There really is no cure for the ache of missing. Other things change, some fade, some shift into more comfortable positions, lose their sharp edges. Missing goes on.
Last week I was teaching my youngest students how to approach drawing rabbits. I told them to look for familiar shapes. I gave them a copy of a photo of a rabbit and told them they could take their pencils and go over the shapes on their copies; could they find an oval? Could they find a circle? I told them that by tracing these shapes they were developing muscle memory that would make it easier for them to draw the rabbit on their own paper. I almost started to cry --and this is something that happens a lot at the most unexpected times--when it happens around adults I don't care but around the kids I can't let it happen. It was simply using the phrase "muscle memory" that triggered that raw place of missing you. It is an absence that has a shape. Every day, my mind traces the shifting contours of your absence. What does it learn? Am I getting better at something? Is anything getting easier? Is the cell of a prison any less terrifying new than familiar?
Being in an elementary school is itself a trigger for me. I look around each new class, see how popular your name has become, know that I will have to control my voice every time I say it. I see your struggles repeated, remember how stoically you bore them as a child and how quickly they unraveled as an adolescent. I see the little boy with his overwhelming perfectionism and I want to shout at him to run as far away from this institution as he can. I see the boy for whom boredom is like a powder keg waiting for a spark, the boy whose emotions are too big for his body. I see you over and over and I have no more answers now than I had then. So much for muscle memory. So much for "easier".
Maybe the best thing a teacher can offer is that nothing is easy. Least of all loving.
Last week I was teaching my youngest students how to approach drawing rabbits. I told them to look for familiar shapes. I gave them a copy of a photo of a rabbit and told them they could take their pencils and go over the shapes on their copies; could they find an oval? Could they find a circle? I told them that by tracing these shapes they were developing muscle memory that would make it easier for them to draw the rabbit on their own paper. I almost started to cry --and this is something that happens a lot at the most unexpected times--when it happens around adults I don't care but around the kids I can't let it happen. It was simply using the phrase "muscle memory" that triggered that raw place of missing you. It is an absence that has a shape. Every day, my mind traces the shifting contours of your absence. What does it learn? Am I getting better at something? Is anything getting easier? Is the cell of a prison any less terrifying new than familiar?
Being in an elementary school is itself a trigger for me. I look around each new class, see how popular your name has become, know that I will have to control my voice every time I say it. I see your struggles repeated, remember how stoically you bore them as a child and how quickly they unraveled as an adolescent. I see the little boy with his overwhelming perfectionism and I want to shout at him to run as far away from this institution as he can. I see the boy for whom boredom is like a powder keg waiting for a spark, the boy whose emotions are too big for his body. I see you over and over and I have no more answers now than I had then. So much for muscle memory. So much for "easier".
Maybe the best thing a teacher can offer is that nothing is easy. Least of all loving.
