how love and habit blurred so thouroughly to make a life;
today, in the gym locker room, i was tying my shoes and a woman carrying her baby paused in front of me. "i have a rather odd favor to ask. i want to know how much my son weighs, so i was thinking i'd weigh myself and then weigh me with him, but..."
"you want me to hold him?"
"yes, if you would.."
she holds out a towel and then hands me her three month old son. he's heavier than i expect, but it only takes a minute for him to settle against my shoulder, as his once surprising weight begins to dissipate.
last night, i coaxed a three-and-a-half year old to sleep with the story of jack and the beanstalk. the only problem was i couldn't remember what happened after the magic beans and the stalk that stretched into the heavens. i was disappointed because this was my great-grandfathers favorite story to tell me and that fact is about all i still remember about him. i forged ahead anyway, making up my own tale so long-winded and full of pointless twists that my aim was little more than to exhaust her before i had to come up with an ending that made sense.
she was persistant, asking why at the most innocent times, curling closer to me and deeper into the sheets. when i finally found a sufficient way out, i had barely said 'the end' when i felt her little arms wrap around me tight. as i picked her up and repositioned her in bed, all i could think was that this was exactly what i've been missing.
one of my students speaks about ten words of english, which is nine more than she spoke four weeks ago. her name is patricia and she has already been in the country for about six months, electing to stay in sixth grade even though she had ms. pierce as a teacher for the tail end of last year. she's nearly six feet tall and thirteen years old and her favorite word is 'beautiful'. she uses it to describe anything she finds pleasing, like the cherry scented pencil i gave her or my hair on what i would consider one of my worst hair days. she uses it each day to comment on the ever increasing number of books she reads a night - her record being forty. these books are only about ten pages each, with more pictures than words, but i know that her reading level has already increased, and i try to believe that she learning all her words from one of these.
every time she slowly begins her sentence with "miss jones", pausing for a couple seconds to process what might come next, this look of intense concentration comes across her face. today i sat with her as she took her science test and tried to remember what the letters of the acronym i made up to help them remember the english steps of the scientific method stood for. after trying to spell hypothesis with an "a" and inventing a word that started with an 'r' that was nowhere close to results, something clicked and she began to say "observation! analysis! conclusion!" with a childlike glee. i then helped her find the words in the spanish-english dictionary they were allowed to use, knowing that unless she had something to copy from observation would be written as orbsvetn and the science teacher would mark it wrong with a cursory glance overlooking all the effort it took to even get that.
when it was all over, she came and sat with me while i made my poster for the next period. the rest of the class was in a post-test frenzy. the science teacher had all but given up. my head pounded from the boys' noises and the girls' giggles, but all of that began to matter less as patricia pointed to every single letter i wrote and said "beautiful, miss jones, beautiful."
kids don't make me feel bad for how much i care. they don't mind that i yell and then feel bad twenty seconds later. in fact by the time i'm convinced i need to make it up to them, they've completely forgotten that it ever happened. they compliment in a completely organic way, asking me to be their math teacher or their older sister because of the fact that it would make their life better. whenever i walk in a classroom i'm greeted by a chorus of "hi miss jones!", whenever i confess that i'm just coming to drop something off or pick something up, they let out a collective groan and pout as if they weren't a day over three.
still, i spend my days feeling ambivalent about my teaching ability. no matter how much they like me or how well i explain things, i feel like i fail in some way that's impossible to articulate.
it's a three day weekend that i need to spend with people my own age, away from the whines that make me want to cry and the puppy dog eyes that never fail to make me change my mind. but i guess it can't be all bad considering i already know i'll miss it all enough to not hate tuesday when it comes.