Tag: moving

What I Mean Is… We’re All Gonna Be Ok

PavowskiLeave a comment

I’ve been saying “it’s gonna be ok” to people just about every day for the past two months or so. Because I’m a teacher, and I’m leaving my students.

I need to be more clear, and not just because I haven’t written word one on this page in, oh, a couple years? I worked at my current – no, my former – job for 8 years. I really, really liked it. No, I loved it. You don’t get upset over leaving a job the way I got upset if you don’t love it. I loved my job, I loved my students, I loved my coworkers.

But I’m leaving, because life does funny things to all of us, and sometimes opportunities arise that will never arise again, and because people on their deathbeds don’t talk about the things they did and wished they hadn’t, they talk about the things they didn’t do and wished they had. This is the kind of move that I would always wonder about if I never made it — so I’m making it. Even if it’s scary, even if it hurts.

The hardest part, by far, is leaving my students. I guess that might sound strange to any non-teachers out there, but I can’t even say I’m a normal teacher. I teach theatre. I don’t just have a student for one class somewhere in their 4-year career — I often have students for multiple years. Some kids I teach for all four years. Some I teach as freshmen, then not again until they’re seniors. Some, I never *actually* have in a class, but I direct them many times in our after-school performances.

Point is, I have *relationships* with these kids, and our group feels like family. And I’ve read so many letters in the last two months since I learned I was accepted for my new job — letters showing appreciation for what I’ve done, and who I was, and the things I’ve taught them, and all kinds of things. A thing I wasn’t quite ready to hear was, to how many of these students I became a father figure. (Yes, scary thought if you know me in any capacity, but that only goes to show how much these kids counted on me.)

So — my refrain, upon leaving them, has been: “it’s gonna be ok.”

Which it is. They’re getting an outstanding, well-respected educator to take over the program. I’ve worked hard to make them into confident leaders who can handle things even if their supervising adult doesn’t know anything about the theater (it happens). It’s gonna be ok.

And people leave, right? People come into our lives, and they impact us in big ways and small, and then a lot of them leave. Sometimes expectedly, sometimes not, but nothing lasts forever in this world. And that’s ok. And I tried to explain that, inasmuch as you can explain that to some very, very sad high school students.

What I didn’t quite realize — or what I didn’t want to realize — was that I was telling them that because I was trying to convince myself.

I’ve been in this job for 8 years. That’s well above the average term of employment in the building. I’m a *fixture*. I was ready to potentially play out the next 14 or so years of my career here, if it came to that. And I would have been happy to do so. I wasn’t *trying* to leave my position. And learning how much some of my students are hurting, how sad they are to see me go?

I wasn’t sure *I* was going to be ok upon leaving.

Because not only am I taking a new position, I’m moving. Out of state. To a place where I’ll know nobody (save my sister and her husband). I’m starting over. I’m leaving my second family.

I wasn’t sure I would be ok.

But suddenly, just a few days ago, I believed it. I believed it would be ok. I was shaving my head, and playing some 80s music, and maybe there were some chemicals at work, but I was thinking about leaving and thinking about what’s ahead and for the first time, I didn’t feel sad or worried or guilty. (The tracks were “Who’s Gonna Drive You Home”, followed by “Cruel Summer”, for the curious.)

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the school year is officially over, the seniors have graduated, and the goodbyes are, by and large, behind me. (That part was THE WORST.)

But I think it’s gonna be ok. It’s a weird thought, for an eternal pessimist like me. But I can’t help it. It’s gonna be ok.

If I’m lucky, for all of us.

Happy Stuffing

PavowskiLeave a comment

I am moving rooms today for the second time since being at my current school.

Which is to say, as of next year, I will have been in a different location every year since I’ve taught here. (Future progressive verb tense is fun. English teachers, you feel me.) And that’s kind of a bummer. You get moved around every year, it’s tough to feel at home in your own classroom. Can’t put down roots. Can’t put your feet up too much. Like living in an apartment and never bothering to paint the walls because you’re gonna have to paint them taupe again when you move out, so why bother?

I didn’t make this connection for my first couple years. up went the posters (dozens of them). Decorative lamps in the corners. Personal pictures and bulletin board borders and all. I even hung stuff from the ceiling tiles. Deep roots sunk into the earth of the place.

Which takes forever to clean up and stirs up all kinds of emotions while you’re working for hours to do said cleaning.

So, I don’t put down roots anymore.

When I realized I could — and likely would — get moved at the end of the year, my personal touch became more of a tap. Just a couple of posters and only a few things in my own little corner of the room. The room writ large mostly blank or marked with a couple materials that we’re working with actively — to be pulled down again once we’re done.

Yet even without those personal imprints, I feel more at home teaching in this school than I have in any of my other schools.

The moving is frustrating, but it also serves as an opportunity for cleaning out and reflection, more perhaps than I would have had otherwise. Everything must be gone through, everything must be assessed, everything must be weighed and measured and either kept or discarded. Rather a lot like moving house, except instead of evaluating your memories and keepsakes, I’m evaluating practices and methods (will I teach that next year? Will this handout be useful again?)

So while the students are signing yearbooks and studying for finals (HAHA who studies for finals), I’ll be stuffing boxes.

Happily. Peacefully. I might even enjoy it.

A Day of Shoeburyness and Lawn-Care Mutterings

Pavowski6 Comments

If you have ever wanted to cut off your own piece of the bleeding edge of American literary greatness, this is your chance.

My house is for sale. The culmination of what feels like (and, by now, I guess actually is) months of cleaning and fixing and tearing down walls and repairing pipes and hauling off trash and more than once considering simply setting fire to the whole thing. But of course, the work isn’t over. Now that we have it clean and “show ready”, we have to keep it that way, which has us doing all sorts of things we would never do ordinarily, though my wife insists that normal people do these things all the time.

Taking the trash out once a day. Keeping the sink clear of dishes. Vacuuming the floors every day. Keeping laundry out of the floor. Mowing the yard at 8pm on a Friday because it’s literally the only chance we’ll have to do it.

Madness. My wife, somehow, has a reservoir of patience and sense for this sort of thing. I do not. While circling my yard with the mower last night, thoughts of murder circled in my head like swarming crows. What the hell am I doing out here? It’s getting dark, for crissakes. Primeval man survived for tens of thousands of years without mowing the damned grass. It’s all gonna grow back when global warming wipes us all out, and the kudzu will consume the country. Why fight it?

lawn-mower-938555_1280

I may have mentioned, here or there, that yard work is a dirty word with me. I’m not exaggerating. My mind goes to some dark places when I’m holding garden tools.

But it has to be done to keep the house show-ready, so mow I did. Just part of the deal of trying to sell the place.

Also part of selling the place? A sensation that I don’t have a word for: The vaguely disconcerting , slightly unsettling feeling of knowing there have been total strangers tromping through your house, peeking in your closets, judging your choices in counter-toppery.

Douglas Adams once wrote a book full of words like this, and I’m sorry to say that I have not yet read this book — The Meaning of Liff. But from the liner notes and offhanded comments found in The Salmon of Doubt, I know that within that text is a word that comes close: Shoeburyness, the uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat that is still warm from somebody else’s bottom.

This is stronger than that, but less extreme than the real discomfort and terror that, for example, my sister-in-law is experiencing, having been the recent victim of a break-in that did not apparently result in any theft — somebody just broke in and skulked around.

It’s somewhere in between those two extremes. Odd. Definitely not pleasant. But not actually disruptive or traumatic in any way.

Again: nothing to be done about it. Just part of the process. And, hopefully, the beginning of the end of the all-consuming task that selling our house has become. I don’t quite see the light at the end of the tunnel yet, but I can’t see the light from where we entered either at this point. There’s a comfort in that — in seeing how far we’ve come — even though this mushy middle part is bleak.

At least I’m writing again. Words on the page. The concrete evidence of progress.

The light at the end of the tunnel has to be up there, somewhere.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

Pavowski4 Comments

This post is part of SoCS. This week’s topic: Attachment.

We’ve spent the past 48 hours fixing up this old house, the wife and I.

That’s 48 hours of parent time, which is measuredly and markedly less efficient than regular human time, because parent time is punctuated regularly by appointments with a baby who is hungry, a baby who is sad, a baby who is upset, a baby who is angry, a baby who wants attention, a baby who is attempting to pull all the sharp things off the table and into her mouth, a baby who has somehow figured out a way to deepthroat the remote control that’s twice as big as her head. We even got her big brother out of the house and off to the grandparents’ for a couple of nights to buy us extra time, and we still spent the day scrambling. As a result, in 48 hours we got three bathrooms painted.

It’s a chore which, we realized after just a few hours, was about four and a half years overdue. (We’ve been in the house for five years.) For all that time, the walls have remained the same bland, inoffensive taupe, plus or minus the scribblings of our two-year-old and a few decorative pictures and photos. They say taupe is soothing, but what it is, really, is invisible and characteristic of nothing. Which I guess makes it the perfect color for a house you’re trying to sell: it’s a blank slate for prospective owners to color with their own hopes and expectations. Somehow, we never got around to filling it with those things for ourselves. We can blame it on the kids a little bit, but ultimately, we just hadn’t taken the time to do it.

And therein lies another realization. Why were we able to let this little thing go so long without being done? Why have we stared for five years at the same bland, inoffensive walls, without being overcome by the surge of frustration at the vacuous sameness of it all? Because we’ve never been particularly attached to it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love our house. It’s a weird kind of wonky style with lots of open space and plenty of room for us and all of our stuff. It’s been the empty husk in which germinated the pale little seedlings of our tiny family. It’s in a nice enough neighborhood, away from traffic, and with pretty decent neighbors. But I also hate our house. That wonky style is born of the 70’s, which is when the house was built, and you can tell, because parts of the house are starting to fall apart as you might expect things built in the 70’s to do. Underneath the taupe paint we’ve discovered layers upon layers of horrible — and I mean really quite atrocious — wallpaper with nausea-inducing patterns and colors. I’m talking about gold-and-green flowers on chocolate brown background. It’s buried behind the light fixtures and air vents, and any time I undertake a home improvement project, I’m always discovering the stuff, like little breadcrumbs leading me back to the house’s horrifying past.

At any rate, my wife and I are both feeling that it’s about time to move on. Our family has grown, and like a snake growing too big for its skin, we need to leave our old trappings behind. We need a basement. I’d like a study that doesn’t double as a guest room. It’d be nice if we could find a place that comes with insulation in the walls. It’d be peachy if the pipes in the new place don’t explode at the slightest glance from the gods of winter.

Our little project this weekend has shone a sharp light on just how ready we are to move. All of a sudden our heads are full of all the little things we need to do to get this place ready to sell: fixing up the porch, replacing carpets, painting rooms and walls and doors… the list is growing by the minute. That said, we handled three rooms this weekend, which is not bad for a sleep-deprived couple with a nine-month-old who still isn’t sleeping through the night.

Not that I’m complaining. That little girl, unlike the house, I am actually quite attached to.