More books. Too much emotion. No warning labels.

Reading The Mother Garden by Robin Romm at home and When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers at school because I really have to figure out what to DO--okay, reading both in both places, really--not doing a good job these days of drawing any kind of clean line between teaching and the rest of my life. I feel like it's a school of nun teachers except we don't live together--we just all work and talk about work and email about work ALL THE TIME. But anyway. Slightly cranky lately--though not in the kids' direction, and had a conversation with a student yesterday about how "it's not fair" to be cranky towards the people who aren't the ones who made you cranky, whether you're a teacher or a student or a mom or a boss or a sister or a brother... I am hugely appreciating the kids lately. & that's something, a huge something.

But--crying over both my books.

Yesterday sitting in my classroom during homework help, after school, I read this to myself: "I can think of nothing that I do 186 days out of the year, in front of my peers, that I know I will consistently do poorly. Can you think of anything you do that qualifies? I gave up tennis because it was too embarrassing to constantly run to that adjacent court and retrieve my errant ball. I stopped aerobics class, for I never could understand that grapevine-turn-around-dip thing, and I got tired of the instructor standing directly in front of me, shouting, 'Cross-over now.'" I had a student in my classroom doing her math, so I cried that small way. I'd just finished working with one boy who wants to learn to read, and two others who wouldn't stay in the room, who kept running out and being brought back by other teachers and staff members, laughing at everything I asked them to do: Write your name, write down the title of this story. At the end of the day during a quiet private moment, I said to one of them, "Do you want to learn how to read?" He laughed. I said, "D., I'm serious. It's an honest question. Do you want to learn how? Please just think about it tonight." I've spent a lot of time since then wondering if I should have said that to him--but it is an honest question, though oversimplifying everything, and I don't know what the hell else to say.

This morning I read Romm's story "The Tilt," from the point of view of a young woman whose mother is sick and dying, and the young woman is sitting with her boyfriend's stepmom, Anna, thinking about how Anna is mourning her dead son by trying to hold on to him, spending her time trying to commune with the dead. The son, Milo, shot himself. "I want to ask her what she hears when Milo comes to her, when he materializes out of wind and light. Does he simply sit near her? Is it like she's pregnant with him again? Does he get lonely? Does he tell her why he did it? How the gun felt? What that moment was like when his finger tightened around the trigger? Did he think about Anna, the powdery smell of her neck, the drugged feeling of sleeping near her when he was small? Was it brilliant, that smash of pain? Did he see colors? Did he feel love and sorrow surge up in his throat and go soaring out of him? Was that what death was? No longer needing to contain these feelings in your body? When suddenly, all the splitting song inside you is you. You are--finally--no longer a container--you are the things that once were contained?"

In another of Romm's stories, a daughter apologizes to her dying mother for choosing the movie she'd rented, saying something like, "We checked on the box, it didn't say anything about a woman dying of cancer."