The more we cleaned, the more we found and the angrier we became. I believe we ended up getting rid of a lot of things that perhaps, now, I'd want but it is too late for that. As we emptied out my mother's life and pulled apart her existence, we found many things that were expected and many that were not. The numerous school projects and photos were lovely to find. However, the drawer of every pen or pencil we've ever owned was extreme. We found a bag of bags and a suitcase with another suitcase inside with another bag inside of that and smaller bags inside that with yet smaller bags inside them.
I found an envelop of teeth from my mother's dog that she had when my parents were first married. We found a box of dog hair in a cabinet. But the thing that was most shocking, and the thing we hope was accidental and not saved on purpose, was a piece of folded tape with two ticks. Ticks in tape. It was in a dish on her dresser. I'm sure they were long dead and should have been thrown in the garbage but for some reason, they ended up in a dish on her dresser with various other jewelry, saved for posterity.
This was the climactic find, the thing that threw us over the edge and propelled us into a whirlwind of desire to just get rid of it and be done with it. Every time we would open a drawer or cabinet and find more stuff, we'd ask each other "Do you want this?" and our answer would be "ticks in tape" and we would get rid of it. We filled trash bag after trash bag for goodwill and left load after load at the Salvation Army. We left massive amounts of things at the end of our driveway and posted it for free on Craig's List. We were so desperate to be rid of the stuff and to stop cleaning that we gave away a lot that we probably could have sold.
My mother had collected many items, useless to us but precious to her, and packed them all very neatly into every nook and cranny of the house. She was a lover of everything southwest and Indian and had amassed a collection of figurines, photos, paintings and pottery that covered every surface of the house. She was a lover of knickknacks and mementos that were strewn about the walls and end tables and display cabinets.
My mother, having moved around many houses in Albany as a child, loved the idea of home. She was raised in a household that struggled to make ends meet and she cherished her beautiful things. Her knickknacks were all very lovely but not our style so most of them were given away or sold. She had a house filled to the brim with things. She loved to go shopping and bring more stuff home to display. In retrospect, she may have been a hoarder of some kind, but the point is that she had everything that she could have possibly purchased for her home and yet she was not happy. In the end, I believe she was extremely depressed, having lost my father under terrible circumstances, and even her things could not heal her heart.
The entire ordeal of losing my father and then losing my mother two years later and deconstructing their lives was the most profoundly life-changing and life-altering experience I know I will ever have. I certainly matured and grew up even more because I no longer had them to rely on, but I also gained a new perspective on life and how I wish to participate.
It no longer made sense to give a card on birthdays or Christmas because ultimately- what do you do with it? It becomes someone's ticks in tape. I began thinking: if I were to die tomorrow, what am I leaving behind for my family to clean up? How angry will they be going through my drawers of knickknacks and old cards and things that really only matter to me. I had boxes shoved in my closets of all my childhood toys and books and cards given to me. I had Valentine's cards from boys I had crushes on in second grade. I had saved every little thing, just like my mother, because, like my mother, my things meant something to me. They were memories. They represented my life. I started thinking: is this how I want my life to be represented? Leaving behind boxes of crap for my family to deal with? Do these things truly need to be saved? My old statue of a train is someone else's ticks in tape; it only means something to me.
After we had finished cleaning out Mom's things, I began going through my own. I realized I wanted the memory of things but didn't necessarily need the things. Craig's List became my friend. I wanted to simplify my life. I wanted to get rid of things that were ticks in tape. So I began to go through one drawer at a time with a digital camera by my side. As I found things that I deemed ticks in tape, I'd take a picture and then put in the appropriate pile: trash, give away, sell or recycle.
The box of Barbies I had been saving out of sentimental reasons, and also under the guise that I would have children one day, was given away. The bag of dinosaur toys and large box of the dinosaur books I had amassed as a child were given to a young autistic girl who was obsessed with Dinosaurs. I took photos of everything as I gave it away so I would have the memories. We had done the same with my mother's things. We took photos of things as we gave them away and my mother's life of memories is now in a folder on my computer. But that is not representative of her life's work; we are. My sister, my niece and myself and all the other lives she touched are the true measure of my mother's life.
I must thank my mother for the final lesson she taught us: things do not make you happy, they do not solve your problems because, in the end, your things are ticks in tape. The materialism and near greed that had plagued every holiday was less important. Buying someone something is not what shows them that you love them. You do not need to give someone an expensive present to prove your love or to prove their importance to you. Your actions are what matter. How you treat people is what matters. The lives you touch and the relationships you have are what will define you when you leave this world.
This is something that not only changed my perception of the world but it also changed how I felt when I went back to work after having taken two weeks off to begin grieving, cleaning and taking care of the legal business of death. I returned to work and everything was a blur in my anger, shock and grief. One day, a student approached me after school and said "you didn't give me a point on my test that I should have" and I wanted to say: who the hell cares? It doesn't matter. This is what you're worried about? Of all the problems in the world to have, this is what you complain about? I watched my parents die. I chose to let them die. Who cares about a point on a test?
Everything was trivial and began to frustrate me. Many students in my district are privileged and when Christmas came around, I was disgusted when I asked them to write about their wish lists. I was sickened by the materialism and entitlement I observed. All I could focus on was the scads of spoiled children who received whatever they wanted whenever they wanted and demanded the same from their teachers. I was horrified and ready to get out of the high school. I was repulsed by a student who refused to get up and get a pencil and was at the end of my patience. I was tired of listening to spoiled brats whine about how they needed extra credit or couldn't do their homework because they had a game. I was sick of how they treated each other and expected me to kowtow to their wishes.
This led me to the Doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at SUNY Albany. I wanted a way out of the high school and thought that teaching teachers in a university would be my salvation. However after three courses of doing busy work and jumping through hoops that were not a productive use of my time, I decided I didn't want to waste my money on a program for which I had no passion. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted my life to count for something. I wanted to leave behind something other than boxes of things.
I decided that I wanted to return to my roots and write something that mattered. I mentioned to a colleague that I was thinking of looking into a creative writing course at a local community college. She said "you need to do the CDWP" and that conversation led to the second most profound experience of my life. She said there was a summer program that she did wherein she wrote and thought about teaching and writing with other teachers.
I got home and went to their website to find that there were only two days left to submit an application for their Summer Institute. I hastily filled it out and got the needed recommendations and sample writing submitted. I was accepted into the program and was excited to write with other teachers. I had no idea that I was embarking upon the most meaningful professional development I would ever do. During the Summer Institute of 2011, I explored myself and education and I shifted. Things clicked into place that had never made sense. I spent thirty days of my summer with a group of equally committed educators and writers and I found myself.
I found the peace that I had lacked since my parents passed. I found a new professional home and left with a renewed commitment to education. It's extremely hard to articulate what exactly happened because our daily experience in the Summer Institute was comprised of talking and writing and sharing lessons, but something incredible changed my life and opened my eyes. I invigorated my passion for teaching and learning, deepened my understanding of the transformative power of writing and fused both of these things with my soul.
I gained a profound sense of my professional self and I left empowered. I felt justified in making, what a good friend and colleague, Chris, refers to as, courageous deletions. I was ready to take chances and now had the words with which to articulate the reasons why and the confidence to do it. I transformed and returned to school the following September renewed with an energy and spirit I had never had.
It was that through my exploration with the CDWP that summer that I finally discovered the way to incorporate a speech I had heard on TED by Chimamanda Adiche called "The Danger of the Single Story" that can be found on YouTube. It was the courage and power I gained that allowed me to take out grammar and vocabulary drills and replace it with cultural literacy. For a year, I happily explored all the ideas that I gained during the Summer Institute. My students began journaling and we were writing more and more in class. The traditional vocab quizzes and tests were replaced with more thoughtful assessments. It was a wonderful year and all the frustration toward my students had magically disappeared. I was able to put their materialism into perspective and start conversations with them about it.
In the summer of 2012, I was invited to attend a meeting of the CDWP. Little did I know that the purpose of that meeting was to distribute some of the leadership duties to members. I picked one thing that was interesting to me and ended up on a committee with two other people. Sean, Nicole and I were asked to plan two leadership workshops the following school year. My attendance at this meeting was the third most life-altering experience of my life because it introduced me to another way of thinking of myself: as a leader. We met and discussed what professional development teachers might need as we planned and then lead two workshop days to inspire teachers and call them to leadership.
It was in getting involved with the leadership of CDWP that I was invited to another meeting wherein we spoke about how teachers need to be producers of knowledge and not simply consumers of it. That idea sparked one member, Sean, who was working on his doctorate, to invite a group of teachers to biweekly meetings. For his dissertation, he wanted to study and observe a group of teacher writers, writing about their inquiry into pedagogy. Thus the Professional Writing Cohort (or PWC) was established. Sean became a facilitator and observer of a group of us, committed to leading inquiry into our practices and writing. My involvement with the PWC enhances my life in profound ways every day.
At a recent meeting, we were given a writing prompt that asked us to think about what PWC has meant to us over the past year. The first line I wrote is: PWC is oxygen. Weeks when I know we’re meeting, it’s like I breathe easier.
Through my involvement in both CDWP and PWC, I have truly become a reflective practitioner. I meet with my fellow PWC teachers every other Friday for three or four hours with the goal of producing knowledge. We all have chosen strands of inquiry, things we are curious about improving or learning about our students and the work we do with them. We question each other and challenge our thinking as we write. We share writing about our inquiry that leads to further discussion. I am a much stronger teacher because of my work with the PWC. I am a better leader because of CDWP and the PWC. It is due to their encouragement that I even started this blog or believed that I had something worthwhile to share.
While I miss my parents every day, I'm grateful for the lessons they taught me. I'm thankful that they gave me a home full of love where we read books at night and shared holidays and experiences. I'm grateful for my mother's last lesson to me and I will always wonder about why she saved those ticks in tape. Had she simply forgotten to throw them out or was there some sentimental reason they were kept? I will never know.
However the process of loss and grief is what inevitably led me to the Capital District Writing Project and to the Professional Writing Cohort. The CDWP saved my career and the PWC rejuvenates me every time we meet. Both groups have played a huge role in my healing as I have only just started being able to write about my mother, nearly three years after her passing. Because of my inquiry and involvement in writing and thinking, I have rediscovered my words.
It is my profound hope that this holiday season, and every day, you tell the people you love that you love them. I hope that you validate their place and importance in your life, not by purchasing them a diamond or standing in line for a Pandora bracelet charm, but by giving them a hug or by asking them how they are and genuinely listening. The idea that life is short is a cliché but it is true. You never know when the people in your life will leave, either permanently or temporarily, and you don't want to miss your chance to tell them how they matter.
So to everyone reading this, I would like to say thank you. You matter to me. Your attention to my words matters to me. Your presence in the lives of the people you touch matters.
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