Motherhood, Redo
Moms are all the rage these days. Moms competing for sexual desirability, making insane lunches in Bento boxes, complaining, boasting, drinking at Marianos and Trader Joes, competing for the best mother ever award which marks them as bad mothers because competition is so triggering. We see them everywhere, dancing with their offspring on TikTok, yelling on reality television, modeling clothes and being interviewed along with their model offspring. Our current Vice President is a mother and the Speaker of the House, and we have mothers all over the globe running countries and being bad asses. This is progress.
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Gratitude
One of my students simply typed “thank you” fifty times down a sheet of paper. Another wrote about the mystic connection she felt with me. One file contains notes, some formal, some scribbled, all read carefully and all effective in pushing back at the despair I so often felt teaching high-school English to these teenagers. Despair because it was so hard, so time consuming reading and commenting on their essays. The only way to teach writing is to read everything and give rapid, encouraging, concrete feedback. Teaching literature required constant reading, annotating, and discussing ideas. After I had corrected 60 Macbeth essays my then 6-year-old son threw the papers in a mud puddle. “ Returning them I told the class why their papers were so beaten up and I heard one student whisper to another, “She has a kid?”
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Dangerous Writing
I thought all children viewed life as dangerous. There were the woods, the ocean, my parents’ wild fights, there were drugs, the Vietnam War, two assassinations, and countless horrible serial murderers. There were weird men looming out of bushes, rumors of alien abductions, no seatbelts, no helmets, no way to contact anyone except on a landline. My parents hated driving so we hitchhiked.
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