I have the best job in the world

except for the days I don't

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As a reminder, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this post if that works better for your life. Today’s pocket is special as I’m sharing the link to the live performance of my PIVOT story. A big shout out to my paid subscribers, especially those of you who chose to continue supporting this work for another year. Thank you! Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends. I’m raffling off free seeds at the end of this month to anyone who shares my pockets.

Without further ado, today’s pocket

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

I run a multi-cultural student staff book club with two of my friends and colleagues. Our goal in creating multicultural book club was to expose students and staff to different cultures and perspectives, to share our love of books, to foster community and to give students and staff space to explore their own identities. This past week, Andrea Bass and I took our book club members on a special field trip to Auntie’s, a local bookstore in downtown Spokane, a short walk from our high school. Because of a generous grant from the Spokane Public Schools Foundation, each student got to choose a book from the bookstore to take home. After we thoroughly perused the stacks and the students made their choices, we walked across the street to eat Indian food at Mango Tree.

I spent the entire walk from our school to the bookstore talking up Mango Tree’s mango lassis to the kids, and at lunch, one student was brave and smart enough to try one for the first time. I couldn’t tell if she liked it at first, but when she finished it, she asked if she could have another. One student played it safe and ordered the pepperoni flat bread, but she eagerly tried the samosas I ordered for the table, a small step outside of her comfort zone. We happily ate our naan, curries and pepperoni flatbread while we discussed our book choices and what we might put on our unofficial resume, a question I posed on the walk over to get everyone talking. We laughed and chatted easily. These kids have been gathering weekly now for almost a year, talking about stories, sharing their insights and wonderings, playing games together… They had become friends.

I have the best job in the world.

This week I also hosted a release party for our literary magazine, a one hundred plus page book, designed by student editors, which features the art, writing and photography of the students in our school. We had so many submissions this year, I blew our budget at the print shop as the book was twice as large as it was last year. We held the release party at Wishing Tree Books, another amazing local bookstore. I am so lucky to live in a city with more than one amazing bookstore. Students shared their work and spoke about the artistic process. They spoke of mental health. They spoke of people and characters who inspired them. They spoke of love. Most of all, they spoke of the power of art. After they shared their pieces, we cheered, snapped and clapped for them. It was such a safe space that some students who weren’t planning to share changed their minds, and some chose to go again.

I have the best job in the world.

This week I sat with a student piecing together his final research paper, focused on the culinary accomplishments of Black men and women in the Civil War era. I showed him how to create a works cited page and how to connect his ideas within the paper to this works cited page. I listened as he talked through his ideas and answered his questions about where he should put his commentary and what his commentary should focus on. I read his evidence aloud to him, and then I said, “It looks like you are highlighting the incredible cuisine that originated in the mid to late 19^th century across…” I couldn’t find the right word.

“The African Diaspora,” he said.

I nodded my head.  This same student shared his poetry at our release party. After the performance, he said “This was my first year writing poetry. I just can’t explain how I feel,” He was beaming.  “I’m just so, so, so…” He couldn’t find the words.

“High on art,” I said.

He nodded his head.

I have the best job in the world.

I worked with another student this week on his final mythology paper. He had missed a full week of school because he had gone back to the reservation as two of his family members had died. Since graduation is this coming Saturday, I wanted to make sure he had what he needed to turn in his paper. He assured me he had it under control. The next day, the day of the field trip, he found me and asked me I would please help him. Eric’s paper required that he support Joseph’s Conrad’s assertion that something is lost when we don’t have shared stories. Eric and I had a long conversation about how this might be true but perhaps we should reconsider some of the stories we tell. Some of the myths Conrad is referring to are misogynistic and violent. Maybe telling them again and again isn’t as valuable as Conrad thinks, or maybe it’s like Padraig O’Tauma says, “We don’t need to eradicate our myths: it’s that our interpretation of them needs to be investigated.” Eric and I mapped out his paper which allowed him to explain why knowing some Native myths was essential to his identity but also created space for him to challenge Conrad’s ideas about which stories are worth telling. Eric left confident that he could write his paper.

I have the best job in the world.

Except for the days I don’t.

And there are days I don’t, days when waking up at five am so that I can attend a 7:10 meeting to talk about why none of our kids are coming to class, feels like way too much, days when I discover a student I really care about has hurt themselves or someone else, days when it feels like the apathy in the room might suffocate us all…

On those days, I try to take long walks with Cato after school, and it often helps. These walks calm and soothe me. Cato regularly poops on these walks, and I pick up her poop with a biodegradable bag, and we are on our way, but every once in a while, when she has munched on too much grass, her shit gets stuck, and she can’t get it all the way out, and it is the saddest, most pathetic thing in the world, and the worst part of it all, is that it’s my job to help her. Some days, after a shitty day at work, I am standing on someone else’s lawn trying to get shit out of my dog’s butt.

Sara Petersen, In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, reminded me this week of what lyz wrote in 2017 about motherhood. Sara’s writing often seeks to challenge the myths we tell ourselves about motherhood. I share it here because I like the idea of challenging the stories that don’t serve us, and I think this particular message extends beyond motherhood… to work and the general act of humaning.

It’s an understandable urge to try and make every moment teem with meaning, but sometimes, your kid pukes, you catch it, and the moment is everything and nothing. Sometimes you just sit and stare at your baby, because what the hell else can you do? Just as much as motherhood has always been part of art, not all moments of motherhood rise to the level of great significance, aesthetic or otherwise. The everyday realities of motherhood are not all about noticing or experiencing. They are not always elemental. Sometimes they are just what they are — a lot of hard shit that you scrub out of your carpet because someone pooped on the floor (again). To assert that motherhood is in and of itself significance, is kitschy in its denials of shit. And any rendering of motherhood that doesn’t grapple with shit cannot be fully honest.

Any rendering of life that doesn’t grapple with shit isn’t fully honest.

I have the best job in the world.

Except for the days that I don’t.

My Pivot story came out this week. I’m sharing it here, so you can click the link and watch my performance if you like. You can start from the beginning and see all the performances, which I encourage you to do, or you can click through the performances using the button at the top right-hand corner and watch them separately. I am the fourth performer. The third performer is Loreley Smith, my other friend who runs book club with Andrea and me. Her story is a hilarious account of her experience as a pet sitter, which turns out, is not the best job in the world.

My story is about the beginning of my teaching career, when I definitely didn’t feel like I had the best job in the world, but it’s mostly about the day I discovered I did. Twenty years later, those magical days, even if they are few and far between, make all the shit worth it.

Thanks for being here. Support your local schools. Support your local bookstores. Support your local libraries. Peace!