I want to write something about this book of mine that’s coming out, but I keep thinking about the night before the return to school after winter break. All three of the Feyen girls’ lunch bags were opened and drying on the kitchen counter, and a cinnamon candle was lit to combat the two-week old cucumber smell that was festering inside one of the lunch bags, because one of the Feyen girls neglected to not only eat her cucumber two weeks ago, but also forgot to throw it away when she returned home from school.
I can’t say two-week old cucumber smell is the worst smell I’ve ever inhaled, but at the point of writing this, I cannot unsmell it, and my stomach churns at remembering. I also remember the sting of cinnamon, and the flame from the candle flickering next to scrubbed clean lunch bags, and the rinse and hush of the dishwasher as it worked to clean one of our mistakes so we could start again.
This makes me remember the night we went to the Tigers game, and Harper ate her weight in hot dogs and ice-cream, and in the wee hours of the still dark day, she threw up. Jesse and I have had our share of clean up duty, but this was truly amazing. Vomit was everywhere – the bed, the walls, in books, toys – it was as though Harper became a lawn sprinkler, dousing everything she owned in hot dog and ice-cream remains.
One of you washes the kid off, helping her out of her pajamas and into new ones as she shakes and cries and says, “I’m sorry.” You wrap her in a blanket and lay her down on the couch and say, “It’s OK. It’s not your fault. Get some rest.” Another scrubs the room, peeling off sheets, piling up stuffed animals, wiping off books with Clorox wipes.
When I wore what I hoped would be the wedding dress to make Scarlet O’Hara green with envy, and stood before my Grandfather under the beams of Calvin College’s chapel, and I promised to love Jesse and stand by him through sickness and health, these middle of the night throw up sessions never occurred to me.
But the two of us were sitting on the coffee table facing the washer and dryer – groggy, grossed out, waiting for one load to finish so we could put that in the dryer and then another one in before we returned to bed, and Jesse started laughing as he took items out of Harper’s backpack – rocks, enough hair elastics to start a small business, scraps of paper with doodles and etchings on them, a Dutch-American translation guide. It was the laughter of surprised delight – a father marveling at his whimsical little girl that he’ll probably never completely understand because she is her own, and it is her job to understand herself, but what fun it is to be with her and take care of her as she grows and finds herself in this world with rocks and languages, dancing, and baseball.
Maybe The Teacher Diaries started on a run last January as I rounded the corner of Packard and Industrial, insisting to myself that I had nothing to say about teaching Romeo and Juliet, but then remembering a first kiss and the events surrounding it, and deciding a night on April 1991 paralleled quite well with the first scene of Act 1 of the play. I remembered laughing as I ran home in the not really rain, not really snow because I thought I’d found a story. I ran my fastest mile yet that morning – the urgency to get to my notebook widening my strides. It was an awkward essay, one that was uncomfortable to write, and is probably uncomfortable to read, but it’s full of grit and beauty (I think), and I sent it to Laura Barkat, whose idea it was for me to write about Romeo and Juliet in the first place.
“This?” she wrote back, “This, I’ll take.”
The project took off from from there, but I’m not sure that was the true beginning.
Years ago, soon after Hadley was born, I started going to Starbucks for a couple of hours to read or write after Jesse came home from work. One of those days, I wrote something on the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice because I wanted to understand the story better. I wrote what I connected with, who I connected with, I tried to use words I didn’t understand, I wrote down sentences I loved. I pretended I had to teach the book to middle schoolers, and made up an activity and lesson for my pretend students. That piece of writing is still in a notebook, deep in the files of my closet, and will probably never see the light of day, but I can remember exactly where I was sitting, and exactly what I was wearing, and I know I thought, “This is fun.”
I started a blog. Sometimes I wrote about books with activities I paired with them, but mostly, I wrote about Hadley and then soon after, Harper. I was well aware and totally ashamed of the term “mommy blogger,” because I was afraid “real” writers tsk tsked this sort of writing (or didn’t call it writing at all), but writing about Hadley and Harper felt like claiming a part of them. It felt like claiming a part of myself. And when we change and grow and see the world differently, I will have a record of who we were and what we did, and I don’t mind that at all.
One afternoon, right at Hadley and Harper’s nap time, our doorbell rang. Our doorbell was the most obnoxious doorbell in the nation, and equally obnoxious was our buzzer that allowed people in and up to our third floor condo. Plus, everyone who is buzzed in liked to express how damn loud the buzzer is as they were winding up the second floor set of stairs, so everyone knew, including the babies that were sleeping, just how loud the buzzer is, which was the case of the mailman who greeted me with a package at my door.
This is all to say I was disrupted, and I detest being disrupted. I am not an easy going person. There is nothing about me that’s flexible. I am wound up, and my peace is found in a well-laid plan.
The package was a book from my dad. Rumors of Water, by Laura Barkat. “She writes about raising her girls and writing,” he wrote in the note inside the package. “Sounds like something you’d write about someday.”
And so I think I have lots of beginnings – of disruptions: the rot of cucumber and the spicy whiff of cinnamon; the treasures found after a night of cleaning up a volcanic vomit eruption; a seed of a story that keeps me company on a run; writing about what I don’t understand whether it’s about getting a baby to sleep, or Mr. Darcy; a father who delights in his girl trying to figure herself out, watching what it is she is doing, and sending her books as she walks into the dark, trying to take note of her tracks so she won’t get too lost, while at the same time, attempting to name what it is she sees, and bring it to light.
I am proud to be one of TS Poetry Press’ authors. What’s more, I am honored that the two girls Laura wrote about in Rumors of Water, the daughters she delighted (and delights) in as they figure themselves out, had a hand in my first book. One was my editor, and one created the cover – a cover that I look at every day as I did my wedding dress before the wedding, or Hadley’s onesies before she was Hadley and still becoming whoever and whatever she would become.
Love is in the finished product, the pomp and circumstance, but love lies in the distribution, too. It waits for us, hoping we will pick it up, take a look, and see what it is we can do with all that we are unsure of.
The Teacher Diaries: Romeo and Juliet is available here.
Romeo and Juliet: A Teacher Diaries Companion edited by Sara Barkat, with essays by Sara, Hannah Haney, Karen Swallow Prior, and myself is available here.
Oh, but this is wonderful, all of it. I, too, delight in a well-ordered plan, but since my health often doesn’t allow me to complete my to-do lists I keep writing them and holding them loosely. One of my lists is of writers that I love whose writing I’m behind on, and your name is perennially on it. I’ll send you a picture. I don’t even want to talk about my own writing to-do list and how far behind I am in everything. The only list I reliably check off every week is grocery shopping, preparing meals, and making coffee, which is good I guess because no one else around here is going to feed me.
I’m so excited about your book, just waiting for my budget to catch up before I order it. What I love about your writing is the same thing I hope to do with mine: You craft your life into a story by assuming it’s a story already and trying to tell it as faithfully as possible. Your life and your writing become inextricably linked, not just to your readers but to (it seems to me) yourself as well. I often wonder how people who don’t write even know who they are.