Tag Archives: depression

Copper Heart

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“Was it hard?” I ask.
Letting go?”

Not as hard as holding on to something that wasn’t real.”
― Lisa Schroeder

I have said before that this is the job that will break your heart, over and over, each and every day. I realized the other day that my time at this job is limited, being that I resigned about two weeks ago, effective the last day of the school year.

Memory is unreliable, so I have decided to try to write down as many things as I can; to keep these things here in the blogosphere until a later date when, I hope, I do something with the information and the stories.

Why did I resign my position? On paper, it is because we are moving to Maine, and that is true.We are moving to Maine and I am very happy about it: so is Cody. But the question from many people is why are you moving to Maine? There are many reasons: life changes, nature, scenery, community. But there is a truth that our jobs have become untenable and so stressful that I feel they have temporarily (I hope) changed our personalities and our way of interacting with others and each other.

On Friday I watched a student cut herself with pieces of a mug that she smashed on the brick wall of the calm room she was in (I didn’t realize the mug was there). She is 9 years old. I watched as a police officer and a nurse came in to speak with her. I stood outside, shocked and saddened.

Right now there is a little boy, age 7, in my co-APs office crying. He has been crying for over 30 minutes: wails, sobs, hollers, screams.

I can’t find reliable staff for the two classrooms that serve the children with emotional disturbance. The one who cut herself has had over 5 crises at school. Her parent is trying his best, I think, but he is also coming at this problem of living with a person (her deceased mother) who had substance abuse disorder, and no doubt, has his own deck stacked against him.

The public schools aren’t designed for this; we don’t have the resources or the knowledge to help. Even the “behavior specialists” from our district don’t seem to understand what to do with some students. It is this endless stream of trial-and-error, emphasis on trial.

My heart is broken. I feel depressed. Depression is not a familiar feeling for me, so I think that this is temporary. Anxiety and I are good friends, but depression no. I feel so heavy, as if I have no energy to do anything. I feel hopeless. I feel like I am doing everything I can for this kid and I am doing very little because there is little to be done.

I keep thinking about myself at 9; it was 1989 and my parents hadn’t lost all their money yet and we lived in this big house with a pool. I used to do my homework in a raft in the pool. I loved that pool; it had a waterfall made of rocks and one was so big that you could dive off it. The house had a screened-in porch on the second story and a hidey-hole room under the stairs. I used to sit in there and read with a lightbulb on a string glowing in the dark. While we lived in that house, my parents bought a ton of stuff including this really awesome stereo that I still wish they hadn’t gotten rid of! Shortly though, the money disappeared as fast as it had came and we had to sell off our belongings, cars, and then the house itself. We left private school and went to public school. My dad had a nervous breakdown and was never the same. Our family was never really happy ever again when we were together for too long; we could sustain a couple of hours but that was it.

That experience of watching my parents lose all their money and then lose their focus and happiness changed my life. It made me understand life differently, and as I aged, to commit to certain values. One of them is to not be attached to things, despite being a loving collector of weird objects. One of them is that it is important to listen to your heart.

I listened to my heart here back in September when the 5 year old brough a loaded gun to school. I resigned in my heart that day. But between then and now have been so many things that have happened that have just hurt this heart of mine. Perhaps hearts are like metal: the more they are hammered on, the stronger they are? I like to think so. I commit to never altering my love for children, despite the heartbreak. But, another thing I learned from my parents is that once you recognize dysfunction and an unwillingness to change, it is time to remove yourself from the situation and find one better suited.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

From Both Sides Now

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It is a strange but comforting memory.

It is made of a wooden door with glass in the front, and squeaky stairs that go up, and then an old jukebox bathed in amber light, and lastly, an ice cream counter. It is a place in Galveston, a town about an hour south of Houston, where my family went together many times when I was a child.

There was a store there that sold imports, I think. It had wooden bins full of little things like beads. It had shelves on the walls with fabrics folded upon them. In this store, just after my grandfather died, I was wandering around and looked up to see a very white haired man in a button up, loose-fitting, short-sleeved shirt, wearing glasses and a camera hanging from his neck. It was my grandfather, and by the time I looked back at him, upon recognition, he had, of course, disappeared.

Galveston has a long, tall, cement wall that stretches along its seashore and was built to protect its citizens from damaging hurricanes, like the one in 1900. Some parts of it are painted with murals. Some parts of it are dotted with seashell shops, which sell lots of seashells not native to Texas at all, and many of those pretty shell chandelier-hanging lamp things. I always wanted one of those.

When we had the dog, Bear was his name, we would take him to the beach and he would run around. Once, my cousin Bruce came to visit from New Jersey, and he took Bear way out into the water. The dog panicked, and clawed Bruce’s back to bits trying to save himself in Bruce’s arms.

We used to stay in a beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula that belonged to our family’s lawyer. It was a brown house, made of wood, on stilts, and, at night, you could go out to the dunes with a flashlight and hunt ghost crabs. One visit, we discovered that the house had been robbed and things tossed about, as if in a storm. The two policemen who came demonstrated to us, flabbergasted, how they thought two people had gotten into a fight and thrown each other around. My parents didn’t agree with the theory, but I don’t remember ever staying there after that.

When I look back at time, and try to piece the story together, as I have been wont to do of late, I have been looking back to see when the family functioned well and when there was evidence of happiness and contentment. I think it ended just before my grandfather died, when my parents lost their house, their car, and many of their possessions. We moved into a small rental house with a duck in stained glass on the door. I lived in a tiny room, which I loved, and I had curtains around my bed. I used to sneak out of the huge window and go and walk in the park, later whilst smoking cigarettes.

Today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a time I only remember because I was in a Texas History class at Knox Junior High School when it happened. My teacher was not a good teacher, but did have a slight obsession with Dan Fogelberg of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The only three things I remember from her class were Dan Fogelberg, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and learning a computer software that, I think, was some precursor to PowerPoint.

During that time, I have very few memories of my parents together or apart. I remember being alone a lot. I remember my brother playing with all the kids in the street all the time, and that once we had a massive, neighborhood-wide pinecone war. I remember doing my homework on a blanket in the front yard, and waving every day to the same lady in the same car. After a bit of time, she stopped and introduced herself. She was Irish and lived down the road a bit. I went to her house for tea. She became a great friend to me and we would talk and have tea; I remember she had a wonderful tea towel collection. I remember my mom coming to pick me up there one evening.

That time is shrouded, and soon after, we moved into another house, the one in which we lived when I graduated from high school. Come to think of it, that was the house with the large window from which I snuck out. All I remember of that time, in the house with the duck on the door, is darkness (it was a dark house). I remember my dad being in the bedroom all the time, and I remember not understanding why there was no one home and it was hard and dark, scary and confusing. I remember buying groceries for the family at the grocery store, and coming home to put them away. I remember doing laundry, and making sure my brother was all right. I remember getting into wearing vintage corduroy mens’ jackets. I remember catching the bus. I remember that sweet old neighbor, whose name I have forgotten.