To Be Big

Dad and Kathy are here, and thank goodness for that. They brought buckets of love to pour over me, and lord do I need it. It's good to feel taken care of, and they're being absolutely perfect with Tex, loving but acknowledging that everything isn't "perfect," that she's going through a hard time and may need her space. It's a good balance.

It's rainy in Texas and I can't seem to sleep past 7am anymore, but that's ok. I enjoy these quiet mornings, just the cat and I, til the sun comes up around 8 and the birds start going bezerk. I drink my coffee and I read and I give little wordless prayers to the universe to ease my achin' little heart. Yesterday at work one of my coworkers, an older Mexican woman who has been my Afterschool Mama for two years, took a bracelet off her wrist and put it on mine. It's a stretchy bead thing you can buy at all sorts of places these days, with pictures of Mary and Jesus and various saints on each bead. She told me it'll protect me, and in a weird way, I believe it. I don't want to take it off. The way she just pulled it off of herself and gave it to me... I think only people who come from poverty (she does, oh man does she ever) know how to give that way. This woman has about three teeth and not enough money to replace the glasses she broke, so they're taped together at the corner.... and yet she feeds the homeless on her street and gives her much-better-off coworkers the few trinkets she owns. I feel like there's power in that, and I'm going to keep this bracelet on until I reach the end of this particular road.

Also bolstering me up these days are the kiddos in my program. They made me a bunch of cards yesterday. One reads, "Ms. Caylin, You are like a real teacher to me." Wow! What an honor! Surely not like a REAL teacher?! :) And another says "Dear Mrs. Caitlin, I like you because you are pretty and you are nice and you made Stampede and you let us go out on the playground." (They didn't actually spell all that correctly, but I'm taking editorial license.) And a third wrote, "Good luck to your parents and family," which I find just hilarious. As in, "They have to deal with you now! Good luck!!" The kids hung on me yesterday like monkeys. They all told me they loved me and I hugged them back hard and long. One more day to see their smiling faces, and then I'll be gone, and I simply can't believe that.

Today I picked up Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," which I read for the first time in AP English with Erin, and have read about ten times since. Each round reveals something else in the story that I love. This time, it speaks to me in a whole new way - the dissatisfaction in your life, the need to change, the apparent impossibility of rewriting your own story. Of course, in this novelette, Edna Pontellier drowns herself at the end, because in her world there literally WAS no option for change. So I guess I should feel lucky. I don't have to walk into the swirling Gulf surf, stripped of long skirts and corsets and stockings and all, and let the tide sweep me under - that isn't the only way to reclaim my Self and take possession of my life again. I can get in my car, strike out from Texas, and just go home. I don't have to rest in a dissatisfying partnership, I don't have to accept a way of being that doesn't express all of who I am. I can let my heart love with a great ferocity, with all its stretch and vigor, and push the false limits of my life out into the limitless potential of my existence. I can "be big," as J tells me. I think I'm gonna try.