This Is What They Don't Tell You.

They don't tell you, when they tell you to pursue your dreams, that your students will look up at you like puppy dogs and ask, "Why are you leaving?" And you say that you are tired, and those stories you tell about your children staying awake too late and getting up too early and sometimes waking up in the middle of the night are all true stories. And they say, "But you're my favorite teacher!"

And you will feel sad and wish you hadn't decided to follow your bliss.

And then you will go pick up the kids, and one will fall down while he's running on the meadow, and his favorite shirt and favorite skirt will get all muddy, and you'll scoop him up (all 40 pounds) and say, "I know. It's not fun falling down."

Before the fall, you will ignore the 5-year-old girl who asks your son, every time he wears a skirt, why he is wearing a skirt. You will resist the urge to ask girls you don't know why they're wearing pants. No matter how cool you think it is that your boy loves skirts, you will feel violently, painfully protective of him, even though it doesn't seem to bother him that other kids ask him why he's wearing skirts and dresses.

After the tears stop, you'll go to your kids' favorite museum, because they've been wanting to go for two days, even though the thing they really want to climb on there will be wet and slippery and not at all fun. So you'll go back inside and do the same favorite things you've done all winter.

On the way there, you'll pull over in the same place you pull over every single Thursday, to let one child pee along the side of the road. Even though you know it will happen every single Thursday, you will find it frustrating and annoying beyond belief. Even if he's just four years old and more interested in playing and running and holding his baby doll than thinking about his bodily functions, the same functions which have consumed astonishing amounts of your energy, focus, and time since the moment of his birth. You might swear, quietly, under your breath.

Nobody tells you that parenting is a constant renegotiation and reconsideration of codes and rules that you'd never known existed. You'll sometimes tune out the children's conversation while you're driving to ponder why the dress code requires 3 and 4 and 5-year-old kids to wear shorts under their skirts, especially when shorts and a skirt and underpants are really just too many layers in the summertime.

You're going to feel like you won the lottery when the kid who never wants to pee anywhere but home agrees to go to the bathroom because he so obviously can't hold it anymore.

When the pee doesn't make a sound, it's because it is slowly soaking your kid's underpants. And the shorts under his skirt. But not the skirt. Thank god. Not the skirt. Nobody warns you that letting your kid go commando in a skirt at a children's museum produces an astonishing amount of anxiety—what rules are you breaking; who will ask you why your boy doesn't have any underpants on; and always the need to justify your choices to everyone else.

And when you finally get home, to the sanctum where anything goes, and you notice a tick on a scrotum (thank goodness we are not so strict about pants in our house), and you have to listen to an hour-long tantrum over the two-second extraction, nobody has warned you about how intense it is, to know that you have to do this unpleasant thing that every time feels like a violation of the secret covenant between you and your child: I will not hurt you. Because he doesn't understand right now that getting that tick out *is* not hurting him. That the fretting and worrying and watching for fever and rashes that starts every time we find another tick has good reason.

When the kids are finally in bed after fifty rounds of back-rubbing and leaking water cups and cries of "mommy, mommmmmmy!" you will lie in the dark with them and soak in the sound of their breathing, the touch of their toes under your body, their warm hands wrapped around your arm. You will lie there in the dark with tears streaming down your face. You will cry silently, feeling conflicted about crying over what wasn't really such a bad day, considering all the things that are awful in the world. And then you might, possibly, go write a blog post about it. In case someone else was wondering: how was your day? Consider yourselves warned.

Riding in the Car with My Boys

When you decide to drive 765 miles away from home with two four-year-olds, you take it pretty seriously. We made serious preparations. At the end of the first day of driving, I thought: Hey! This was so easy that I ought to blog about it! And at the end of the return trip, I thought: Hey! This was so hilariously difficult that I ought to blog about it!

Here's what we did: We drove from Durham, NC to Jackson, MS. Here's what we didn't do, not once in the four days total we spent on the road: use a screen to entertain our kids. This wasn't a deliberate choice: We had a backup plan with plenty of videos loaded onto our computers. Our boys love watching videos of garbage trucks and trains. On the other hand, our children also turn into drooling zombies when they tune in to screens, so we thought we'd see whether things ever got so bad that we'd bust out our laptops. We were close. But never really thought of going there. Perhaps we should have.

That first day, we felt like champs. We'd purchased several new items, mostly variations on toys/activities they already had. This had worked for us when we flew cross-country with 2-year-olds. What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the best stuff we tried:

Mess-free drawing pads

Tubes that stretch, compress, and hook together. The BEST toys we bought.

Lift-the-flap books with few words for us to read, so they could "read" them themselves.

We doled out our prizes out slowly over the first day. The children played merrily as we zipped down the road. We felt smug. Some things didn't work, but the boys were happy to play with what they had. This was great! Traveling with kids is so easy!

And this leads me to Tip #1: Never assume that works one day will work the next day. Do buy a few new things. Don't buy too many.

We arrived at our first day's goal, the ACTUAL General at The Southern Museum, with almost an hour to run around inside, take selfies with the train, and enjoy some of the fine playthings there. Our boys LOVE Buster Keaton's film "The General," and we'd carefully planning our trip so that we could go see the real thing. They were delighted. Tip #2: Plan for a destination midway through the drive that will get you all moving/out of the car for at least an hour. Our stop at the General was necessarily at the end of the day, but the kids were so excited to see it that the anticipation carried us through. For subsequent days, having a longer break mid-day would have helped more than having a final destination.

Tip #3: Don't eat dinner at the hotel. There is a well-rated burger joint next door to the museum in Kennesaw. We didn't eat there. We regretted this decision for the rest of the evening as we waited ages for mediocre burgers, wilted salad, and lousy fries.

Tip #4: Book a hotel with a pool. There are people who will drive 12 hours in one day. We are not those people. We like to sleep all night. It takes longer, and costs more, but is so worth it. The pool was extra-pleasant: We got up in the morning and swam before we hit the road. After a day spent cooped up in the car, spending a while moving before we got cooped up again was great. Day Two started off great.

Then came the turn: about an hour into the drive, D asked, "what else did you bring for us?" We managed to put him off for a while. But eventually we went through our whole stash in a couple of hours. We tried audiobooks. Those produced screaming. With another two hours left before we got to Jackson, things were getting serious. We took a break.

The break shifted the air a little bit. We said things like, "Well, you can have the toys you have, or we can just put them all away." It wasn't pretty. Music helped, for a while.  But we arrived in Mississippi with about an hour of whining total over two days. We felt even more smug.

We had a great trip—got to go on walks together every night, spent lots of quality time with the family. The kids slept great, unlike the last time we traveled.

For the return trip, we aimed at Chattanooga and its many wonders (trains, aquarium, Lookout Mountain) as the endpoint of day one. Day one found the children totally onto our strategy: imagine colossal amounts of fussing and whining and frustration with every new variation on drawing/coloring/cheap stuff to play with. At one point we were walking around in the rain trying to calm down screaming children. That novelty addiction is serious stuff. We survived, thanks to an emergency, yet extremely frustrating, toy purchase (not pictured because it was so annoying. Instead, please look at this cute picture of the boys with those spinning sparking things. These were a brief, glorious hit.)

Tip #5: Always double-check that your "halfway point" is really halfway, possibly a little more than halfway. Also, please refer back to Tip #4: we took a swim as soon as we'd parked our car. It totally changed how we all felt about each other. Very little about driving in cars with small children over long distances is fun: they don't want to play I Spy, they can't read, and even the truck-obsessed become jaded about all the tractor-trailers. The boys didn't take a nap until 3:30pm, which led to a cranky wake-up and a late bedtime. But swimming with small children is a delightful opportunity to connect—no requests for food; no help with LEGO; no sibling fights. We didn't know, during that swim, just how unevenly we'd divided our days of driving.

As a side note, I would absolutely drive through Chattanooga again—the scenery was fantastic and there were plenty of fun things to do, had we chosen to do them. Chattanooga to Durham is just under 7 hours on Google Maps, but I can promise you it is a much longer drive than that at 451 miles: the scenery is amazing, but there are windy roads, tons of trucks, and a lot of stops to make. The kids continued to play with their frustrating toy, with varying levels of success. We were all wiped out from going to bed too late. We did mention to them that we would not be giving them new things every five minutes; perhaps I will look back on this trip fondly as the time they learned to deal with delayed gratification. Perhaps I will look back on it as the trip that made me give away all the toys.

The best rest stop I've ever been to we discovered just over the North Carolina border. This stop saved our sanity. I wish we'd had a picnic lunch to eat; we could have spent an hour playing here. Instead, we were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch. Tip #6: Pack lunches, or plan ahead for a stop you can tolerate. Don't hope to stumble upon a great place at the next exit. It doesn't exist.

Fresh air and room to run. 

We climbed trees.

All of us climbed trees.

Peace and bliss were achieved when the kids finally took a nap at 3:30 and slept until we were only an hour from Durham.

Tip #7: Keep your sense of humor and drink plenty of coffee. Happy travels!

In This Moment

Some days are hard. Sometimes, it's hard to be at peace in the moment. Some days, there's one meltdown after another. Some days, I'm exhausted and just want everyone to be quiet. 

Eno River

So often, in the grind of work and tending little ones and tending to a home and adults who need feeding, too, it's easy to get caught up in what isn't going right—no nap, not enough time for yourself, not enough time to do everything, no way to do anything with two cranky three-year-olds. And then there are other days, days when even though one kid doesn't nap and it's hot and I'm tired we somehow manage to putter along happily all afternoon. Those days, I'm living as much in the moment as my kids are. I'm able to feel contented with this moment, with this life, with this place. 

What happens when he's having a hard time sleeping.

Usually, that feeling of ease emerges when we're able to spend the afternoon oscillating between backyard and kitchen, when I'm able to accomplish something I need to do, but not under pressure to do it all. When I'm able to pay attention to what the boys need, able to be unruffled. The backyard is a naturally peaceful place, full of birds chirping, soothing breezes and an unending variety of creepy-crawly life. 

Checking out some worms.

I have a master plan to plant a bunch of stuff in the yard, which is at this moment a total blank slate. But a knee injury has had me sidelined since February, and while I'm almost all healed, I'm still not up for digging a bunch of grass up for hours every week. 

Yep. The whole yard looks just like this.

Still, dirt is good. Soil on your hands is grounding (ahem). I want to say something profound about how slowing down and working with the earth and watching plants grow makes me a better mom and a better person. But I've kind of said that already, before kids. So, I found a few pots at garage sales, and spray-painted an old file cabinet that our neighbor was giving away. The afternoons that we've spent loading dirt into pots, planting, and watering have been absolute bliss.

Not shown: sleeping brother.

We dug together, planted together, and now I look outside and can enjoy the sight of things growing.

Gardening with my kids is much less stressful than cooking with them. No matter how patient I try to be, I can only cook with the boys about once a week before I get frustrated with the legos in the batter and the hands in the raw meat. Outside, there isn't much harm they can do aside from too-vigorously separating root balls or overwatering. Outside, where nothing can break or spoil, not really, is heaven. 

Maybe it's their wonder at the green and growing world.

I am happy to make the shift from grass to garden one day at a time, to stretch out the hours my boys and I spend digging and patting and tending and exploring. I miss our old garden, but this new space gives us the infinite promise of tomorrow's work. We have plenty to do. 

Having It All

By now, everyone has read Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in The Atlantic—if you haven't, the gist is that even (or especially) women who have accomplished great things in their professional lives find the demands joys of parenthood to be a significant challenge to their ability to continue on the paths they've chosen. She argues that her generation of feminists has been telling women that they can "have it all" (career, family, self-fulfillment) if they just work hard enough, long enough, but that this message is deceptive and untrue. There are thousands of responses I'll never read (if I did read them all, I'd never write this post; this is a good one whose excellent points I won't directly address here). But I want to mention a couple of the ideas that came up for me as I was reading Slaughter's piece and a couple other pieces.

First, it goes without saying that I'm hardly in the category of "alpha leaders." High school English teachers don't exactly run the world, important as our jobs may be.  And I don't want to run the world. I want to garden, do yoga, and watch my boys grow up. I've made compromises already, scaled back my ambitions for the next ten or more years, as Dana Shell Smith asserts one must do even in an "insanely demanding job." Teaching is an insanely demanding job, even without the ambitions I have put on hold. Being a parent who is present as much at home as at work requires somehow fitting that insanely demanding job into very little time. But would it have made such an impression if, as a friend said to me, an English teacher had written 13,000 words about how hard it is to balance work, life, and ambition? Another friend pointed out that it's not just women with children who find balancing work and life difficult. She's right: some of the most over-worked people I know are childless men. Clearly, the system we live with isn't fair or pleasant for many (most?) of us. Indeed, people without kids often feel (whether correctly or not) that they're unduly burdened with expectations that do not fall on the shoulders of those with young children. I know I felt that way in the past.

And Slaughter herself admits that she's hardly the spokesperson for all women or all people—she has incredible privilege; after all, she left DC to go back to work as a tenured professor at Princeton. But her privilege does give her the opportunity to be heard. The part of her point that I felt most resonance with is that for many women the definitions of happiness and balance change when kids come along, and we're left with trying to choose among the things we love; the idea that this is in any way a choice for  women is a fallacy, according to Slaughter. Slaughter quotes Senator Jeanne Shaheen:

“There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.

Children trump all—whether that means putting career plans on hold or working extra jobs to provide for their needs. Given my recent experience with just trying to tread water in my own career and life, never mind feeling fulfilled on all fronts, I'd have to agree with her.

After an adult life spent defining myself by all the things that I do, the shift to the so-called mommy track is hard.  I love the interactions with my students, the stimulation of the reading and thinking and talking that goes on in the classroom. I love the energy of adolescence, the perspective I'm gaining on learning as I watch my children grow. And I miss being the go-to gal for a presentation on integrating digital tools into the classroom. I miss feeling satisfied with hours spent in the garden. I miss calling my mom just to chat in the middle of the afternoon. I miss having friends at work chat with me about movies or books or TV; during the school year, I miss having friends.

But I'm home with the boys for the summer, and I'm quite relieved not to switch roles twice a day. I can just be a mom. It's so much more work than being at work. I'm not doing as much prepping for the school year as I should be doing. But I'm taking Sunday mornings off to go to yoga. I'm swimming once a week. I'm taking a dance class. I'm watching TV with my husband after the kids go to bed. No, I'm not gardening, but it's only a matter of time. I'm cooking a little, here and there. I'm making friends who are moms and meeting up with friends who aren't moms, too. For these eight weeks, I have just about enough.

Love's Austere and Lonely Offices

Yesterday I taught Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" for the umpteenth time. I loved this poem before I had children. But now that I have two very sweet, gorgeous boys to take care of, I almost cry when I read the last two lines:

"What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"

My sophomores get it: love comes in many forms, and not all of them are hugs and kisses. And I got it, too, when I first started teaching the poem. But there's something about the relentlessness of this first year with the twins that makes Hayden's point so much clearer now—there is never a day (or night, and some nights it seems like there's never even an hour) off from the offices of parenthood. My fingers are nowhere near "cracked" from the "blueblack cold," but it's still not easy.

What did I know of 1, 2, and 4a.m. wakeups all in the same night, not always with the same child, with a 5:30 start to the day that follows? Of losing touch with everything that keeps me sane—yoga, friends, garden, writing—because if I have a spare minute, I need to grade papers or cook or shop for the babies? Of the loneliness of sitting in the car on the way to work so I can pay the nanny to be home with my babies so I can keep myself entrenched in my career? Of knowing that my lunch hour will be cut in half by needing to pump, so being at work is rarely the social occasion I desperately need it to be?

No, the austerities in my life are nothing compared with those in Hayden's poem. And I am now filled with so much more gratitude for every moment of my parents' lives, for every midnight waking and meal that magically appeared from the kitchen, for an education and a home and all the million privileges I'm trying to provide my children with, too.

What did I know of love? This stuff is hard.

On the other hand, because I feel myself tearing up as I think of the relentlessness: What did I know of the sweetness that is an open-mouthed smooth on the lips from an 11-month-old with a runny nose? Of the intensity of being covered in babies from the time I walk in the door, one wanting just to be held, the other dashing back and forth with the world's biggest, goofiest smile on his face? Of the amazement and wonder I still feel that my body has helped these two little beings grow big and strong, yet can also help them drift off to sleep at night? Of the kindness and generosity that friends and coworkers show? Of the bittersweet feeling I get every night that I'm up nursing a baby that one day soon this too will end?

What did I know of love? This stuff is great.

But I'm looking forward to getting a full night's sleep.

Back to the Salt Mines

That's one phrase I'm going to try to eliminate from my thinking about teaching this year. And any other similar phrases. As this Profhacker post reminds me, the words we use affect our attitudes:

Each time you say something like “back to the salt mines” (which is usually accompanied by a shrug, or slumped shoulders) you reinforce your own attitudes about your workplace as being somehow like a dangerous mine where prisoners labor.  Sure, maybe you didn’t mean it, or not at a conscious level.  But if you think or say “salt mines,” “salt mines,” “salt mines,” several times a day, you’re probably not going to be feeling lively, energized, or creative.

Attitude makes a difference. I should know better than to adopt a negative attitude toward the work I'm doing (yes, this is another thing I've learned from yoga). Teaching is often hard work, but so is much of life. So, the next time I talk about the misery of grading, or being buried under course reports, I will try to be more conscious about my attitude: the grading is there to serve my students' learning, not to torture me. Interims and course reports serve the same purpose; in fact, they liberate me from the tyranny of letter grades. So I should be grateful, or at the very least, accepting, of the parts of teaching that aren't necessarily fun. And then I should keep trying to find ways to be more efficient and effective at those things, so I can spend more time on the fun stuff.