To Coffee or Not to Coffee?

I am undecided on coffee.

I go through phases. The thought of a homemade latte in the morning gets me out of bed with a flutter of hope rippling through my stomach. The caffeine is a burst of joy. It expands in my chest as I softly sing along to Lady Gaga on my morning commute, a rainbow of every shade of green flashing past my window. The energy tingles down my fingertips and my brain buzzes with new ideas for lesson plans, pieces together poetic phrases, makes the untenable reality of a working mom in 2022 feel completely and totally doable.

Sometimes the tingling becomes too intense. It starts to feel like tiny, jarring bolts of electricity churning in my stomach and creating a cloudy whirlpool of anxiety in my mind.

Then one day, my body rejects the bitter, murky mug of brown liquid. I physically cannot get it past my throat, even as my exhausted body and weary mind crave the burst of energy. I try again the next day, but I still cannot tolerate it. A week goes by, then a month. I keep my head down. Wake up, perform the herculean miracle of getting two little kids out of bed and off to daycare, teach 5 classes of middle school in a row, then return home to cook dinner. My six-year-old asks non-stop questions and my three-year-old repeatedly rams into my legs like a very angry, sharp-horned bull as I chop onions and stir lentils. Repeat daily for two months, no coffee. My brain is a constant, dull, muddled grey.

But the anxiety seems to have lifted. My days feel grey, but steady. I’m no longer a roller-coaster of adrenaline, starting out as joy and ending in paralysis.

Summer break arrives. I detox from the breakneck pace of teacher-mom life for two weeks on the Oregon Coast, in the cocoon of my parents’ home. Detach from the news, the constant injustices, the trauma of teaching though a pandemic. I decide to try again.

“Coffee?” my mom asks. “You don’t drink coffee anymore, do you?”

I pause. I consider how I haven’t felt that tingle of anxiety shredding the inside of my nervous system for several weeks. Also, I note that I can no longer recall the last time I felt the color of joy; it has all been grey for a while now. Not black. Not depression. Just grey. The grey of not knowing what the hell is going on in the world or where on earth you are trying to get to. A complete inability to even identify your emotions, because there were so many of them and they have all swirled together into a heavy cement brick in the pit of your stomach.

“Actually, I’ll try a cup of coffee.”

It goes down my throat and it tastes good. The caffeine doesn’t ramp up my nerves, because there are no classes to teach or places to be. Only beaches to roam and beautiful children to laugh with. My kids spend hours and hours in the back of Grampa’s rusted white pickup truck, making tacos with screwdrivers and nails kept in an old tin bubble gum container. The caffeine once again swirls as possibility in my stomach.

I stay up way too late every night of the summer, reading and writing. The words flow and flow. I refuse to overanalyze them or preoccupy myself with their future value. The value is in the present, in the way I feel as my fingers scurry across the keyboard, piecing together combinations of words. There is color fluttering in my mind and chest again.

I question if the caffeine is giving me the emotion – and what that means. Or, is it the other way around? Did my emotions change, allowing me to enjoy my coffee again? I wonder what the lack of sleep is doing to my health. But I don’t think the greyness was healthy either. The grey wasn’t me. I’m sparks of color, aren’t I? For now, at least.