Microwaved Salad

“I decided not to eat my salad today,” my colleague says to me at lunch with a big smile. She’s eating her salad, forkful of lettuce halfway up to her mouth as she says this.

I smile at her, waiting for my brain to catch her meaning. It doesn’t, so I end up just staring at her for one long second.

She realizes I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Oh! You must not have been in here yet yesterday when I heated my salad.”

“OH!” chimes in our other colleague. “I though you said, ‘I decided not to EAT my salad’ and I thought, isn’t she eating it right now?” That’s what I’d thought as well.

“No, no… yesterday I heated up my salad in the microwave by accident.”

Another co-worker joins from across the room: “Yeah, I took it out of the microwave when it beeped, and I thought, well that’s different.”

We all bust up laughing. It feels like we have been back in school for 4 weeks already. Or that we never left. It has been 4 days since Winter Break. Monday was a snow day. We got the call that school was cancelled exactly 3 minutes after I started the coffee maker.

Today we drove by creeks creeping inches from road level, water already spilling into multiple stretches of the street. I think it has been one day, but it feels as though it has been raining nonstop for weeks.

I have never experienced the weather as a stress-trigger before. But in these times, weather events seem like one more layer of bizarre hellishness cast down from universe, reminding us that we are not in control.

This morning, another teacher from my school stopped by my room on the way down the hall to apologize. “Sorry about yesterday – when you said good morning to me all I could say was ‘hey.’” His “hey” had come in an uncharacteristically unfriendly tone, from one of the goofiest teachers on staff. He mentioned that the snowy and rainy weather had got him a bit down this week. We commiserated briefly about wanting to have a more positive mentality but finding this difficult lately.

I hadn’t for a second interpreted his “hey” the morning before as rude or unfriendly. I saw a person in stress. Because I know that stress.

I noticed that I too failed to greet a coworker this week, without meaning to. I saw another teacher down the hall as I walked out of my classroom, looked directly at her, and continued walking. It’s as if I didn’t have the energy to raise my arm and rotate my palm left to right. Like I was frozen. The word “hello” never left my tongue, and I didn’t realize it until I closed the bathroom door, feeling confused.

Lately we all seem to walk around school dazed and confused.

In a meeting Wednesday, we told one of our administrators how impressed we are with how she has managed everything this school year in such a calm and collected manner. She replied, “You know, I passed the point of being angry or upset about any of this a loooong time ago.” Then added sarcastically, “Of course, part of my soul had to die for that to happen…”

I’m still waiting for that part of my soul to die. The part that cares too much.

The impossible thing about being a teacher is knowing that what we do matters… Yet to maintain our sanity intact, we have to somehow convince ourselves that what we do doesn’t matter that much. Then, sometimes we have to re-convince ourselves that what we do actually matters.

My soul hasn’t died yet, and something strange has happened to my emotions. They are always there, bubbling at the surface. They never go just a few inches deeper, down past my throat or somewhere I can get a tiny respite. But strangely, I can function in, around and over them in a way I couldn’t do just a couple years ago. (“Able to function” being a potentially debatable analysis of the situation.)

I can be in a deep, raw conversation with a mentor at 9:21am, eyes sucking back hot tears, and at 9:30 I’m greeting students at the door with an energetic smile. Eight amazing students from eight countries around the world learning English at eight different levels. We chart, sketch, discuss, write and share for 50 minutes, and my tears stay tucked back under my eyelids for the next 6 hours.

I get an email from a precious student – she tested positive for COVID and wants to check in so she can stay on track with her learning from home. My throat tightens up and my breath shortens. I feel dumb and dramatic for caring. 59.4M cases, 835K deaths. What did you expect – of course you have one student. I shake the panicky tingling out of my fingertips, step into the doorway and begin greeting every student who walks by: “¡Hola!” “¡Buenos días!” “¿Cómo estás?” Many smile and say “hola” back – even the ones not in my Spanish classes.

The weight of the world is in my throat at any moment during the day, threatening to explode. Yet I step into my classroom and keep on moving – swapping broken student masks while explaining verb conjugation, orchestrating a choral reading while directing a student to dispose of a Ziplock bag containing an open ketchup packet floating in water. (Don’t ask). I have no idea if this is me developing some kind of emotional resilience, being able to switch from emotional train wreck one moment to competent teacher the next, or… ?

At lunchtime, the teachers file by. They have a look on their faces. I know it so well. It’s a glazed over expression of numb anxiety. A half-smile of What the hell world is this?

There is beauty and joy in the shared experience of this ridiculous moment in time. We greet each other in the halls with nothing more than raised eyebrows and an eye roll, and we understand each other. That one look says, Is this real life? It says, I see you. Me too.

As we play ping pong daily with our fears and exhaustion, every single educator at my school continues to do outstanding work with students. I feel proud of that. We continue to show up. We laugh and cry. We swap hilarious stories of wearing two different boots to church, of organizing a parent-teacher meeting and forgetting to invite the parents, of getting into somebody else’s car after leaving a restaurant.

Sometimes we pretend to be fine, and other times we tell the truth. We wish we could be fine. And we may be fine again someday soon. But for now, we’ll keep nourishing ourselves with microwave-crisped greens and celebrating when we make it to work with two shoes on, any two shoes. Because that’s the best most of us have got right now, and that’s fine.