Yet Another Rant About Columbus Public Schools

Today's rant is brought to you by a news report about parents in Florida who are protesting (with signs and everything) the safety precautions (washing hands and faces twice a day) put into place at the school because one of the kids has a severe allergy to peanuts.  These parents should all catch a horrible, incurable disease, preferably of the venereal variety.

There is nothing that makes me angrier than fighting with my daughter's school about her allergies. I've heard such pearls of wisdom as "I totally understand.  My daughter is allergic to milk." No, you don't "totally understand." Your daughters farts don't compare to the nights my daughter spent in the hospital, including one where they couldn't let her go home because the air is our neighborhood was too toxic because of the flowering of the nut trees planted everywhere on our block. Or the image of her little four year old face when she turned to me crying, her eyes swollen shut, her cheeks the size of baseballs because someone touched a nut, then touched her. "I told Caidyn that she needs to start taking responsibility for her own illness." First, of all, it's not an illness.  It's a disability.  Secondly, she's a SECOND GRADER.  If you, her teacher, and the other parents are too fucking stupid to avoid tree nuts and peanuts, how do you expect her to?

And trust me, she's taken responsibility.  She's the first one to ask "Does that have peanuts or tree nuts in it?" She took responsibility the night she ended up in Children's Hospital, unable to breath, and because the doctors assumed it was an asthma attack, and not anyphylactic shock, she passed out on the table and left me screaming for help. She's taken responsibility when she couldn't walk because her legs got infected (three times) because her skin broke open from her allergies.

People who believe there's such a thing as a "mild" nut allergy are just plain wrong. When Caidyn was four, this happened:
"It happened to Catrina Vonder Meulen 18 months ago, when she lost her 13-year-old daughter, Emily, to a peanut allergy while on a shopping expedition. 'The day that Emily passed away, we were at a mall in Cincinnati, buying her a graduation dress for a friend,” Vonder Meulen told TODAY’s Hoda Kotb on Thursday. “We stopped in the food court, stopped at a national chain restaurant, buying a sandwich that she had eaten probably 50 times before. There was nothing at the time that alerted us.”

Vonder Meulen and her husband, Paul, who have two other children, had known since Emily was a toddler that she had an allergy to peanuts, and Emily was constantly vigilant about staying away from them.

But, her mother said, no one in the family had ever imagined that it could be fatal."

They didn't have her epi-pen, because every attack she'd ever had was "mild." Every time the school takes my child's life in their hands (allowing parents to bring cookies, cakes, candy bars without bothering to check the ingredients) I remember Catrina Vonder Meulen. No one knows when an allergy attack will be deadly.  No one knows what can happen.  Why is it too much to ask for the school and other parents to make SMALL changes in order to accommodate a (DEADLY) disability that affects 3 out of every 100 students? And, most importantly, why do they have to be such douche bags about it?

You Know What Really Irritates Me?

Yes, of course I'm going to tell you.  Fifth grade is the year of research.  Supposedly.  My oldest daughter, fifth grader extraordinaire, has done innumerable research reports this year.  Countries, books, cities, states, stars.  We are now on stars.  And what really pisses me off, pisses me off enough that I'm writing this blog about it, is that IT'S NOT RESEARCH.  It's a passel of kids let loose on Wikipedia at school to find a bunch of random facts.  They are then sent home with those facts and instructions to write a one page paper, create a power point AND a poster.  Based on ONE PAGE of research, and that's being generous.  I found out the criteria way too late to change it (as has become my wont).  What I discovered will make you cover your eyes in terror.

First, my darling's paper is entirely plagiarized.  Not just a little bit, I mean her name is the only thing NOT plagiarized.  When I asked her what plagiarism was, she told me that her teacher explained that, when she writes publishable papers, she will need to learn about citation. Seriously.  No wonder I hear so many college level instructors lamenting the amount of plagiarism they see and the fact that students don't understand what plagiarism is.

It's quite simple.  We don't take other people's things.  We don't take their stereos, we don't take their words, and we don't take their ideas.  We can borrow their stereos, we can borrow their words, but we can't then pretend those words are our own. We have to acknowledge that they are someone else's. And we don't create a research paper out of willy-nilly borrowing.  There is work to be done here! Actual thinking (oh, the horror).

The argument my daughter made (from her teacher) is that citation is too difficult.  My daughter figured out how to make videos, upload them to youtube, and create a website on her own. Citation is not too difficult. I'm not even asking for citation-- just a simple acknowledgment, somewhere in the world, that these words don't belong to my child.  She has words-- weird, wild, wonderful words.  But her school does not require her to use them.

So I assume, like many students, she will someday lose her ability to create her own ideas based on the work she has read, her own analysis,thinking, and synthesis.  Because none of this is part of the process.  The process isn't even research. It's hanging out online for a few minutes, then producing, producing, producing. I read my students' research papers every term and vow to make yet another committed effort to teaching them research (or, more correctly, unteaching them research).  I wonder why some seem to have none of the excitement I feel when I start to research a new project-- passion for a topic, the basic ideas, the desire to know, the willingness to learn through the process, to maybe (oh my god say it ain't so) change because of what I learn.  Maybe that excitement has been beaten out of them by an educational system that only cares about the product, not the process.

Day Two

This morning, driving to teach (driving is when I do my best work, which is why the world never sees it.  Because by the time I get some place where I can write, I've forgotten it), coming down off the high of realizing that I don't have to do anything I don't want to do, I realized something. 

"You do realize, self," I thought, "That this means you DO have to figure out what you want to do, right? I mean, you can't just sit around refusing to do things for the rest of your life." Crap. This question is the bane of my existence.  My psychiatrist used to say, "We know who we are by what we love to do." I've come to realize this is the mark of a great psychiatrist.  They have like five insights that they keep on rotation, and the rest of the time they just let you ramble on until it's time to insert insight. "I don't know what I love to do," I used to always say.  Clearly, I still haven't figured this out three years later.

So, still driving down High Street, I started to try to figure out what I love to do.  I love to go to the beach (except the sand.  I didn't used to mind sand until I had daughters.  Spend an hour driving home with a little girl screaming "I have sand in my virginia, Mama!" and you will learn to take a pitcher to the showers with you). I love the water (but I hate getting wet). I like to sit outside and read (except for the bugs.  And the sun). I like to hang out with my kids, but only when we're doing something everyone enjoys (think no COSI, yes art museum).  I like to travel (but not really to big cities). By the time I parked my car I knew I was in trouble.

Last fall I took a break from writing for two months.  I didn't write anything. I had somehow gotten it in my head that I had decided to become a writer because that's what I'd always done, because that was my role.  My sister's the lawyer, I'm the writer.  It's something I'd always been good at. So, I decided not to be a writer.  It didn't work. Instead, I realized that I didn't love teaching as much as I once had.  I LOVE teaching, but I didn't like the teaching I was doing.

So, I'm no longer in the car and I haven't gotten anywhere.  I don't know what I love to do.  It's not even clear to me what I like to do.  I do things because I am supposed to do them. As someone who grew up in a dysfunctional (hate that word) family, I spent all of my twenties just trying to figure out what people are supposed to do.  What do mothers do? What do daughters do? What do friends do? What do good students do? How? How? How? I thought once I figured all that out, I'd be happy.  Wrong. Now that I have a pretty good handle on what people are supposed to do (in case you're wondering, the average times women vaccuum their house each week depends on if they have kids (and carpeting, of course).  Kids=once a day (on average). The answers from men are the funniest.  "Once or twice a week or a month or so" is my favorite) I've discovered that most of what people are supposed to do makes me wildly unhappy.

What do I like to do? I like puppies and babies, as long as they aren't mine. I like warm weather, but not too warm. I like to ride my bike, but only on the way there.  On the way home I realize what a stupid decision it was not to drive. I like to drink a glass of wine next to the outside fire in the evening in the summer.  There, that's what I'll spend the rest of life doing.  Now I have a plan.

I know lots of women in their forties, or more often fifties, who are living the exact lives I want to live.  Maybe that's the ticket? At some point you get enough age and wisdom that you stand up and say "Eff this! I'm going to figure out what I love, and screw the rest of it as much as possible!"

This is my ongoing quest.  What do I like to do? What do I love?

Expert Book Reviews

Since I read faster than most people I know (and I'm counting babies and puppies here), I thought I'd do us all a favor and provide quick reviews of some books I've read in the last month (for pleasure-- I won't bore you with the ones I read for research).

Drinking; A Love Story: Life changing.  Amazing.

Water For Elephants: Sucked (but it had its moments.  OK, moment).

Roseannearchy: Unfinishable (that woman is fucking insane, and not in a good way).

The Seven Daughters of Eve: Sucked, but readable if you're into anthropology

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: Great. Not as great as I'd heard, but pretty great.

The Memory Palace: Sucked.  Aspects of it were interesting, but honest to God, I never thought I'd say this, but can I get a straight forward story here?

The King's Speech: unfinishable. I'll wait til the movie comes to Netflix, thanks.

Privilege and Scandal: Semi interesting if you're into British Royal history.  I happen to be, so I found it ok.

Duchess: See above (I was on a week long British history thing, ok?)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: if you've ever had a kid, wished you could smack a kid, loved kids, or all of the above, read this book right now.

The Last Station: read it twice.  Watched the movie.  Twice. Amazing.

The Warmth of Other Suns: Toni Morrison recommended it.  Toni Morrison is smoking crack. Unfinishable.

The Other Wes Moore: I finished it, but barely.  I never thought I'd say this about a book detailing poverty and crime and their effect on society, but this book sucked. It sucked real bad.

Right now I'm on Hiroshima in the Morning.  I'll reserve my opinion until I'm finished, but so far it's not terribly impressive.

That is all for now. If you disagree with me, by all means post your opinions to your own blog (which I don't read anyway).

You Don't Have To Do Anything You Don't Want To Do

Someone said something truly astonishing to me this morning.  He said, "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do."  My first thought was, well, sir, that simply cannot be true. It is entirely impossible for that to be true.  But what if it is? Well, that would be life changing.  So, I've been testing this theory of his.  You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. 

Before I even made it home I thought, I'm tired of fighting with my eight year old every day about her hair.  She refuses to wash it herself, comb it herself or even to acknowledge that there might be a problem with rats the size of New England. Her hair is the bane of my existence.  She has expressed the desire to cut it numerous times, but I've held off, because I thought she'd change her mind.  I don't want to fight with her anymore.  So, when I see her I'm going to say, "You have two choices.  Either you learn to wash and comb your own hair, or we're getting it cut into any style you like, as long as it's short and manageable." Cuz guess what? I don't have to comb your hair three times a day.  I don't have to listen to you scream.  My friend, I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.

I imagined my seventeen year old self.  Self, I wanted to say, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I can't even imagine how different my life would have been between the ages of 14 and 21 if someone had said to me, Kid, guess what.  You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.  I'm dead serious.  Try it out. You don't want to drink? No problem.  You don't want to skip school? Awesome.  No drugs? Fine and dandy.  No sex? Well, if you insist, young friend.

Clearly, I thought, this is a dangerous little piece of knowledge. I have a house recovering from guests, floors that need sweeping, dishes that need washing.  Self, I said as I drank an extra latte, totally up to you. Wash the dishes, don't wash the dishes.  I washed the dishes.  But I realized that perhaps I didn't want to, but I certainly didn't actively not want to.  So, OK, self, we will wash the dishes.

The only fights I have with my partner are about what I'm doing and what he's not doing.  I take care of the kids.  I make the decisions.  I pay the bills.  I clean the house.  What if, during one of these bi-annual arguments, he had simply said, You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Well, I probably would have punched him.  But I'm telling myself.  You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.  I feel like I've lost a thousand pounds.  I feel like I'm standing up straighter. A whole life of possibilities just opened up. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.  So I won't.

My Wonder Dog

Yesterday we found out that, after a long medical ordeal, our dog is probably not going to recover.  There's still some hope, but it's limited, and if we choose to keep him alive, it will not be a good life for him, or for us.  One person said to me, "You know who loved that dog the most? You." and another "This is going to be hardest for you." And I realized that these things are probably true.

When you're the mom, and your family makes a decision to get a dog, there is at least one secret part of you that thinks, "Great! A fucking dog! One more thing for me to keep alive.  I'm glad you all are happy." But somewhere in the day to day (Come on, let's go out.  Come on, let's go in.  Come on, let's go out.  Come on, let's go in.  Walkies? Ready to eat? Where's your toy? Who needs treats?) I fell in love.  He is my constant companion. Because I am so isolated (for many reasons), with Ali is sometimes the only adult conversation I have in a day. I talk to my students, I talk to my kids, but Ali is my only grown up friend.  I tell him about what's happening.  I ask him questions.  When I'm gleeful, the days I dance in the kitchen and sing along to Dirty Diana, he's the only one who knows. He's the only one who has ever danced with me. To him and me, a good dance in the kitchen before you mop the floor makes perfect sense. When I sing, he doesn't roll his eyes or request silence.  He wags his tail and follows me around, waiting for me to pat my chest and say "Up! Dance!"

Ali is now and has always been a terrible, terrible dog. The day we got him was early spring.  I was still an undergraduate student with four kids to entertain and less than no money.  So, I got the brilliant idea to take the kids to visit the dogs at the animal shelter.  "We're not getting a dog," I said over and over. "We're visiting the dogs." Rookie mistake.  As soon as I saw the little room, five black and brown puppies stumbling around, I knew. "We're getting a dog." I called my partner and told him to meet us at the shelter after work.  It was shockingly easy.  I filled out some paperwork, handed over a check.  The kids chose him.  He wasn't even the one I wanted.  I wanted the girl puppy with the sad eyes.  Instead, they picked the trouble maker. The people at the shelter told us he was a lab boxer mix, and he'd grow to be about 70 lbs.  This was a lie. We each chose a name and put them on scraps of paper in a hat. I wrote Jack.  The kids picked "Ali," The world's greatest boxer (I repeat-- he's not a boxer.   Animal shelter people lie.  I don't know what he is, but strangers find great joy in guessing).

We took him home, and almost immediately Ali began his reign of terror.  He pooped every where, he bit the kids so much they refused to be around him ("He's MEAN! We want a different dog.") he found so many ingenious ways to run away I started yelling "We've got a runner!" seven times a day. He terrorized the neighbors with little dogs by running after them, trying to "play." He stuck his head through the fence and bloodied his eye, he scraped his hair off trying to crawl under the fence.  He jumped, he licked everything and everyone obsessively. He ate shoes and every toy the kids left on the floor or anywhere near it.  He got into the garbage. He ate every scrap of food the kids dropped on the floor, and many they hadn't even had the opportunity to drop yet.  If we don't push the dining room chairs in, he climbs up on them, cleaning the table after dinner. I tried taking him to the park, but as long as I kept him leashed he would take up the most horrifying caterwauling I've ever heard the entire time we were there. It's embarrassing. His idea of fetch is for you to throw the toy, and for him to either take off and hide it, or insist that you play tug of war with the nasty, spitty piece of a rag. He tears up his toys, he refuses to learn any skill except "Sit," and then only when the treat is clearly visible.  And, worst of all, he KNOWS he's not allowed on the furniture.  Yet every time we return home, I find fur on the love seat. Yesterday, when the doctor finished describing the surgery he said, "Oh, and by the way, we found a foreign object in this stomach that we had to remove." The damn dog ate his bandages. He's a terrible, terrible dog.

But when I say, "Wanna fight?" he stands on his hind legs and waves his front legs at me as I wave my hands at him.  When I come home from the store he gets super excited, because he knows I always bring him something, and when I don't I have to say, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. Not this time, bud." When I'm trying to ignore him he stuffs his wet nose into my hand and holds it there, blowing hot air until I give in and pet him. When I work in the kitchen he sits in the doorway, watching my every move.  When I vacuum he tries to get between me and the vacuum, barking to protect me.  He does the same thing with the broom. Or garbage bags. Wind. Silence.

When my daughter woke up this morning, she told me she'd had a nightmare. There were ghosts.  We had to escape the house. Leave the state. "And we had to leave Ali behind!" she kept saying. "We would never do that," I said.  Then I realized that we would.  "I'm sorry you had such a bad dream," I said instead. "That sounds like a terrible dream."

Secrets

I haven't written on this blog in two and a half months. I told myself that it was because writing the blog was fulfilling my need to write, thereby taking away from the time I should be spending working on my short story collection.  This is, of course, a bunch of bullshit, since writing doesn't work that way.  There isn't a reserve, and once it's empty there's no more. The truth is that I've made myself more and more isolated this year.  I didn't even know this was what I was doing, or at least didn't admit it, until I started reading Drinking; A Love Story.  More on this later.

I have good reasons for my isolation.  My mom was being treated for cancer, my dog got sick, my kids keep me busy, I'm working.  But I've come to see that there were times I could have had lunch with friends, had coffee with a colleague, and I chose not to. 

So, here's the truth, or at least as much of it as I'm willing to tell you. I have pica.  It's a disorder in which people chew on or eat things that are not food.  I've had it since I can remember.  It started when I was very little (a toddler) with me licking ashtrays, eating dirt, chewing the tops off matches if I could find some.  At one point a doctor said this was caused by low iron, but that wasn't true, because iron supplements didn't make it go away. 

When I started reading, I began chewing on paper.  I realize how horrifying this is to people who love books, but it's true. I'm a carnal lover of books.  I can't draw the line between my love of reading and my love of ripping off the bottom of the page, putting it into my mouth, and folding the paper into perfect squares with my tongue. No other paper works the same as the book you are reading at that time. In my family, this is called "Why are you eating books?!?"  I'm not eating them.  I'm chewing on the paper. And swallowing it.

Very, very few people know this secret.  My family. Two or three friends. More people probably knew when I was younger and not so good at keeping secrets.

I don't eat paper any more.  Very much.  I've moved to cloth and wool.  I remember when my daughter was a baby and I had to wash her clothes in Dreft.  When I opened the washer and the smell hit me, I was overcome with the urge to chew on her clothes (I didn't).  For many months now it's been one scarf.  It's white, and it used to have big chunks of string clumped together hanging off the end.  It doesn't any more.  I started to get scared when I had to have a pair of scissors nearby constantly to cut pieces off the actual scarf itself.  At some point I had told myself that as long as it was just the string, not the wool itself, it wasn't that big of a deal. Now I've given up making rules about it, and every day the scarf hangs right there in the closet, on the door, and every day it gets a little bit shorter. What am I going to do when it's summer and it doesn't make sense to have a scarf in the closet?

I tell my counselor that I'm not interested in learning to stop having pica.  It's not damaging me.  I can control it. It's not like I do it in public.  Except that I do.  I'm doing it right now.  I can't leave the house without cutting several pieces and putting them in my pocket.  In the fall, I started having terrible stomach pain. I've broken my front teeth four times on various items (plastic mostly), and now my dentist tells me that my back teeth are so grinded down they may have to be removed. I can't go anywhere without a bottle of water, because I choke on things, even if it's actual food. I'm terrified that I'm going to end up with an esophageal blockage like my dog and people will not believe the irony.

I'm the weird kid in the third grade who sits in the corner and rocks.  That's what it feels like.  It's like if I can't chew on something all the time, the anxiety will be too much to handle.  I could describe exactly how it feels, why it works, but I won't, because no matter how familiar the need for comfort might sound, a part of your brain will still be thinking, but, dude, you're eating paper. That's fucking weird.

But I've ignored all of this for as long as possible.  I'm not an alcoholic. Having pica is not like having a problem with alcohol.  But it is an addiction.  And reading Drinking; A Love Story, sometimes I have to reread a page like the information is going to be on a test because it's so true.  I have other addictions.  I'm just too weird for them to be alcohol and drugs.  I have to pick the odd ones. Pica is one of them.  I'm starting to realize how much my addictions control my every day life.  Some things I can still do. I can teach without anxiety, because it's not really me teaching.  It's this persona I put on when I get in the front of the classroom.  This person says the same things every term, makes the same jokes, writes the same notes on the board. But lately I've begun to see cracks-- even when I'm teaching I begin to feel anxious.  Tired.  I don't want to do this any more.  I just want to go home and hide. I can go to my girls' functions, because that's the public mom me.  I avoid other parents-- I carry a book and disdain conversation.

I believe people think of me as someone who's not scared to tell the truth, who is honest.  And I am, about those things I allow people to know.  But there are secrets I keep-- some I will always keep.  At some point in this last year, the secrets got too heavy or something.  Because now I feel nailed in place. I have to be alone. I am tired. And at some point I have to unload some of these secrets. I have to at least acknowledge to myself that my behavior has become a problem.  You are what you do, not who you think you are or who you want to be. My secrets have, in most of the ways that count, taken over my life.