkling that "math was hard because we're girls" and that's refreshing.

There's tons of statistics  (like college enrollment rates) and research that support that women are still underrepresented in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Women of color (more specifically Black and Latino) are terribly underrepresented, with this fear of science stemming (sorry) from elementary school years. Motivation, gender, and color are huge when it comes to which people will finish school with which degrees. Particularly, Latino girls see themselves as caretakers of others, and will, if they choose to seek a career, mention ones that relate to taking care of children and babies (teacher, day care worker, nurse), more than any other field. It's incredibly limiting and sad as a society to see this play out. The truth is, we need a society with women AND men scientists and doctors. Women and men bring different roles to the proverbial table, which makes better workplaces for us all.

(Quick side note: I just read The Green Glass Sea, which is a children's book that received the Scott O'Dell award for Historical fiction. It was GREAT. It dealt with a girl protagonist living on the base of Los Alamos when they were building the atomic bombs. The kids meet all the scientists you think about learning the early stages of radiation studies. It's a different side of WWII book than I'd read. If you have kids-- 8-12ish, make them read it.)

Imagine my surprise when the girls trotted upstairs to gather (it seemed like) every stuffed animal and

baby doll known to man to bring to the basement to "play daycare." I was a little disheartened-- these are girls who have scientist and engineer parents-- why are they stuck in this gender-role play?

I gave it some time, and laughed as I came downstairs to check on them. The babies were all in the side room-- in quarantine. They were using makeshift cell phones -- calculators, old phones-- to call all the parents at the day care. They'd come, not as day care workers, but as CDC doctors to quarantine the Norovirus. Yes. The Norovirus. One kiddo warned me, "Don't go in there. It's the Norovirus.  There's vomit. EVERYWHERE! We have to keep these kids on lock!" They giggled and laughed as they put on their imaginary medical gear to take care of the babies and to put on press conferences about spreading the virus. They put on serious voices and made day care outgoing messages for the parents of the children struck.

With the Ebola virus crippling Africa currently and scaremongering laypeople about hospital care of those aid workers returning home, (even in my native Atlanta and alma mater Emory) it seemed prescient that these kids were playing doctor/scientist/aid worker in the basement in Colorado. They are neatly living this beautiful idyllic childhood, but the real world exists.

And this highly-contagious world may have a few health care workers coming up through the ranks in a few years!!

Mother's Day 2013

May '08, ASC: 3 generations of education graduate degrees

30 years ago on this Mother’s Day, my mom was only a few days away from giving birth to a second child, her first girl, and the first the granddaughters on both the Thomaston side and Gauthier side. It was the 80’s and they only did the ultrasounds if there were suspected problems, so she didn’t know if she was having a girl or a second son. The story of my birth includes my Grandma Jane coming to my parent’s house, at a rainy, drizzly midnight, where a feverish toddler brother was being read stories while my mom breathed through contractions. My grandmother, all 5 feet of her, admonished my mother and pointedly said to my father, “I can read to Neil for you. I CANNOT have this baby for you. Now go to the hospital.” (I was born at 2:52, and would have been born sooner had the obstetrician even been at the hospital. The nurses slowed my mother’s labor with drugs and instructed her to wait on the pushing bit. Apparently I was ready to head out into this world!)

If you’d asked me ten years ago, “What are your mother’s day plans?” for today, I’d have assumed I’d be celebrating this holiday with my family and own children. I do not have children, with the exception of the many hundreds of children who have passed through my classroom door over the course of the past five years. I often do quite a bit of counseling with my students (from the young ones up to the high schoolers) and I am grateful that I’ve been deemed worthy (by whatever powers that be) to give advice and help my kids see a different point-of-view on the world. Little ones (from teaching Elementary school classrooms) have called me “Mommy” instead of Miss G from time to time, and many hugs with heads buried in my side and arms wrapped around my waist included wistful, “I wish you were my mom”s. Many of my high school kids have fussed at me for not having a baby yet, saying that I’d be a “cool mom” and warning me that my “eggs were frying and I needed to have kids soon.” (Yikes!) 

Several of my high-schoolers have been mothers or mothers-to-be and I’ve had a special bond with those girls, encouraging and enabling them to get the education they deserve in order to be the mom to their babies that their children deserve. I’ve felt humbled when talking with teenagers (usually girls) and pointing out that their moms are scared to lose their little girls—and that this transition point of high school is a clear sign that they won’t have the same role to play with their daughters as when they were younger—and hopefully saying words to these girls that will help smooth out the oft-tangled relationships between teen girls and their moms. 

So am I glad I’m not celebrating Mother’s Day tomorrow with children who are “mine?” No, not really. I’m a little jealous of moms and that relationship that they have as a sustainer of life—it seems to me like a mystical, spiritual chance to be one with God…one that I haven’t had the opportunity to take. Am I happy for the moms out there? Of course. If not for moms out there, I’d not have had the chance to teach, converse with, sing with, make art with, and learn from their children. 

My mama came to my Beethoven concert in April

In another sense, I’ve been so fortunate, lucky, and blessed to have a wonderful mom. My mom has shown me with her dedication to anything she sets her mind to—that life is yours for the taking. She never showered me with gifts, but always experiences— Girl Scouts, church, theater, museums, concerts,  Social Studies fairs; trips around this country and Europe; piano, voice, and oboe lessons. She is thoroughly academic and musical and has always encouraged me through her words and actions that I should strive for excellence. She has been my toughest critic with singing, acting, and music…but she’s also been at every concert and performance humanly possible. One time, in grad school, I was singing with an acapella group and we were singing at a woman’s wedding. My mom crashed the wedding—in order to hear her baby (24-year-old) sing.

 My mom is a teacher—a product of the 1970’s era of Women’s Lib when she knew that she had the opportunity to go to college, but she felt that her only two career options were nurse or teacher. I worked really hard in college to NOT become a teacher, but to accidentally follow in her footsteps anyway. They’re definitely not bad footsteps to follow. She’s been a teacher who’s constantly reinvented herself: she taught Elementary school, then worked while she was pregnant to obtain a Master’s degree and Gifted certification; then after 17 years, she switched to teaching Middle School Language Arts and Science and earned her Specialist’s degree. After 13 years there, it was time for a change again, and she switched to Elementary gifted again—at schools with immigrant populations unlike the golf-course-homes one she’d left years before. 

She’s made her mark, earning Teacher of the Year for her county, helping countless kids earn Social Studies, Writing, and art awards and taken dozens of field trips around the southeast with kids. She started a monthly recognition luncheon for the best citizens in each class—and it’s caught on so that other teachers help bring in deserts to brag about the good kids. She lives her life as true to herself as she can—church-choir singer, sci-fi fan, family caregiver, rescue-dog-mommy, pianist, baker, reader, gardener, and Snoopy collector. 

Some other moms in my life are my grandmothers: my mom’s mom, Grandma Shirley Jane Pepperd Thomaston, and my dad’s mom, Grandma Marilyn Faye Cerasoli Gauthier (see, French and Italian!). I was at my Grandpa Bill’s 80^th birthday celebration this weekend when his sister-in-law (a woman I’ve not seen since I was a toddler), looked at me from a table, sighed, and said, “I see Marilyn in your face.” It made me cry because my mom’s always said that she sees my beautiful Grandma Marilyn’s eyebrows on me—in addition to other features. My grandma Marilyn was stricken with a neuromuscular disease most of my life—so I always knew her to be in her home, surrounded by her books, beads, sewing, crocheting, music, television programs, and Bible. 

There were several summers as a child when we spent a lot of time at their house west of Atlanta, and although she didn’t have the strength to do much of the cooking, she perched on a stool and gave me directions of what to do—to make Italian stuffed shells, salads, desserts, and drinks. She had recipes, but she also cooked by smell and visual presentation. Her dishes, “tablescapes,” and foods were beautiful to look at and wonderful to taste.  I would often call her as I was driving some place and she would fuss for me multi-tasking, but she would listen and sop up every story about my life that I had to tell her. She was an incredible listener, philosopher, and activist. I remember saying to my sister, that I can’t call Grandma Marilyn any more, but at least I can still talk to her—I just have to wait a while for her answer. From the time we were little, we’d give eskimo kisses and say “Bee’s Knees!” and so whenever I hear that I think of her.  I miss her so much.

 '08 Baccalaureate-- mom and grandma Jane love stuff like that.

My grandma Jane was a force to be reckoned with. She grew up traveling across the U.S. by train because her parents divorced (it was unheard of!)…her father was a photographer and her mother a contortionist. She was more or less reared by an Aunt and Grandmother on a farm in Oklahoma. She received a scholarship to Birmingham Southern College and eventually met my Grandpa Matt there. My grandma was the mother of 5 children, a dutiful wife who cooked every night, and an avid reader. But I think more than anything, she was a talker. When people who I’ve met through teaching (she taught for over 30 years in the county where I currently teach) say that I remind them of her because of how I talk and care about people—there’s no higher compliment. She looked out for the teachers, parents, and children in her school and she was a wonderful Grandma.

She traveled with me singing to South Carolina, Chicago, and all over Europe. I lived with her for a time in both high school and college and I thank the stars every day for the opportunity to know her the way that I did—not just as a grandchild who cared for her grandmother, but in a more one-on-one nurturing way. Grandma Jane didn’t know a stranger and she loved to tell entertaining stories. She had one about during World War II about rationing and that it was time for her to get her allowance of shoes and the only mary janes available in her size were RED! The ten year old Janie couldn’t have been more delighted with her luck to be the only girl at her school to have red patent leather shoes. What luck, and what a perspective on the direness of the times. 

Luchsingers concert May 08. She was able to hear the Dec. concert from her new home.

I also learned things about cooking and sewing from my Grandma Jane. To this day, I’d throw away all my vegetarian ideals for her pot roast and cornbread. She grew up with little store-bought food, but since she was on a farm, she knew how to make something to eat out of most anything. She didn’t bake terribly well because she was in much too much of a hurry to read the directions carefully (all that chemistry and stuff). It didn’t stop her from making me a birthday cake a time or two, or calling my mother and asking HER to make the beautifully frosted confections that my mom was excellent at making. Grandma Jane and I had a funny song and dance at IHOP or Cracker Barrel in which I would order whatever food she wanted, and she would get the senior breakfast that I wanted (I always liked the portion better)—in order to save on the bill. We’d wait til the waiter was watching, eye each other’s food and say loudly, “Yours looks better than mine. Shall we trade?” I wonder who was fooled. 

I got my chocolate brown eyes from my Grandma Jane (okay, my dad has brown eyes too) and I’d like to think her fighting spirit and love of seeing places of history all over the world. She and I shared many a marvelous moment traipsing across Europe—and she never got tired of people asking if I was her daughter, and she proudly explaining that I was her granddaughter. A bus driver even commented (to our amusement), “Oh yes, I knew you were related. You have the same nice legs. Sexy.” I learned a phrase from my friend Amber’s mom when she said, “I ran into your grandma and she was telling me about your trip. You know she thinks you hung the moon!” I cherish the things my grandma Jane liked to say…”How often do you get to tour the Red Light District of Amesterdam in the morning and hear your granddaughter singing a Mozart Aria at a cathedral in Germany in the evening?” She lived for soundbites!

These women and others have shown me to live my truth and to stand for what is good, right, beautiful, and musical in the world. Maybe I have one’s eyebrows, one’s legs, one’s brown eyes…but their spirits and good energy are in my heart and soul. Happy Mother’s Day to those ones who I have been so lucky to have the love of in my life.

Mother's Day Lunch 2012- Aunt Janet, Neil, Adrienne, Emily, Mom. We are generally an amiable bunch.