Grow Up.

“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.” ~ W. E. B. Du Bois

“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.” ~ Mister Rogers

“My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, LORD, I will seek.” ~Psalm 27: 8

My parents came for a week after the birth of our firstborn. Our son was born on Thursday and they arrived on Saturday, just a few hours after we got home from the hospital.

During the week of their visit, my mother took care of me and helped us with the baby. She, my father, and my husband also packed up our apartment and moved us to a townhouse, where they proceeded to unpack us again.

By the time they left the following Saturday, we were well on our way to being settled and I was recovering nicely. But I wasn’t quite ready to let them go.

That afternoon, with Bill out on an errand and my parents just departed, I stood with my newborn wailing in my arms, and I cried too.

There we were, otherwise alone in the house and both of us crying, when I realized that someone was going to have to stop crying–and that someone would have to be me.

I had to be the grown-up.

More than Maturity

We all understand that the best-case scenarios find babies born to mature adults, emotionally prepared to rear a person into maturity. Not all babies get this in their parents; not all people are equipped to be parents. And many of us (I’m raising my hand here) learn to be parents along the way.

It’s impossible, prior to the arrival of your first child, to know everything you’ll need to know. We learn as we go. And even though a firstborn schools us in ways the next child(ren) won’t have to, we learn from our children all the time. It’s not enough to be a parent: we learn to be Auggi’s mom or Piper’s dad. The uniqueness I wrote about last week demands unique attention.

I think it’s fair to say that it takes more than maturity to rear a child. What we need is wisdom.

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. ~ James 1: 6-8

In light of our need for wisdom, that first sentence there is absolutely fantastic: you need wisdom? Ask God! He’ll give it to you!

But there’s more to it than that. In my isolated paraphrase (just verse 6), God dissolves into something resembling religion, a system of behavior-and-consequence. Here God is a genie or vending machine: I ask for wisdom, he dispenses it. Voila!

The difference between Christianity and religion is that Christianity is a relationship. God is a real person, and we are his beloved (unique and inimitable) children. Among the scads of virtues that make up his character, wisdom–like the rest of them–is not something he totes in a box or jacket pocket, ready to dole out like so much candy. Rather, wisdom is an aspect of who he is, imparted to us as we know him more.

The more we are changed by his love, the more we love. The more we receive his patience, the more we are patient. The more we know his grace, the less quick we are to judge. The more we know his wisdom, the wiser we become. 

The verses following James 1:6 bear this out. We ask God for wisdom, but we must believe he will give it to us. We have to trust that he’ll answer our request. In other words, we don’t sit around waiting for wisdom to hit us between the eyes. We go about our business, trusting God, because we rely on who we know him to be: good, faithful, true to his word.

And wisdom comes. Why? Because God is good, faithful, and true to his word.

If as parents we are paying any attention at all, we know we need wisdom. We also need patience and gentleness and a host of other things.

We need God.

Which leads me to the whole point of this post: parents who want to teach the gospel to their children must absolutely grow up.

Growing Up

Crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. ~ 1 Peter 2: 1-2

Peter’s words here are an admonition and encouragement to people who already have put their faith in God and in the gospel of Jesus Christ: you have tasted the goodness of God, and you know how delicious, satisfying and nourishing it is. Want more. 

We appreciate the metaphor. If I’d never had a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from Bojangles, I would never miss one. But now that I’ve had one, well. Suffice it to say that they come to mind from time to time.

In a similar but far more challenging and satisfying way, the delights we have known through the love of Jesus should make us want more of the same. In craving him, we pursue our relationship with him, and this causes us to grow. We become mature, joy-filled, obedient, faithful servants of the living God who are sources of blessing and comfort to the people and world around us.

Including our children.

How Do We Grow?

So, how is it done? What are the actions that result from the craving Peter recommends?

I’ll be honest:

1. they’re familiar
2. they’re beautiful
3. some upcoming posts will focus on some of them.

But the simple answer is the best: spend time with God.

If you’ve been a church-goer for any time at all, you’ve heard this before: read your Bible. Pray. Spend time in honest joy and pain with people who also have put their faith in Jesus. Be taught from the Bible by people who take it seriously. Receive communion with a full heart.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

This is all so familiar. And it’s also spot on because of what I said before: Christianity is not a religion. It’s a relationship.

The Relationship

I’ve been married to my husband for almost 30 years. Being with him has made me a less judgmental person because he is less apt to judge than I am. I also have a better sense of humor than I used to because he is funny and has an excellent sense of humor. I hear music differently because of how he appreciates it. I also regard money differently. And entertainment.

These changes wrought by his influence come off the top of my head, but there are other changes, deeper and more vast, that have come from years of being with him, talking with him, learning to see things from his point of view.

Spending time with a person changes you. Same with God–but far more mysteriously, richly, and abundantly than with anyone else.

I’ve known a lot of beauty in my life, but this quiet and real transformation is among the most beautiful things I’ve seen.

Two Additional Notes

1. Peter tells us to “crave pure spiritual milk.” I translate that as having a desire to know Jesus. But just like enjoyment, no one craves anything all of the time. We won’t crave Jesus all of the time. We just won’t. Here’s the thing: I don’t feel like going to the gym all the time, but I go anyway.
2. An important but less frequently made note about pursuing a relationship with God: do what he says. New understanding of him comes through obedience. I’m not exactly sure why or how, but it does. There’s this fabulous moment in John’s gospel where Jesus is once again being confronted by people who can’t figure out who he is. Jesus says, “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak it on my own” (John 7: 17). In other words, Jesus says that revelation of truth comes through obedience. Mysterious and true and, once again, beautiful.

Growing Up and Teaching the Gospel to Children

I began this post by pointing out our need for wisdom. God, as the father and source of all wisdom, becomes our pursuit as we seek what we need to nurture our children.

But nothing about God is transactional. We don’t seek him to *get the stuff we need.* We seek him, and we get him. Beauty and grace result.

As we grow in Christ, we are transformed by him. Our children might not witness that transformation. Being young, they may not track the changes and growth he is working in us. But they will see the beauty of his life in us. They will live in an atmosphere of increasing grace and mercy because of that life. And this may very well awaken in them a craving to know him, too.

I wrote a post before this one on enjoying our children. Read it here. 

The post Teaching the Gospel to Children: Grow Up. appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Every student in this country has started back to school by now. The other day, a boy in my daughter’s math class announced that, two full weeks in, they had completed exactly 5.5% of the school year.

This was not excellent news to Emma. She wasn’t sure that 5.5% was worth registering.

Nearly three weeks ago now, I visited her school with her at student orientation. With five minutes to pass between classes–threading our way in and out of buildings, up and down stairs–we sat in each of her classrooms for ten. Her teachers met us at their doors, encouraged us to take copies of the neatly stacked hand-outs. And in what must have felt to them like a hot second, they explained the scope and sequence of their courses, their methods of teaching and evaluation, and briefly listed (if we would be so kind) those extras we could provide that might be handy over the course of the upcoming year: whiteboard markers, boxes of tissues, hand sanitizer.

None of them knew that I have been a teacher, but like every parent in that room, I’m sure, I was interested in how my child would do in that class. I wondered if the methods employed would work for her unique mind, her way of perceiving the world. And, as a teacher, I had that other perspective: knowing what it feels like to greet student and parent alike for the first time. Knowing that I would be navigating relationships with both, listening carefully to both. Seeking to know each student insofar as he would allow it, as was appropriate. Seeking to like each one. Knowing that my standards were high and earnestly believing that my students could and would get there, that it was my job to give them everything they needed to reach those goals.

Emma’s 5.5% has been well worth her time already. I hear it in the way she talks about her classes: the experiments, the discussions. On the way to school this morning, she was telling me about parent functions in math; last night before bed she was discussing Malcolm Gladwell and rhetorical analysis. She likes each of her classes; she likes her teachers very much.

***

Once, years ago, I saw a comment about teachers on Facebook that saddened me. It was made by a mother of grown children, each of whom had been educated through college and perhaps beyond. She was complaining about teachers asking for pay raises. Why did they need to ask for more, she wondered aloud on social media. They only work nine months a year. They get the entire summer off.

I didn’t reply, but if I had, I might have said something about the work a teacher does around the edges of her day, those hours when she’s not required to be in her classroom. I spent hours and hours at planning and grading when I was a teacher. After an eight-hour day at school, I easily and often put in two to four additional hours of work at home, especially in my earliest years of teaching.

Listening to my daughter’s teachers talk about the upcoming school year, I had a difficult time assessing the value of their expertise. This one has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a Master’s in teaching. She will conduct her students in performing experiments that will help them draw conclusions about acids and bases, and she will–at the same time–ensure that none of them blows himself up, or his neighbor, or school property.

When you are a teacher– I wanted to say to this Facebook remark– you don’t work with your colleagues. You almost never see them. You work instead with people who are vastly younger than yourself in age and experience, vulnerable people, people who are not in charge of their own lives and so sometimes (often?) are victims of poverty or anger, who are trying to understand the world while you are trying to teach them the beauties of a sonnet.

Please put a price tag on that and then pay the teacher accordingly. Or give her the summer off. Or both.

***

Every year I was teaching, my husband would compose a list of “class rules” and write it on a white board in my classroom. This is fall, 2007. Sorry for the flash. Again, 2007.

Of course I realize, too, that some people are terrible teachers, that they entered their profession in error or that, over the course of years, they have become calloused or embittered to the point that it might be best for them to stop teaching altogether. But that doesn’t happen because teaching is easy. That’s never why.

***

A teacher is a person with two loves: her subject and her students. They vie for dominance within her, and she is at her best when their marriage erupts in the classroom: when her delight in a sonnet equals her delight in her students discovering the same.

This doesn’t happen every day. It can’t.

And the most difficult part of a teacher’s job is when he is altogether unable to enjoy the thing he loves in deference to loving his students. They present with needs, difficulties, challenges, issues (or essays) that he must give his full attention while his love of sonnets molders behind the classroom door.

And that is part of the job.

***

My very favorite teacher helped me learn to write. I can’t say he taught me: like the best teachers, he understood that the best learning was a process of discovery. But he provided the insights and the examples, and he made me write. And then he only gave me praise when I wrote well.

He was an excellent teacher, and in what I consider to be among the best of the essay-ish things I have ever written, I recounted his excellence and my blundering foolishness in the face of it, and my regret.

He was a teacher, but he was also a writer– and it was his love of good writing that equipped him to teach me. No doubt it was also his hours spent evaluating my writing and that of others that prevented his getting more writing done. I wish I could thank him for that.

But there is this: he has released a book. Or rather, a book of his writing has been released (ugh, passive voice–he would have hated that), compiled and edited in the years since his death by his colleague and another of my favorite teachers, Dr. Gloria Stansberry.

Fragments is a collection of Bill Donnelly’s short stories–some fiction, some not–that showcase his love of language. He taught me to love the dictionary, and this book demonstrates that he loved it too–for all the wonder and surprise a rightly chosen word can deliver.

He was a brave writer, unafraid to experiment with writing–and this is what he encouraged us to do, so many years ago now, in his Advanced Writing class.

I think he knew what I have learned: that writing is always a risk; that you never show up to the task alone, despite how solitary you are; and that perseverance just might produce quality. So it’s always best to try.

He said, “Fragments are not the enemy. I like fragmentary sentences, vivid imagery, humor, weird repetition and variation, sound effects, contentious dialogue, electrifying facts, surprise.”

I did not know him well, but I can vouch that the above is true. It describes not just the way he wrote; it was the way he taught.

The book is titled Fragments because, I think, of his avowed love for them. But the book is fragmentary too: pieces of a life.

And that’s the thing I like best about the book: I can hear his voice as I read. No matter which story, it is Bill Donnelly’s voice reading it aloud. He is perched on a desk at the front of the room, his long legs bent in front of him. He is sucking his cheeks, he is pausing, he is enunciating the words exactly so. And I am riveted, listening, hearing not just the words but their sounds, not just their sounds but their rhythms–and finding my own voice because he shared his so generously. I am sitting there listening, and I am learning how to write.

I received my copy of the book a few months ago, but I’m writing about it today to celebrate. The book itself is a few months old, and today my novel celebrates one year since its release. I guess one could call it my book’s birthday.

So this is another gesture of gratitude to Dr. Donnelly, who above all others, helped me find my voice as a writer– or who, at the very least, most emboldened me to try. It is the page, after all, that teaches us to write. But Dr. Donnelly provided me immeasurable help.

Once more, Dr. Donnelly: thank you.

William Francis Donnelly, III    1935-2015

Fragments is available here. 

The post Of Teachers and Why We Love Them, My Favorite One, and Two Birthdays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Time spent teaching is never lost.

I spent an hour in a 9th grade classroom yesterday. The first time in nearly five years.

This was at a public school, Durham School of the Arts downtown. The place where my daughter now spends her days, where my middle son used to spend his. And we’ve lived in Durham for nearly-ever: I’ve driven past that school hundreds of times.

But yesterday was my first time teaching there, and this as a one-time guest. Fifty minutes with a creative writing class. Thirty-one students. Poetry and prose and metaphor packed between the bells.

***

I’ve taught in public and private schools, many years ago and only five years ago. The schools had different philosophies and perhaps some of them were better formed than others. But yesterday I realized again how much they are the same, whether I’m in a public middle-and-high school in the Pittsburgh suburbs or a shanty school with a corrugated roof in Nairobi’s Korogocho slum: Here the students sit, and here sits or stands the teacher.

And Then What?

It’s the Then What that interests me.

***

Yesterday it was metaphors and extended ones. It was listening for the metaphor in Cory Fry’s current song Underground and then discovering the weight of the metaphors in a clever poem by Sylvia Plath.

As teacher, one can’t be in a hurry with these things. To rip the thread from the spool is to leave your students abandoned, distracted, unlearned or annoyed. You have to tease it out, to let them talk to you. Good teaching is, I’ve learned, so much less my telling them things and so much more their telling me. 

Which was why I loved it yesterday when Aaman said he thought Fry’s underground was a mine, and why I reveled in Lorin’s observation of the “percussive influence” in the song. Why I loved that Emerson declared they could do without songs about love, thank you very much, and that Katherine noticed the nine syllables in Plath’s poem aligned neatly with the nine months of pregnancy.

And when they realized, as a class, that the poet was talking about pregnancy in the first place, we had that sonic boom of revelation that many teachers live for: the metaphoric light bulb, the newborn understanding, the thing I was always after for my students–no matter where I taught–when each one or even one of them says: I See.

***

I miss teaching.

***

But yesterday was fifty minutes. It was an island of time. It was a window the students let me climb through, unburdened by a week’s load of lesson plans or papers to grade or the learning modifications that require a lesson’s reconstruction. It was without obligatory phone calls to parents or tardy slips, without concerns because this student isn’t paying attention or asks to leave the room too much. It was without getting up too early or deciding (again) what to wear (the students pay attention to these things: “Mrs. Stevenson, you wore those shoes with that shirt last week.” Good lord).

Yesterday was a song, a poem, a paragraph from Fitzgerald. And then the bell.

***

I think any scholar of the New Testament is supposed to love Peter the most. Aren’t we supposed to love Peter? What with his foolhardy faith and his big mouth, his walking on water and his, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life” (John 6:68).

And I love Peter. I do.

But I love John the Baptist the best, I think. He was raised in the church, so to speak. Reared believing, like me. He leaped in his mother’s womb when he heard Mary’s voice, and He knew the Messiah on sight: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Matthew 3:14).

And when his disciples grew anxious because people were all going to this Jesus fellow to be baptized, he understood–didn’t he?–where exactly he fit in the scheme of things: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).

It’s a good thing to know what one is called to, or not. To know that your time is up, your job is finished, that someone else can absolutely do the job just as well as you can, perhaps (so likely) better.

It was right and good for me to leave teaching when I did. And I miss it still. Which is fine.

***

The best moment for me with John the Baptist is when he was in prison for speaking the truth. He’d been in there for a long time, and I’m pretty sure he knew–he was no fool; he knew the temperament of the Galilean rulers–this would not end well.

He sent a message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3).

John. Prophet. Believer. Cousin of Christ. Asking whether Jesus was the Messiah.

***

John teaches me this: It’s okay to ask. It’s okay–years out, even five of them–to wonder about His work in your life. It’s okay to miss what He’s shut the door on. And it’s okay to be overjoyed in the life you currently have, to see the goodness and the blessing and the labor of it, and to still love the thing you once did. To wait in hope for the next thing, to work hard at the thing you are doing, and to remember with inexpressible sweetness what it was to be with your students–your students–all those days, all those times, before.

It’s okay to ask, says the imprisoned John, as long–always, always–as He is the One you go to with the questions, and then you stay put for the answers, even if He seems quiet for a long time.

He is always good, and He is always true. And the poetry of that right there is enough.

***

 “And Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”          Matthew 11:4-6

The post It’s Okay to Ask appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother:

“(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence because I think it loses meaning. Thoughts?”

Thoughts. Immediate: to swings, and how I love to go up in them.

How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the loveliest thing/ever a child can do!

I’m thinking of the time I learned to pump the swing myself. We were visiting my grandmother in Florida, and my older sister and I were taken by the hand by our father and walked rapidly (my father always walks rapidly) down a sidewalk that had, to one side, a tall white fence. Over the top of the fence we could see lemon trees, and my father sang us a song about them as we went.

Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

And this was Very Funny, because my father loves lemons.

We arrived at a park, and my father pushed us on the swings, and then he explained how one leans on a swing and pushes one’s legs out and back again. Suddenly I had learned to pump the swing with my legs, and I could swing on my own.

How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?

I pushed William on a swing when he was barely old enough to sit upright. Everett, too. And when Emma turned one, we bought her a baby swing for the swing-set in the back yard. I remember her blond hair, so fine and straight, swaying back and forth from its pigtail above her grinning face.

The mother: “I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence.” Thoughts?

Yes, to the mornings my children and I sat around our kitchen table eating breakfast and reciting poetry. It was my way of packing in a few elements of school before they had a chance to realize it: a Bible story, a picture study, a poem over pancakes and in our pajamas.

Among the many, we learned Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” “The Wind,” and “The Swing.”

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” I think my children wanted to know if they were, too.

Thoughts?

Yes, to grading papers at my desk when teaching high school, typing paragraphs of encouragement about supporting arguments and placing commas inside (INSIDE) the quotation marks, and wishing from time to time that these students had spent a small corner of their childhoods reciting poetry–and many of them had. Because you can teach a person how to shape an argument, how to develop said argument over a series of paragraphs, how to enfold supporting evidence via quote or paraphrase into one’s sentences. But by the time one is in high school, it might be too late or insupportable to teach the value of rhythm, the power of varied sentence length, the priceless weight of emphasis and inflection, the music of our spoken–or written–words.

The mother: “I think it loses its meaning.”

Can it?

Up in the air and over the wall/till I can see so wide/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside.

I can imagine the daughter standing at the corner of the sofa, reciting. Or seated at the table, head bent over her coloring, reciting. UP in the AIR and Over the WALL till I can SEE so WIDE.

What is the rhythm of this poem if not Stevenson swinging himself? Back and forth, back and forth. The daughter may be sitting at the table, colored pencil in hand, but the words she is saying are motion, and they are moving her back and forth with the poet himself, with all children anywhere ever who have sometime swung on a swing.

Till I look down on the garden green/Down on the roof so brown

Stevenson’s poem will lose its meaning only when there are no longer children outside because they’ve all turned to their iPhones, when all the swings sit idle, when the rushing breeze and flying force born of a child’s volition loses all power to answer.

Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!

“Thoughts?”

Yes. That surely some of the meaning is lost on the daughter, for whom swinging in this way is so close–for now–to her everyday experience. For her, for now, this mother is doing everything right: getting this poem in the child’s head. It’s Stevenson’s cadence that will keep it there, and so she’ll be saying it in her head for years to come.

And someday she‘ll be pushing her little one on the swing and admiring how the breeze pushes that one sweet curl back and forth, and she’ll mindlessly start saying the poem to her curly-headed cherub. And suddenly the poem’s meaning will bring happy tears to her eyes, just because the realization is so sweet, and she’ll know for the first time that her mother gave her that poem–a gift– years ago, and she’s only just opening it now.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Yes. We think so. Scotland is small enough. How many Stevensons can there be?

“Mom, are we related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Sure. Why not?

The post Two Questions appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking spots in the senior lot. Would they vie for a spot when they are seniors, and Katherine’s someday first car being a motor home. They did not talk about classmates, about other students, although the conversation sometimes goes this way. Because what is high school–around coursework and extracurricular everything– but a time in close proximity to people who are and are not like you, the joys and challenges this brings?

The girls’ school sits in a beautiful block of our city, one whose approach is filled with small and charming houses, sidewalks, tall trees. The school itself is a sprawling, seven-building affair, lined with trees but leaving little room for lawn, except in front of the middle school. On Thursday morning, I saw and heard something I’d never noticed before: that lawn filled with students literally at play.

I was, of course, driving. The car-line and commuter traffic is considerable here. I couldn’t pay close attention to these middle-schoolers on the lawn. But Katherine explained that this was a privilege granted to students who maintained grades to a certain standard, and by evidence of their apparent enjoyment, this seemed a worthwhile reward.

I tried to watch them–impossible–as I drove past. What they were busy at, if everyone was included. Who was engaged, how they were playing. And if anyone–isn’t there always someone who does?–stood or sat alone.

If I look for the source of this impulse, probable causes assert themselves one after the other. When I taught school–so recently, so long ago–I made it my business to like every one of my students. Because we learn better, don’t we?, from the people who earnestly like us for who we are. When I think of my own children at school–long ago or now–and the pain I feel at their potential isolation. When I think of seventh grade and how I hoped to have someone to sit with at lunch. Or when I hear (rare, once?) the story from my father, brilliant but not athletic as a child, who stood against the brick wall of his school during gym class, enduring.

I tried to get a clear look at the middle schoolers, but they moved like leaves blown over the lawn, and I didn’t know any of them.

Thursday morning was beautiful. The morning light slanted in its warm way through the buildings and the trees. I pulled up to the drop-off point, and like a fool I said to the girls as they got out of the car that every one of them is precious. All the students in the school are precious, I said, even the one who makes you cry in math. Because on the second day of school this year a boy in someone’s math class made her cry. We are not naming names.

The girls are not sure they agree with me when it comes to who is precious and who isn’t, and they said so as they hurried out of the car, pulling their backpacks behind them, slamming the doors.

I proceeded, slowly, through the line.

It was September. It is still September, and it’s not fall yet, not quite autumn if you’re going by the calendar that marks the solstice and equinox. When I was teaching and the school calendar all too soon eclipsed what was left of summer, I insisted on the equinox, if only to myself, and that fall didn’t arrive until September 21st.

It goes too fast: this life, these days. Unless you are in high school. Or middle school, which may be worse.

It was still summer on that warm Thursday morning, as I proceeded in the burnished morning light through the car lines. The trees were still green: the decorative pear by the high school’s front entrance, the crepe myrtle in bloom.

Then I drove under the live oaks. A wind gusted, and leaves like amber blades spun down and cut the air. Emma and Katherine were out of the car; they had gone their separate ways, but for a few moments still in the car line, I was driving next to Emma and watching her in my way. She did not look at me, already focused on the day ahead, already at school. But I watched her as I slowly pulled past, saw her beautiful blonde hair and watched as she was enveloped into the school.

The post Morning Drop-Off appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I have never felt that his was my story to tell. I had the privilege of being his teacher for only a few short months, you see, and that is nowhere near long enough to discover anyone, let alone this bright-eyed boy, this sometimes seven-year-old-wonder in a fourteen-year-old body. Like anyone else, he was not expendable, and in a thousand years of knowing, of finding him faithfully attending my class, pouring himself into essays (sweat of his brow and mind), I would not have come to know the fractaled beauty of his limitless imagination, let alone him, himself (each of us inimitable, irreplaceable, priceless).

I almost never, anyway, came to know my freshmen until the second semester (hiding as they are within the remnants of their eighth-grade selves), and this one wasn’t one to push himself forward, wasn’t one to make himself known through either boisterous engagement or distraction. It was, instead, reputation (said Lauren in 9th, 10th, 12th grade: “my little brother is so cute!) and side-line observation (Oh! he’s that little one! (he was so small)) that arrived ahead of him in room 214, that stood him out (he would not stand out himself). And then that day, working on projects, and he walked past my desk and made those sounds– whirring whistle whatwasit?– that was my beginning of Blake.

And how did I know him after that but in those thoughtful essays that were really so much better than he’d hoped, and in the way he made his classmates laugh, and in the way he talked to everybody, and in the way he listened. I knew him in the way he was so slow (So Slow! So Hurry Up, Blake!) and the way he would not let me squeeze his cheeks (And who would? Only his sister had told me to try it). I knew him squeezing under desks to sit on the floor in the discussion circle. I knew him pondering what to do with squashed banana. I knew him peripherally, in the way of the classroom, in the way that I was there for all of them in only the ways they needed me and nothing more– and Blake didn’t need me so much. Which was, of course, Just Fine.

In October, he took home the lesson of the ziggurat. I could see it in his face, in those bright brown eyes. I could see it in the way all teachers can see (sometimes) the lesson go home. That the ziggurat was the way of pleading with the gods, of trying to please them and then getting from them what they wanted. But the God we know and serve isn’t like those gods. Not at all.

I watched those words go home for Blake, just quietly behind his brown eyes.

And on the last day (We didn’t know it was the last day. Who would have guessed? Still we are surprised by it. Still. A year later and we are still surprised), I watched him struggle with newborn understanding, watched him try to press a verbal foot through the door of avid discussion, all of them hot on the trail of what it might mean to live under tyranny, what might be the consequence of real and unlimited power. The bell was about to ring and they were jotting down final notes on their notecards and Blake (hurry!) was the last one (of course!) to leave. He handed me his card (he wrote on it, front and back, trying to shape thought into words), and standing at my desk he explained himself (marvelous mind!): That legislated morality is impossible; that legislated morality Isn’t Morality At All.

I sat still after he left, holding for a moment his notecard and thinking that in a thousand years of teaching, in hundreds of years of well-planned readings and open discussion and opportunity for students to draw their own conclusions, moments like this one would still be (so rich, so thoughtful, so wise his conclusion) So Rare.

And he, too, was so rare. Each of us is so rare that our going (like Blake’s the next day– unforeseen, unimaginable) will leave a void unfillable and dark.

An empty desk, an empty locker, an empty space shaped like Blake (he was so small, but growing taller; his face so perfect, eyes so bright). It’s enough to make you want to do over that January day, that innocent play, that adventurousness that wasn’t at all the dare-devil. They were only playing. He was just a boy– inimitable, irreplaceable, priceless. His loss is enough to make you want to build a ziggurat so you could call the gods down: “you get down here and fix it!”

But Blake knew better than that.

“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8: 38-39

He has already come down, and He has fixed it.

The rest is waiting and living in hope and loving the inimitable, the irreplaceable, the priceless that is everywhere (everyone) all around us.

Blake knew that, too.

www.blakesstory.com

The post Knowing Blake appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I love seeing how the sun falls in the breakfast room in a silent house at 2 p.m. on a September Wednesday.

I love having the laundry done, so that kids who dirtied their uniforms only yesterday have them spanking clean and ready to go today.

I loved being on Emma’s field trip to the Eno River yesterday, just going along for the fun of it and to be helpful, and not — this time — being completely responsible for everyone.

I love not being exhausted when it’s time for Will’s soccer game. Or Everett’s cross country meet. Or Emma’s volleyball match.

I love having time to write notes on my children’s lunch napkins.

I love those bedtime conversations, which I am suddenly so much more free to have because I don’t have a raft of papers to grade or a class to prep for or an early morning meeting.

I am so grateful.

And last night– Parent Night at our school– I could attend as Pure Parent and not, as has always heretofore been the case, as Teacher. I didn’t have to get up in front of everyone and welcome them to my classroom and my course, and describe our syllabus and rationale, and guess without reading nametags whose parents I was talking to because of the family resemblance.

Until last night– until recently– I had always felt more like the Teacher at our school than I ever did the Parent.

I know people who Love Change. There are rumors of them, certainly, and I’m pretty sure that all those people bungy-jumping and drinking Mountain Dew in the television commercials are of their ilk. They are beautiful and have great teeth, and they are always having a good time. I’ve actually met a few, too: people who declare, “I love change,” and then go on to sing its benefits. They always seem so strong to me, those people, so healthy and hale.

I am not like them.

I am, instead, a look-over-her-shoulder kind of girl. Maybe you know the type? Maybe you are one?

Change is good. It’s very good, even vital. It promotes growth; it’s an indicator of life; it means development and even, one hopes, improvement.

But it doesn’t always also mean that What Came Before was bad. What Came Before was sometimes, even often, good, too. Which is what makes the decision to make the change Just So Difficult sometimes.

Last night, watching my colleagues express with mastery and humility, joy and humor what it is they teach and why they love it and their students, I missed it all. I missed my classes and curriculum, my classroom. I missed the ringing bell and the debate about whether we ought to have bells. I missed the joy of opening worlds for my students: Gilgamesh’s world and Odysseus’ world and the world of the biblical Jacob. I missed our writing rubric and helping my students find their argument, and the joy of seeing them discover how to develop an argument in papers short and long. I missed our discussions. I missed my students. I missed my (former) colleagues.

There may be teaching again in my future. I rather hope so. But a school, like so much else, is a river.

And Right Now is so good. Right now– life here at home– is a river too. I am grateful to have time to pay attention to it.

But for a person who doesn’t love change, then what we have here is just a quiet recognition of that fact. And it is also, more importantly, a quiet recognition that what I did before now– teaching all day in the halls of Trinity School— was So Good, Too.

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

-Robert Frost, “Reluctance”

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Last night was Will’s first soccer game of the school year. It’s still more than a week before the first day of school, but soccer has been underway for a while now. Yesterday’s game felt familiar: the boys tore up the field and all of us parents sat on the sidelines, growing damp and agitated in the August swelter and the intensity of the game.

This week has seen another first: Will driving me to soccer practice—or, rather, Will driving himself to soccer practice with me coming along for the ride. Such is the demand of his learner’s permit, and I obediently comply, texting in the passenger’s seat like a teenager and occasionally fussing with the radio.

Firsts are, typically and understandably, active things, things one does rather than doesn’t. First step, first kiss, first day of school. The inevitability of the latter has recently made itself known at our house. It looms in the piles of school supplies, in the boys’ fresh haircuts, in the list of things yet to do.

In consequence, I almost missed the first that is today. It’s a rare inactive first, a not doing rather than a doing, and it is quietly changing my life: I am not at school today.

Today is the back-to-work day at our school, the day when the returning teachers Must Absolutely Be There, a day of meetings long and short, and the beginning of the preparation for the Beginning. This day has always been every bit of enormous for me, marking a necessary shift in focus from my life at home to my life at school. It introduces lesson plans and class lists, and it presages piles of papers—my primary reading material over the next nine months.

It also means the renewed fellowship of faculty, that low and constant rhythm that serves as support to our work; and it promises the students– those worlds of effort and ideas that somehow become, over those months, a new world of shared laughter and deep mutual regard.

This is the first day in six years that this is not my first day.

Instead I am at home and will be for a while, the first time since Emma was born that I will not be teaching, the first time not homeschooling, the first time not in graduate school.

What in this world will I do?

Laundry. And cleaning. And laundry. And driving. And watching kids’ games, and shuttling kids to lessons. And laundry.

And reading things Just Because I Want To.

And writing. Oh My Yes. Lots and Lots of Writing.

I Can’t Wait.

The post A First Sentence appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that feeds my longing for grey skies and the need to wear coats against the cold and the audible silence of a snowfall.

in the weight of the school year—and the interminable demands for lesson plans at the ready and papers graded, in the faces of students who need me. We lost ourselves in Oedipus Rex and lined note-cards, in research and the citing of sources, the dangers of plagiarism. The weekdays are relentless in their fullness; and in January, morning comes in the dark—a practice that defies all kindness.

in travel to Shanghai—a twelve-hour time change, coming and going. My mother says it costs you 24-hours for every time zone you cross, but I didn’t do the math. Who knows how long it takes to recover from such monumental shifts? The clock arbitrates our days, but what if we refuse to submit to it? We left Shanghai at six p.m. on Sunday and arrived three hours earlier—three p.m, on Sunday—in Chicago. When in the world were we?

in a new kitchen—and oh, I am so grateful. The cabinets are clean, the storage ample. I can’t believe it’s mine. But there again are the days of dishevelment, the appliances and pantry stashed in boxes on the living room floor. We picked our way through them to find the cereal; I earned a serious bruise from accidental interaction with the rice cooker. To say the process has been unsettling would be nothing short of true, the gratitude notwithstanding.

But none of this made me forget. It was something else entirely.

It was that day at the end of January, that Saturday so like any other, when the news came through the phone line that my student had been killed. A freak accident. Who would have thought? In the sliver of a second, he was pulled from this life to the next and all of the rest of us are still standing at the void, peering into the open space that he had filled: at school, an empty desk, an idle locker; at home, an empty bed, a mother’s aching arms.

I lack the language for such appalling loss. I had only just begun to know him. We all needed more time. He was such a beautiful boy.

God lost His Son, too.

I was home on Good Friday, a day off from school, a day to grade papers, to navigate the new kitchen, to negotiate again with God this recent rending. And at the kitchen window, I saw them: the newborn leaves on the maple tree, carried along by the wind. Pulled by invisible agency along with all the other newborn leaves around them, all the other trees who had waited out the winter, who had sustained the months of deadness for this—this glorious movement, unmetered. I had forgotten until Friday how leaves in the wind can look so much like plants underwater. I had forgotten

how beautiful it is.

Not too many days after Blake died, Rachel left a gift in my mailbox. It was a little something lovely, something nice for me to wear. It was to remind me, she said, that there remains some beauty in the world.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. -John Donne, 1572-1631

The post Reminded appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

My tennis elbow– earned two years ago when I spent every spare minute typing away at my Master’s thesis– has recently (are we surprised?) returned. And just now, my eyes glazed with fatigue, I wiped at some specks on my computer screen: an array of them, origin unknown, scattered there like some archipelago of dried spittle on the glowing monitor. What could that be, I wondered to myself, stroking them gently with the sleeve of my bathrobe.

They did not remove.

And then I realized: Oh, these are just the dots over some letter i‘s. Letter i‘s that I put there on purpose. I‘s Come With Dots in the lower case, don’t you know.

Maybe I’m just tired?

The post Friday Night appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.