Tuesday Slice: Big decision, new beginning

Life in quarantine was moving along.  End-of-school-year plans were being made, speculations about next year discussed lightly but without much purpose with so much unknown.  

On April 30th, my plans were turned upside down.  My neighborhood school librarian announced her retirement, a year or three earlier than I expected.  The school where I picked up and dropped off my children for eleven years, taught and interned for another three years while I worked on my library degree, was in need of a librarian for next year.

I was in shock for the next three days.  I weighed the pros and cons of applying with the library services director, trusted friends, colleagues in other Title I schools.  Other than the hectic pace of serving 1250 students at my upper-SES campus, I love my current job.  My administrators, staff, and assistant are amazingly supportive of my library program, as are the parents and students.  I am completely happy where I am.

And so I wrestled with this for two solid weeks, even as I applied for the position and went through a rigorous interview process.  Even as I was offered the job, and said yes.  Even as I announced, through my tears, my acceptance to my principal and our leadership team.

There are things I'm giving up by taking this job.  I'll miss daily visits (if we ever get those back) with my wonderful coworkers and students I've grown to know over the last seven years, these people who have taught me how to be a librarian.  I'll miss my wonderful assistant, who does her job so well that I can't claim to be her manager.  On a practical note, I'm giving up a spacious library that's only twelve years old, with windows on either side to view the mountain laurels and let in the sunshine, with an adult-sized bathroom tucked into the corner.  My neighborhood school was built in 1977; the library is small, completely enclosed by hallways in the center of the building, with no windows or natural light--and the bathroom is around the corner.

But...I will be gaining a fresh start, a chance to change my perspective, to focus anew on my "why" for being a librarian.  To pay back a little of what this school did for me and my children in their formative years.  To take what I've learned at an upper-SES school and figure out how to make it happen at a Title I campus.  To encourage another learning community to use and love the library as much as I do.  The three-minute commute and smaller campus--550 students--are pluses, too.

 

I've already received a very warm welcome from my "new" campus.  May I serve them well.  

Tuesday Slice: The eyes have had it

Dual laptop screens light up at oh-seven-thirty-a-m

Emails to read and respond

Presentations to record and tweak

Numbers to check, accounts to balance

Virtual meetings of ten, twenty, one hundred

The faces get tinier as the numbers grow

Straining to see who's talking

This one frozen, that one glitchy

I take breaks every hour, away from screens

A load of laundry here, a walk around the block there

A three minute solo dance party in the living room

A short trip to the bathroom to reapply lipstick

The timeouts help.....but by oh-four-thirty-p-m or so

The eyes have had it

And not even a book can hold their gaze long.

*******************************

As a school librarian, I (like most teachers, I imagine) am not used to staring at laptop screens all day.  My eyes are usually focused on students filling a learning space or up close asking for a book, focused on a teacher's face a foot away or the pages of a picture book at arm's length.  I even purchased blue screen reading glasses; they help a little, but can't seem to erase the exhaustion of "close reading" all day long.  Summer break will be a break for my eyes!

Tuesday Slice: Juxtaposition

Like planets aligning, celebrations will be juxtaposed this coming weekend.  My youngest, my second-born will turn twenty-two on Saturday.  Sunday we celebrate Mother's Day.

This has only happened three times before:  the weekend of his birth, 2009, 2015.  The next time it will happen will be in 2026.

I remember the coincidence in 1998 with a smile because of chocolate-covered strawberries.  I had been gestationally diabetic during pregnancy, and rule-follower that I am, had very little chocolate during my last trimester--we're talking three M&Ms each Wednesday, just to cure the craving.  My postpartum bloodwork announcing my normal bloodsugar coincided with the delivery of a dozen chocolate-covered strawberries from a local candy manufacturer, gifted to every woman in the hospital giving birth that weekend, in honor of Mother's Day.  I ate eight of them before leaving the hospital on Tuesday.

There are celebrations I didn't want to combine.  My firstborn's due date fell just four days before our December wedding anniversary, and I hoped they didn't match--how romantic is throwing a child's birthday party?  Fortunately, she complied....unfortunately, a bit too well, arriving on Labor Day instead. Yes, we all recognized the irony at the time.  She has had a Labor Day birthday three times since, and will have another next year.

But how can I deny the connection between my children's births and Mother's Day?  After all, I wouldn't be a mother if it weren't for the gifts of their arrivals.  Because of my son's timing, we get to co-celebrate every so often.  It happened the year after he was born and twice more since; it will happen again next year. I really don't mind.  His birthday, as well as his sister's,  always make me pause and remember what an amazing experience becoming a mother has been, and will continue to be.

Happy Mother's Day to all who celebrate this Sunday!

Tuesday Slice: Mother's books

As far back as I can remember
there was always something to read

My father had his Popular Mechanics
the odd Edgar Cayce, a manual or two

But my mother...she had books upon books

Book-of-the-Month Club books
Harlequin romances--one in every room of the house
library books, New York Best Seller paperbacks

My mother could get so lost in a book
"Mom......MOM!"
you'd have to call her name twice

Of course, she bought us books
Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys
comic books and library cards
"Circle what you want from the Scholastic order
 I'll write you a check"

This leads me to wonder
if my own book hoarding
my career in the library
is really just a yearning
for Mom.

******************
Here's an early wish for a Happy Mother's Day to all moms who pass on a love of reading to their children, not just by purchasing books, but by being readers themselves.

Tuesday Slice: One sided conversations

It finally hit me last Wednesday.  The blah-ness set in.  

I had staved it off with work ethic.  I got up early, showered and dressed in cute shirts and colorful jeans. My school laptop was turned on promptly at 730a, sometimes earlier, at my designated work space in the study.  In the last four weeks (has it only been four?), I assisted with developing a help site for teachers, recorded over half a dozen read-alouds, tweeted out online author events, created library lessons for six grade levels, supported my instructional tech teacher's virtual broadcast project and attended over twenty virtual meetings.  I've watched webinars on information literacy, database accessibility, middle grade book releases with author panels.

I have enough work to keep me busy. I am blessed to have a paycheck.   

But reading aloud to a screen, without the reactions of and interaction with listeners, began to fall flat.  How can I tell if they're getting the joke, picking up the pattern, following along?  Book talking without kids present can feel like prescribing medicine without knowing the symptoms.  It's easy to say "Keep reading, students!"--but do they have access to the books that fit them, that fill their needs?  

I miss collaborating with my teachers at the circulation desk, too.  They are busy figuring out how to personalize the district-provided lessons for their classes, some navigating virtual classrooms and learning platforms for the first time.  A few pop in to my weekly "office hour" to listen to tips on connecting ebooks to Google Classroom, differentiating with database tools.  But most are up to their ears in emails from parents, virtual team meetings, and online grading--all while holding down the fort at home with their families.

I'm still getting up early, dressing for work, logging in promptly.  There's been a little more interaction with parents and students--a happy note from a suggested activity, a screencast to help a student navigate an ebook platform.  It still feels so very one-sided, though...I miss my days in the stacks.  

Tuesday Slice: Not just words

Not Just Words

Be careful when you open that old Funk & Wagnalls
(It's the same age as my brother, how did I not know that?)
Gold titles fading on spine and cover
The bindings have seen better days

Every inch of space inside the covers is used
Pronunciation key, foreign sounds, "specimen entries"
My father's name in my mother's handwriting squeezed in front
Abbreviations and weights and measures in the back

Those pressed corsages were my mother's, blackened now
Yellowed plastic containing their fragile petals
From proms or Army balls or Mothers' Days, I don't know
But they were important to her, so they are important to me

Don't throw out that folded napkin in the back!
Open it to find a list of names
Sixteen girl, eleven boy, one for either
To have at the ready for both of our babes
Genders unknown 'til they made their arrivals

So be careful when you open that old Funk & Wagnalls
(It's the same age as my brother, how did I not know that?)
Gold titles fading on spine and cover
The bindings have seen better days.

Tuesday Slice: My office romance

I am entering my third week of working from home.  He is entering his second week.

Our routines used to be more separated and defined.  My four-thirty-am alarm, his six-am.  I would be finished with my morning tasks at the computer before he entered the study, hitting the shower as he drank his coffee, kissing him goodbye before he finished his first cup.  Unless I had the day off, he was always the last to lock up the house.  We wouldn't speak to each other during the day.  I would call from the car in the late afternoon to see which one of us was running later than usual.  If he got home before me, the door would be unlocked and ever-so-slightly ajar, enough that I just had to push it open, because he knew my hands were often full.

Now we're both having trouble with consistent morning routines.  I still manage to wake up before he does, but sometimes by just a few minutes.  My eighteen minute commute, his half hour, are now shortened to thirty seconds, tops, from bedroom to desk.  My setup is at the craft table in the study; he has taken over half the kitchen table, where our college boy usually sits when he's home.  We both log in before we're dressed for the day. His first tasks are sometimes accompanied by my workouts in the living room, but once we're bent over our computers, we can't see each other from our respective "cubicles".

He is an incredibly understanding and supportive co-worker.  I pass by him several times an hour when my Fitbit reminds me to get up and walk, our small house not affording much room for movement.  I sometimes pause for a kiss, and he hasn't reported me to HR (yet).  He is quiet while I am recording read-alouds or running a Hangout, and hasn't interrupted a single virtual meeting by getting in the frame.  Come lunchtime, we'll break for a quick walk around the block together.

They say office romances don't often work out...I think we'll be fine.  Quarantine or not, it's nice to be married to a coworker with a shared work ethic.  Just don't tell the boss about those midday kisses...