“My students often say smart things I wish I had thought of and work hard to write and revise their essays and stories. But my friends don’t see their jobs as museum curators, naturalists, political consultants, or human rights advocates as fundamentally separate from who they are. When I rush out the door on the two days I teach every week, it’s past noon and everyone else has already put in a half day at work. I’ll still be home more than any of my friends in our co-op building in DC. The shift feels seismic: the landscape of my life is about to be rearranged again. I’ll need time to be a teacher, time to be a writer, and time to be everything else. So why am I having the same nightmares about going back to work?Īfter three months of staying home with my own writing, it’s daunting to resume the schedule for a divided self. My students often say smart things I wish I had thought of and work hard to write and revise their essays and stories. The only positive comments I received on my semester-end evaluations were expressions of incredulity: “She really cared about literature!!!” “She believed reading was important.” Now I teach nonfiction workshops and literature courses in an MFA Program. My first full-time teaching job, some 30 years ago, was at a small Catholic college where the 18-year-olds in my general education classes copied each other’s answers on pop quizzes (why else would a whole row of students write that Jason sailed with the Argonauts in search of a golden calf?), carried on their own conversations, ate their lunch, slept, looked through their vacation photos, and even painted their fingernails while I talked about heroism and hubris. In my end-of-the-summer nightmares, I am a student failing a class, a grown woman unable to leave her childhood house.
Lost in a warehouse while their students wait for them elsewhere, looking in vain through their briefcase for their books and notes, or standing at the podium in the wrong clothes or no clothes at all, they are still the teachers they have become. My colleagues have anxiety dreams about going back to work, too, but their subconscious at least allows them to remain who they are. Every year around this time, sleep drags me back to a house that turns out to be my father’s, or a math class I’ve been skipping where a big test is scheduled for tomorrow, or a foreign language class where everyone is speaking it and I don’t even know what it is. When I wake up with the cats next to me, it’s 5 o’clock in the morning in another country, my father is long dead and my stepmother is out of my life, but summer is almost over, with school starting in a week. After all these years, it turns out, I’m still living in their house in Japan, a burden and an embarrassment they always said I would become to our family. I grab the cats and run upstairs for my car keys and phone, but at the top, there is another kitchen, and my father and stepmother are seated at the table.
Someone is out there tampering with the basket and trying to break into the house. Outside on the patio, a plastic laundry basket left on a picnic table keeps shifting its position: first, the long side faces us then the short side then the whole thing is upside down. In this version of the dream, I’m in a suburban house at dusk, sitting at the kitchen table with my two cats perched in the window.
0 kommentar(er)
