And so today’s moment of happiness despite the news.
It pretty much just happened. I’m still glowing.
On Wednesday afternoons, I teach an on-site group in the AllWriters’ classroom. The group is called the Wednesday Afternoon Women Writers Workshop. Historically, this is the class I’ve taught the longest, coming up on 30 years now. It started at Waukesha Park & Rec as the first class I ever taught. Then, it was called SeniorScribes. It was on Friday afternoons. And as my very first class, it was the one that taught me that, while I might be the teacher, I’m also the learner. I’ve learned so much from this class.
Eventually, the class came with me when I opened AllWriters’. I switched it to Wednesday afternoons, and I took out the “senior” requirement, opening it to anyone of adult age. It was also opened to all genders. But as time went on, the class slowly became all women. I enjoyed it so much that when a man attempted to join, I pushed him off to another workshop and changed the name to the Wednesday Afternoon Women Writers Workshop.
I’m not sure what it is about Wednesday afternoons, but somehow, this class not only drew in wonderful writers of all genres, some just starting out, others with publications already under their belts, but it drew in compassionate, caring people. People who reach out to others.
Including me.
As I said when I decided to return this blog to once a day for the month of December, I am over my head in grief. Way over. And the thing is, it’s not just about Michael’s death, though I hate to put a “just” in that sentence. It’s about the trauma of how he died. It’s about the five months he spent struggling to come back into himself, ultimately to lose himself in his brain injury and then die. It’s about the absolute wrongness of what happened to him, yet knowing that the perpetrator was able to fork over $73 to pay for a single citation and then move on as if nothing happened. And it’s about how I have absolutely failed in trying to correct this. No matter what I’ve done, no one in authority listens, even though there are at least 4 different versions of what happened on that day.
Michael was the one person in my life (that I know of) who believed I could do anything. But I haven’t been able to do this. For him.
So just yesterday, I was talking with someone, and I told him that I felt like my energy was just totally gone. I said that it was even difficult for me to walk into or sign into my classrooms. “All I’m feeling is sad,” I said. “And like a really, really huge failure.”
And then I walked into my classroom today.
I have a new student in the Wednesday Afternoon Women Writers Workshop. An amazing poet who has absolutely no idea that she’s an amazing poet. She’s scared. She’s worried. But she knows she wants to write.
Today, she presented the opening pages of a book. “I’m only going to read 3 pages,” she said. “That’s all I can handle.”
And boy, did she handle it!
After class, she stayed for a few minutes. She looked right at me and said, “I just read some pages from my book to a whole room of women. To a whole room of women writers!”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “And you did it so, so well.”
We both cheered. The smile on her face…holy cow. If I could have taken a picture of it, I would have framed it, hung it in my classroom, and put a caption under it: “THIS is why I teach.”
Then, just before she left, she turned back. “I wrote a poem about you,” she said.
About me?
“Well…it’s like about what I would be like if I was you,” she said.
Like me?
“Is that okay?” she asked.
Oh, yes.
This is why I teach. This is why I’ve done what I’ve done for the past almost 30 years. This is why AllWriters is what it is, and has been for 20 years in January.
This is who I am.
And this Moment showed me today that, despite how I feel right now, despite the grief, the depression, the feeling of letting the person down who I loved the most, despite the lack of energy, the fatigue, and this sadness that I feel has taken over for my skin, I am still here. Somewhere. I am in this temporary skin, but skin sloughs off and new skin appears, and in this case, the skin that will appear is the person that is me.
Whew.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
