The worst part about being a teacher is grading papers. At first, I thought it would be fun. When I was a kid, I loved playing teacher, or sitting at my dad’s desk at the newsroom and playing journalist. During my student teaching, I’d take papers to the coffee house where I hung out and pretend I was doing oh-so-important work. The other customers might sometimes ask me, “Are you a teacher?”
“Training to be.”
“Wow. Good for you. I could never teach. I’d be afraid I’d have kids like I was in high school.”
Knowing smile with a twinkling eye, “Oh, I have plenty of those. Looks like you turned out alright though,” ah, ha, ha, ha. We all laugh and laugh together. Such noble work we do, we teachers.
I have so many papers to grade, I feel like showing movies for the next three weeks so I can have a chance to catch up on my papers. Problem is, I’d probably just get sucked into the movie. Plus I’d have to give my students some sort of assignment in order to make it an authentic use of class time and then I’d have even more papers.
I have two goals this year: 1) my students’ 12th grade English teachers feel I have prepared the students well, 2) my students feel like they worked harder than they’ve every worked in an English class.
I know one thing for certain. I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked. Maybe by second semester I’ll have a routine down and I can get back to a regular blog posting schedule.
Ah, who the Hell am I kidding? I’ve never had a regular blog posting schedule. I’m dropping the pretense.
I’m struggling with my depression and anxiety more than usual. Odie is struggling worse than I. We are too much alike. When we were contemplating taking our relationship from friendship to the next level, he expressed the concern that we don’t balance each other and would end up reinforcing each other’s flaws and faults. I don’t normally think of Odie as a prescient man. Boy, did he nail it. I can imagine the benefit of complementary personalities. One person balances the strengths and overlooks the weaknesses of the other. Together, they’re a team! I don’t have that. When I feel sad and hopeless, I wish I could count on him to tell me everything will be okay. I come home from work, he asks how my day went.
“I suck. Nobody learns anything. I’m a joke. What am I even doing in the classroom? I can’t teach. Everyone hates me. I’m so behind in my grading, I don’t even know where to start. Parents are going to show up with torches and pitchforks any minute now. OH, and I’m a shit mother. The kids don’t even want to come home from preschool. I have to spend twenty minutes begging them to get in the car and another twenty threatening them to. My parents should have smothered me at birth. How was your day?”
“Same.”
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
Mommies in Melancholia
The latest trend in Mommy Blogging appears to be confessing to your mental illness. Anxiety and depression are the new “Aden and Anais” must-have muslin swaddle blankets. We’re wrapping ourselves in terror testimonials and Klonopin confessions instead of adorable pastel prints.
It was inevitable. Heather Dooce Armstrong was the pioneer of blogging for a living, and when she birthed out the Mommy Blogging genre, millions followed suit. Her first book was a confessional about her postpartum breakdown and stay in a mental hospital. Not really up to the hype, in my opinion. Being awoken nightly by your roommate who’d escaped a Satanic Sex Slave Farm so you could help her catch the vampire bats flying around your semi-private suite in the state hospital — now THAT’S worth the price of admission. Heather had nothing like that in her book of tales. Just some hackneyed dairy trebuchet impressions.
Now, every time I open Facebook, Huffpost is directing me to mommies in melancholia admitting to angst, accompanied by a montage of black and white pictures of lovely young women with darling offspring. Their bylines saying they are writers and/ or stay-at-home moms. SAHMs, to the uninitiated. And the green-eyed monster nibbles at my toes while the flames tickle the sides of my face.
During my unit on The Crucible, I taught my students in the spirit of the book that when you go to name all seven deadly sins, if you forget one, then you suffer from it. Gamely, they challenged me.
Gluttony, greed, vanity, wrath, lust, sloth… Pride? No, it’s the same as vanity. Already said it.
“Envy, Mrs. Odie,” one of my students blurts out triumphantly.
“Is it true?” asks another. I grant that it is.
Shiny fuel-efficient cars, Craftsman houses, unchewed fingernails, black pants free of pet hair, flat tummies, perfectly draped scarves, and two year-olds without tooth decay. I see these daily and I covet. I envy. I sin.
It is deadly, too. It is the death of joy. The irony that I want to get into a suffering contest with other mommy bloggers over who really suffers anxiety. You’re obsessive about your carpet? Not sure your husband’s coworkers’ wives will think your dinner party is as good as theirs? I’m pretty good at feeling sorry for myself. I get up at five. Well, I get out of bed at five. My kids just don’t buy this whole “sleep all night alone” malarky and are far more into “Mommy sure is warm and soft.” I’m always tired. I teach high school. I seem to care about my students’ educations more than they do. I’m forever behind on my paperwork. I forget to do my attendance reports. Someone always needs to take a make-up quiz. My paychecks go right to the grocery store. Parents who would probably have been too shy, busy, or passive to pick up a phone in bygone eras and call me about every assignment grade may feel no qualms about email. Email is to passive-aggression what prosthetics are to amputees. They help them get around.
Bridget Jones once joked that she was “seduced by the informality” of the medium into “flirting with [the] office scoundrel.” Teachers in today’s social media-obsessed climate tell me some parents find the informality of email removes not only barriers, but also does away with things like the chain of command. After all, the principal, board members, and superintendent have email addresses too.
My class has moved on from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Carpe diem. March to the beat of your own drummer. Emerson reminds us that not only is envy ignorance, but imitation is suicide (Self Reliance). I want to kick my own ass down the block when I read a SAHM’s confession that the anxiety of keeping her carpet clean gives her red, itchy hives and I suddenly morph into Dennis Miller.
Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but…
When my husband worked and I stayed home with each daughter for a year, he sometimes complained that coming home was not so much a reprieve and respite as it was showing up for his second job. It infuriated me, but I get it now. I feel the same way. Only I also have the night shift. I’m grateful he makes it so easy on me. I can always count on him to throw some of my laundry in with his, remember trash day, include wine on the grocery lists. I have a partner, and I don’t know how anyone goes it alone. I also don’t know how anyone can pretend to go it alone, misleading readers about how much help she’s really getting.
I know, I know. You can’t win with me. You don’t have enough stress to justify your anxiety disorder. Shut up about your goddamn depression. Why won’t you stop covering up your fucking OCD/ADHD/Manic Depression/NPD/BPD or whatever the hell makes you flutter around your perfect little home like a hummingbird, shitting crafts everywhere you land. Just TALK about your depression already!
There’s just no making this bitch happy. Well, there actually are three ways. Zoloft, Xanax, Ativan. The holy trinity, forever and ever. Chemical relief without end. Amen.
And Odie unloading the dishwasher. That’s my porn.
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