I am trying hard to keep it together these last few weeks of school. Only, not so well. Sometimes I put pressure on myself about how I should feel or what I should write about. Sometimes I want to protect my readers from all the messiness that is happening. We don’t know where we will live, or what we will do, or who will make the money, or really anything. The stress is getting to me.

I wrote on The Mudroom about dying, about waiting for and believing that the resurrection is coming. I am clinging to this, hoping that my mustard seed of faith is enough.

Everywhere I run, I am headed toward dying things. Everything that I think I might love to do, people are warning me those things are dying. On my worst days, I am terrified. The slow dying of the classroom teacher has drained me. I feel myself walking around exhausted, half as much blood pumping through me as a person should really have. I feel the gasping for breath, the slowing of thought as I realize there isn’t enough oxygen to sustain me. 

Read the whole thing here. 

I wrote about our state of radical uncertainty for She Loves this month. I feel like this is all I write about lately, but this is where I am. I feel like the end of this article wraps things up really neatly. If you are where I am please know that is me claiming a promise I know to be true, even when I don’t feel like it. In reality I am not sleeping very well, and am probably using an unhealthy amount of distraction techniques. I am yelling more than I usually do. We are all just doing the best we can. I stand by the ending, that it will be good, I know this to be true even if it doesn’t feel like it.

If you are moving forward, you are going to have to leave people behind.

I am sorry to be so blunt, but I thought I would lead with the thing no one wants to tell you. Moving forward means sometimes people get left behind. It totally sucks, but it is totally necessary.

Forward means movement, and movement means not everything comes with you. It means not everyone comes with you. I know. I hate it too.

Moving forward in your career, or your beliefs, or even in your location, means that not everyone will follow you. Not everyone is supposed to follow you. Sometimes you need to move forward and they need to stay. Sometimes you move forward in different directions. It is messy and awful and it hurts—this moving forward thing. It is just plain hard sometimes. A lot of times.

Change is not for the faint of heart.

You can read the rest here. 

Dear Juliet,

You are six. How is that possible? You are officially a kid, not a little kid, not a baby. Just a kid, running wild into the world. Every year writing you this letter gets more complicated, because your world gets more complicated. There is so much more that you are working out, that we are working out, that needs working out without the prying eyes of the internet.

As I read through the past letters I have for you I am delighted at how much you have grown, and how little you have changed. You are still so friendly, still so extroverted and encouraging. You still see every day you wake up as potentially the best day of your life. You tell me I am doing a great job, and cry when I will not let you go to sleep over at the house of a person we met twenty minutes before. Why not mom? She is my friend.

I struggle with the balance between protecting your bright ideas of the world, and protecting you from the dangers this world holds. I don’t want you to go through the world afraid, but I don’t want your youthful abandon to get taken advantage of. It is confusing for both of us sometimes.

You have grown longer this year. Your pants that fit in the waist show far too much of your ankle. The dresses that fit in your shoulders expose a lot of your leg. I let you run through the public splash pad in your underwear your last day of being five. You looked eight. How can I explain to the world just how young you are, how innocent, how full of joy? Your dad and I talk about wanting to raise you wild and free, and the older you get the more you are expected to comply. This growing up thing is not for the faint of heart.

But your heart is strong. You are big hearted and generous. You are bold and pure. You are good good good my love. You are a delight. Sometimes I catch you looking around to see if anyone is looking at the cute thing you did or noticing the smart thing you said. It is a blessing and curse to be so aware of the emotions around you. People notice. They do. But I hope that I can teach you the lesson I am learning. What is good and right and delightful is between you and your God. If you please yourself, and you please your God, it does not matter what the rest of us think.

You are so amazing.

Love,

Mom

It is teacher appreciation week here across the United States. We celebrated last week at our school, because this week we are testing. The irony is obvious enough that even my freshmen English students could point it out.

“We want to show our appreciation, but we first must make sure that the state tests that most of you abhor are not interrupted by any means.”

I don’t blame the PTSA, or my principal, or anyone I come into contact with on a daily basis. These people are doing exactly what I am doing, navigating the situation that has been handed down to us the best we know how.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I appreciate the appreciation. I am very grateful to have a PTSA that collects the money, gives us free lunch, tells us thank you. At many of the schools I have worked at, Teacher Appreciation Week started with an email asking for donations from the teachers so we could celebrate it.

But we need more than appreciation, we need your trust. We need you to hear us when we tell you that testing has taken over, and your kids, who we call our kids are worse off for it.

We need you to trust us. Yesterday, the computers we were testing on stopped connecting to the internet. Because I was in the very safe testing environment, I couldn’t be sure if it was just my students computers, if we had a school wide, district wide, or even state wide problem. I just knew my computers were not connecting. But I don’t have any power to do anything. All decisions must be made by the testing coordinator who needs to clear everything with the state administrator. High stakes testing means high stakes for everyone including the teachers. I couldn’t be trusted with the decision because it wasn’t my decision to make, and spent literally hours just waiting with students on the off chance the system would come back up in time to test.

We no longer trust teachers to make decisions, about what is taught or sometimes even how. We don’t trust them to know what is best for the kids, when an exception should be made, or even what to do when all the computers go down. While we say, especially during this week that teachers are the force that makes a huge difference, the laws are currently written so that we aren’t trusted to do that in the ways we know are best.

We need you to hear us. Are you listening? Teachers have been saying for years that the tests are getting in the way of learning, rather than in facilitating it.We have been voicing concerns over the state of the state testing. We have been trying to warn someone that the ways state testing is being employed is damaging to our kids. This year I have more students with anxiety problems than I have ever had before. The pressure of this week has extended to the whole year and our students, the ones we do this job for, feel it.

Every single time teachers get told to employ another test, another program, another late night we are told we need to do it for the kids. And every single time we get thanked for what we do, we get told thank you for the kids.

We are grateful for the appreciation. We are doing it for the kids. But we need more than appreciation, we need a voice in what is happening in our own classrooms. We need you to trust us enough to hear that what is happening right now is not okay. We need you to include us at the decision making level so that real teaching and learning can happen every day in school.

If you really appreciate the work that we do, please, let us do it.

Sometimes when people asking me how I am, I start crying. So. That has been answering the question pretty effectively lately. I mean, it at least cuts the conversation short.

There are five more weeks of school. I turned in my separation paperwork. I am officially not teaching next year. That is all I know.

The answers I was sure would materialize by Christmas, didn’t. The questions I was sure would be answered by Spring Break, haven’t been. I told God I just really really needed to know by April 14. Apparently God thinks otherwise.

I appreciate how many people care about us and our lives. I wish I had answers for you when you ask. I just don’t know…anything really. I don’t know if we are moving. I don’t know if I am going to the seminary or if I will ultimately need to defer for a year. I don’t know if I should Priscilla’s name in the pre-k lottery. I don’t know.

The church has a meal train for births and deaths, but where is the sign up sheet for I just need help getting through the day because the uncertainty is weighing and I have been giving into my children on a regular basis because I don’t have the energy to fight them. Where is that sign up?

I know how to sign up for casserole delivery when a woman in my church delivers triplets. I know how to get someone’s mail when they are out of town for a funeral. But what do you do when life is just too hard? When the daily grind how ground you to dust and you just can’t do it anymore.

I don’t know how to ask for help when I don’t know when the need will stop. I don’t know if it is proper church etiquette to keep putting the same need in the prayer request blank. I don’t know how to teach, and parent, and write and edit and do all the things I could manage even six months ago when I can’t even remember to eat lunch every day.

I don’t know how to tell you this without my mom emailing me to make sure I am okay. I don’t know how to grieve a job I love that isn’t the same anymore. I don’t know how to leave my students without an explanation of what is coming next. I don’t know how to stop the tears and I don’t know how to cry with dignity at the copy machine.

I don’t want anyone to worry about me. I know we are going to be okay. I mean, I am choosing to believe that, but right now in this moment. This part is hard. I don’t know that there is an end date on that. Every end date I have set has been ignored by the universe.

But I also need to be allowed to feel  like this. I need it to be okay to my community that I am terrified right now. I need to see it as radical uncertainty before I can see it as a grand adventure. I need to be not okay.

Every time I pray, God is there, but silent. And every time I get mad, I get sad, I am confused, God is still there, silent but not shocked. Almost relieved for me that I am finally moving through.

The season is hard, but it is made a little easier by speaking it out loud.

Recently this post has been going around.  Julie Lythcott-Haims a former dean of students from Stanford and author of the book How to Raise an Adult explains what skills every 18 year old should arrive to campus with, and laments the fact that they do not have them. I wholeheartedly agree. Students should graduate from High School with the ability to manage their own schedule, be able to talk to strangers, cope with ups and downs, know how to take risks and every other thing the article says college freshmen should be able to do. I think it is important to raise kids who can go out into the world with the ability to handle their own autonomy. But I don’t teach any of the life skills that my students graduate without. In fact, I often  participate in behaviors that hinder in the development of important skills.

Why would I participate in behaviors that I know will hurt the development of my students in the long run?

The quick answer: I have to. The way the system is set up forces teachers to forgo the long term development of their students for the quick and dirty of testing and graduating. There is less and less time to teach things that aren’t on the test and more and more pressure to make sure the kids pass those tests. This is true for a lot of reasons, but after nine years of teaching I think the main culprits are graduation rates, testing, and a strong emphasis on standards

Graduation Rates: Here is the deal, school rankings are based largely on graduation rates. With good reason I suppose, if you can’t get kids to graduate, then what are you even doing? Isn’t that what school is for? BUT kids who fail too many classes have an uphill battle to graduate on time. If a kid needs 4 years of English to graduate (and they do) then they need to pass each year. If they don’t the student who already isn’t so great at the subject has to take summer school or two English classes simultaneously. If a student falls behind it is really hard and sometimes expensive (summer school costs money) to get them caught up.

So yes, I extend deadlines, give kids one more chance, don’t make them face the consequences of their actions. I have to. The law says the kids need to graduate or the school is punished. The kids have to pass my class in order to graduate. If they fail, my school fails and no one wants to be taken over by the state. They can’t even write testing procedures that are coherent, they sure as hell won’t be able to run a school. My kids can’t learn the lessons that failure teaches best because the school cannot afford for them to learn the lessons. Failure is too expensive for everyone, even if it is the best teacher.

Testing: If it isn’t on the test, it isn’t a priority. That should not be news as Art and Music curriculum has been slashed since the beginning of No Child Left Behind, but it may surprise you how many life skills a high school student used to pick up on the way through school, have also been marginalized because no one teaches it on a test.

It doesn’t surprise me my students come to college not knowing how to talk to strangers, or have a conversation about a problem they are having. My interviewing and verbal communication unit got left in my college teacher training with my high heeled shoes and the promise that I would never yell. You do what you have to do, and what I have to do is get my kids to pass that test. The amazing and complicated projects you still remember from your high school days where you solved problems, worked in groups, learned you loved to be in front of or behind a video camera, and finally had a chance to talk to that cute boy you got paired with are likely no longer in the curriculum. It doesn’t directly impact a test score, even if that thing did impact you for the rest of your life. There just isn’t time.

Standards: Don’t get me wrong. I am actually for a national standardized curriculum. With an interconnected world we need to ensure we all have a baseline of information, but we shouldn’t shackle every moment of instruction to these standards. If a kid brings up black lives matter in math class, the teacher should be able to talk about it. If a kid does something dumb in my class, we should get to have a ‘teachable moment’ about that. I shouldn’t be worried that someone with a clipboard will come in and ask me which standard is being taught.

There is no standard about, how everyone feels as awkward as you feel and you actually aren’t alone. There is no standard about why it is important to be kind to your classmates. There is no standard about death, or money, or power, things our kids are dying to talk about and themes that are present in our literature. I used to spend a lot of time learning what my students thought. We would talk, we would think, I would push back. They would show me funny YouTube videos and I would introduce them to the Beatles. Now I spend a lot of time teaching them the standards.

High school teachers know our kids need these skills, and we are certainly aware they do not possess them. (Why is your mom emailing me about your grade when you are sitting in my class not making eye contact?) We too are concerned about how these kiddos will function in the world. But our hands are tied to the tests, to the standards, to the ratings. until we are freed we won’t be able to make it better. We will try very hard not to make it worse.

I am having trouble finding words here. The transition spot is squeezing me and my family and I covet your prayers. I thought I would share the reminder from the archives that I needed.

I don’t want to stand in the desert and talk about how it really should rain, how it used to rain here all the time and now it is not and if it would just rain again then everything would be okay. Don’t get me wrong. I am praying for rain. I am standing in the desert praying that the Lord would make it rain. Make it rain justice, and mercy, make it rain grace and peace. Lord make it rain! And I think He can, and I believe He will. I will listen for thunder and sniff the air, I will smell the hope of rain.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t grab a shovel and start digging. Yes, I want it to rain, but that isn’t the only way for water to come. Mercy and justice can also spring up from the ground and that is just as miraculous.

I will stand where the Lord has lead my heart, I will bring a shovel, and I will start digging. I will trust that the water will spring up from the ground, and I will dig. I will pray for rain, and I will pray for the strength to keep digging. I will join others as they begin to dig.

I will notice the wells that have already been built and I will dig with my brothers and sisters to widen the well, so that more water might pour out. And I will continue to pray for water.

I am no longer willing to live in the land of swimming pools and freshly watered lawns and contnue to be willfully ignorant of the deserts of my brothers and sisters. I will take my water to them, pour it out for them, and aid them in digging their own wells. I will turn off my hose when I have enough, so that others can also have enough, so less will go thirsty. I will pipe my water into their community. I will give both a shovel and a glass of water to those in need.  And I will pray for rain.

But I will not stand in a desert and lament that there is no rain; I will not blame the thirsty for their lack of water while I stand in my shower and let my water run over me just because I can. I will not see my full well as a sign that I am doing it right, and the thirsty are doing it wrong. I will pray for their rain, and I will join them in digging.

I will pray: Lord make it rain, and Lord allow the water to spring up from the ground. I trust where you put my heart. I will sniff the air and smell the rain, and I will put my hands to the shovel and I will dig. I will trust that the water will come, and I will find those desert places, and I will bring my water, and my shovel, and I will trust that the water will pour out.

We are talking about creativity this month at the Mudroom. And I am leading artists who are children at my church. Mostly I just clean their brushes and change their water and remind them that if they keep painting the same spot with wet paint it will be brown. They Holy Spirit has been meeting me powerfully on the floor there. The table I had was too tall for the kids to reach.

I like hanging out on the floor. I like wearing clothes that are okay to get paint on. I like watching the kids concentrate and I love the way my congregation comes by to look at the art. I love the way they compliment the kids and mean it. I love how proud the kids are of their work, and I love the final product. I am learning a lot about creativity with these kiddos.

There is such careful consideration. Such thoughtfulness. My own girl took a turn this Sunday, and I promise I have never seen the amount of concentration come out of her. There is a deep love for this thing they are creating, and great care for how they are doing it. There is so much pride in being able to participate in the worship space provided. There is a desire to join in. Everyone wants a turn. And we are answering the question, what does God want the world to look like, so everyone gets a turn.

You can read the rest here. 

I have a complicated relationship with the word sisterhood. It has for sure been a powerful force in my life. But it has also been wielded it by people who maybe claimed it too fast or fickle. Who used the term to wield power over me and my choices. But sisterhood has been most powerful to me when it means you are in. Period. Because you are you and we want you, and we will never not want you. I have some thoughts about the church body and how it is one of the last places we have where we are stuck with people even if we don’t like it and how God uses that to move us. You’ll have to wait for that. Until then this is what I wrote for SheLoves.

Sisters

It seems my whole world has been formed around sisters. I was born into a team of sisters, a triad. I was the littlest link. The youngest. The baby. It was a position I loved but also fought against.

It is hard to be a “France girl” when you are the “third France girl” and mostly good at the things your sisters are good at. All in the band, in the choir, in the plays. We were sisters. We belonged together. Sometimes that belonging felt like a blanket, thrown over my head without even asking me if I was cold. Sometimes it felt like it didn’t fit. Sometimes I resented just how well it fit. Nobody asked me. It just was.

* * *

In elementary school, at Girl Scout day camp, my mom asked us, “What does ‘sister’ mean?”

We were talking about being a sister to every Girl Scout. I raised my hand confidently. “’Sister’ means you don’t get to choose. It means you are stuck with each other.” Well, my five-year-old self wasn’t a liar. Sisterhood does mean you are stuck with me. And I with you.

You can read the rest here. 

Hey you, exhausted lady, come close. I want to do that thing my children do to me when they need to make sure I have heard something. I want to press both of my hands firmly on your cheeks and stare into your eyes while I say this slowly:

Jesus. Does. Not. Care. About. The. Dishes. In. Your. Sink.

Or your laundry for that matter. I don’t think Jesus gives one crap about the last time you vacuumed. I just don’t. Maybe YOU do. Maybe you function better with a clean house and the rug vacuumed and if that is the case, more power to you. If a clean house makes you a happy lady, then you.do. you. But maybe don’t put that on me.

Maybe I am picking a fight where I shouldn’t. Maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill, or maybe, maybe I am just so exhausted from the shame I am constantly fighting over the state of my house and the state of my heart.

I could build an extra storage shed out of the various christian materials marketed toward women about how to grow closer to Jesus, and also clean their house all with the same process. Then I would have somewhere to put all the stuff I have not had time to de-clutter. I am tired of being told that my refusal to de-clutter is actually a refusal to trust God with my stuff. I simply do not have time to de-clutter, and read a book about it, and maintain my prayer life and my sanity. It is all I can do to get the sanity all the time and the prayer life most.

I have a big problem with the bazillions of books that are about my house, because it isn’t really about my house. It is about the extra chains we attach to the gospel. It is about the shame I feel when I don’t measure up. It is about unrealistic expectations that the church has bought into and sold to its people.

Over half of American households are households where all the adults work. But still, women do most of the house work, the grocery shopping, the bathing of the children, the homework folder wrangling. Women have, on average, 30 minutes less of leisure time per day. Y’all the statistics are the same for the women in our pews.

So, when you suggest, even implicitly by the sheer number of books you sell about it, or the articles you publish, that my lack of home making is a heart issue, pardon me as I respond: NOT TODAY SATAN!

Why is this hot-mess-gender-segregated-chore-garbage only shaming marketed toward women?

Where are the book marketed to my husband about the relationship to his spiritual life and the “man chores”? Where are the books called:

• Is your lawn and your heart overgrown?
• Pruning your life and your bushes. Building a shed and a Godly life.
• Shiny like Chrome: At the Car Wash with the Holy Spirit.
•  In God’s Garage, How keeping your car running clean keeps your mind running clean

Where are those books? Why don’t they exist?

Because we don’t have the same expectations for men as we do for women. This jacked up system was set by the world. And instead of the church offering me freedom from it, it has just doubled on the shame. I should feel bad not just because I can’t find my couch under the laundry pile and the toothpaste on the sink has hardened into sparkly blue cement, but also because this shows a lack of commitment to Jesus.

This isn’t okay. Every single day since I wrote this post, someone has Googled “working mom devotional” every day. Why? Because those don’t really exist. Even though over half of the women in the church work, even though over half of American moms work, still we feel like we are alone, like we aren’t good enough, like we are falling short.

Yes. My house is a disaster and I haven’t folded laundry in two months. Yes, we are having pizza for dinner and I am not even going to pick up the clothes my kids are likely to discard right on the living room floor. Yes, it was a small miracle Priscilla found matching shoes and everyone left the house wearing clean underwear today.

No. That does not mean I need to get right with Jesus. It means I am in the same boat as most of America. It means nothing about my relationship with Jesus. The dirty dishes in the sink? They mean I am probably going to get ants. THAT is why I should wash them, not because Jesus cares.