The Place Where I Used To Work

Where is it? my 18-year-old son wanted to know.  A community college I thought he would like. 

It’s up north, past the place where I used to work.

My throat closed as I heard myself say it: Used to.

The grief rolls over me in waves.  Grief over the loss of my work as a teacher, the place where I worked, the people I worked with.  The looming loss of my brother-in-law to cancer.  The looming loss of my son.  The loss of youth, of multi-potentiality, of energy, of the belief in perfectibility.  The loss of hope that the past will ever be redeemed.  The belief that anyone other than myself is responsible for my failure and limitations and unhappiness.

Twice a year, lakes turn upside-down. The well-defined gradations of light and temperature and living creatures break down, and everything mixes with everything else: protozoans, algae, bottom-dwelling scavengers, decomposing litter.  Dissolved oxygen and minerals intermingle throughout the water column, a fertile reshuffling of matter and nutrients.

Like the monarch in its chrysalis. Another potent soup.

Getting Real

Okay, I tell myself, clicking off the SAD light: Get real. I know I’m depleting my meager retirement funds, taking Social Security too early, taking my leisure while my husband is still exhausted with a demanding full-time job.

I cut short my usual morning ritual: face, jeans, tee shirt, peanut butter toast, the Washington Post on Kindle, and the New York Times KenKen, with multiple cups of coffee.

Get your butt moving. I flick on the laptop and wait for it to crank up. How do you spell the name of that online tutoring service? Is it Smart-thinking or Smarthinking? The latter, I recall. It makes no sense when you read it phonetically; the two words crash together, with a disturbing aberration at the middle.

It takes a while to sort through the website to locate an application form.  Cheese-and-rice!* They want a resume, cover letter, recommendations. All this for a 10-bucks-an hour tutoring job for which I am wildly overqualified.

I refuse to spend an hour making major edits to the resume and cover letter I have on hand. I make one or two tweaks and paste them into the form. Just a few hours a week, I think. I can do this in my sleep.



*(Okay, this is not really what I said.  I'm being polite.)

Choice?

I feel like a failure, like there’s something wrong with me for being unable to sustain my energy and excitement for teaching. Like someone who deserves to be kicked out.

But here’s the truth: I choose to vacate a system that relegates part-timers to the “housework” of the English department—the lowest level comp classes, the 2-credit research writing classes with high labor and low financial reward—the courses the full-timers don’t want. The draining emotional labor of trying to carry students in financial, mental health, and academic crisis through to the end of the semester.

I choose to have control over my schedule, to feel appreciated and generously rewarded for my skills and effort, to foster my own creative ambitions and meet my own emotional needs.

That's at least part of the story.  The other part is that it still hurts. 

Un-deciding

I can’t bring myself to email my dean and tell him I won’t be coming back after all. It’s embarrassing, changing my mind from one week to the next.

Then I get an email. The dean offers me two courses for spring.

Shit. Now I really have to tell him.

A few days later I go upstairs for a good cry. I have no idea what I’m crying about. I just ask for help—from my angels, from Jesus, from Thich Nhat Hanh, from no one in particular.

I feel a warm, female presence, a young woman. It’s okay, she says. It’ll be okay. Change is hard. You’re scared. You’ve been teaching, helping people all your life.

It helps, a little.

A fall without a classroom

For the first time in 20 years, I’m facing a fall without a classroom, without the identity I’ve sheltered in for so long.  There’s a hole at the center of myself, and sense of being adrift.  I still grieve for the person I was and the structure that held my identity in place, but now I sniff at the air, looking for clues—what will I do next?  My whole career, my whole life, has been about pushing myself, improving, achieving.  Finding the one occupational identity that would redeem me, as I somehow needed to be redeemed.  "Who am I?” seemed always linked to “what should I do?” My mind would spin for weeks, months, even years over that question. 

How I Left Teaching

When I see myself at the front of that classroom eight years ago, I am wearing my favorite skirt—mid-calf, with overlapping splashes of black and magenta and sea-green.  A long silky blouse, bare legs and sandals.  My hair at the time is thick and glossy, dark brown with red and gold highlights.  I’m smiling.  I throw out questions, elicit the students’ answers, cajole them when they’re reticent.  I am so used to this that I come to class with only a vague idea of where we’re at and where we’re going.