Took a little while, but I'm teaching again.
When I moved to Seattle some eighteen months ago, I was awfully pregnant. The end of my New York experience blitzed by too quickly for me to take it all in. I remember directing a showcase for my final class of students while waddling slightly, and kissing them goodbye in a flurry of light cues and performance adrenaline. I remember they baked me a cake, and there were no plates or forks, so one of them ended up running to Duane Reade on a tech break to return with utensils. I remember sitting on the edge of the stage, swinging my legs and quipping about baby names. I remember some of them cried when we said goodbye.
Then I was here, and then came Rafa, and he was a lot to take in.
And I've watched Oscar transform from a baby into a boy. Again, a lot to take in.
Plenty, really, for a long time there.
I'm their mom, you see, and to them it's the only thing I know how to do. I'm proud of what I've learned so far about mom-ness. Mom-ness has been -- and will continue to be -- extraordinarily educational, consuming, frustrating, fun.
In the interim, I've also had to re-learn who else I am. I've been as patient as I know how to be. More patient, actually, then I've ever known how to be before. Waiting for my turn again.
Because everything that will ever happen in my life will always happen within this context of mom-ness. I will never not be their mother. I will never not have that job.
So if I do any other sort of job, I have to figure out how to make it work again: tend to all of it.
Funny, I'd been away from teaching so long that I began to doubt I'd ever truly get back to it. There were no jobs; I was in a new city; there was never any energy; there was never any time.
I was sorely tempted to lose heart.
Was that it?, I asked myself. Maybe it simply won't happen again. I'm not the woman I was anymore . . .
. . . and OFF went that inner giving-up switch. If I were a giver-upper, I'd never have become an artist in the first place. Instead, I did what I've always done: the work, the work, the work.
And
It happened.
You know what? It wasn't magical. Magic didn't do it. Instead, it happened how things really happen. Through working. And waiting. And loving.
I had to re-sow some seeds that resisted sprouting. (The middle peat pot, if you're wondering. Parsley.)
But look:
It is happening, in its own time.
What these college kids will think of me remains to be seen.
