The other morning, I woke up slowly, more so than usual. My other half stood in the doorway to our bedroom, his grin wide, a glint in his eyes. Half-awake, I struggled to make out the clock and drag my sorry self into a sitting position. I squinted at Rice, suspicious.
“You must have had quite a dream last night.” He walked in and kissed me.
I returned his greeting with all the love I could muster. “Huh?”
His smile was now more of a smirk. “You let me snuggle up to you to get warm. We were all nice and cozy, and then you mumbled, ‘I hate people.’”
I squirmed. “I did not say that.”
“Oh, but you did,” he assured me. “You didn’t say it meanly. Just sort of under your breath, like how you get when someone makes a thoughtless comment or starts to act rude for no reason.”
Gradually, it started to come back to me. “I was trying to tell you something, but I knew I wasn’t making sense. And that’s what I hated. Not people. Just all the busy-ness in my head.”
“Well,”—he squeezed my hand—"speaking of busy-ness, she’s already here.”
I nodded, knowing exactly what he meant, accepting his unspoken gift with gratitude. A touch of quiet before heading downstairs to my 6:30 weekday morning routine. A sip of hot coffee while brushing my granddaughter Charli’s hair. A little more coffee while she ate her breakfast, then time for our game of Two Truths and a Lie.
Charli: “This morning I woke up, got dressed, and then fed my unicorn.”
Me: “I think the part about the unicorn might be your lie.”
Charli: “Ding-ding-ding. You’re right.” She giggled. Hard.
After that, she walked to the bus, checking out constellations with her Big Daddy. They passed the park as the day broke. Peaceful. On its own clock.
Alone again, my heart was full, as it often is. I’m thankful for that.
Yet sometimes my full heart leaves my restless soul hungry for even more quiet. Like a couple mornings later, when our ritual repeated.
Me: “Today I’m going to go shopping, have lunch with my Happy Hour, and go see the Barbie movie.”
Charlie: “I think the shopping part is your lie.”
Me: “Buzzzzzzzz. Good guess, but you’re wrong.” (It was a good guess as she knows I hate shopping.) “My lie was about the Barbie movie. I already saw it, remember?”
Charlie: “Oh, yeah.” She giggled. “I hope you have fun with your Happy Hour.”
I hoped so, too, because that lunch came during a week filled with busy-ness. Not just the routine stuff, but extras as well…for each and every one of us scheduled for that lunch. We squeezed it between appointments for haircuts and crowns. Around babysitting the grands and visiting doctors. Making time for another friend’s birthday dinner. An elderly parent’s fall.
It’s all good, though. That elderly parent bounced back well—yay, Rita!—and our Happy Hour did have fun. Plus, we didn’t just squeeze in one lunch. We made time for even more.
Granted, it took a special telephone call to make it happen. No emergency, thankfully. Just a "How 'bout I come to visit soon?" call from Debra, one of our Happy Hour foursome, which is still going strong after thirty-two years. Okay, we’re not quite as strong as back in the day. Lunch plans now require buying a round-trip plane ticket, dealing with TSA, figuring out who will brave Atlanta traffic to and from Hartsfield-Jackson, juggling schedules….
In other words, nothing earthshaking. Just life.
So…truth or lie: Life is just a big ol’ blob of busy-ness.
If you’re like me, you’re probably shouting, “Yes!”
Then again, it’s all good. Because sometimes, a little more busy-ness is just what it takes to keep our hearts full.
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Friendship. We all need it in our lives, no matter our age.
I’ve read that when we’re younger, our friendships are influenced by so-called life tasks (finishing school, getting a job, raising a family). As we age, we tend to develop more cross-generational friendships. Then come our golden years, which are less about building new friendships than sustaining old ones.
That all strikes me as true, although, if I’m honest, it’s hard to remember back when.
To jog my memory, I once asked my grandson Britton to remind me how young people make friends. Seven years old at the time, here’s what he said:
“Start to know them …and start playing with them. Start talking about yourself. Tell them what you like, and you tell them what you don’t like. They might have something in common. Then they might say, ’Let’s be friends.’”
If only it were always that easy, no?
But that was in 2019, when Britton hung out with a neighbor of ours who happens to be his age. Back then, Britton and Illyana would play for hours, laughing at the same tasteless fart jokes, making You Tube videos of God-awful science experiments, sometimes just trying to escape their younger siblings, who were ‘annoying’.
Jump forward to 2023. Britton and Illyana walk home from the middle-school bus stop on opposite sides of the street. God help them, accidental eye contact might deem them ‘a couple’.
Could anything be more heinous than that?
Granted, Britton still goes over to Illyana’s house, but only to see if her younger brother Camden would like to shoot hoops.
Ah, the complexities of friendship. Always evolving. Often in beautiful strands of rainbow-colored silk. But sometimes in coarse, fickle bunches of scratchy burlap.
Through the years, I’ve experienced more silk than burlap. Lucky me, my friendships have crossed not just generational boundaries but gender and ethnic lines as well.
Some of my most precious friendships continue to be with other women, some met through neighborhood gatherings, church, and work. Others through book clubs or friends of friends—or even my kids.
Who would have guessed my kids’ friends might have moms I like hanging out with? And who would have predicted we’d form a foursome we called our Happy Hour? You know, like the Spice Girls, minus one member. Or maybe the Sex and the City Girls, minus the city. No, make that Thelma and Louise, squared. (Just without that one last crazy ride in the convertible.)
Seems just like that, our Happy Hour has morphed into something more reminiscent of the Golden Girls. I don’t know how or when that happened. I just know that I miss my girlfriends!
These past eight months, I feel like I’ve stood a better chance of finishing a marathon in record time than getting together with my own sweet Golden Girls. I can’t remember the last time all four of us got together. Maybe in 2021? Shoot, even though three out of four of us still live within two miles of one another, out of sixteen attempts to meet up in 2023, only two have worked out. TWO. (Superbowl Sunday with our guys. And an August dinner—again with the guys—for who knows what reason. Maybe because we all had the same open date on our calendar.)
May I make a confession? More than once, I’ve fretted my now Golden Girl friends no longer need me. Or worse, they no longer want to hang out as much. And you know what? Both those things are both probably true. Because long-time friendships don’t just happen. They happen when people grow older. And growing older brings new complexities to the mix, like illnesses—our own, our spouses’, our extended families’. Stomach bugs and vertigo. COVID-exposure and surgeries and physical therapy. And let's not forget crises with extended family and aging parents. Last-minute requests involving the grandkids. Even good things, like time to finally travel, have meant a cutback on our once-upon-a-time frequent gatherings.
But while I miss my friends, I’d hate if you pitied us.
Long-term friends make room for the ebbs and the flows, for those pockets when gatherings become sparse, for whatever reason. True friends make efforts to sustain what they’ve built.
And let me tell you, that takes work. Sometimes it almost seems easier to develop new friendships.
Almost.
As I write this, I’m preparing to attend a writers’ conference in Chicago. I look forward to seeing some new writing friends I met at last year’s conference—and making some even newer friends this year as well. I’m excited. But I’m nervous, too. What if I pack the wrong things to wear and look like a misfit? What if I can’t think of what to say, or worse, blurt out something inappropriate?
I don’t know if anything could be more heinous than that.
But I take comfort in knowing this: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Friendship remains important, no matter our age or stage in life, regardless of our gender or ethnicity. Whether rekindling old friendships or celebrating new ones, what’s not to love about small kindnesses swapped back and forth and over again?
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(Note: This one’s for the teachers. If it comes across as anti-public education, that’s not my intent. It may showcase my limited understanding of the law as I reference a Georgia House Bill as it relates to a teacher’s termination and her journey to get that decision reversed. So be it. It’ll definitely shine a light on my own past feelings and behaviors as a classroom teacher—sometimes rash and embarrassing, but oh, so human. And that, my friends, is my point. All teachers have superpowers. They make tough decisions each day. They excel. They fail. They’re human. So, teachers, I want you to know: I see you. I respect you. We need you. Here’s wishing you all the best!)
Recently, my daughter Quinn, who teaches kindergarten, brought up the book, My Shadow is Purple by Scott Stuart. A teacher here in Cobb County purchased a copy from her school’s book fair last spring and read it to her gifted fifth grade class. According to the book’s back cover, it’s a story that considers “gender beyond binary in a vibrant spectrum of color.”
A couple parents voiced concerns that the teacher’s sharing that book violated their rights under Georgia House Bill 1084. Passed in 2022, the bill bans educators from teaching so-called divisive concepts. The teacher who read the book was asked to resign or be terminated for violating HB 1084.
“Oh, my God,” I said to Quinn. “You didn’t read that book to your class, did you?”
“No, Mother.” She rolled her eyes at me. I could tell, even though we were talking on the phone.
“Actually,”—I felt my lips twitch, fighting off a wry smile—“it sounds more like something I would have done.”
And it does.
Back in 2003, after years as an at-home parent, I felt called to go back to teaching. A friend who had done the same thing warned me the lay of the land had become very different.
“It used to be 80 percent creativity and 20 percent B.S.,” she said. “These days that’s flip-flopped.”
Still, I felt that calling. I went back to school for linguistics and Brit Lit, the classes required for my recertification. Then I pulled together a portfolio containing my resume, teaching philosophy, and a writing sample—a critique of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock. And I interviewed for positions.
Wonder of wonders, I landed a job teaching middle school language arts--three sixth-grade sections and two at the seventh-grade level. Giddy, I signed my contract mere days before school started. Off the bat, I learned the language arts lead instructor was on leave with a newborn. Her stand-in replacement, overwhelmed, stumbled to know how to help me except to say that textbooks were backordered with no teacher editions on hand. And then I found out a PTA scandal the previous year meant no discretionary funds for classroom supplies. I hadn’t expected much, but this meant nada.
I dug in, determined to answer my calling. And maybe I could have, if I’d just had more time. But I didn’t.
From the get-go, time was not on my side. My personal planning period got filled by team meetings. At lunch time, I—like my fellow faculty members—got half an hour to wolf down my own food while watching the kids do the same. In-service days focused on accreditation assignments and discipline how-tos. Granted, I needed the latter. Kids were different from when I’d last faced a classroom, fifteen years earlier. Yet I had no mentor assigned to me because—well, I wasn’t a new teacher. I just felt like one.
In the classroom, the range of maturity, learning styles, and abilities stunned me. I had core curriculum guides to follow, with timelines and standards designed to “encourage the highest achievement in every student.” It didn’t sit well with me, introducing new lessons before previous ones got mastered. But time demanded it. Standards had to be met. Reaccreditation depended on it.
Time—well, also age—continued to work against me personally, too. A doctor who looked fourteen diagnosed my prolific, long-lasting menstrual periods as symptoms of perimenopause. I couldn’t thank him enough. It was easy to purchase and stash massive amounts of super-plus feminine hygiene products. Finding enough student-free moments to tend to my business proved more challenging.
On the homefront, my own kids faced challenges, too. We teachers were told not to use our personal cell phones in class, so I told my kiddos to call my school office in case of emergency. The day one of my daughters called, the office failed to let me know. I was livid. But what could I say? One of the front-office clerks had called out, suffering side effects from chemotherapy.
Here I was, eight weeks into the school year, twenty pounds down (stress), and living on five hours of sleep a night (from planning and grading and filling out answer keys into the wee hours). My own kiddos no longer counted on me when they suffered a personal crisis. I was having too many of my own.
Around this time, one of my sixth grade students—let’s call him Benjamin—came into class in rare form, making jokes and asides every time I started to talk to the class. Finally, I'd had it.
“Benjamin!” I pointed a finger at him. “Shut the hell up.”
A little girl in the front row gasped. My heart cracked, seeing her brow furrow and her face go slack. I liked that girl. Shoot, I cared about them all, even Benjamin. But there was no undoing my deed.
“That’s right.” I squeezed my fists and shook them. “I said it. I said hell, hell, hell, hell, hell.”
Each time I repeated the word, I stomped a foot, left then right and repeat, until I’d completed my tantrum. Then I wrote Benjamin up for class disruption and sent him to the principal’s office.
Bless my naive little heart. Benjamin told the principal what happened (!), and I got reprimanded. Understandably so. But that day I went home with a realization: This middle school teaching gig wasn’t working. I never dreamed I’d break a contract, but that’s what I did. Over tears that night, I typed up my letter of resignation.
Three weeks later, I walked out of that middle school’s doors one last time. I spent months mourning how I couldn’t cut it. Years later, when Quinn went to college, I told her: “You think you’d like teaching? Well, take time to weigh all your options. It’s harder than most folks will ever know.”
Quinn remembered my struggles. She opted to study interior design—for a semester, maybe two. But the call of the classroom persisted, luring her back to her passion.
She’s taught at the same elementary school now for nine years. I’ve watched her superpowers grow. God willing, they’ll keep on eclipsing her more human moments.
Given time, I like to think I could’ve grown into a decent teacher, too. Sometimes I think bizarre circumstances and timing rigged my chances. Other times I blame the public education system. And then there’s this: Maybe I just couldn’t cut it. I have to accept that I’ll never know.
What I do know is this: Teaching is hard, hard, hard. That’s why I salute all the teachers out there with a virtual hug and a THANK YOU! Teachers: May your superpowers carry you through your toughest days, and may this year be one of your best ever.
Cheers ~ J
