If It's a Paper Moon, I'm Going to Strangle Myself

It's scary story time at The Crooked Clothesline. Curl up with your laptop and a bowl of popcorn to enjoy this frightening work of fiction. I do hope you're not afraid of the dark. Oh, no, not THAT kind of dark. I'm referring to the dark landscape of the human mind...

I’m writing this using the voice-to-text feature on a borrowed Mac. They don’t let you have a pencil in a place like this. Apparently, they think you might try to jab yourself to death with it. Or maybe they’re worried you’ll go for one of them. Poke a pin-sized hole in an nurse’s jugular or something.  Well, that’s fine with me. I’m done with the paper-pencil method of writing. But to be honest, it’s not the pencil that scares me. No, the thing that sends a tremor through my heart is the paper.

I used to love paper. It was fresh, crisp and inviting. Beautiful. Seriously, I would stand in the stationary section of a store and admire all the paper products. Mouthwatering reams of the stuff. Packages of college ruled loose leaf with empty lines in neat, straight rows, like a freshly furrowed garden waiting to be planted with words. Sketch pads with wide empty spaces of white sky longing for someone to coax a world into existence at the end of charcoal pencil. Notebooks were like treasure boxes eager to be filled with one of my most valuable possessions...my imagination.

But now the very sight of it...a neat stack spring-clipped together, a pad of construction paper, composition notebooks...the very sight of it leaves me short of breath, like I'm standing shoulder-deep in the Pacific and the entire ocean is slowly pressing the air out of my lungs.

I know now that it really started twenty years ago, when I thought I should make a sensible career choice, although, understandably, my coworkers think it started last fall.  It was the first day of the new school year.  All of us teachers were gathering in the library, filling plastic plates with fresh fruit and bagels provided by the PTO and settling in for a day-long meeting. Our principal was opening the meeting with a warm welcome. She soon instructed us to open our calendars. I flipped mine open, a little sad that all those clean, white spaces had to be marred with numbers - bossy, rigid dates and times. We all proceeded to cram pack those calendars full of deadlines and due dates and demands, mandatory events, and life-sucking expectations.

It seemed to me that this was how the school year always started. It was like the principal held up the starting pistol and discharged it with a startling bang. Then everyone was off! Running and running and we couldn’t stop for breath. But I had to. And I did often.

For example, one Wednesday night, early in the first quarter, I arrived home later than usual after returning a few parent phone calls. I came in the front door, walked past a partially covered sketch pad on my easel in the corner and set a small stack of math tests on the kitchen table, intending to grade them before the evening was over. By the time I had finished supper dishes and written a social studies quiz for the next day, it was eight o’clock. I leaned against the kitchen counter, looking back and forth between the stack of tests and the sketch pad in the corner. It didn’t seem healthy to spend every waking moment on my job. I slid a chair over to the easel.

The next day, I came home with the math tests and the social studies quizzes but there was no time to grade them. I had to run back to school because it was my turn to represent fourth grade at the PTO meeting. Mandatory. By Friday, the tiny stack had grown to include reading, spelling and grammar tests as well as various homework assignments.  I stuffed the messy pile into a canvas book bag to keep it contained on the way home. It was going to be a busy weekend of grading.  I was on my way out the door with the heavy bag cramping my shoulder when Brenda, one of my teammates, hollered at me.

“See you tomorrow morning!”

“What?  What are you talking about?”

“District training all day. From 8am to 3, remember?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You know," she explained,"about the new standards.  Laura, didn’t you write it in your calendar?”

I dropped the twenty pound bag on the floor and dug through it for my calendar.

“Oh.  I guess I didn’t.  Looks like I doodled a cute mermaid, instead.”

                                                               

After attending class all day Saturday, I managed to grade only a couple of assignments on Sunday, in between church, the grocery store and working on next week’s lesson plans. So night after night the following week, I could only glance longingly at the half-finished drawing in the corner as I lugged into my kitchen a plastic crate on wheels, overloaded with a teetering pile of homework and tests. Throughout the semester, it continued - festivals, committee meetings, parent-teacher conferences, staff training, all at dizzying speed.

“Ms. Jameson,” a child's voice asked, “are you okay?”

I turned from the whiteboard, dry erase marker in hand, to stare blankly at the girl seated in the front row.

“What do you mean, Kylie?”

“You stopped explaining how to find an equivalent fraction about five minutes ago and started doing...well, that.”

I turned back to the board and was shocked to see a detailed rendering of a life-size horse. It was pretty good. Still, I started to wonder what kind of counseling services my insurance might cover. I never got around to checking into that, though, because by the week before Christmas break, I was carting around three large packing boxes in the backseat of my car, each one hiding a shameful hoard of ungraded work. I was starting to panic because report cards were due again. What was really disconcerting, though, was the mysterious email I received from the producers of a TLC program that featured crafts made from found objects.  

Dear Ms. Jameson,

We thank you for your email inquiry outlining your proposal to host a weekly show demonstrating how to create wreaths, decoupage end tables and construct museum worthy mobiles all from ungraded school work. Unfortunately, this type of programming would not appeal to our current demographic.

Best wishes,

Finders Reapers

A fluttering, dark cloud of moths rose in my stomach. I had no memory of sending any such email. I began rifling through my purse for my insurance card, hoping to make an immediate appointment with a psychologist, when I was called to the office. Tommy Sheffield's parents had come to see the principal because they were irate with me. Based on the few assignments I had managed to grade, Tommy had F's in two subjects. The kid deserved both but I didn't have the cold, hard evidence to back those grades up. It was somewhere in the paper burial mound that was suffocating my soul, that growing pile of ungraded assignments that I was now dragging around behind my car in a rented U-Haul trailer.

“Ms. Jameson,” the principal said, “it is imperative that you provide the students and their parents with timely feedback.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, looking sheepishly across the table at my principal and Tommy’s glowering parents, “but I just...I just can’t do it.”

“Ms. Jameson, of course, you can do it.  Clearly, you just need to manage your time better.”

“No. I can’t do it.  I can’t do this.  It’s too much.  It’s all too much and I...I suspect I might be having a nervous breakdown.”  I stood up from my chair, trying to remain my polite self. “If I am having a nervous breakdown, I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as possible but for now, you can all blow it out your whazoos.  Oh! Yep! I'm so sorry about that! This is definitely a nervous breakdown!”

Late that night, the fire department received several 911 calls concerning a large bonfire on the school playground. I was found dancing naked around the blazing mountain of school papers. I actually don't remember the incident so when reporters questioned me in the hospital, I didn't have anything of interest to say. They thought they could jog my memory by showing me the photo of myself being arrested but when they handed me the newspaper, I tried to escape by way of the indoor plumbing and had to be sedated.

Now I spend my time making crooked clay ashtrays and yarn dolls. But paper...I signed my consent to be committed on an Etch-a-Sketch.

The Red Crayon

Is this bad blogging form?  The following post was recycled.  I originally wrote it this past fall for a magazine contest.  When I sent it off, I knew it was not a contender but I was very tickled to have finished something I started (NOT my forte.) I've changed it up slightly to fit my little corner of the Interwebs.

The clouds are moving in. It's about to get personal and very dark here at The Crooked Clothesline.  If you like your blogs the way you like your laundry...mountain-fresh and stain-free...well, then, you might want to move along for now.  And if you're my principal, it would be best for you and me both if you just turned away from the ugly truth, shielded your eyes from this marred and sweat-stained load of stinky laundry.


You see, the persistent, melty, red crayon in the dryer of my life is this: I am a loser. Oh, I don’t mean a “Nobody likes me, might as well eat some worms” loser. I am a “Stand back! Do NOT hand that to me if you ever want to see it again!” loser. I lose every piece of paper I touch. Whether that paper has been used to print a grocery list, federal currency or my teaching contract, I will lose it. I’ve lost countless phone bills, my proof of car insurance and my Social Security card. When I was a fifth-grader and the whole fifth grade was climbing onto a bus for the big field trip to the airport, I had to stay behind at school because I had lost my permission slip. (And if Mr. Waite is still alive, you are welcome to look him up and verify this sad fact.)

Losing paperwork at home is inconvenient and frustrating.  At school, as a teacher responsible for piles and piles of papers, including legal documents, this is a horrific disaster. What I seem to lose over and over again, no matter how many different organizational systems I try, is student work. Yes, I am that teacher. (I am assuming my principal took my kindly advice and has moved on to enjoy other more positive, uplifting pockets of the Internet.) Sometimes I lose one student’s late writing assignment. Sometimes it’s an entire stack of reading tests. It happens on a regular basis and, obviously, it’s entirely unacceptable. I have neither the time nor sufficient behavioral health coverage to fully explain how this defect of mine affects my self-esteem and confidence as an educator. But it’s awful.

It’s like cracking your shin in the same spot on the coffee table several nights in a row without time for the goose egg to go down between injuries. It’s more and more painful every time. Eventually, your shin will turn to the consistency of applesauce and you won’t be able to walk anymore. Every time I lose another paper or stack of papers, I’m more and more ashamed of myself. I feel worn down a little more. It’s a regular reminder that I’m not really cut out for this most noble of professions and I don’t belong in the classroom.

Thanks to my self-deprecating sense of humor, I had always been able to laugh at myself about my tendency to misplace things. I’d always made jokes about it with co-workers. However, after being so open about my embarrassing flaw for so long, I’m starting to feel like the high school sleaze who the whole school knows is making out with a different guy in the backseat every weekend - I haven’t any pride.

Last year, I had to choose between preserving the last milligram of pride I had left as a semi-competent teacher or maintaining my integrity as a person. You see, some genius decided to put me on a committee. And give me responsibilities. I think it was my principal. (You don't think she's reading this, do you?  I mean, I did tell her...ya' know...not to.) The committee was collecting data to help teachers analyze the effectiveness of our math instruction. Each teacher would administer a designated math test and pass the scores on to the committee member representing her grade level. Then, we highly-organized and responsible grade-level reps would reassemble to share this data amongst ourselves. However, immediately after giving the assessment to my own class, I lost my entire stack of graded tests before I managed to record the scores.

It wasn’t a huge deal at first because I had some time before the committee would meet again. I basically ransacked the joint, flipping madly through every sheet of paper in my classroom until I had pretty much licked my index finger print clean off. As the next committee meeting grew near, I began to panic. I knew I hadn’t thrown them away - I wasn’t an idiot, regardless of the nasty rumor going around in my head. I certainly hadn’t incinerated them or flushed them down the toilet. They were in that classroom somewhere. I knew without a doubt I would find them someday. Unfortunately, I knew from past experience it was highly possible that “Someday” would be too late. Like when I found my unsigned airport permission slip in my desk the last week of fifth grade. So I had to make a decision.

I couldn’t bear to tell my principal that I had once again lost something. I couldn’t take another moment of feeling incompetent - another crack from the coffee table on my bruised and mushy self-esteem. I was now teetering precariously on the line between being a loser of papers and being a Total Loser. In a dark moment, it occurred to me that I could just make up those missing scores. I was familiar with my students’ abilities. This information wasn’t going into the grade book. I could just plug fake grades into the computer. No one would know and no one would care.

But, of course, God would know. Jesus told his followers, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy with worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?”1

Pride certainly falls under the category of worldly wealth. Pride, so unimportant in the overall scheme, was one of the few things I could afford to lose. So I made up my mind to go to the next committee meeting prepared to share my teammates’ scores and to admit that I had temporarily misplaced my own set of tests. I would hand over my last little scrap of pride, the size of an elbow patch, and brave any possible reprimands from my principal and/or looks of unspoken disdain from my co-workers. It was very difficult to walk into that meeting knowing that I was going to be exposed as foolish and incompetent yet again but I knew that I would tell the whole truth.

However, the subject never came up. There was no time for that particular part of our overall task. This happened two times. Twice, I walked into the committee meeting knowing that I would be revealing my failure and sacrificing the remnant of my pride. Twice, the principal pushed the completion of that one assignment to the back burner for a while longer.

Finally, as the end of the quarter neared, an email was sent out to the committee members declaring a final due date for the information. Apparently, God does care about the little things because suddenly, my set of tests showed up in the classroom, like my own little ram in the thicket. Trying to follow Jesus, I had handed my pride over to God and He kept it intact. I ended up committing an after-school violation of church and state there on the spot, by thanking God right out loud for his grace.

In the end, I entered my scores and was able to present them as part of the fourth grade data. Subsequently, my principal was not forced to fire me. 

Oh, look!  The clouds are clearing. The sun has returned above The Crooked Clothesline.  

I think, though, it's quite possible the infuriating red crayon, marking up all of my laundry with a scarlet D for disorganized, is going to be with me all of my life. Maybe I should be thankful for this defect because it certainly keeps me turning to God again and again. Maybe without these unattractive stains, I would not be as sharply aware of my need for God.  As much as I hate being disorganized, I would hate even more to miss out on experiencing the wonderful, crazy ways He shows His love in the midst of my chaos....

Psalm 124 in action

1 New International Version (©2011)