Desperately Seeking Balance - 12-27-08

I took my shower tonight while listening to my “Can You Dance?” mix, which I hadn’t listened to in a while. I was searching through my playlists for something full, something that would make me feel, just a little. I’ve been a little restless, and I know why – since coming to my parents for Christmas, I haven’t been running. That always makes me moody and restless. And of course, that Old Faithful each month is here – bad skin from PMS and moodiness from PMS. How on earth will I ever be able to think positively about my skin when no more than a month will go by before I’m struck simultaneously with bad skin and a negative outlook? But anyway.

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When I started listening to my mix, the most beloved mix I have, I did feel something. I suddenly began breathing harder and reflexively ran my hands over my face as I was flung back to heat and running and freedom and “before,” the before I knew before school struck and I lost all joy. And that’s what made my eyes smart with tears – the remembered joy. I had it in that glorious August, the innocent calm before the storm, when I woke up every day looking forward to something, looking forward to getting dressed nicely, cleaning and tending to my new, lovely house, and going for glorious runs in the evening. Everything was so good then. And I thought again in the shower how long it has been since I’ve had joy. Now that I have calmed myself into an acceptance of my life and my job, I have calm, I have a measure of acceptance, I certainly have appreciation, and occasionally I have a sort of contentment. But I have a counterfeit happiness and I have no joy. I am numb once again or I feel the restless unhappiness and dissatisfaction. It is those two choices. Either bad or nothing. And I am spoiled, selfish, and terribly ungrateful. But no matter how hard I try, no matter how well I try to remember and focus on what I do have in my life, I can’t find a way to feel more than a dutiful, unsatisfying appreciation. I do not believe this is all life has to offer anyone – merely duty and obligation, no magic or anticipation or passion. But you’ll; be hard-pressed to find anyone who won’t tell you that some times in your life must be spent limited in such a way. It’s the toll to be paid to get through to the next good thing. But that also didn’t keep my chest from squeezing with the memory of lost emotion and deceased joy.

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I think of this summer, with its delicious excess of heat and the long, open days with plenty of room to do things, plenty of room to stretch. I think of reading the “Twilight” series over and over because the joy I felt in reading them changed with the advent of the school year from a free, happy enjoyment to a joy my hands clenched around in the growing swell of misery. I think of the perfect music-book association between those books and “Can You Dance?” and how for so many days and weeks, the music could take me back to a better place, a good place, a place landscaped with trees and heat and darkness and fresh air and solitude. I’m back in the meadow, out on the water, my feet eagerly pounding their way through my whole lovely neighborhood, before the misery threatened to chose those paths like thorns, before I had to blindly thrash my way to a calm acceptance and appreciation of what my life is so I could once again unclench my frozen fingers from around the expired joy of those runs. So much – and all of it good – in that music.

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The new year approaches. Once again. I am alone. Once again. I feel the same old way. Once again. And I struggled against tears as I thought tonight about It’s Just Lunch. And I still couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Does it matter at all that I so desperately don’t want to do that?” You’d think I could have found a way to accept it and force hope back into me like a shot of adrenaline into a faltering heart. And I thought about this music, this beloved playlist that makes me cry with the joy it shows me because the joy is gone and has been gone for ever so long, it seems. And I thought how when one’s choices of feeling are numbness and pain, it is interesting to observe how one chooses numbness when necessary to function, but how one allows the pain just so one feels something. You go too long being numb, you start to wonder if any permanent damage has been done, like gangrene setting in a limb that has been asleep from an awkward angle for too long. You start to question your humanity if you stay numb for too long, so you reflexively allow or even pursue pain so you don’t get to that point. The questions of “Why am I here?” and “What’s the meaning of it all?” that originate in chronic numbness have their own icy pain, and few people are brave enough to take on the risk.

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I know this doesn’t sound much like acceptance, like that less lovely side of maturity. I have to call It’s Just Lunch and be done with it. I have to go through more and more dating. I just don’t know how. How do I tread that razor-sharp line between being reckless with my vision and controlling my control? I need to know the logistics of keeping the vision alive when it seems I must not focus so single-mindedly on marrying in 2009, on marrying soon after meeting, on being able to stay home when I get married, on focusing on starting a family soon after marrying, on those things which have a surprisingly strong effect on the potency of my vision. If I have to accept that he might not be financially capable at first of supporting me, so that I’ll have to keep working after the wedding, if I might have to stay in this loathsome job indefinitely, if a wedding may not take place this next year at all, if nothing I want or picture has a strong chance of working out that way, then the vision is murky at best. And dating is hard enough with a crystal-clear vision! I just feel like I’m drowning in my own vision because all of its elements have gotten rained on and are now running thick and fast down the canvas into my nose and mouth.

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So how do I do this? I’m supposed to focus only on the end result but that end result has been shown to be more amorphous, more prone to unexpected alteration, than I thought when I started. Or has it? Am I just supposed to hold fast to my original vision? Make it detailed and rich with color and movement and feeling? But how do I find that balance? And what am I to do?

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With New Year’s coming ever closer, I think on last New Year’s, the New Year’s of this year, and no doubt I refused to believe in anything happening this year. So I can’t do that again. I must make a statement of what I want to happen in 2009. And the first thought that comes is that I want to get married this year. But how can I hold to that when maybe that isn’t in the stars for this year? It’s all well and good to say I should plan with reckless abandon but not to lose sight of the essentials of those desires, as I determined a couple of journal entries ago. But how the hell do you do that? How do you plan when you must always think, “but if that doesn’t happen…” I just want to know what I’m in charge of doing. I know the universe is in charge of the how and even the when, but the when is integral to my vision. I don’t just want to get married. I want to get married this year. I’ve waited long enough, dammit! I don’t want to wait any longer! But do I just picture the wedding and not think “autumn 2009”? Or do I think that but always remember it’s the getting married that’s important. Then how does that timing aspect of the vision that makes it so much more focused keep its integrity? My brain is going round and round and I feel a burgeoning anger born out of frustration, which only makes me more frustrated because what good does anger ever do? When all of these questions swirl around and around the only clear vision I have is of having to walk through my personal hell indefinitely: going on date after date, blind date after blind date, never finding my rest. I am a stranger in a strange land. I am a pilgrim who must always keep walking. There is no rest for the weary. Surely God cannot mean to leave me so unsatisfied. But is he doing anything to clear the path between the One and me? Is he guiding our footsteps? And do I still even believe in the One’s existence anymore?

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Surely it must do something that I’m not the only one wanting this. My mother, Margaret, Jess, to mention a few, all investing energy, heart, and belief in my meeting the One at last. Does that all do any good? Is it smoothing or shortening our paths? Is it lighting our ways? As for me, I’m just tired, and heartsick that I must continue with a dating service. I guess it doesn’t make a difference how desperate my desire not to do something is. Now, if I can only stop thinking it does.

Purgatory of Persistence - 12-23-08

My mother reminded me today through her musings on the Secret that the key to making it work for you is “joyful expectation.” And it hit me again – but in a slightly new way – how completely that is missing from my life and just how long it has been gone. I used to have it. But it’s been so many weeks – really, since that date with Alan which gave me yet another epiphany but nevertheless wasn’t the date I had been expecting and signified still further continuation along this path. I think the real petrie dish for this lack of joyful expectation is my job. I have settled finally into a view of it that is not unbearable at every turn, but it is settling regardless, however necessary it is. I have found a few things that don’t blind me with their glare to focus my gaze on, and the best I can do is to continue calmly on, no longer flailing in the mounting waves, but also feeling no love or joy. In the Secret, you are supposed to manufacture those good feelings until you splash into the real thing, but I have not even come close to finding out how to achieve that, at least over a long period of time. So there is no joy to be found in my job, that enormous chunk of my days, and the most I can feel is a dutiful gratitude for what I do have as a result of this job.

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But I think it is only compounding the obstacles to joy that I am still alone. I admit freely I have not been going out and pursuing all possible paths to the One, scrabbling for any sign I’m on the right track without rest. I stopped actually doing anything after that date with Alan and hoped and hoped and hoped still more that somehow the Secret would entail a respite, some sort of ending in this endless-seeming solitude. I hoped and chose to believe that if I really didn’t want another dating service experience, if I didn’t want it strongly enough, then it wouldn’t continue to be my experience. I thought God and the Secret had to be creative enough to generate an organic meeting with my mate, one not so fraught with preconceived notions and expectations and choices and thought. But however much I hoped that could be for me, days passed, one after the other like dominoes caught in molasses. And I remained alone. And no opportunity presented itself. And my vision dimmed until I felt just like the old Nicole, unable to see myself responding to a man even in a natural setting. And joyful expectation eroded into utter stillness.

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A job that at best is merely bearable and a constant stream of reinforcement to my current reality as a single woman have conspired to make me feel nothing. I am blind and deaf and mute. I am once again numb. My life is a sensory deprivation tank. And I just can’t seem to find a way to change that, to access the key to change.

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It’s just been so long since I had something to look forward to. Christmas is already here, that most beloved and joyful of holidays for me, and I feel nothing. I see the tree and decoration and presents and it feels like any other Thursday. Occasionally I feel the most muffled stir of the old emotion I would feel every year prior, that awareness that yet again it’s just the three of us and would I ever find anyone.

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It seems pretty clear my only option is It’s Just Lunch. Just like my job, “I have no other options.” It is my life right now. Mom said a teacher of the Secret said it seems there is a force that prevents you from getting what you want until you’ve fulfilled a certain quota of persistence. That you have to suffer and wait for a certain, undisclosed amount before it comes, but it will come. And so my only options at this juncture and for who knows how long is Newsome Park and It’s Just Lunch, the two most loathed things in my life. Lovely. How did I use the Secret so well for so long only to be left with those two options? I may have faltered recently but I invested many good months. And all I have to comfort me is the job of believing that it will come to me. I just have to find a way not to count my days as they burn away, one by one. I have to just not think how all these days being wasted could be spent in love and happy. I am nearly 30 and still with nothing to show for it.

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So that is why I accepted that I had to stay in this job and that I have to do It’s Just Lunch or some other dating service. That less lovely side of maturity, of this real life of mine. I don’t know how. I don’t know how I will do another date and all that entails, the getting ready, the drive to one of the many restaurants that have tragically been linked irrevocably in my mind with blind dates, the first sight of each other, the forced conversation, the relieved moment when we can part ways and I can go home. I really don’t know how I can do that – not just two more times with I.J.L. but with the next dating service and the next and the one after that. All the while with nothing really good in my life aside from my condo that it seems I can’t afford and my parents. Nothing to get really excited about to remind me of what joyful expectation is so I can manufacture it to bring my future to me. The most I’ve been able to muster for a long time is a dull, forced reminder that it’s coming. But is it coming if I can’t feel that joyful expectation? What if I’m just caught in a downward spiral and I stay alone and trapped behind my classroom door? A purgatory of persistence? Screw that.

Let's Be Reasonable - 12-21-08

All right, let’s look at this levelly, cleared for the moment of preconceived notions and crystallized expectations. I need to clarify once again what I truly want, separate from all I want, because the two sometimes diverge. I want the world. I want a lot, but what I truly want, what is essential, is much narrower.

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I’ve been feeling weighed down, each day’s troubles and thoughts laying heavy on my shoulders, but in its own way, the passing alone of each day being the most draining thing to carry. On some deep level, I signified the loss of each day as some failure on my part, representative of some inability of mine to get my head on straight and laser my focus on my future. Something must be wrong with me, to be still alone, the hard chill of winter being so much more significant than the predictable climate change of another season. Why wasn’t it happening yet? I kept asking myself. What was I doing wrong and how could I fix it? Because surely the universe did not mean to make me wait even longer for love. I had to be the deciding factor in extending this bottomless, endless deadline.

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And involved in all that angst was no just meeting my mate, but a slow clenching of my fists and fingers over the “how” and “when” of this eagerly awaited event. Steadily, my simple vision of meeting my love rose like yeast bread in the warm, moist air of my imagination into far more details and strictures than I began this vision with. I wanted it to happen this way, I wanted it to happen at this certain time, I didn’t want it to come by this particular channel. All these little preferences clouding the issue and bowing my back under their collective weight until I could only see the ground beneath my feet and not the glorious future before me. No wonder I had lost all hope and vision.

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So now I have the reluctant task of differentiating between what I want and all I want, between what I must have and what I would like to have, like separating the wheat from the chaff. And it’s taken me all these weeks to come to that difficult realization because I wanted to believe part of the visualization process could be determining a little more of the “how” and “when” than maybe really is part of it. Maybe I need to rein in – just a little bit – my hunger, my passion, my all-or-nothing instinct to remember what’s really important.

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I want a husband. I want children. I want to be able to stay home with my children. And even taking each part and melding it to make it as rich, detailed, vividly visualized a whole as it possibly can be, I am still forced to admit that those are really the only essentials.

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If you dared to ask me what I would like, I would spill them out one after the other with the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. I would like to be in love for Christmas. I would like for last winter to be the last winter I spend alone. I would like an August or September ’09 wedding. I would like to live in Chesapeake. I would like to be able to quit my job after this year to stay home. I would like to meet my husband in a natural, organic setting and fashion. I would like never to hear from or about another dating service again. I would like a romantic story. I would like to know instantly after meeting my future husband that he’s someone special. I would like to meet someone who is financially secure enough to support a family immediately. Lord, I could keep going with all the things I would like. But that’s not the point of this exercise. The purpose here is to remember foremost what it is that I truly want, the cornerstones for all the castles my imagination has been building with reckless abandon as the Secret taught me. And I do believe you need to be reckless with your visions, that you need to throw your arms wide to scatter all those details like seeds, let them fall where they may with trust that they’ll bear fruit. But maybe you have to be reckless without going blind to the basic desire. The trick is how to swing away with all that heart and passion without losing your feet in the glorious freedom of it.

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It’s Just Lunch called again, making it two attempts after the date with Alan. I kept clinging to a belief that it mattered that I didn’t want a dating service to be the how, that it made a difference to the grand plan. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe that was a “would like,” a perk, a secondary or even tertiary hope. But not part of the essential, the “that it happened,” not “how it happened.” Maybe the only thing I can really do is feel that hope as sharply as I can, throw it out there with all my might, and keep walking along the dating service path. If I got my wildly wheeling eyes back to the basics, I would say again, with conviction, I don’t care how it happens, I will bless any means by which my mate, my match, my love finds me. Do I want to take on It’s Just Lunch again? No. Most definitely not. But I didn’t want to return to Newsome Park day after day this year, either. But I do. Do I get to wake up each day eager for what it may bring me? No. But I wake up anyway. Did I curl into a ball when the last flicker of hope for another job flickered out? No, I did not. Do I fling my young, unsuspecting students away from me, even when they have tried the last of my patience? No, I compose my face and speak gently to them.

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I suppose that’s all just the less lovely side of maturity, of that real life I ached for and desperately hoped I could achieve. That’s being accountable for my choices and not being a victim. That’s facing yet another day the cold that presses on me without complaint, accepting that there is no shelter. That is the golden apple of faith, of belief in the unseen, that I must battle my way to grasp. It’s accepting that just because it’s not easy doesn’t necessarily mean it is not vital. This is my life. I have to live it, and I have to remember how to live it with grace. And somehow, I must keep my eyes focused on the prize.

Siren Call - 12-20-08

I cry out to you, one last final gasp from my chewed-up energy and dimming hope. I open my mouth wide and let fly with a voice that for an instant knows nothing of weariness and defeat. My voice goes winging out, far beyond myself, rippling outwards to houses and doorways and empty streets in a desperate effort to be heard before the waters roll up to fill my open mouth. You’re out there. You want me. You are for me. You can hear me. No one else will hear me, like a keening only dogs can hear. You are the only one who can hear this, can feel the subterranean vibration made by my spirit. You feel it and know somehow that strange sound, that unexplained sense, is for you. Now you are called. Now you must come. You must smash the ice that rims my heart. You must breathe over my numb insides so I can thaw and feel. Yes, it is you I call. I am talking to you. You are indeed the one to respond to the call. I have just a little spirit left in me, just a last swipe of hope around the insides of the glass that frames my heart. I scrape it out and fling it out just as I stumble. You are there. You are for me. You are the One. And now I am spent, lying perfectly still, barely breathing. Eyes closed and chest moving shallowly

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I am not what I was supposed to be; neither am I who I can be. I have thrashed through my life, thinking a lifetime’s worth, trying to change that truth. And I finally accept that I cannot be all I could be until you come to my side and wake me up. You will make me wife, make me mother. You will make me belong, make me fit in finally with all the others. You will make me not alone. You will take what I have to give. You will be my future. You will make me finally bloom.

Visualization Entry - I Am Not Like Other Brides - 12-14-08

I am not like other brides. I did not get cold feet or the jitters. I did not cry as I took my vows, my voice trembling and weak. I did not stress out at making arrangements or micromanage my bridesmaids. I did not get so caught up in the machine of a well-planned day that I lost sight for even a moment of just what day this was. I did not even have a twinge of regret as I expected at the loss of my single life. Even though it was long, it was good, that single life, my “before,” and I expected to feel the loss of it. But that was just one more way I was not like other brides.

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I had always wanted, for my wedding day, to be filled with a pervasive, unrelenting awareness, a sense of appreciation so clear that each moment of that day would be crystallized into memory for the duration of my life. I would be different, I said, than all the other women who lost sight of what that day truly was in the onslaught of lace and programs and invitations and flowers and expectations and damage control and seating arrangements and torn hemlines.

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I just let go. All my life, I struggled against letting go, even as I longed to do so. I let go of anxiety and planning and questions. I just focused on how I wanted my day to go and released it. And the man who finally showed me how to let go stood at the end of the aisle, bursting with joy and pride. He taught me how to let go when he swept me off my feet and I had nothing left to hold onto except him. And my wedding day was marked indelibly like a magic marker scribbled all over a blank wall with the unshakeable certainty that I was home. I chose the right path. I ran the race and here was my first finish line.

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And I think the moment I felt that knowledge and peace the strongest was that first sight of him as I walked down the aisle. I had gone all day without seeing him and it hit me harder than I thought it would. I had gone my whole life without seeing him; what was one brief day? But through all the surreal excitement was the most prosaic thought of just, “I miss him. When will it be time to see him again?” So when I started down that aisle, my eyes sought him out immediately, thinking only of being so happy to see him, and I was struck, so powerfully my feet almost lost their steady rhythm, by what I saw on his face. My heart spluttered as I took in the look of absolute joy and focus on my face. He didn’t look nervous, he didn’t look away. There truly seemed to be no one in the room except the two of us. I have never seen such a naked love as I saw on his face in that moment; I wasn’t prepared to see it to quite that degree, even after all these weeks and months slowly coming to believe in what he kept telling and showing me – that he truly loved me.

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And as I finally reached him, slipping my small hand into his warm one, my heart beat strongly and steadily and I truly knew what this day was. This was the day a man as utterly sublime as this looked on me and before God and the world, declared to all in existence that I was the thing he wanted most. His face showed that more even than the words he spoke. He was saying he wanted nothing more than to tie his life and well-being and future to mine. He stood there, so close I could feel his heat, the strong, sure touch of his hand, and laid his name over me like a cloak, a mantle of belonging and protection. This was the day that begins a new life of being seen, of being someone’s only love, of being someone’s most cherished treasure. I matter to someone. I will always matter to this man. This was the day he declared that he would be here, that he would let me love him, that he would need me to be there, to see him and listen and care for him. It was really a wonder I could hit my vows on cue with all this blindingly bright awareness filling my brain to capacity.

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All of my stereotypes about men have been shattered by this one. And I have come to truly accept that a man can love me as well, as passionately, as I can love him. I never have to hide my desire for him, my single-minded focus on loving him. I never have to throw a casual light on the raw need, even as I hold to the solitude I often need. And through it all is a natural balance that suffuses us. No choke-hold to be found, nor any cold distance. We were meant to be together. Whatever the psychologists may claim, we complete each other. If you truly complete yourself, if you are complete in yourself with no need of anyone in your core, then what is to become of you? Where do you go if you don’t need to go anywhere? I need him. And it is so sweet to be needed just as much, just as unapologetically. If any psychologist was looked at the way he looks at me, like he can’t decide if he wants to devour me or protect me, they would take their notes and research and burn them.

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I am recklessly happy and after a lifetime of moderation, of sensible living, it feels so glorious to let go, to be swept up, to be in love, to leap and have no thought of where you’ll land and have no anxiety about it because you know who will catch you. I’m flying so high I’m light-headed and yet my feet are firmly planted in the conviction that this is where I am meant to be. My past has almost single-mindedly led me to this, my greatest desire. Let the world be stunned by the purity of our love. Let all who see it be inspired to reach for the same heedless heights. Let the two of us come together like supernovas to explode into one endless galaxy. All the clichés are true. Count on it. They are all true. I cannot contain them. My body burns from the light of his love, streaming out through my very skin. I am loved. I am loved more than anything.

The Tunnel Darkens - 12-7-08

It started with the Thanksgiving Day conversation about relicensure. Yes, that’s where it all began, the spiral downward, the devolution of my positivity, my power, my hope which is the cornerstone of the Secret. Steadily, like an accelerated dry-rot, I find myself here. I can no longer see meeting my mate, I can no longer see leaving teaching after this year to stay home with my family. I salt my food with tears and stain my pillow with them and dully accept that there is no way out, neither now nor later. I see going through this year at Newsome Park and the remotest possibility of transferring to another school in the district. I do not see somehow sliding into another district closer to home, nor getting a position outside of the classroom. I see this as my future.

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I did take something from Mom’s lecture about the economy and all the layoffs. It informs my perspective, perhaps in the way Mom intended. I see now no other job. Forget leaving the workforce entirely to be a housewife and stay-at-home mother. Talk about a pipe dream. No, there isn’t even an option outside this job, in this district. I saw that when TowneBank’s stock finally took a dive. I can’t risk joining any company now – last to join, first to go. These enormous layoffs are by no means the last we’ll see. The economy looks to be in store for these dismal conditions for at least several years. So I stay. I can appreciate the job security. In Newport News, I have tenure. I can’t be fired outside an act of God.

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And so I am left here, on a barren landscape and weak and blind enough not to see all the good in the face of all the hopelessness and pressure felt by those left with no job at all. But I do appreciate that fact, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am looking at a long haul ahead of me, struggling every day for peace and happiness, remaining a person of small things, of small pleasures. God, that’s a bleak picture. It will go on so long I will truly forget what lightness is like, what it feels like to be eager to wake up.

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Unlike my grief all those years ago, when I had the sharp-edged blessing of ignorance, with no idea how long I would have in the valley in which I found myself – and a good thing, or I never would have survived – in this situation, I may not have an ending date, but I do know I have at least seven months, and quite possibly a year or two past that. And the only comfort I have is knowing where my next paycheck is coming from – a significant blessing and one so many hunger for, but it can’t give me joy, only a quiet acquiescence. There is no joy in the world right now. Those with no jobs certainly have none, and it’s dying out with those who have the jobs left, with the added responsibility left by those who have gone. All belts are tight, all eyes shadowed, all shoulders bowed. And I am one of them.

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And I am afraid I don’t have enough faith to withstand reality, the reality of the economy. I don’t have hope enough to keep believing a man will come along and marry me soon and support me so I can escape this. As long as I see it as an escape, I suspect God will hold it away from me. Something about motive. He says he rescues us, but I rather think that’s from actual danger or emergencies, not a lingering despair and stubborn unhappiness that resists all attempts at manufactured happiness.

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When I had talked with Mom on her birthday about my quandary about Match.com, we talked a long time, and to help me see that the universe is working for me behind the scenes and that all of the creation of my future doesn’t rest solely on my shoulders, she told me that Jinxie, one of her neighbors who I absolutely love and who was quite taken with me, wants to bring her son, Tyler, to the house when I happen to be there and see if we hit it off. Mom hesitated to tell me that – Tyler and I were supposed to be ignorant of the well-meaning machinations of our mothers – but she told me in any case because she wanted to encourage me that my belief in my future was putting a lot of things in motion. And I didn’t get all my hopes up about Tyler even though he’s absolutely hot and has so many of the qualities I want, mainly because he lives in New York and shows no inclination to relocate back home. But I did start thinking, even wondering, if he might fall in love with me enough to move back here with no regret or bitterness, which did for the first time make me wonder if I could really ever be enough for a man to move to me willingly. But anyway. It did encourage me.

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But now I think dully why would it work with Tyler? Why should he be the One when no one else has been? Before, I saw that history with a new, more reasonable perspective, that my mate is so perfect for me, that there could only be one person for me, that of course it would take a little time. But now, I just can’t see things that way. So much for the interpretation that staying at this job would allow me to coast so I could focus all my attention on attracting my perfect mate. What is actually happening is that this job is stressing me out so much I can’t see myself investing any energy in anything else. I couldn’t respond to a man if I tried, and I can’t picture, with all this mental fuzziness, a man putting enough effort into a first meeting with me to warm me up enough to respond.

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So I’m left with the depressing, lonely picture of staying alone in this job for years. I weep when I think of my son, wanting him so bad and wondering if he’ll ever come. I supposed I don’t want him so well as I did before, as I’m not doing such a good job of investing that desire. And yet I think now that all this would be so much more bearable if I was in love. I probably shouldn’t think of love as such a drug, but it sure would dull the pain.

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And it’s cold, because it is now getting on to the middle of December, so the winter has begun, despite delaying for as long as it could for my sake. And that winter which would be the first winter I would spend not alone is starting to stretch on the way all the others have done.

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It’s Sunday night and I’ve been crying sporadically as the clock crawls closer to bedtime because it means I have a whole week at work ahead of me, and that’s how it is now. That’s how it will be, as I have lost hope having finally grasped how bad the economy is. This is what is in store for me. That is my future. And as depressed as I am about my present, how can I generate good feelings to bring about a different future? When everything is bad or worse, how can you turn things around? This would be where God comes in, but he’s giving every sign that I am supposed to stay where I am indefinitely, and giving no sign – as ever – that I can at least have the comfort of finally meeting my mate.

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My mother asked me to distinguish and prioritize my desire for marriage and my desire to stay home. I rebelled against separating the two, running true to form in wanting everything which should be beneficial with the Secret but hasn’t proven to be yet. But I had to admit to her I wanted marriage most of all desires. I want not to be alone. I want to be seen. I want to be touched. I want someone to tell me they are choosing, above all things, to be by my side. And after talking with Margaret today, the day of Morgan’s baby shower, jeez, again I just want to get it over and done with and stop dealing with comments and expectations. But how dismaying to face the possibility for the first time that I may have to pick and choose my future, take marriage now and maybe staying home with my family later. Will I have to wait to have children for long like so many others do for finances’ sake? Will we struggle with money like so many others do? I know I’m being greedy, but I have long since accepted that part of my nature is the unqualified desire to have all or nothing, despite my efforts at moderation. But if I had to choose, I would choose marriage. But I also don’t know why I’m killing my hand to explain all that. I don’t have any belief left. All I see, all I feel and hear and taste and smell, is more of the same I’ve always had, chained to this classroom and my empty bed. I am tired. I am so tired. And I fear I am only breaking up my future to add to the shards of my present laying jumbled at my feet.

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Is there anyone who would love me? Anyone who would like the look of me and be compelled to be near me? Is there any second glance in my future? And any man who could do the work at first because I can’t seem to raise my limp arms or dark eyes? Do I have to do all the work? Can I never feel the exhaustion, or doom myself if I do? Is there anything more in store for me?

"An (Off-Key) Christmas Carol" - 12-6-08

Last night, on our way to an aborted evening of entertainment at a showing of “A Christmas Carol” at the Wells Theater, Mom and I got into a confrontation that shook me and cracked some of the hard-earned, unquestioned trust I had placed squarely on Mom’s shoulders. By the time we had turned around and come right back home because I was too upset to enjoy the show or even be in the same room as Mom, we had communicated well enough for me to see that her lectures about how many tens of thousands of people have just been laid off and she didn’t want to hear any more complaints from me, were all from her perspective that that kind of “buck up” lecture helps her count her blessings. On Wednesday, I was overwhelmed with my misery and with the horrific prospect of staying in teaching at Newsome Park indefinitely and cried for an hour after I had talked with Margaret who, of anyone, would know of any crack at all I could slip through to get out of this school, told me sympathetically, “You just have no options.” I got off the phone as gracefully as I could and the bomb went off. A true crying jag. I have cried privately plenty often this year, but only have had a few actual crying jags – running mascara, face in my hands, whimpering tears instead of my usual silent sobs, an hour passing before I can talk coherently, the whole bit. And I called Mom because that is the long-standing agreement, tacit in many ways, that we have. And next day, as I started my day with an inexplicable calm and composure, she sent me an email, as she had the last time I had sobbed to her that I just didn’t know how I could go one more day, let alone all the dozens after. Her email was a buck-up, get over it, you have so much to be grateful for, etc., and crippled me again so I had to get it together a.s.a.p. before the kids came in. We emailed back and forth, and for the first time, I responded to her perennial concern over my lack of “resiliency,” not with a meek resignation, but with a clarification of my definition of resiliency. Basically, I told her that she is the only one who sees all that emotion, and that I am resilient because I go into work the next day and do my best and no one has a clue that I am any more stressed than any other teacher in that cursed building. I told her that it is because of her that I can be resilient. I thought I had clarified well enough the nature of those occasional sobbing phone calls to Mom, but apparently not. It took driving to and from Norfolk for me to understand that she had still been shaken up by the sheer force of emotion I had lobbed to her, crying about how I couldn’t see how I could go in the next day and the next week and month and year. She was thinking that could easily lead me to storming into Sherry’s office and screaming, “I quit!” even though I had specifically assured her that because I could still come to Mom when it got really bad, that scenario was forestalled. So her whole lecture and refusal to be the one I could go to when I was crying about my job was all coming from her fear of this economy and my actually chucking it all with no back-up plan.

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I was in disbelief that after all these years and all the time I had spent with her and all the me I had let her see, she wasn’t assured of my character to know I am far too much my father’s and mother’s daughter to be so reckless. I was also distantly alarmed to the point of horror that she had been my only safe outlet when things go that bad and she was effectively telling me she was taking herself out of that role and essentially I had no outlets now, after I had specifically communicated to her that it was only because I had her to turn to that I could go on and make the right choice.

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So to her, this discussion was just her being a good parent and showing me what a good life I had, basically stop sniveling and be grateful, because when things have gotten hard for her, she has gotten through it when she’s thought of how much she has. But for me, it was far more than a lecture; it surpassed that definition when she said, “So let’s not have any more complaints.” Ever? Really? This year and its stresses are by no means over, and there is nothing I can do with them? So everything we gained, all those pieces of trust that had finally all clicked together that day at Jim’s Beans years ago when I told her everything, about my chimera, my depression, my suicidal thoughts, and she handled it and I knew I could come to her with anything because she said, “I want you to come to me before it gets to that point because I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here on this earth,” when all that happened and all that trusted solidified now, I was only eventually going to have the rug pulled out from under me and have no one? No one? I couldn’t process it.

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Fortunately, by the end of the bad night, we had cleared up a lot of it. She saw what she had done and I saw what she had instead tried to do. I told her that not all my trust was broken – that could never happen; she had shown her true character well enough for so many years for that to ever happen – but my trust in coming to her when I’m only knees with the stress and the long months and years stretching ahead of me was damaged. How could I let her see all of that misery? How could she ever know the nature of it? How could I not edit myself? When I truly did not see how I would literally get dressed, walk out my door, drive that commute, and face the kids, what would I say? Would I offer disclaimers before every thought? I had done that for too much of my life, having to preface every thought with, “I know that…” I don’t do that anymore. I spent too many years feeling I didn’t have the right to any complaints or dissatisfaction because I had such a cushy life. It took 25 years to finally own that I had as much right as anyone else to a bad day. I told her this in that dark car. She said she still wanted me to come to her and not edit.

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She’s sense and I’m sensibility, I see that with a new clarity. She’s Eleanor and I’m Marianne. We love each other and are close and on the same page about most things, but at some point, we handle stress and unhappiness very differently. I told her this, too, and that while she responds to those stern lectures well, my nature is such that that only makes it harder for me to see clearly. I respond best to soft sympathy so I can see I’m not alone and maybe I can make it one more day. Maybe all this happened so she could understand that essential difference between our natures and respond better in the future.

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I emphasized to her that I would never be able to take such a self-indulgent risk as to quit and say to hell with my beloved condo and my whole life. But I don’t care about the economy and how high-pressured the remaining jobs become. My job is stressful, no matter which way you cut it. My workplace environment is unhappy, unsupportive, and incompetently managed, no matter how you look at it. There are certain objective truths that remain what they are regardless of the subjective emotion with which I may view them.

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I think she really understands and I think I do, too. I told her everything I’ve ever written in her birthday and Mother’s Day cards is still true, and we’d just have to get back to that trust. But once I got home and went for a run, I was faced with some hard questions. Was I really as strong as others? Am I just more delicate, that my breaking point was so much closer than others? I always knew I lacked a certain toughness that others had who had had to work from a young age and become independent so much sooner than I. I could never see how they could be happy when their lives were so hard, and shied away from what that meant in my own nature. I can’t help that I had a soft life, and Mom said she’s always been more reticent than Dad in giving me gifts and buying me things. But it is what it is. I told her I’ve done well with what I’ve had. I still make good choices, always trying to live well, and wisely. When things have gotten hard I’ve somehow managed to make it through. I just maybe feel more than she does, maybe feel truer and sharper than she does. Maybe that is where the essential difference comes from between me and others who seem to be able to take more in stoic silence.

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And as I sat there on the pier, looking up at the moon, I thought, “Am I then good enough? Is this a flaw in my fabric? Is my strength enough, good enough, worthy enough, in comparison with that of others?” I’m too old not to accept who I am, and even getting an unflattering picture of myself or a new knowledge of a long-held flaw can’t change that. I wasn’t asking that question with the fear that all I know of myself would crumble to the ground under the weight of a storm, however great. Any fault in the foundation of what I’d built of my understanding of myself won’t be great enough to topple that. But I still had to ask the question. “Am I good enough now? Am I strong enough?” I am not as tough as others. I know this. I’ve always wanted to be delicate, but I seem to be delicate in all the wrong ways. “Is my strength good enough?”

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But then I thought of how low I get, how I am on the floor sobbing in despair that this is my life no matter how much I want a different life, and I can still go into work the next day, dry-eyed and composed. I can hug my kids, laugh with them and tease them and speak softly to them to make them love me when I saw I had to, and never let them see how much I don’t want them. That is a kind of strength, isn’t it? It takes a certain strength to show love where there is none. Perhaps that’s a woman’s strength. At any rate, it seems to be my strength. But where will that leave me, I have to wonder?

Stuck - 12-3-08

Crying in the car on the way home. Jeez, I thought I was done with that. Evidently not. At our Wednesday planning meeting, we were hit with the one-two punch of more expectations and paperwork piled on us and even less accomplished on our next week’s lesson plans (read “nothing”). Yet again, we are overloaded even more, if that’s possible. I had to leave because I was going to lose it if I didn’t. I just keep thinking, “Hold it together till you get in the car.” And what truly burns is that all this work we are expected to do – much of it pointless – would be overwhelming for someone who actually wanted to do this, who still believed in this worthless profession. So to me, it is salt in the wound. I already hate teaching, loathe being around kids. So right there is a large measure of necessary energy missing, and I need every last bit of it for all the work required of teachers, let alone all the extra work required of us at Newsome Park because we didn’t meet AYP.

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I had already begun losing the ability to go day by day, beginning to see with dreaded clarity the sheer length of this school year, thanks to that discussion about license renewal. So today just compounded that inward groan I had been feeling for days. And as I got in the car and began my commute out of this passionately hated city, I alternated between squeezing tears and dull hopelessness. It seems incomprehensible to me that the year is not even half over, that I still have seven months left. I cannot fathom that, let alone another two years, God forbid.

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I’m stuck. I’m so terribly stuck. There’s no way out. Obviously. I can’t even use the Secret because I think it’s become quite clear that this is where I’m supposed to be. It made sense that TowneBank didn’t work out, but I can’t even comfort myself with the thought of how staying where I am is going to help me focus on attracting the future I really want, because I can’t feel, see, hear, sense that future anymore. I’ve gone dead. My transmission tower has shorted out. Flat cardboard cut-outs are all I have left of the vivid, beautiful future I envisioned. And it’s not even like I’m giving the lie to all the belief I had in that siren call out to my perfect mate. It’s just that I’ve fallen silent and can’t sing out to him anymore.

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And I could understand the reasoning that TowneBank would have really diffused my energies and diverted my attention from marriage and family. But would all new jobs have done that? At this point, I would leap at the chance to work in another school or district, even as a classroom teaching. Just anything in another building, out of the smoke of the burning ship I’m on. But no school or district will touch me without me losing my license. I’m under contract. So there is not even the prospect of me getting a job I could do easily so it wouldn’t divert my attention too much.

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And you know, that reasoning only goes so far. The silver lining of losing TowneBank was that I had a job I could coast through so I could focus on attracting my perfect mate. That only goes so far as my spirit remains intact. And this school and this job are crushing my spirit. So how does that reasoning make sense?

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So there’s no way out. And for a year, I’m trapped – and the year timeline is only IF marriage or a book contract pan out by August. I can’t help but think that I did such a good job for four years in this position. I worked extra hours, worked hard to become proficient and learn and hone my craft, took so many opportunities that I could easily have let slip by to mold and understand my students. I spent so much time and energy and heart to do good and make a difference, and for that I have earned a year in the pen? What did I do that I must be punished? Because that is what this feels like. Punishment. Retribution for a crime not committed. I don’t understand why I must go through this.

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It is draining me, and therefore my focus on my desired future. It is solidifying racial prejudice which could have been avoided if I had just been allowed to get out. And my loathing for children would have been able to stay at a distant, occasional frustration or distaste.

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I just don’t understand why I must stay here for another seven months, God help me. More to the point, I don’t understand how I can stay. Things are reaching a critical mass; they have to so somewhere. There has to be some resolution. And I thought on the way home, “God, you have to help me. You can’t possibly, you couldn’t possibly mean to just leave me here for a whole year!” And I thought, yes, he can. He can intend exactly that.

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I don’t know how I am going to go in tomorrow and teach all these different things to kids who won’t get it anyway, insist upon beating my head against a wall with them, and deal with all their shit, when I don’t even want to teach. I don’t want to be around children. I am sick of being around these children who have no self-control or home training. School is not a place for learning; it is merely the receptacle for any shit a child might be amused enough to throw. And I’m saying this after I’ve already finally built relationships with all of them and I basically like them, and yet I hate them. If I never had to see one of their faces again, I would rejoice. I just don’t want to do this with any of my time, resources, or energy. It is just an unending, frustrating, completely pointless repetition of rules, consequences, and concepts. I hate this job! I hate this job, I hate the building, I hate the kids, I hate the administration. And I just don’t know what to do, because there is no way out. I’m in prison.

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And I can’t go back to the way things were at the beginning of the year. I can’t. Not just I won’t; I can’t. I know part of that hell was my own making – my choices, m y reactions, my refusal to invest anything in my students. But most of it was not me. Most of it was just that it is a miserable profession to me, that it has become a horrible place to work, with incompetence laying out more work for teachers to do. I can’t go through that hell again, with crying at home and at work, never smiling, dreading every minute, having to work so much harder than I’m capable of. I got undressed today and thought, I wish there was a way I can wear khakis, my school shirt, and tennis shoes every day. I just don’t want to try anymore. I just want to pull my hair in a ponytail every day and wear minimal makeup and no jewelry, and just be comfortable. Because there’s no point in looking cute. There’s no point in being anything but comfortable because there’s too much crap to deal with. Yeah, another way keeping this job is preparing me for meeting a man – female-dominated, sucking my energy dry, crushing my spirit, and finally making me actually look like a teacher. Yeah, great plan.

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And when I finish this journal entry, what will have changed? I’ll be just as dead as I was before, and just as trapped. Will God come? Will help come? I certainly hope so, but if it does, it won’t be with my help, because I’m sinking. And I so wish I weren’t. I wish some way would show itself to get me out of this hell. Is there no hope for me? Am I destined to have to complete this year-long sentence? Is there nothing can be done?

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It just boggles me that there is no possibility. In this whole big, bright world, in this amazing modern world of millions of opportunities, there’s nothing for me? I really must stay the rest of this year? I just can’t fathom it, can’t wrap my brain around it. What happened that all my opportunities, all my possibilities, got taken away? All these years of working so hard to do the right thing, live a responsible life, get education and train, learn and learn and learn, only led me to a dead-end? How did this happen? How was it that I did all I was supposed to do, was such a good student of life, and all that did was drop me off in the middle of nowhere? How can I be left like this, with nowhere to go? Was it all a waste?

The Tunnel Begins to Form - 12-1-08

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the Secret lately about the things I really want: my clear skin, my perfect mate, my perfect weight. I just keep feeling so tired. That’s the only word for it. When I think of what I truly desire, everything just gets fuzzy in my head. And it takes focus to really visualize and feel the feelings of having it now.

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Now I feel like I’m in this narrow, dark tunnel and every day that’s coming is precisely like the one that came before. I can’t picture so easily meeting the One without feeling those old feelings of pressure and what will we say and will I respond correctly so he doesn’t walk out of my life because he doesn’t think I’m interested. I try to remind myself that if it’s the One, it will feel natural and all those concerns will be moot, but then the fuzziness comes back at that moment. I feel like the same old Nicole, as if I’ve lost all the changes I earned so well. And that spirals into feelings anxious over those feelings, and the tiredness makes it impossible to counteract them with strong good feelings. I need help, but will it come? Am I holding a match to the manuscript of my future over which I’ve labored so long? Oh, please, don’t let it all go to waste simply because I am tired. Even young men grow weary and cannot go on. Even young women lose their strength. And what is to happen to them when they do?

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It just feels like there is nothing new on the horizon and everything I’ve created in my head is just a mirage, an effect of the heat that charged my brain for a while, a fever dream. I just can’t seem to open my eyes, or close them, rather, and see the possibilities.

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My father brought up my soon-to-expire teaching license, of all times right before I was to embark on my Thanksgiving Day cook-fest, which I had anticipated for 11 months. See the balloon? Now see the pin. Voila! Instant letdown. I promised to check into it when school started up again and said no more about it, but inside my brain was roiling, trying to see my way through this disturbing new thought forced into my head. It suddenly made me feel so foolish and naïve to think I could manifest a husband who would marry me by autumn of next year and be well-off enough and secure enough to support me as soon as we marry, so that this year would be the last year I would EVER have to enter Newsome Park’s doors, or those of any school. Listening to my dad talk about “just being smart” and “the job market now” and “people are losing their jobs all over the place” made me feel like not only would I have to finish out the year at Newsome Park but would have to bleed another year out of me. How trapped and disheartened that made me feel. I had sworn I wouldn’t invest one iota of my energy into a future in education, even a fall-back future.

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And today I went back to work, positive, managing even up until the parking lot and walk into school to live in the present, wasting no energy on dread. And the day went fine, I suppose, but I still ended the day bowed down. I investigated the relicensure scenario and I can take creative writing courses, which would help my writing and be paid for by NNPS. But all day I just couldn’t stop thinking, “I hate this fucking job,” over and over. Not even angrily. Just a fact that won’t be denied.

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99.5% of the time, I’m reconciled to the fact that I am here the rest of this year. But there are those 0.5% days when I allow myself to become aware of how I live day to day, borrowing neither trouble nor time from tomorrow or next week or next month. And I think, “How long can I go on, living day to day? How can I do that for another seven months?” And when I confided in Dad tonight as I cooked, his responses were, in this order, “A lot of people don’t even have jobs right now” and “You’ll find the strength” as he ate his huge helping of Thanksgiving leftovers. And I very nearly cried right there over the pasta. Because I didn’t want to have to find the strength, not for another two years. I can’t even fathom another two years when I don’t even allow myself to think of next month.

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When I confided to Mom my feelings, she actually listened to my hate for my job. She heard me when I said I don’t want to work with children at all, in any capacity, ever. She listened when I said that if I didn’t get out soon, I worried what it would do to my desire for my own children. Her ears were open when I said I didn’t want to hear another child say, “Ms. Parks.” I loathe this job. And even if I had to stay in education, God almighty forbid it, it would have to be out of the classroom and far away from children. And I said how faraway all my dreams seemed, like every day is just like the one before, and that it was like a wake-up call when that concern over relicensure came up: How could I actually get what I want? How could I marry my perfect mate by the time my paycheck runs out and actually get to quit this utterly despised profession? How silly and naïve was I to lose myself in such castles in the air.

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And Mom replied quite firmly I must not allow myself to be dragged off-course. That she and Dad were just being parents and thinking safe and sensible, but if that truly conflicts with what I want, then to focus instead on what I want, since no one knows my desires like me. She said if I truly hated teaching so passionately, then I shouldn’t bother renewing my license, even though Dad would disagree.
I objected that it wasn’t that I thought they were trying to drag me off-course, but rather than I was disheartened by the very real possibility that their suggestions is the universe showing me I need to prepare for the unexpected, and that it was tough not knowing if this is the case or not. Mom said it’s not my job to know how or why, just to stay focused on what I want. I conceded that it had occurred to me that maybe the whole conversation came up because this is a way to hone my craft with creative writing classes, which I wouldn’t do on my own coin but which would be paid for by the school district. That maybe relicensure was merely the vehicle. And how delightfully, wickedly ironic that my loathed reality should pay for my way out of it.

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Ever since I started writing a reinvention of the Rumplestiltskin fairy tale, I have wondered if there is a job out there I would want. If maybe I can write or get published by autumn so I can still quit teaching. I’ve considered that if it hadn’t been for going back this fall, I wouldn’t have rediscovered fairy tales for the sake of my poor, literature-deprived students, and I would never have gotten this idea for a book. And I’ve also considered that if this year hadn’t been so horrible from the start and if it hadn’t have driven the hatred for my profession so deep in me, I wouldn’t have such a motivation to write even when I don’t feel like it. If writing got me out of teaching, I have endless motivation to keep at it – anything to stay away from the pit of education.

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I don’t know. I did feel better after talking to Mom, although I still feel so worrisomely fuzzy with my focus on my future. I’m going over there tomorrow to hammer out some classes to take next spring.

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And somehow I will make it through the next seven months, though God please not another ten after that. After my shower tonight, I was gripped suddenly and unexpectedly with a shaking emotion as I felt what I would feel if I was told I didn’t have to go back tomorrow, or the next day, next week, or ever. I could feel the tears pushing at my throat, and I realized that if I heard the key turn in the lock of my prison door to let me out, I would not laugh or jump or squeal or dance. I would simply weep. I would weep for the freedom I had dreamed of so often and for so long, at the feel of it finally solid and crystalline in my parched hands.