Ken’s on the phone with the air conditioning repair-man for the second time since Sunday. We are currently blowing the heat in the house, hoping to melt whatever clog is in the coil this time. Heat in Texas in May is less than ideal. The temperature sensor on Miles’ monitor is blaring red at me. My patience is worn thin. This isn’t going so well.

This is week one. The first week we’ve lived in a relative state of remodeling. And, just like I expected, nothing goes as planned and everything happens at once. Had we planned on the air conditioner breaking? No. That’s not part of this plan. Had we planned on Miles getting sick (since of course he woke up with a fever today after his four hour nap yesterday)? No, but we knew that this would get interesting with the ever unpredictable health and needs of kids.

Our container arrived last weekend and we moved everything out from our house and into the pod. We knocked out the indoor trellis, a relic of 50s design we didn’t understand. Ken worked on getting everything in place, all his tools ready, his shop cleaned, the dumpster delivered.

With Miles sick and the air conditioner not working, today is when the chaos really started. The house is still all open to us – we still have a functioning kitchen, a whole open room in which to roam. But when I got home from work today, I found myself sitting on the couch, Miles asleep on me, with a hutch two feet in front of me and a temporary support wall taking shape on the other side.

In the next week Ken is hoping to finish the temporary wall, suck the old insulation out of the attic and make sense of the horror of our air conditioning situation.

I hope to survive the last full week of school while my house sinks into further chaos.

New to this whole remodel story?

Read about our plan here and our preparation here.

I held it in until I couldn’t anymore. Until I sat in my classroom, facing my computer screen, hoping that the students wouldn’t notice that my eyes were heavy with tears, that they were willing themselves out and I was doing all I could to will them back in. I held them back, let the pools sit just ready to pour over, just seeping over the edges of eyelids and lashes. They stayed put. They never managed to fully escape.

At 4:30 this morning Miles started to cry in pain or discomfort or loneliness or whatever makes a baby cry out and insist on only sleeping on his mama. He needed me. And I let him sleep on me for almost two hours until I crawled back into bed only to fall asleep ten minutes before my alarm went off. I walked through my day almost zombie-like, except I had to be a zombie who solved problems, who had intelligent discourse about teaching philosophy, who interviewed new candidates for jobs, who tried to solve problems that had everyone abuzz, problems that seemed so important, so worth storming in to the office about. Until the phone rang.

He’s been asleep for almost four hours, the director told me. Should they wake him? she asked.

Yes wake him. He’s tired. He woke up at 4:30. He has a bad cold. He’s getting his molars. Thank you for calling. Thank you for caring that I’m his mom and believing I  know him best.

The teachers, my colleagues, were still buzzing about the other problem. The problem that I had stormed around about, that I had tried to “fix,” the problem that suddenly didn’t matter to me anymore, sort of. At least not right then.

Four hours? What was wrong? Was he sick? Was the medicine from the doctor yesterday doing strange things to him? Was he just tired? I was tired.

I let fifteen minutes pass before I called the daycare back. In those fifteen minutes I felt that horrifying sense of helplessness that sometimes accosts me as a working mom. The sense that I want to be the one to walk over to his crib, to gently kiss his cheek, to rub his head as I wake him from his deep sleep. The unfairness of that moment when I can picture his teacher seeing his confusion, wiping his tears, glimpsing his chubby belly as he gets a diaper change. The pain of not being there in that one moment for that one task.

I called the daycare back and he was fine, eating his lunch and sounding happy in the background. Sounding so close. Feeling so far away. He was fine but the tears came anyway, rose to the surface despite my knowing that there was nothing I could do, that there was no sense in worrying. But I hate that feeling. I hate wanting to help and not being able to, wanting to snuggle my baby but being stuck somewhere else.

If you’re a working mom,  you know. You know that phone calls from daycare are a blessing and a curse.

The pencils are sharpened and ready to go. 120 pencils, sharpened with love at my dining room table, ready to arm my students with confidence and knowledge as they sit for their AP exam tomorrow (a valid test I don’t have to get all worked up over). I can’t go with them, so I send them in with sharp points to mirror their sharp minds, new pens with which to pour out their new knowledge. I have to trust them and myself, trust that they’re ready, trust that I’ve done all I can.

Perhaps this is why teaching and parenting, for me, many times seem like complimentary pursuits. I keep my students under my wing only for so long. I teach them how to fly, let them test it out a few times for themselves, let them learn from their own failures, let them bask in the light of their successes. And tomorrow I have to trust them to succeed outside the boundaries of our comfortable nest.

Parenting is not a 180 day job, but the goals I have for my students are goals I have for my own children, the goals I have for myself as a teacher are the goals I have for myself as a parent. Nurture, teach, model, let go, hold on, let go, hold on, fail, learn, succeed. Fly off on your own because you know you can.

The drool started flowing this weekend – the no-joking around drool that soaks a shirt in a few minutes flat. At first I wondered if he had a sore throat, but then I remembered the growing bulges in the back of his mouth. The ones that have been there FOREVER! How long does it take to get molars? I’ve been using the huge teeth as an excuse for fussiness for over a month now and only today as he opened his mouth to cry about something did I see the first hint of white, the first signs of gums stretched so thin.

Molars make babies crazy (or at least my babies). These four teeth turn my sweet smiling toddlers into giant pools of mess, toddlers who can’t fall on a pillow of air without crying, toddlers who scream at the mere thought of chewing food, toddlers who need attention on top of attention with a side of attention.

After surviving a weekend of mood swings, of vacilating between complete toddler cuteness (learning to fake sneeze and drop things off his head – does it get cuter than that?) and the pick-me-up-I’m-mad-at-the-world phases I started to think that all of this teething induced drama and moodiness is just early training for surviving the onset of PMS. Here’s my dorky chart comparing the two:

I wish I could invent some sort of tooth suction device to pull those four suckers out from under those gums. I’m ready for them to make their grand entrance, for Miles to be back to sMiles. Come on, already one year molars, I’m so done with you.

Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you all get some extra snuggles or some extra quiet, some extra play time or some extra me-time. Me, I just wanted sleep and some time to shop unaccompanied by two young people. “Aren’t I supposed to want time with my child?” Another mother asked yesterday at dance, after expressing these same wishes for Mother’s Day. We comforted our guilt by deciding that when children are young, Mother’s Day is about time for us; when they are older, we suspect, it will be more about time all together.

This week’s Sunday reads focus on the idea of motherhood.

First, a Leonard Pitts column about the societal narrative of Princes and Princesses, motherhood and fulfillment. If you’ve never read Pitts, you should spend some time reading his other columns too. He is one of my favorite columnists and always manages to hit the nail right on the head.

Almost everything else I read this week had to do with the cover of Time magazine. I’m not going to write about the issues that cover stirred up (as it was clearly meant to), but there are two responses to the cover that I highly suggest reading. The first is by Lisa Belkin at the Huffington Post. She writes, “I am not Mom enough to take the bait. To accept TIME’s deliberate provocation and either get mad at this woman for what I think I know about her from this photo, or to feel inferior, or superior, or defensive, or guilty — or anything at all, if it means I am comparing myself to other mothers.” You should really read the rest.

Another favorite response to the Time cover came yesterday from Katie Granju. She is calling a stop to the mommywars. A stop to all the media-initiated judgment of others’ parenting styles. I’m with her. Are you?

The best reminder that we shouldn’t be at any sort of war with each other, though, comes from my favorite author and it isn’t something I read this week, but a long time ago, on a long car ride with my own mother, during a time I had no idea what the author was really saying. Now I fully understand the sentiment in Anna Quindlen’s “All My Babies Are Gone Now.” She writes, “What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations – what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay.” I can’t link to the rest of the essay, as it exists only in PDF form on the great Internet. You should read it though, just google “All My Babies Are Gone Now” and you’ll find it. It’s worth the effort. I promise.

Since that piece brings me to tears each time I read it, I thought I’d include a good laugh too. If you’ve never read Tina Fey’s “A Mother’s Prayer For Her Daughter,” you’re missing out. You really are. Fey asks in the poem, ” And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord,/ That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 a.m., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.” The rest is equally hilarious.

And finally, something to watch. My friend and photographer Christie Stockstill made this beautiful video of mothers and their children (Nora and Miles and I are in the middle. My favorite picture that still to this day represents so much about my family and the push and pull of two small children.) You can watch it by clicking here.

What are your favorite stories, posts, poems, on motherhood? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

32 quarters later…

The permit is taped to our front window. Our plans are approved.

And so now it begins.

Every summer I have had a project – Operation Nap In Crib (failed), Operation Potty Train (failed), Operation Learn To Parent Two Kids (success?) and now Operation Remodel. There is no choice but to have this one succeed.

Tonight we started packing for our move one room over. The house as it is now has two adjacent living rooms. Why? I don’t know. We are going to knock that wall down, open up the space. And while all of this is in progress we are going to live in one room (and the bedrooms – we aren’t touching those yet). I’m not sure I’m ready for this chaos. I’m having flashbacks to living with a newborn Nora in our old dining room which, at the time, functioned as living room, office and everything else while we finished that first remodel project. The room was small. It was cozy. We only had one small newborn.

Now we have two very mobile, very active children. I’ve just packed half of their toys away in boxes to be seen and used again when this is all said and done. Nora will be fine. As long as she can dress up and create a story for herself to enact, she won’t care about the noise and the cramped quarters and the missing toys (that she probably won’t even miss until she realizes later they were gone). Miles, on the other hand, is afraid of the vacuum. I vacuum and he cries. I vacuum and he stares at it and tenses out of fear and begs to be held but still cries in fear even in my arms. Drills and saws and air compressor noise will be an interesting test. If he cries the whole time I probably will too.

This weekend Ken will put up the temporary wall that will keep us safe from construction debris and dust and danger. He will move boxes of extra dishes and glasses and books and office items into a temporary storage container in our driveway. We will live on the other side of that wall for months perhaps. It will be an adventure. An adventure that gets us a house we love, a house that will feel more like us, more like home.

It all feels a bit crazy. A bit overwhelming. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” Ken said as we were packing up. And we have. We knew when we bought this house almost two years ago that this is what we would do. We envisioned the house in its lighter, more open, more modern, less carpeted, less painted paneling state.  And now it’s time to endure the chaos to make our vision a reality.

They nearly revolted today – the 25 ninth graders sitting in my room for their third day in a row of testing this week. They didn’t want to hear the same robotic directions read to them anymore. They didn’t want to be stuck in one room for four hours. They didn’t want to take a test.

And I can’t blame them. By day three this week (not to mention the four days two weeks ago, the two days three weeks before that, the two days two weeks before that. Oh – and those are the state mandated days. I can’t count the days of district mandated benchmarks and assessments meant to help students burnout prepare for these tests.)

What does this have to do with parenting? Why should you care about this rant if you normally read this blog for cute stories about my cute kids? Well, one day your children too will sit in a classroom (if they are not already) and your children will be subject to the educational policies of the state and the nation. And testing is going to be the death of learning.

My first years of teaching, right at the start of the No Child Left Behind policies, were spent in a wealthy town that boasted the highest test scores in the state. Each year I was proud to find that my students scored so high – but I was also fully aware that their scores had almost nothing to do with me. We saw testing as a mild inconvenience, a chore we had to complete. But we taught with no fear of the test, no big brother watching over our back to make sure that we kept our number one ranking.

If I had never left that idyllic setting I would have no idea what the reality of testing looks like in a more typical American classroom. I would not see the students stare off for hours out of utter boredom, furrow their brows in frustration, pick their split ends or nail polish because even that is more interesting than taking a test. I wouldn’t see parts of the school culture die out because of the pressures of testing – awards ceremonies rushed, pep rallies rescheduled, announcements not made all in the name of the test. If I wasn’t standing in a classroom each day, a classroom that mirrors the majority of our country in terms of economic standing and race, I would have no idea the horrors that testing creates. I wouldn’t hear a student ask, at the end of a long day, “What’s the point of all this, Miss?”

Being a parent has made me a better teacher. Even though I have less time to devote to my students, I have higher standards for myself, and, arguably, my students. I think about what I want for Nora and Miles. And I remember always that my students all have moms who, like me, want what is best for them.

Testing is not what is best. I know that. I understand that we need to unify standards, expect excellence across the board. I understand that teachers need to be held accountable for doing their jobs well and that students need to be held accountable for their learning. I embrace the idea of raising the bar in education, the notion that no child should be left behind. I don’t think any teacher or parent would argue with any of those premises. But there has to be a better way.

After suffering 12 hours of testing this week, after seeing the way that testing has affected the moods and attitudes and motivation of teachers and students alike, I know that testing reaps more misery than rewards.

I’m a parent and a teacher. I get to see both sides of the educational choices we make. This isn’t a good choice. And more parents need to know that so that they can raise their voices and be heard. I don’t want my children to think that learning is something we do for tests. I don’t want my children to feel overrun by assessments. I don’t want my children to spend hours caged in a classroom taking a test that won’t bring them any great rewards in life later on. I  don’t want them wondering why they are subjected to such torture.  I do want my children to feel the energy of a classroom in action. I do want my children to feel intense curiosity. I do want my children to learn and explore and read and write and compute and experiment and discuss and discover.

Isn’t that what you want too?

Her feelings were hurt today. In the back seat of the car on our way home she tried to hold back her tears as she told me about the boy in her class making fun of her princess ring she had worn today – the ring that she loves so much she hasn’t really parted ways with it for a few days now (it even sleeps next to her on the floor). He had called her ring silly. It was nothing, really, nothing to get upset about. But it upset her. His words coupled with the long absence of her best friend pushed the tears to the surface.

Staring at her in the rearview mirror, I listened to myself give the first of many speeches about loving herself as she is, no matter what. “Do you like the ring, Nora?” I asked.

“Yes,” she muttered.

“Then that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. If you love it that’s all that counts.”

Most of the time she has confidence to fill buckets, gallons and gallons of confidence. I’m not used to an insecure Nora – a Nora who listens to a boy who calls her ring silly. I’m used to a Nora who’s real self is a princess, a girl in fancy look-at-me clothes, a girl who narrates her life as if she is the star of a show, a girl who declares that we cannot start dinner until she assumes her role, dresses the part and sits on her throne.

In my rearview mirror today, I saw years flash before my eyes. She was no longer in a carseat, but in the driver seat. She was no longer worrying about a boy at preschool and what he said about her ring, but about a boy in high school who said something about her body. She, of course, wasn’t thinking about the implications of hurt feelings, the inevitable slide in her pre-k confidence. She didn’t know that, comforting her about her hurt feelings, I felt like I was at dress-rehearsal for the big show that will be raising a teenage girl. A confident girl. An independent girl. A girl who doesn’t care if her friends like her ring.

I think, really, that this hope for her to become a confident and independent-minded teenager is what makes me so embrace her confident and independent four-year-old self. It is why I love taking her out in her princess costumes, why I love her over-the-top outfits that she throws together each evening. Why I love that when all of her friends are wearing their tye-died shirts that they made at school, she insists on wearing hers with a tutu and rainbow leggings.

Her hurt feelings feel like a stab in my side. I’m not ready for her to leave the world of childhood innocence, for her to feel any need to conform. I’m not ready for her to realize that people can be cruel and that sometimes other people try to define you in ways you’re not ready to to define yourself. She’s so carefree, so innocent.

She doesn’t yet know that nothing gold can stay.

I saw the bug lighting its tiny light across the lawn as I bent down to pick up one of the many toys strewn across the yard. And then there was another light, and another light and another until our back yard was suddenly the back yard of my childhood, filled with magical bugs that throw their magical lights into the evenings of imagination and possibility. I hadn’t ever seen a lightning bug in Texas before.

I ran inside to get Nora, who was reading her bedtime stories with Ken. She followed me outside and together we followed the bugs around until she caught one in the cup of her hands. I caught one too and we examined the red striped wing and tiny bulb that magically illuminates. We let the bugs crawl on us until they flew away.

And Nora ran back inside to finish her stories.

The fireflies continued to light up the back yard and I caught another one, watched it crawl, returned to the nights of my own innocence. I remembered catching them in jars, chasing them around, staring at the bug and its light and trying to comprehend its magic. Nora thought the firefly was interesting, but she wasn’t amazed by it in the way I remember being as a child.

The roly poly. That is Nora’s childhood bug. From the moment she spotted them in masses crawling on the rocks of our old front walk to just today when she picked one up, named it and created a story for it and its family. She loves roly polies (also known as pill bugs and doodle bugs). Holding the rolled up bug in her hand, watching its legs squirm, watching it fold and unfold, she still exudes excitement as if she’s never seen the bug before, never witnessed its feat of rolling into itself.

She picks them up carefully and holds her childhood in her hand.