Bettie Bookish

A serious sense of liberation

The house is sold. Gone. No longer my problem. No longer my safety net. No longer waiting there just in case I decide New York is too much for me.

I can't tell you how good it feels. I feel like I've lost 50 pounds. I feel like I've cut my hair short and found out I'm blindingly fucking gorgeous. I feel like I could fly.

HSH is out of town on business today. The girls and I are going to the pumpkin festival. We love pumpkins.

We love New York.

Xerxes Update: He called yesterday. He's looking for a job. So he can make some money. And take a trip farther south. This shall pass, right?

Burn it down 'til the embers smoke on the ground

I said I couldn't talk about Xerxes. I'm still not sure if I can.

We miss him.

I worry about him. I do not know this person - this young man who angrily refuses to accept any genuine help, who calls in sick to work, who isn't in college right now because he just didn't apply. He just didn't apply.

He did apply to Americorps, and had a couple good interviews for a spot in Delaware. But he just let it slip away. No - that's not right. He pushed it away. Just like the people who have loved him these past couple months.

It's heartbreaking.

He is in Florida now. I haven't talked to him in more than two weeks. His grandmother gave him a gophone and some minutes. He used them up, and called us only once. I feel pretty certain he has run out of money by now. I don't know how he plans to return here. Or if he does.

Mostly, I doubt he has planned anything.

I don't know this person.

I've been listening to his iTunes library - all full of emo and government rap. Bone Thugs For Cutie.

I'm listening because I miss the kid I do know - the one who I know is there, underneath all this crisis of adulthood that has created a hard, thorny shell of weirdness.

That is why I'm so scared for him - this crisis. It's clearly some amalgam of depression, anxiety and a healthy dose of good old-fashioned shiftlessness. It is physically painful to see your child enduring something so hard. And even more painful to understand that there is just nothing you can do.

Is there?

Hello, Netflix

We're killing out television. Well, OK, not killing it. Just giving it a bypass.

A week or so ago, the "input" key on the remote stopped working, so we were forced to survive on meager rations of DVDs. The thing is? It's not that bad. And it's really pretty great for the kids, since we get to be all intentional about their programming.

Although I still assert that there's nothing wrong with using TBS reruns of "Sex and the City" as a babysitter. They're certainly not going to learn how to be slutty, shoe-mongering anorexics from me. I will never be anorexic.

So we haven't had any television, and we've survived pretty well. Yes, I miss the whole nightly Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert sandwich o' political satire. But we've been busy watching Season 2 and 2.5 of "Battlestar Galactica," so we're pretty frakkin content.

I've also been hard at work with my new classes - Middle Eastern culture and migratory patterns (that's two classes, not one. Although I'm thinking now that I might be able to kill two term papers with one thesis...)

And then there is Xerxes. My son is travelling right now. He is visiting friends in Florida. I don't know when he's coming back. I miss him.

Oh, oh yeah. Did I mention that we have a contract on our Florida house? We're supposed to close a week from today? I guess this means we're really staying in New York.

Send a good thought or two.

Pumpkin's 5$

My school job is about 10 minutes away from the house, and I get to go in with Bee and Posey, who throws her arms up and squeals "Yay!" when we enter the parking lot.

My other job - the marketing job - is 30-45 minutes from the house, depending on which route I take. The longer route has curves that are more vertical, the shorter path's curves swing pretty wildly on the horizontal plane.

This morning, i was running a little late, so I took the shorter, twistier highway.

It snakes past farms and half-dead hamlets and bonafide "filling stations." Gar-lee.

The sky was very blue this morning, but swirls of fog settled here and there in the valleys. At one farm, horses played in the mist - looking for all the world like a Stevie Nicks video. It was pure magic.

A couple miles down the road, there was a pumpkin stand with a hand-lettered sign: Pumpkin's 5$.

I thought, "I need to write about this. I need to attend to my blog."

And now, just after 11 p.m., I have finally found a few moments to type. I don't know how other people do it. And clean their houses? And wash their hair every day?

They're machines, I tell you.

We only touch materials we know how to use

Today was Bee's first day of school, and my first day as a substitute assistant in a 6-9yo Mont3ssori classroom.

Bee loved her class.

"We didn't take a nap!"

Other than that, it's basically the same old same old for her, just in a different room with some older kids, most of whom she knew already from after-school daycare. The biggest change was moving from the little kids' playground to the big kids' playground.

It was a big day for her.

And for me. I got to work with a bonafide M-ssori teacher, Ms. A.

Ms. A is in her 50s or so. She has all the earmarks of a former hippie. She does not have The Teacher Voice. The children get quiet because she gets quiet. 

It helps, perhaps that she has the perfect kind of face for teaching. She is sometimes expressionless and utterly unreadable. An adult looks at that face and - like a dog hoping for a treat - runs through all the tricks hoping to hit the right thing. Kids are equally thrown off-guard, and immediately start looking for instruction.

But then, when she smiles, her whole face lights up. It's a reward in itself.

We spent an hour on rolling mats, and it was riveting. We spent another hour cutting apples and spreading peanut butter on them for our snack.

I love this work.

The kids

Tomorrow, Bee will start kindergarten. Actually it's a 4yo, Montessori-brand kindergarten. She has picked out her best dress and packed her backpack. She is ready.

Also tomorrow, I will be going to my third day of work at the school Bee and Posey attend.

Q. Have you always really liked working with kids?

A. Um, not really.

Q. Are you just doing this for the tuition break?

A. Initially, yes.

Q. Do you really love it like crazy and wish it paid something even close to a living wage?

A. Absolutely.

For the past couple days, I've been helping in the childcare department, working mostly with kids in the 1st-3rd grade level. I will be perfectly honest and tell you that that age group is not my favorite. Today, for example, I had to put the kybosh (?) on a game that involved digging in the dirt and then taking backrub breaks. Younger kids wouldn't have done it, and older kids would have been sneakier about touching each other.

I am the wife of a teacher, so I have absorbed by osmosis a sense of what it is like to work with kids. My HSH tells me that I do not have The Teacher Voice. Apparently, that's the voice that can call everyone in a room to attention AND MAKE THEM DO WHAT YOU SAY.

Seriously - I don't even have an adult voice. It's a challenge.

What thrills and kills me is the way you can see the adult versions of these kids, even now when they're only 6 and 7.

I see my husband in a smart, sensitive kid who gets things on a level his peers don't yet. But he comes up with a game based on a movie they all love (and he gives himself a role with authority), so he gets along with everyone.

I see my sister-in-law, Lila in a little girl who is meticulous and supersmart and genial. Today, as all the kids were digging in a wide indention on the playground, she was taking two shovels, and using one as a mallet to help her chisel away at the earth. I told her she looked like an archaeologist, and she launched into a long description of her "ancient finds."

Her brother has been diagnosed with Aspergers, and is already feeling the social repercussions.

Another boy on the playground has leukemia, and a port that "kinda freaked out" a couple members of the summer daycare staff when it came time to apply sunscreen.

And another girl is Muslim and Eastern European, so that she and her siblings have names that the other kids think are unusual. Today was their last day of summer daycare before tomorrow's first day of school. I asked her if she was excited about school.

"No. I hate school. Jenny and Sophie hate me and aren't friends with me. No one is friends with me. I hate school."

I wish there were a way to tell her, "Yes. I know. It sucks. But it will get better.  Sure, you'll have to go through the next 10 years of school, during which you'll probably  be marginalized and pushed aside because you're amazingly smart, and you wear a hijab. But on the other side, you'll find things are a little better. Not perfect. Never perfect. But better."

I could not tell her that. So instead, we played a noncompetitive game of tetherball. It's not a bad way to go.