Surprised by Fear

I walked out into the alley behind our house to dump the trash into the dumpster, only to nearly miss stepping on a used condom. It, along with the torn Trojan man package, was directly in front of our back gate. My daughter, age three, was right behind me–in bare feet.

“Oh no, honey,” I said pushing her backward with my hand. “You stay inside the yard. You don’t have shoes on; there might be broken glass.”

I opened the dumpster and threw in the trash bag, sidestepping the condom and three white crumpled tissues. I eyed a purple needle. I turned around and walked back into the yard, my lips pursed. Something happened in the alley right outside my gate, some sexual act. Someone left this remnant here, a sign that it happened. So much goes on in this neighborhood, in this great big city, that I never even know about.

I wished that my husband was home. He was away for a week, and at night I worried about the door. Was it locked? Should I go check? What would I do if someone broke in? My cell phone was resting on the dresser; would I have time to reach it if someone came thumping up the stairs? I was nestled under the covers in-between my kids — a chubby-kneed baby and a long-limbed preschooler — and feeling the weight of protecting them.

I never thought I would be scared to live here. I spent a good deal of my early 20s in this inner-city neighborhood. It’s where my husband and I dated, got engaged, and rented our first apartment. It’s where we brought our daughter home from the hospital as a newborn. And it’s where we discovered a little Mennonite church a few blocks away where, for the past five years, I have spent most Sunday mornings singing songs about peacemaking.

8275524986_8bb66bd218_o (1)I felt naïve, not knowing what it would be like to steer my daughter around smashed beer bottles on our sidewalk, to tell her to keep her tricycle inside our gate, to avoid the playgrounds where young men are sitting on the swings, smoking. “But, why, mama?” she wonders, and I don’t know what to tell her. I want her to be confident, to free range all around her environment like those happy cage-free chickens, to not need my constant, watchful presence.

So why, why, do we live here? I tell myself we’re here because place matters. Where we live matters. What we see every day, the people we come in contact with, the reality of our communities — they matter. Our place, our community, shapes what is “normal.” For every smashed beer bottle, there are dozens of friendly “hellos” and shared toys over the fence with the Somali family next door. For every waft of second-hand smoke, there are kind strangers holding open the door for my double stroller at the Dollar Store.

And I want to go down kicking and screaming against the mantras of the American dream, that more stuff and homogenous living is better. I want to rail against the malaise of centering only on me and mine and my kind. I want my kids to know that their whiteness is just one color among many. Because I want to be where God is dwelling, and God is here, or so I’ve been told.

The day after I found the condom I opened the door to our backyard, a serene patch of green contained inside a privacy fence. As my daughter squeezed past me to go outside and play, I heard the voices – loud and strained and scary. Neighbors were fighting. No, they were screaming.

“Mom, mom,” my daughter said as she lingered on the back steps. “What’s that noise?”

“Inside,” I said, pulling her back into the house, closing the door firmly behind us. My daughter’s eyes were confused, searching mine. I brusquely pulled out the watercolor paints and paper to occupy her, my heart pounding all the while.

As I watched my daughter paint at the kitchen table, I thought about friends who have lived on our block for over 30 years. They raised two sons who thrived, sent them to public schools, and volunteered countless hours in the community. People always wondered, always asked them: How did you do it? How did your kids turn out so well? And they replied: You never need to warn your kids about abusing alcohol when they see drunks walking down the block every day.

My kids, like their kids, will be okay, right? God is here, I reminded myself, as I swallowed back my fear. God is redeeming it all. I looked back over at my daughter, hunched over her painting. I peered over her shoulder and admired her splotchy stick-figures, their colors black and brown and pink. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked, turning her sunny face toward mine. “Yes,” I replied as I touched the wet construction paper. “Yes, it is.”

* * * * *

stinaStina Kielsmeier-Cook a writer and recovering idealist from the cold north where she raises kids, maxes out her library card, and is usually late for church. A former housing advocate for refugees, Stina loves to talk about social policy, parenting and her neighborhood in Minneapolis. She blogs at www.stinakc.com and can be found tweeting, badly, at @stina_kc.

 

Broken bottle photo by Lig Ynnek

Tongue Depressors and Other Teaching Relics

I curate a small store of relics from my years teaching in Chicago—

cMerediths-In-Her-Shoes-Pencilsrayon-drawn cards, apology notes with misspelled superlatives, and portraits where the size of my head dwarfs my torso. In one early drawing, a student depicted me with flowing red hair and a bikini. I have two guns in holsters at my hips and a rainbow behind me.

I’ve packed away most of my memorabilia in a catchall file in our spare bedroom, trying to organize and place memories from a time that spilled outside of any boundaries I tried to create for it. One lone tongue depressor has made it through three apartment relocations and three school changes. Each time, I considered tossing the stick, but I always ended up keeping it, laying it back amongst my pens. It’s small enough, important enough to keep.

It’s Corvell’s stick. I met Corvell in my first year of teaching, and he was my first student to disappear.

I showed up to teach in Chicago’s inner city with more experience teaching stuffed animals than actual children. I took the alternative certification track to gain my teaching credentials along with many non-teacher types who cared about social justice and/or had seen the documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

We came tugging our Photo 217liberal arts educations behind us, hailing from some of the top universities in the country and swearing our scout’s honor that we worked hard and could make it through a few years teaching in the inner city.

By my second week student teaching, my childhood expectations of education came undone. When I played school as a kid, I propped my stuffed animals into position, neatly stacking papers and fastening them with paper clips. I taught my plush class whatever I wanted, and ears full of cotton, they still listened. Back then, I mimicked the lessons delivered by my own teachers, tidy women with pant suits and coordinating jewelry.

My teaching experience looked nothing like this, I looked nothing like this.  My days didn’t form into an inspirational narrative, but instead finished with a sense of mere survival. Instead of matching jewelry, I wore hardened streaks of oatmeal on my coat from eating on the way to school.

Teaching overflowed into every corner of my life. Jayla’s empty stomach leaked into my thoughts at night and lesson plans edged into spare weekend hours. Carefully constructed reading activities got interrupted and sloshed aside to be buried under math tests and leveled readers. The education system proved much sloppier than I ever imagined. And yet, Corvell’s disappearance still knocked the wind out of me.IMG_1580

His Dad picked him up for an early dismissal, and by 3:00 p.m., we got his transfer papers. Someone at the school called DCFS on Corvell’s parents. This report added to many others on file, and as had become their custom, the family moved onto a new school, away from the prying eyes of the well-meaning teacher who called in the report of neglect.

The principal and case manager did not bat an eye. They told me the news as a point of business. The school secretary laughed at my shock and said, “One less copy to make!” Corvell’s story was a familiar one in Chicago, but I was still a newbie.

That day after school, I cleaned out his desk, slid his reading circle book back into the classroom library, and cancelled other evidences of him around the classroom. I pulled Corvell’s stick from the small tin bucket with a whole class set of tongue depressors inscribed with each student’s name. My co-teacher and I rifled through the sticks when eyes got sleepy during a read aloud or when only a few hands darted up in a math lesson. If I drew your stick, you were on the line, responsible as the next person for our classroom learning.

The last time I worked with Corvell, I made him cry. I told him he wasn’t trying hard enough on his reading test. As I chided him and repeated the test question again, his usually swinging legs held still. He traced over his name with his pencil again and again as he let tears splash on his paper. And that was the end of our story.

There was no shiny ending, no epiphany. I stowed the stick in my desk, to remember Corvell always, to remember the lesson learned that day, that kids sometimes disappear.

I grew accustomed to Corvell’s story or one’s like it.

I stopped keeping mementos for each student. Corvell’s stick has become the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the memento to represent my utter lack of control over the faces in all of my classrooms. For a year, or sometimes less, I poured my whole self into my students, thought about them, fixed their hair, wiped their tears, went to bat for them, drew smiley faces with ketchup on their burgers, and then they disappeared into chaos.

My last year teaching, I lost track of Corvell’s stick and found it while drawing sticks out of the jar of tongue depressors in my first grade classroom. My co-teacher must have found it and decided to repurpose itIMG_0162 for another student in our room. Like any relic, its meaning was held in the knowledge of the one who owned it, like the rag of an apostle’s robe or the heel bone of a saint.


I looked at the faces of my first graders and thought of the ones already missing from their rug spots. Now my fourth year in the classroom, I’d better learned how to rise above the rubble and teach in the moment, but I still mourned my Corvells.

He was every student I couldn’t help enough, couldn’t reach, couldn’t follow, or hold forever. He was every student from my years in CPS, kids I cared for deeply and will likely never see again.

***

Meredith-bio-YAH-1024x327

Like Shards of Shattered Stained Glass

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable

Love is itself unmoving

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless…

        ~ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

This is my third year teaching at an inner city middle school. My common refrain when asked what it’s like to teach is it’s exhausting but never boring. I often tell others the most overwhelming challenge I have faced in life is the emotions of a middle school girl. I previously had no categories for the appropriate responses to their occasionally incongruous behaviors. This has led me to be uncomfortable, anxious, and downright turned about at times in my role as a teacher, authority figure, and role model.

When I started teaching I had no notion or intention beyond the present need to have a job and hopefully do something which gave me some purpose. The long term desire was always to do something grander- namely go back to school and do something more than just teach 8th grade math and science. This was the desire of my heart.

I have enjoyed teaching and the relationships I have formed, but what has always made me uncomfortable about my job is disciplining students. I often enter into it with fear and anxiety. My thoughts run like this: “You are disrupting my class and wrecking any peace we (I) might have enjoyed here. I need to stop this.” What follows, almost invariably, is a classic mistake of teachers. We do not realize how well students can read our emotions. In these cases the student either reciprocates my fear or anxiety with his own or simply shuts down and detaches. Even if the behavior is corrected through coercion, there is no ground gained in character or relationship, and we percolate along in our functions without growing. There is intrinsically within the personal desire to regain control a tyranny of the moment which gets in the way of transcendent change.

In the previous two years I had taught 6th through 8th grade math, but this year I only teach 8th grade math and science. This has created the chance for me to teach the same 20 kids all day, students who I have taught for going on three years. By now they know my middle name, my pet peeves, and just about every emotional expression I have. They are hyper aware of even the slightest change in my temperament. Also, the way I relate to them personally has changed almost without me realizing it. There is more than simply a nice hope that they might improve or grow. The welfare of my students has grown over my own personal desires. I only realize this and act on it in broken flashes like the shimmer of light off the jagged cut of shattered stained glass.

Two weeks ago one of my students had an emotional reaction to something she was asked to do and stormed angrily out of my class. This was a reaction characteristic of her strong-willed, vitally independent personhood which has shown up in sporadic, irrational outbreaks of defiance that are shattering to my classroom’s peace and also harmful to herself in the form of ensuing consequences. These incidents have occurred over a three year period with me, and as a result of disciplining of her, I have grown a strong bond with her. This time, in the moment of her explosion, I did not feel the usual anxiety and fear which generally accompanies her outbreaks, instead I felt only heaviness. I felt sorrow.

When I spoke to her later my words felt thick, my eyes began to water, and the thought dominating my heart was a worry for her: she was self-destructing in these meltdowns and the continuance of them would not only hurt her relations with others but also her chances of pushing beyond the boundaries of poverty around her. The initial and usual response of defiance in her eyes faded into a reciprocated sadness. In front of me was a lost child. She was aware of the deeper emotion in my eyes of sorrow over her brokenness. I have known this in the eyes of others looking at me when I was so far gone I thought I could not be rescued, and here I was with my eyes full of the same emotions with a girl so different than me yet so much like me.

The reflection in her eyes stirred something beyond my present volatile and inconstant desires. The timelessness of love momentarily overwhelmed my temporal desires. I spoke as honestly and deeply as I have ever spoken to a student.

The truth is I don’t really love people. I am often affectionate, kind, and even generous towards others  but rarely without an ulterior motive. I have not cared for anyone in my life with the charity of God which the puritans described as “benevolent indifference.” But in this moment, I felt the stillness of indifferent love.

Near the end of the school day, after I had meted out the discipline for her actions, she stopped me as I walked by her in study hall. I sat down next to her. She immediately apologized to me with sincerity for her actions. I choked up, hardly able to say anything in response. As I walked back to my room tired and at peace, I was reminded that in our broken friction, in the destructive collision of our obese, selfish desires, we are vulnerable to the entrance of timeless, co-inhering love. Into our time-filled world, in these messy moments enters the God who is pursuing us.

We like the shards of shattered stained glass are brought back together, one crude edge fitting the next, to form the reflection of our Pursuer. He, who in his love let us shatter ourselves and sustained us in our wrecked state, weaves us back together one to another into the unity of a living body, organic in its diverse, messy flesh, and glorified in the binding coinherence of love that threads us to a living-in-love triune God.

My role in this world, however shoddily I accomplish it, is to reflect this all encompassing, pursuing love. I uncover this only in gasps and stabs.