I have been thinking a lot this weekend about something I read on this blog post, written by a woman named Joy who I barely know through following each other on Instagram. Her words cut right to the point of what I’ve been struggling with since April:

"It’s my giant neon sign: if I’m not creating for days, weeks on end, I’m holding my breath. If I’m holding my breath, I am not abiding in Christ, and fear has stopped me in my tracks. Creating helps me push back the darkness and take a deep breath.”

The fear I experienced that early morning in April when I woke to the sound of death—I cannot say it has left me. Whenever I have to tell someone about that morning, I still start to shake and, if I’m not careful, I’ll melt down into a big puddle of tears. Kendell can tell the story through the lens of “my wife saved my life,” but I’m not certain my efforts really helped; I think it was more the timing of the policeman and then the EMTs that really saved him. But my retellings bring me back, in my memory, to the absolute terror I felt. And while the medical procedures Kendell had should mean that he never will have another cardiac arrest, the fear is still here. I am living in a space where I no longer can feel like we’re “done” with medical issues; I just feel like I am waiting for whatever comes next.

And maybe what comes next is Kaleb, whose heart check-up in June did not go well. And if I thought living in fear of the possibility of my husband’s death was difficult, translating that to my child is just…I literally can’t. I can’t talk about it or write about it or even know how to begin to deal with it. I have to look at it sideways, out of the corner of my eye.

So there’s a lot of fear around here.

And since that morning in April, there has been almost no creating. No writing, no delving into new quilting projects, no scrapbooking. And sure, I’ve had two enormous vacations to plan, and a graduation, and then a really busy summer.

But I think fear is mostly what is stopping me.

Creating something is an act of hope. It means you are imagining a future where the thing you create will still be looked at or used or read, that it might inspire someone else. Sitting down at my scrapbooking desk has felt nearly impossible because it is there that the what-ifs overtake me. The what-ifs that I can’t even write out, but that fill my head. I can’t make any assumptions anymore, and not only about Kendell and his heart or Kaleb and his heart. Life’s biggest lesson for me over the past decade is that people die. All the time, unexpectedly, without giving you a chance to say goodbye. I am incredibly lucky that I am on this side, that I can still hug my husband and my children, that I can send them funny texts and wash their clothes for them and kiss their foreheads when they’re sleeping.

I know that I am lucky. And blessed.

Right now is the only thing I have.

But not creating for months & months…that is a space I cannot abide for long. It’s not in my nature to not be making something, to not be working on a project or thinking about a piece of writing while I fall asleep or making a mess at my desk. It is a dark place, and even though it was terrifying at first, I have started again. And it is pushing back the darkness—just a little. It is, to use Joy’s words, like taking a deep breath. Like breathing again.

Even though I’m afraid.

Because really, the fear isn’t only for my family. Deep down, the fear is also for myself. That my life has come to nothing, that it has been meaningless and I have left no mark. That if it were me who died tomorrow and I left behind all of these people I love, would they know that I loved them? Would it have mattered that I was here? (Hopkins had it right: it is always ourselves we mourn for.)

And maybe scrapbook layouts are a silly way to make my mark. Maybe no one will care that I left them a quilt or two to huddle under when I can’t hug them back. Maybe I will never find success as a writer.

But I have to keep trying. I have to live this one life that I have, and one way I live it is by making. It is my act of faith and hope: that the world will continue on, that my children will be OK, that I will be here to witness and to love and that, if not, I will leave something that might matter to someone else.

It is the only way I know of holding back the darkness.

(I sat down to write about a scrapbook layout I finally made. I guess that will have to happen tomorrow, because this was what I needed to write today.)

If you are a mom, I’m certain you remember this moment:

The very instant your baby is placed in your arms—after a C-section, or delivery, or from a birth mother’s arms. However you got that baby—that moment.

When you first see that baby’s face, and you look at it—you look at it for the very first time, and you realize this is a new person. An entirely new person, just beginning his life.

And you want to do everything right. You know you will do everything right. You promise you will.

You’ll never get mad. You’ll never mess up. You’ll teach him everything he needs to know. You’ll help him avoid heartache. No heartache will happen on your watch.

And there are so few. So few moments, or days, or maybe even a week, until you mess up. You love him more than anything, but still you mess up.

Heartache comes no matter what you do.

I’ve been thinking about that promise I made, four times, to each of my babies. How it was an impossible promise, even though I made it with all of my heart. Especially, this week, that moment I had with Jake.

Every baby arrives with his or her own personality. You can sense it when you’re pregnant but once the baby arrives, it seems to beam out of their skin. It’s unique to each baby and is, I think, their most essential, truest self.

Jake had this specific…sweetness. Or joy. Or kindness. A goodness. I never did find the exact word for it, but oh my, it was…delicious. As he grew he showed me more and more of it, the kindness, the sweetness.

The goodness.

And I worried. I knew—that life would not let him keep it.

Even though I promised to never mess up. To do everything right and to be the perfect mom and to spare him every heartache. To make it so he could keep a hold of that quality he had.

But slowly, slowly, it slipped away, his essential Jakey-ness.

Actually, I don’t think it slipped away. I think it just got buried. Partly it had to be buried, because life and the world does not value kindness or sweetness or joy. Especially not in boys. The world wants toughness. It wants hardness, it wants fists and muscles and strong jaws.

He still has it, but he keeps it hidden.

Even with me.

Except, every once in a while. Every so often, it slips. The manly façade, and I see his true self, still there. He’s still sweet, and kind, and gentle.

I saw it last week, when he and I were packing up his bedroom as he prepared to move out.  It slipped out when he realized that, despite the excitement of an apartment and roommates and all that freedom, this is hard. Changing your life, taking a step into your future. It means what has been normal is now the past, and that is a hard transition even if it’s to a good place.

And then, a few hours later when we stood by the truck, which was filled with his stuff, my own mask slipped. Because I remembered—that moment. That first moment I saw his face. That moment when I was so sure. That I would be a great mom,  that I would give him everything he needed, that I would never mess up. When I was awash in the goodness of his personality, that indefinable Jacob sweetness.

Jake saw that I was struggling. So he came over and hugged me. He said, “Oh, Murm,” and he patted my shoulder and I put my face against his chest (because that is as high as I can reach) and I sobbed. Not just sobbed, but keened, a raw sound I hope no neighbors heard. Because for that moment there it was, the goodness, the kindness.

And for a second, even though him moving out felt like having my liver being pulled out of my ear canal, felt like losing him, like I lost, when he hugged me it felt like I didn’t fail. Like maybe I was a good mom. Like maybe I did give him at least some of the things he needed.

You start out from that first moment, loving your child with a feeling that the word “love” doesn’t manage to convey, starting to know them, and then learning them throughout their lives. Until something happens, adolescence, a mistake, something, and they start keeping secrets, they turn away, they keep themselves away from you.  You know them at their essential self but you slowly stop knowing them.

It is how it has to be, I suppose. So that growth can happen, so that we can separate like we must.

But oh, it is painful.

I can’t reconcile those two experiences, the first time I saw Jake, and then the last year, wanting to still know him, but not knowing him.

So I put my head on his chest and I wept and he, with his goodness, patted my back and gave me, as he left, a bit of himself again.

When you have a baby, you never can really imagine yourself into this place, when your child is no longer a baby, is the opposite of a baby, and is determined to go out into the world. When you have to let go. But motherhood is like that, isn’t it? We are always letting go. They grow and change so fast, there is barely time to love who they are now before they change again into a new thing. But this—this leaving. Even though he’s only across town. This is as hard to label as anything else—I don’t have a word for it. It’s an ending that requires grieving, but that’s silly because it’s not like anyone died. He’s doing exactly what 18-year-olds should do: moving upward into his own life.

It’s what we are working for as mothers. Making ourselves obsolete.

My voice has quieted, but somewhere inside me I am still making that raw sound.

So here I am, a week later. Eight days after Jake moved out. I’ve talked to him a few times, he’s come home for dinner, but it’s not the same. He is not the same. The wall covering up his truest self is firmly in place and his responses let me know that I’m mostly bugging him. He wants to move around in his parent-free world. And I am terrified of the possibility of the choices he could make. I still want to spare him every single heartache. But this is the motherhood place I am in right now: all I can do now, mostly, is watch. Is hope I taught him enough, or that he was listening even when it seemed he wasn’t listening. Hope that he will fulfill his enormous potential, that he won’t make irreversible mistakes. That he will find people who will see in him what I know is there—and I don’t mean his ridiculous math and science aptitude. I mean that indefinable thing, the goodness, the sweetness, the kindness. I hope he will find a space where he can be that person.

(I didn't take any pictures of Jake moving out. It was too hard. But this is us at his graduation this spring.)

(This post inspired by Stephanie Howell's "Blog Your Heart" series.)

(but I will warn you before I spoil it!)

I'm still trying to figure out why this is true for me: I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of the world stripped of most of its people. Post-apocalyptic fiction is almost at a dead heat with dystopian fiction (and yes...they are closely related but I insist they are different speculative fiction subgenres!) when vying for my affection; I like the great dystopians more than most post-apocalyptics, but the majority of dystopian novels are barely good. It's far harder to pull of an awesome dystopia than an awesome post-apocalyptic, I think, because the former requires genius while the latter requires...less genius.

Anyway.

What will destroy humanity? How, if at all, will we manage to rebuild? How would the world itself heal or change if most of us vanished? How would the survivors put to use the leftover everything of human society? How would people interact? With the savagery of The Road? with the human ingenuity of Alas, Babylon? with the humanity hodge-podge and genetic mutations of Oryx and Crake? What would it feel like to be alive in such a world?

I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. But it is delicious, delicious tea to me.

The method of the end of the world is as varied as the (enormous) amount of novels speculating about it. In Justin Cronin's The Passage trilogy, the method is a virus, mutated from bats and then genetically engineered by scientists who at first just want to eliminate death. Death, the argument goes, is illogical considering how much effort Mother Nature has put into human beings; consider our intelligent brains and our ability to create as contrasted with how quickly a human life passes. This nefariously beneficial goal eventually gets superseded with the idea of building an invincible soldier. The first mutation of the virus arrives from South America in a man named Fanning, who becomes Patient Zero. The scientists working on the mutations try twelve different variants of it, each time injecting the virus into a man who had been on death row. Creating super soldiers who can heal quickly, are unaffected by almost all medical problems, and are stronger than the strongest man imaginable—what can go wrong?

In that sense, it is human hubris which destroys the world, but then, isn’t it always?

As they are given their variations of the virus, each of the twelve change in similar and also different ways, but with the same general result: they are enormous, with skin that glows slightly green. Their teeth grow sharp and their appetites turn to raw flesh and fresh blood—they are, in effect, vampires of a ferocious new sort. Only vaguely recognizable as men, so don't picture any of the effete vamps from other books.

They are terrifying.

The scientists keep each of the virus-infected patients in a medical lab in the Colorado mountains, locked in glass observation rooms, guarded and observed by a variety of men. The main scientist of the project, Jonas Lear, decides that the experiment isn’t working because he is putting the virus into the wrong type of people; he wants to see what might happen if it were injected into a child. He chooses a girl named Amy, whose mother has recently disappeared after killing a man; no one will notice that she's vanished. Except—they will. This decision is what the crisis will continually turn on, as Amy will eventually save the world.

There wouldn't be a story if the infected Twelve didn't eventually break out of their containment and spread the virus, which is exactly what happens. 

I decided to start this trilogy this summer because A--the third book came out this spring, which means I could read the whole series in a row with no waiting, and B--it felt like the right sort of thing to read on the two vacations I took in June. I started The Passage on the airplane to Cleveland with Kaleb and I finished it in Paris with Haley; I started The Twelve while I was waiting in the Heathrow airport for my flight home after lugging both books around London, Brussels, and Amsterdam. (I always overestimate how much reading I'll actually get done on a trip!) Then I took most of August to finish The City of Mirrors, the third (with occasional periods of reading something else, namely essays and poetry).

I'm left with mixed feelings about this series.

On the one hand, I really, really enjoyed it. I liked the concept of a virus run amuck across the earth, and I loved seeing how the (very few) survivors adapted. I liked the menace of the virals; I liked that the series is a blend of sci-fi and horror with just a smidgen of fantasy tossed in. I like that while new characters were often introduced, we follow the stories of almost all of the main characters through to the end. I liked that sometimes the story jumped between the time when the virus started and the time, 100 years in the future, when we meet the survivors. I loved so many of the characters.

But.

There were places where the language was highly overwritten. (One sentence in the second book used "sledgehammer" as a verb and my Inner English Teacher had a fit.) And some of the places the story went were sort of...ordinary. I wanted it to be extraordinary throughout, rather than a conglomerate of other survive-a-virus novels (The Stand comes to mind, of course.)

And, ***HERE IS WHERE THE SPOILERS START***​

I was thoroughly disappointed by the book's ending. One bajillion pages of story and a trilogy it took me the whole summer to read, all based on the idea that Amy would save the world. And she did—but in such an ordinary way that I had to go back and reread that section just to remember how she did it. To save the world, she had to kill Patient Zero—the admittedly icky but not quite scary Fanning—and she did it only by being in the right place at the right time. Literally any of the other characters could have done that.  Remember: I wanted this to be extraordinary. So I imagined Amy saving the world by doing something only she could do. Perhaps something in her blood (she is, after all, technically the 14th recipient of the virus, and in her it works perhaps as Jonas Lear intended) fought against the virus in Fanning's body. But her being in the right place to toss a chain around his neck?

So disappointing!

And then there is the problem of the epilogue. This takes us 900 years into the future, when humanity has righted itself; a Jaxon descendant is working on getting people back onto the North American continent, as the required 1000 years since the virus hit have passed. Some reviews I've read have complained that this section was entirely unnecessary, but I actually love that it was included. It helped tie up Amy's story. But there are two problems: One, the technology. Really? If the world basically had to start over, would we eventually end up in the same place, with cars and telephones with cords? I think we would build off of the myths of the vanished world, and the remnants of the technology, to create something different. Second, the language. When Peter's great-however-many-grandnephew arrives in Amy's North America, he has...a conversation with her. Which would be impossible, as language changes so much. In almost a millennium, if the new society spoke something like "English" it wouldn't be very close to the English Amy would know.

***END OF SPOILERS***​

In the end, I am glad I read this trilogy, even if it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. It was a good summer read for me, as I don't usually like the regular "beach read" recommendations but I do like something a little less intense in the hot months. (Well, only if I'm traveling; it just ended up being a summer of travel for me.) It has a literary edge that some genre writing doesn't, but it was built mostly upon story. Despite its flaws, I think many readers will enjoy it, and despite that disappointing ending, I am glad to have spent my summer with Amy, the Girl from Nowhere.

I have been thinking about this article from the Washington Post all day. It describes how, in Utah, to become a teacher you no longer have to have a teaching credential. Instead, you need a Bachelor's degree in the subject you want to teach.

(The only picture I have of myself in my classroom.)

Probably I have been thinking about it because I made the fatal mistake of trying to engage people online who think this is a fantastic idea. "Learning about teaching is pointless" the argument always begins, and then it follows from there. "Because my uncle Tom taught me how to do geometry much better than the geometry/baseball coach I had in high school." "Because pedagogy takes time away from learning about the subject." "Because teaching is something almost anyone can do, so long as they know about their subject."

Now I find myself caught in a frustration loop, arguing with those voices in my head.

Of course, I'm not a teacher anymore. But I did teach, high school English for two years. When I decided to start teaching, I already had a degree in English, but to get my teaching credential, I got another degree, this time in Secondary Ed. (Were I to go back in time, I would just get myself a Master's degree instead of a second Bachelor's; I'm still not sure why I didn't even consider that option.) My English degree taught me about reading, writing, literature, history, grammar, and all things book-related; my secondary ed degree taught me how to teach what I knew to others.

I'd like to think I was a good teacher. I know I was passionate about it. I wanted desperately to teach each of my students several things: to love books, to write well, and to integrate literary thinking into their lives. I spent hours during my two years of teaching working on lesson plans. When I graded essays, I had a green pen in my hand, which I used to correct grammar and usage errors, write encouraging comments, and leave a final thought (on every assignment I gave). You can’t teach writing well without the comments and the corrections, but it takes so much time, especially when you’re grading 75, 100, 150 papers. I ran on caffeine and sugar and not much else during those years; I gained weight and I got wrinkles and prematurely grey hair. I loved teaching—but I was entirely overwhelmed by it. It consumed my life. I didn't go to church, or to family parties, or to my kids' activities. I just worked on my school stuff because I had to stay on top of it. If I didn't do it, who would?

And I did all of that work on a salary that would qualify me for food stamps.

Two years was all I could manage.

The Washington Post article says that "Education officials in [Utah] have been trying to figure out why 2 in 5 teachers leave the state’s public schools within five years."

Really? They can't have been trying very hard. Because their solution—let's hire people who don't know how to teach!—fails miserably at solving the problem. Their "solution" only tries to make it easier for people to become​ teachers, not to continue teaching, thereby underlining the idea that "qualified teachers" aren't the point, just bodies in the front of the classroom.

The process of becoming a teacher isn't the hard part. The hard part is continuing to teach for more than a few years.

Why do so many teachers leave the profession within five years?

Some of it is​ because of the pay scale. But if you dare suggest that teachers are underpaid, the reaction is swift: teachers should teach because they love their subject, because they love teaching, because they have the power to influence young lives. All of that is true, of course, but it is also beside the point. What other career requires people to be paid in encouragement and gratitude? And then there’s the always-popular response: But teachers only work nine months out of the year! Actually, what teachers do is squish twelve months (or more) of work into nine months.

It goes deeper than the pay scale, though. It’s also the working conditions, the run-down classrooms and ancient desks, the computer labs filled with painfully slow machines, the always-dirty floors. It’s the overwhelming classroom size. It’s the demand that if you want, say, whiteboard markers, then you know where Staples is. It’s the fact that technically, there is almost no time in the day for a teacher to use the bathroom. It’s the relentless, looming reminder of testing. And it is the overwhelming feeling that it is always the teacher’s fault when students don’t fulfill their potential.

And yet—we still love it. At least, I did. I loved being with students and trying to ignite their excitement, trying to encourage them to think broadly and objectively, trying to help them see how using the correct word might be the thing that gets them ahead in the world. I loved preparing lessons. I even loved the moments when, grading papers, I’d find a clever phrase or a thoughtful metaphor and think yes! Here! This student is learning! I would go back to teaching in a heartbeat—if they doubled the salary and required me to teach two classes a day instead of three. (Which will never happen, of course. Especially in Utah.)

Not anyone can be a teacher, and yes: pedagogy doesn’t save the world from apathetic, careless, or downright bad teachers. But here is what I know: I learned as much as I could about teaching before I got into the classroom. I worked my butt off during my student teaching experience and absorbed everything I could from my mentors. I was passionate about my subject and I put everything I could into my classroom.

But I only managed to teach for two years.

And I still feel like I failed as a teacher. Because I couldn’t endure, because it became too much, because I could see how I could give everything to it and it would still want more, because to be a halfway-decent teacher I would always be a horrible mother. Because I couldn’t thrive in a broken system.

Utah’s education officials have been trying to figure out how to retain teachers. Their solution is to throw unprepared people into a system that can’t keep the people who are prepared. That’s not even a bandaid. That’s a bomb.

Instead, Utah—the entire nation, really—needs to fix the system itself. If the state wants to retain teachers, it needs to create a working environment that bolsters and rewards, not drains and decimates educators. And it can’t only start with politicians. It needs to start with parents. What if every single parent in the state wrote a letter, demanding that their children’s teachers be given better working conditions? These parents need not be motivated by altruistic measures. They don’t need to care about the teachers at all. They need to care about their very own children, and realize that they will receive better education from teachers who are nurtured instead of drained by the system.

The solution to retaining teachers is not as complicated as Utah is making it. If the states want to retain teachers, they must create conditions that encourage teachers to continue teaching. The teachers would benefit—but even more importantly, the students would benefit. Until that happens, teachers and students will continue to suffer.