A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
For me, the school year has ended. You may not work in a job where the American School System bears much weight, but (whereas I have never had a job where the “year” was not September to June) I wonder if the remnants of having gone to school still remain for you, and whether you can still feel the summer-break-y-ness of everything right now.
This has been a hard school year. I think it’s been the hardest one ever. I remember saying last year, before we were back in person, “I don’t know how we are supposed to shoulder this kind of loss. We lost time, we lost human lives, we lost connection, we lost a huge chunk of our own histories. And as educators, that hasn’t happened before. How can we possibly know what we are going to need?” (I was probably not quite so articulate out loud, but the sentiment was there.)
It turns out that we didn’t know.
Do you remember an instance when it became clear to you that the adults in the room were basically clueless? That the experts weren’t really experts, but were kind of making things up as they went? It feels like aging is a perpetual pulling-back-of-the-curtain to reveal how little control anyone actually has over anything. I remember thinking that The Scientists were going to “solve death” by the time I got old. Or that the Really Important People had Global Climate Change under control. That someone was going to figure out how to make new non-renewable resources. That was how I slept at night, I guess.
As I become an adult, it’s laughable to me that anyone out there would consider me one. But I’m 36 now, which is quantifiably absolutely an adult. If I had been born 200 years ago, I would be considered elderly. (I would technically, for the record, be dead. Modern medicine has saved my life more than once.)
Teaching in a school the year after a pandemic was like looking around and realizing that everyone was just sets of two-children-stacked-on-top-of-each-other-in-a-trench-coat. No one really knew what they were doing. We all stumbled around, guessing what our students needed, and trying to appear to be grown-ups.
Basically, I’m trying to get at this: no matter what your job is, the kind of adjustment you’ve been asked to make as we continue to shakily emerge from worldwide trauma is a big deal. You haven’t had time to process it or to heal from it. As the months have become years, it feels like this is not an event but a whole new life to adjust and re-adjust to; there’s no normal to ever go back to. Nevertheless, there’s processing to be done, and we haven’t figured out how to make the collective space necessary to do it. This stuff is hard. We are all children at it.
(Unless, I guess, you are an alien from another planet who similarly went through a multi-year global pandemic the likes of which had never been known; so bad, in fact, that you had to come to Earth to get away from it all, and now here you are, effectively posing as a human, and WHAT DO YOU KNOW, the EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED HERE. But that seems unlikely.)
At the final performance of the year for the Creative Writing seniors, I made the following remarks:
I probably don’t have to tell you what these seniors have been through, but just in case you don’t know, they were in the middle of their sophomore year in 2020 when the pandemic hit and we had to go to remote learning. They spent the second half the year inside, talking to black squares on computers, collaborating in solitude. For their junior year, they were totally remote, having to ask questions via chat boxes, write in sometimes loud and crowded houses, and perform their work via phone video. This year, back in person, they’ve been in classrooms with desks far apart from each other, trying to communicate through masks, and with the constant looming possibility of a resurgence of the virus that would send them all home again. For three years, they have had extremely limited events and opportunities to spend time together. So much of what makes [our school] special and great was taken from them, because of a global crisis that was completely out of their control. You, their families and friends, have also had to bend over backward to figure out how to accommodate this difficult chapter of learning, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the unacknowledged labor I know you have had to do. As writers, we know that language is a powerful tool that can help us to hold all the difficult truths of being human; acknowledgement is meaningful.
Let me take this moment to also acknowledge you, and all you have given, and all you have done. For every moment you overextended yourself, held more than you could hold, gave yourself to something bigger than yourself even when your Self felt bone-tired and all-the-way-over-it: thank you. I’m sorry that so much of that work has been rendered invisible by the One-Thing-After-Another-Ness of these past few years. For every moment that it hasn’t felt like nearly enough, I am here to assure you that it was. Your real job is to survive, and you’ve done that. Good job. Everything else is extra.
Love,
Sophie
PS - Here’s my Instagram comic about parents, students, and educators for this year:
Add this to your to-do list.
Who is a teacher who has meant something to you? Reach out to them and tell them “thank you,” if you can. (If you can’t, and prayer is your thing, pray it.) I guarantee you that it will mean something to them.
A drawing.
Some sourdough drawings for you, from this Bon Appetit article and this New Yorker article.
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about new parenthood. Skip it if you don’t want to read about new parenthood.)
I came home from work yesterday to find T’s (new) nanny having a hard time. I mean, she was doing a great job, and I have to tell you that watching two babies (she watches T AND T’s upstairs friend M) is a job that I don’t actually think I would be able to do. But she was sad. And she said to me, “Your baby has been screaming for the past two hours, like I am cutting off her arm.” She felt compassion for T, and that kind of screaming and the gasping crying that accompanies it would break anyone’s heart. I read that at seven months, babies enter a new stage of attachment, and most tend to choose one parent to get super-attached to. I have been chosen. T also loves my husband, and her nanny, and her friends — but she does not like it when I leave the room. She also does not cry or scream when I’m around, so I maybe wouldn’t believe that this was something she did if it weren’t for sometimes hearing it when I’m working from home. On the one hand, I feel like I won a big prize, to be so coveted by my child. On the other hand, SHE IS MADE OUT OF MY BODY, and so this makes sense. And I know what our nanny was talking about, because she screamed for two straight hours when she came out, and it ripped my heart to little shreds. It so hard to be around a person who is heartbroken and can’t communicate exactly why. She is cheered by Cheerios (OMG IS THAT WHY THEY ARE CALLED THAT?!) and bland crackers, in addition to her mother making a gasping noise followed by a why-didn’t-this-woman-pursue-musical-theatre-for-real rendition of “That Would Be Enough.”
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Extras:
I have been greatly enjoying other people’s Substack newsletters this last week. Here are three that I recommend whole-heartedly:
Jordan Flaherty’s “floodlines.” Jordan is an incredible journalist and activist, whose work in New Orleans and beyond has informed so much of my own practice as a person hoping against hope to sow change in this world.
“Snack Stack,” a cultural history of snacks from around the world. I especially love the posts that talk about the etymology of snacks — like why we call candy bars “fun size.” This newsletter is so thorough and well-written; I whole-heartedly recommend it.
Nothing is really better than the autobiographical comics Substack “Never Not Nervous” by Brooke Barker.
I have one food word for you: Tteokbokki. If you aren’t acquainted, GET ACQUAINTED.
Are you guys really loving the Wet Leg album? I think that I definitely am, definitely. I like this song the best.
I assigned “Crying In The H-Mart” to my students this year, and it really was all that and more.
I like white-out that comes in a little marker and the white-out is actually tape.
Luke and I are LOVING the new season of “Kids In The Hall.” It is the same as it was. It has not changed. I still find every one of these men attractive.