I Cheated at the Cookie Swap

and I regret nothing

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this post if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose turned two last Wednesday. I am so delighted for this space in which I get to share my writing and connect with all of you. Thank you to each and every one of you for being a part of it. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, so please share with your friends. You can also support this publication by becoming a paid subscriber.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Right before the holidays, my colleague Deena organized a school wide cookie swap. When Deena suggested the idea in early November, I was stoked. I love baking, and I’m all for community building, especially when it involves cookies. When another co-worker of mine confessed that she liked the idea too, but she might just bring Oreos, I side-eyed her and then tried to hide my judgement. However, when it came time to bake the cookies that final week before Christmas break, I just couldn’t do it.

I didn’t have it in me to do one more thing.

The morning of the swap, I had no cookies to show for myself. I briefly considered baking the night before, but I chose to watch a show with Dan and go to bed. However, instead of feeling like a panicked kid who forgot to study for an Algebra test, I woke up with a plan. Giddy, I practically skipped to the store. I had one mission, to buy the most homemade looking non homemade cookies the bakery had. I found some chocolate chip ones that I thought would do the trick. I paid for them, confessing my crime to the cashier who absolved me by nodding her approval and laughing. Then, I returned home, removed the pseudo cookies from their flimsy plastic packaging that shouted storebought and placed them in a clear reusable container. I tucked the container in my backpack and showed up to the swap. I felt no shame.

Sometimes the world asks too much.

Last week, it was below zero every morning. My teenage children, both experienced waiting for the city bus for almost an hour in the bitter cold. One kid gave up and walked home. When they texted to tell me this, I was frustrated. I had made it to school after all. My glasses might be frozen to my face, but so what? I wore warm layered clothes, and I sucked it up. Then, I remembered how Jacob, one of our sophomores, ran past me before the first bell wearing only shorts, his legs raw and red. “Are you alright?” I asked, but he was too embarrassed to mumble an answer.

Sometimes we push too hard.

Last Friday was a professional development day for teachers that I had helped organize and plan. We had a special guest presenter flying in from Colorado. I knew the learning was valuable and important, but on that morning, I didn’t want to go. It was snowing, and my kids had the day off, and I just wanted to stay home with them. I felt guilty about my feelings. Here I was an instructional coach, someone who believes in good professional development, someone whose job involves delivering professional development, and yet I felt so resistant. Then, I thought “No, this just makes me real.” This is how every teacher feels about going in today.

I don’t know if it’s February, and this is just how all teachers feel in February or maybe it’s that Spring still feels so far away, or maybe it’s the daily deluge of disheartening news, but I’m feeling a bit worn around the edges lately. I feel like I’m in a fog.

A few days ago, a student came to my office looking for markers on behalf of another teacher. I vaguely remembered the markers. I knew I had borrowed them, but I couldn’t remember what I had borrowed them for, or where I had put them. Fortunately, this student was also in my class, and he knew exactly where the markers were.

“It was so long ago,” I said to him.

To which he responded, “it really wasn’t.” I imagine he was correct, but these days, yesterday feels like a lifetime ago.

I find myself in a fog when it comes to my writing as well. I start things, but I’m not sure how I want to finish them. I feel less confident in my prose. The epiphanies are not arriving.

I do my morning yoga as usual, and I’ve even started meditating hoping the fog will lift. In one of my morning yoga sessions, Adrienne asks me to think of a word and set an intention. Her word is love. My word also has four letters. It is not love.

Another morning, I listen to a meditation that tells me to think about my third eye. The third eye is supposed to be a doorway to possibility, creativity, energy and imagination. The calm voice leading the meditation asks me what I can see with my third eye. I see nothing. My third eye seems to be closed.

It occurs to me after my third eye meditation that I might be trying too hard.

This book is calling my name right now

Recently, after reading “What if the Future is Soft?” a beautiful and hopeful piece written by my friend Celeste Davis, I relistened to an interview between Krista Tippett and Adrienne Maree Brown. Krista introduces Adrienne, the author of Pleasure Activism among other books, as someone who embodies “ways of seeing and becoming and who point(s) the way forward to the world we want to inhabit.” Adrienne Maree Brown speaks of how societal transformation begins with personal transformation. She says we are the personal frontlines, and we must ask ourselves, “How do (we) personally begin to practice whatever’s in alignment with (our) largest vision?”

Right now, in response to the current climate, there are so many invitations out there to do and be more, and while I know that these invitations are well intentioned and important, I’m as exhausted by them as I am by the climate itself. I don’t think that the way towards a more beautiful, just world is through shoulds and shame. Instead, I think it is more about aligning who we are with what we hope for and desire. For me, this means learning to listen to my body and my inner voice. (If my third eye is sleeping, perhaps it really needs a rest.) It means learning to say no to one more thing, even if I have to be a little sneaky about it, so that I can build the fortitude necessary to be fully present in my life and live in a way that aligns with my values.

The night before our special guest speaker arrived, I made muffins. They weren’t just any muffins. They were blackberry lemon ricotta muffins made with garden blackberries I had stored in the freezer last summer. It wasn’t hard to make them because I had time and the right ingredients on hand, but most of all I had the desire.

This one too!

Maybe the muffins were my atonement for cheating at the cookie swap. If so, I think I’m forgiven because they were insanely good. More so, though, I think the muffins were a reminder that I am enough and that I can contribute to this world just as I am and that I can trust the timing of things. I can use my gifts to enrich the spaces I am lucky enough to inhabit. If I move from this place, a place that is rooted in joy and desire, a place that allows room for rest and care, both of myself and others, it won’t feel like one more thing to tend to what matters to me. It will just be me living a life that I love.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates with you? What is your relationship to rest and resistance right now? What books are calling your name?