Spainiversary

Dear The-Shar-You-Were-on-25-May-2011:

Today, you are going to turn your Verizon phone off for the very last time. You never thought this would be your life: you were going to keep it low-key in the Midwest until the day you died. Even though you've been emailing those poor people at WorldVenture for four years, always dragging your feet to commit to a plan that seemed as plausible as a fairy tale, you are going to get on a plane and do something that those other girls do--the ones who are braver and smarter and better-traveled than you.

You are going to land in Madrid on May 26th, sleep-deprived and hungry, blinking at all that sun, all that heat. Sheryl will make scrambled eggs for breakfast; Lisa will notice you're looking a bit ill and invite you to nap in her basement. There will be no soundtrack playing majestic arrival music, even though everyone who is cheering via facebook will think your life has suddenly become glamorous and perfect. Camarma will slam you into the truth: that life is life no matter where you live. (Some of us get to live in beautiful, warm countries, but we still sweat.) Still, there will be a bouquet in the colors of the Spanish flag handed to you by people who have never met you before but have already decided to love you. You will walk quietly to your new house with your overstuffed suitcases, and the cardigan that made it all the way across the ocean will not make it across the street because you'll accidentally roll your luggage wheels over it. You'll wear it anyway.

Adjusting to España will make you feel like a complete idiot. This is totally normal. You won't be able to do anything easily, like set up your internet--so let go of that independent spirit you're so proud of and ask for help. Trust me. Your new friends want you to make it here. They will talk about a "new normal," and you'll shrivel up like a dried-out barnacle inside because you can't do anything. But in the heat of a July day, you will take the bus to Alcala all by yourself. It'll feel like a birthday party, like meeting the Queen! It'll be a baby step back to adulthood. You'll do it again and again and again, and before you know what's really happening, it'll be normal. Your terror of imperfection will scuttle out of the house like those big beetles you keep finding belly-up in your shower, and you'll forget that this was all so hard once.

Neither your house nor your school will have A/C, but you'll learn where all the community pools are. Your washing machine will be in the kitchen; your dryer is a plastic rack on the back patio. You'll forget how carpet feels, and you'll get in the very Spanish habit of leaving your shoes on whenever you enter a house. Your winter heating bill will make you scream (these brick houses aren't made for holding heat)--the numbers weren't even that high in a North Dakotan January! However, there is a trade-off: this will be the nicest winter of your life. Your bathroom will have a bidet, and you'll use it...to stack your towels on before you get into the shower. (You won't even care about shaving your legs after awhile; the shower isn't big enough; the hot water doesn't last long enough.)

You will never get to stop explaining to friends at home that Spain is not Mexico. That Spain isn't really Europe, either. That Spaniards don't eat tacos and quesadillas, don't even like spicy food! Your school won't start lunchtime until 1:41pm, and you won't dream of looking for a supper venue until at least 8pm. You'll start drinking coffee (Spanish style, of course, drowning in milk and sugar); you'll even start ordering pop at restaurants because the water isn't free anyway (your choices will always, only, be Coke and Fanta, with the occasional Aquarius). You won't even think about ordering milk to go with your meal; milk is for old people and babies, and besides, the boxed shelf milk tastes nothing like the frothy coldness you've loved since childhood. You will drink sangria and tinto de verano with other Christians during a meal, and no one will gasp at the presence of alcohol. You'll try tapas, paella, crisp barras de pan, tortilla (which, again, is not the flat Mexican kind but the egg-y, potato-y, quiche-y kind)--but you'll draw the line at jamon serrano, since the hoof still attached to that giant ham hock makes it rather unappealing. And the smell. And the fact that it's hanging in the middle of the grocery store, unrefrigerated, in a row of other giant pig legs. Your churros won't be coated in cinnamon and sugar; they'll be plain and greasy and dipped in chocolate that tastes like warm pudding. In Spain, food is a way of life, so you'll be able to sit in a restaurant for hours, no one subtly trying to shuffle you out the door to make way for the next customer. You'll pay your bills with Euros that look like Monopoly money, or leave behind a tray full of 1 and 2-Euro coins. When you find that American dollar bill smashed into the back of a drawer, you'll wonder why it looks so big and green, so unpretty. You'll wish they used 20 and 50-cent coins at home. You won't leave a tip.

You'll start craving Reese's Cups and Skittles, and someone will tell you their secret cooking substitutes, like Greek yogurt for of sour cream. Bags of chocolate chips, powdered sugar, Crisco will be big sellers at ECA's sweet shop since they're not imported here. Your diet will stop consisting of mainly cereal; you'll switch to avocados and hummus and those fantastic lemon-flavored Bocadito cookies they sell at SuperCamarma. When you make that rare visit to McDonald's or BK, you'll puzzle over the pronunciation of the items listed in English. Just say it with a Spanish accent. Seriously. No one knows what a BK Fusion is, but they'll happily serve a bay-kay foo-thyon. Yes, say it with the lisp, too. It's not a true lisp, not the exaggerated Daffy Duck spit-talk you joked about before you got here. It's a quiet "th" that slips into everything, and when you talk about plazas (which you will do almost daily), you'll forget that it's not a "platha." Mas o menos and perdona will become a natural part of your vocabulary, even when you're speaking English. If you're surrounded by French speakers, you'll accidentally default to Spanish and sound effects, awkward hand motions. You know you'll get back to the States one day and tell your cashier, "Grathias! 'A luego!"

You will slowly develop the art of bagging your own groceries while simultaneously paying the bill. The cashier will try to rush you through the line with her stare, despite the fact that you're juggling five Carrefour bags' worth of produce. You'll pay in cash (checks don't exist here), and even if it's a Saturday morning and you just need some bread at the local tienda, you'll comb your hair, trade in that hoodie for a nicer shirt. If you leave the house sporting the American casual grunge look, rest assured the well-dressed ladies on the street will stare. This is not the States: you cannot run to Walmart in your pajamas. Some of your neighbors will wave when they see you, like Juan and his giant dog Lula. The rest you will never get to know because they disappear behind the gates every house has, behind the barred windows. Your internal radar will slowly clue in to siesta hours, remind you to not even bother with the store between 2 and 5pm--or on Sundays. If you need lunch for Monday, buy it Saturday morning before everything closes down. Seriously. You will eat far too many lunches that contain far too little food, and tuna on Saltines is not a Spanish delicacy. Write that down somewhere.

Even though you're not great with numbers, you will eventually memorize the structure of the 24-hour clock. You'll start writing the date as 26 May and prices with commas instead of periods (€1,00). Your heart will stop for a moment when you see the number at the bottom of your bank statement--don't freak out! It's just the conversion from pesetas. Speaking of conversion, shut off your internal money converter as soon as possible (but don't forget to thank the ATM when it offers a good exchange rate!). You will memorize the Celsius rhyme and understand why 40° means sudden death, but you'll never quite figure out the equivalents of a Kg or a Km, except for the Ryanair backpack weight requirements, which you'll memorize in two seconds, along with your passport number. (It'll be nine months before you remember your 9-digit cell phone number.) Also, even by next May, you won't know how much a Kcal is, so when you pick up a chocolate bar, be thankful for your ignorance.

You've spent a lot of time stressing over your paperwork, and it won't get easier once you arrive in Spain. In fact, by the time you get your first residency card, it'll be nearly time to apply for your second one. Nothing will happen on time; the government will not share your concern for efficiency. Neither will the cashier at KFC, who will take your order, go into the back to cook your meal, and return five minutes later to take your change. Spain doesn't move quickly, and once you accept that, you'll be able to breathe. You'll understand the importance of being. You'll learn to roll with a country that's always behind schedule (except for the Camarma bus, which sometimes rolls away early without you on board).

I know you're trying to be smart with your limited packing space, but you should toss that extra pair of black boots in your suitcase right now. Probably the pink tennis shoes, too. No one sells size 11 women's shoes here, Shar. When you ask, they will give you crazy eyes and make you feel like the Jolly Green Giant, except you're really more of a Jolly White Giant, especially when you lean down in church to give those old ladies you don't know a kiss on both cheeks.

You'll love Spain's pedestrian way of life, that the dead of night is for families instead of creepers. Old people will pull their plastic chairs into the middle of the street for their nightly chat fest, and dogs will run without leashes and never disappear, and you will have to watch carefully to avoid the poop on the sidewalks, which, by the way, are wide enough for exactly 1.5 people.

Your front yard will have tile instead of grass, but if you really want to see nature, you can hop a flight to a different country for less than the price of gas to Minnesota. You'll figure out when to press the "stop" button on the bus and how to figure out where the end of a waiting line is when no line-like formation is visible. You will see more denim jumpsuits and more mullets in Spain than you ever thought modern society could produce; you will see makeout couples at every turn. You will know which street performers frequent which tourist attractions in Madrid, and you'll breathe in clouds of secondhand smoke as you slide through the city. At night, the storks will clack their beaks. The dry heat of summer will suck your lungs dry. The gypsies at the train station will approach you, selling herbs; they will shake your arm, and it will shake your whole being because you're not used to saying such sharp nos to people, people who are God's creation, too. When someone begs for money on the metro, you will feel insecure about dropping a euro in the palm of a trafficking victim. You will sit quietly, not make eye contact, burn at your cowardice, wonder why it's you who didn't end up in their place, you with all your deficiencies.

The radio will randomly spit out American power ballads from the 90's. Dogs will be allowed in all the stores. The restrooms won't often have soap or TP, but the stalls will be fully enclosed, although it might take some maneuvering to fit those long legs inside the door. Pedestrians have the right of way, though you'll never feel fully comfortable just stepping into the crosswalk while a car blazes toward you, just a block away. You'll be free of all the American election campaigns, all the arguing, free now that you're in a Socialist country--but you'll still experience minor panic when you hear about the transportation strike that sprouted overnight, the protestors crowding Sol to complain about unemployment for the umpteenth time this year. You won't miss having a regular cell phone plan nor a car. That is, the idea of a car will be nice until you see all those glorietas, watch friends take and retake the driver's test, spend thousands of dollars to learn the rules that drivers don't follow anyway. The customer is not the company.

You'll read so many UK-published books that you'll forget whether you've always spelled it recognise or recognize. Neighbour will suddenly look so much more appropriate. And why does the UK get better book covers? You will spend many months pondering this--along with how wrong it is that Percy Jackson defends New York against tonnes of Titans. You will take the elevator to Nivel 2 if you want to get to the third floor, since the first floor is just called 0. There won't be screens on any windows ("keeps the flies in"), and there won't be such thing as customer service.

Shar, there are so many things that seem different now, but by the end of the summer, you won't remember what's new and what you've always known. You will meet a schoolful of kids who can flip back and forth between two or three languages fluidly, who will laugh kindly at your Spanish accent, who will fill in those "nationality" bubbles on standardized tests with something other than "Caucasian." Your American lit. curriculum, trying so hard to be multicultural by incorporating a bunch of Hispanic writers, will turn out to be a dream because your kids can pronounce the words, know what they mean. Those kids, they will grab onto your heart so tightly you'll fear it'll be punctured and deflate, but you will hold on just as fiercely, and you will come to adore them. They will get more talkative; they will get weirder. They will tell you secrets, and you'll weep for them, you'll hold them, you'll hand them books, you'll spend way too many hours grading their papers, you will look out a plane window on the way back from France and think to yourself, "I can barely make it through this semester; how on earth will I survive another year?" And almost as soon as you think it, another thought will kick those words over: "Why are these kids only in my life for two years? Why is this moving so fast?"

You will hurt and you will heal. You will fall in love with a bunch of kids who have nothing in particular to make them lovable except that they are themselves, and that will pry open another tiny window of understanding about the way God sees you. You will never, ever feel fully at home in Spain, but you will start to love it anyway.

When May 26th, 2012, shows up, you will look back at twelve months that can no longer fit inside your brain, and it'll seem as though it's always been this way. There's a wistfulness about this milestone, this halfway point. The past year has been a trek to keep going, stone by stone, building toward one year, but now the numbers reverse. You reach twelve months and you've only got twelve months left. You'll have to start counting down, counting away, from everything that just got familiar, but don't count too fast. Just walk forward, month by month, and breathe in the roses that are spilling over gates into your street. The next year can't possibly move as fast as the past one but surely will, and you need to squeeze the life out of it because there are still people to love. Your life is, for now, still here.

When you board that 8-hour flight toward Barajas, you will still be questioning whether this is the right decision, and you will revisit the question at least fifty-seven times during the next year. But you will always, always come back to yes. Shar, there are twelve months ahead of things you can't even imagine. Handle each day like treasure. All of this, all of it, will always, always be yes.

-Shar
26 May 2012

All the Great Poets of Our Time

I loved poetry after e.e. cummings. In tenth grade English class, we read that "Buffalo Bill's defunct" and about thanking God for "most this amazing day," and the words tangled around me in ways I'd never quite experienced before. Even though we were stuck composing only haikus and lame fill-in-the-blank poems by twelfth grade, it so happens that a college literary magazine stuffed with poetry was all it took to convince me to pour my savings into four years as an English major.

There was a frozen yogurt machine in the college cafeteria, and I think I gained my freshman fifteen in a lone semester thanks to that machine and its caress of my sweet tooth. I ate almost as many poems as I ate junk food during those years; I woke up with fairies whispering words in my ears; I scribbled them down in the midst of lectures. I never knew that poetry was everywhere or that it was so tasty, so all-consuming. I guess I hadn't even realized that people still wrote it, thinking maybe the market had already been cornered and killed off by the likes of Englishmen a few centuries before.

This chapter in my teacher's manual lit book is titled "Words of Prose and Poetry," and it gives me a birthday-party-type euphoria. Meanwhile, I know that my kids see "poetry" and think about how they'd rather kiss one of those callus-sucking fish that give foot massages at Plenilunio. (Foot-sucker fish: I'm serious. This exists.)

When I introduced the 9th graders to poetry last month, I spent hours after school looking up my old favorites, printing out beautiful supplemental poetry, the kind that grabs you by the neck and shakes you all the way down to the metatarsals, certain that I could find something that would affect my most "special" class.

My four classes don't get equal mention on the blog. It's partly logistical: the personality mix of the 7th and 8th graders provides more story fodder than my one-person 6th grade (which only recently graduated to a duo). And the mostly fantastic 9th graders sometimes get overshadowed by a few divas with attitudes that reek like salmon in the sun. It's harder to affirm wit and whimsy in such a large class without the whole thing degenerating into Lord of the Flies. (Ironically, they are the same class to argue that Lord of the Flies is completely implausible, but I know who'd be sharpening the first spear.)

Anyway, one of the 9th graders wrote a poem about not liking poetry. (Kids always think you'll get upset about this. Seriously? You not only wrote a poem, you did it with passion. Gotcha, kid! That's an old teacher trick I learned in 'Nam.) Two of the guys, enthralled by the rhythm of blank verse, paralleled it with the sound of a heart monitor. But even in a class brimming with writers, one summarized the class feelings best when she wrote into her final poem that she couldn't wait to be done with this, that she was "so over poetry." I refrained from telling them a few things I was so over.

Instead, I deflated and braced myself for the opposition from the middle schoolers that inevitably lay ahead.

And you know, there was some. Because "poetry" is, to a seventh grader, something cryptic from ten thousand years ago that rhymes. This time, I was too tired for all the print-outs and the flashy add-ons, and so we stuck to the book, which started the chapter with an Emily Dickinson poem, which seemed unfortunate because Emily Dickinson is one of my least favorite writers on the planet. But--they got it.

And they even kinda liked it.

And when I assigned them to write poems of their own, there was magic. I got this beautiful personification poem comparing horses to preachers, ending with the lines
the sermon is
good and
the whole group
is moved to
the next pasture.

What?! Totally brilliant! Then, as an echo of Langston Hughes' "Harlem Night Song," I got "Meco Night Song," which bids the reader to "let us escape / from all these nosy eyes" while the "moon shines bright with a smile." I even received one that interrupts its cliche rosebud metaphor to cry "This poem sucks! / I want to burn it up / to watch it sizzle in despair / of ever reaching smoke-free air." (He was so passionate about the suckiness of his poem that he memorized it, recited it for the class, and--I found out later--also spent the previous night reciting it to his family.) Yeah, it's no Shakespeare, but sometimes even Shakespeare is no Shakespeare.

I have heard them standing outside the lockers after school, saying, "Have you read mine? It's pretty bad!" or "Wanna read mine? She thought it was good." One asked if he could get extra credit by singing his poem. One composed an ode to his XBox; another, to the way her family was before her mom's cancer diagnosis.

I know there are a few who are just penning poems as fast as they can, shoving them into the homework tray and, later, the trash can. And that's normal. But my seventh graders, the kiddos who have struggled most overall with writing this year, are busting out all kinds of heart-prodding, thoughtful stuff. They're figuring out that poetry is perfect when you don't have enough to say about something--or when you have too much. They're not certain exactly how to formulate an essay or a research paper, but this they understand: the words that fit around their emotions, the grammatical rules that slide over to make room for meaning, language stacked together in a way that fits their ideas better than a 3-point paragraph or a book report or a responses paper ever could.

They might not become the next great poets of the age. But they are becoming poets. Perhaps that's enough.

But who am I to underestimate? The girl who wouldn't look at me in October, the one who panicked when I asked her to read aloud, who blushes and hides when people look at her, is leaping into the door each morning, asking if she can read her poem aloud. At the front of the class. In front of everyone.

She keeps telling me, "Next year, Niki will be back. Niki is the writer of our class. Niki will write pages and pages and pages for you."

I have started saying back, "Look at you. Look at the stuff you're doing. You are the writer!"

Look at them, my seventh graders. They do not capitalize, they put commas wherever they want, they struggle with sentences that go in the right order, but they are awake and learning to feel and to describe, to match words with the deepest parts of being human. They are writers.

Keepin' it Real, Creepin' it Real

The 8th graders asked me to chaperone last night's movie party in Madrid. Sarah also got to come because she provided Skittles.

We took them to The Avengers. And before that, we went to Starbucks. And during that, they decided to talk about men.

I have mentioned before that my students like to play matchmaker. I think they mostly like projecting their own romantical feelings onto adults who can actually do something about them, and they want their teachers to be happy. And they don't understand why two people who are completely single can exist in the same place and not want to marry one another! I am aware that the same type of matchmaking discussions have been imposed on at least two other single females at our school; the only single male teacher is blissfully unaware. (Unless he secretly reads this blog, in which case, hi, Mr. H! Awkward!)

So there we were, sucking back glasses of water and frappuccinos, and the boys bring up the subject of the jungle man. Specifically, a rather buff Jason Scott Lee from 1994's live-action The Jungle Book, which, yes, I did record on a VHS from Disney Channel during my late elementary years. Someone had tossed their VHS version on the free table at school, and I, thinking it could be a good tie-in to the Rudyard Kipling we've read this year, snatched it up. I tucked it on the shelf behind my desk. And that's when the 8th graders found it. They decided that I had obtained it not for its literary merit but so that I could keep the case under my pillow at night and wake up to the face of my jungle boyfriend. Like I said, they really want me to be happy.

Over my Starbucks, I denied any affections for the jungle man, which led them back to poor Mr. H, and though I tried to explain that none of us are going to date Mr. H before he departs for the States this summer, they're unconvinced. (If they had been paying any attention at all, they'd know that comments about Thor wouldn't be as easy to deny--but during that point in the show, they were too busy giggling and spilling caramel corn all over the floor.) They spent the rest of the coffee date drinking sugar packets and trying to figure out whether Sarah or I would be a better match for Mr. H.

Today was the school Rastrillo, a school event that branches out into Camarma: carnival games, food, and garage sale rolled up into one big, fun, sweaty pile. Sarah and I were browsing the treasures; we'd just glanced over to see Mr. H picking up a plastic Chewbacca mask. He was removing it when I held up my camera and said, "Wait, put it back on! I'm going to get a picture this time!" He obliged, and I snapped this shot:

So, of course, as I flung the camera strap back across my shoulder, I turned to see my 8th grade boys watching from a few tables away, mouthing words to me.

"What? What's that?" I walked closer.

"You took a picture of him!"

"He was wearing a mask."

"It's love!"

I walked away when they started drawing hearts in the air.

Summer Calling

The winter went by, windy and dry, and all we talked about for months was how we needed rain.

The rain came with May, and we've spent the whole month avoiding the puddles that curl around the edges of the school fence. So easy for us to forget rain and talk about how we need some sun instead.

And now it is 80° outside. I remember thinking to myself, "Hm, I wonder if it'll be warm today" yesterday as I stood in front of the wardrobe before picking out a long-sleeve-and-scarf combo. I biked to the post office to pay a bill during my off-hour and spent the last ten minutes prepping for Romeo and Juliet by sponging the sweat off my neck. More than one tank-topped Spaniard gave me a questioning glance as I biked back to school, red-faced and dripping. Which reminds me: must look up translation for "sweat beast."

All the windows are open here on the third floor to prevent suffocation. The kids are getting itchy and tired; they can't stay awake in class anymore. They just can't remember things, like how to capitalize a sentence or the difference between "he" and "him." They're starting to grate on each others' nerves: things that elicited laughs at Christmas have now faded into sighs. They're done with summer, they're ready for homework, they need a break from each other, and they don't want the break to come quite yet. We're all pushing against each other right when we really need to be holding each other close.

But it's going to be too hot and sweaty for that in just a few days.

Outside, the high school kids are sorting through toys and clothes for Rastrillo (the school's gigantic rummage sale/carnival)--donations from all the families who've been scraping through, weeding out their stuff in preparation for downsizing or moves to new countries--and the smell of popcorn is sifting out from the kitchen, and I can hear whistles blowing from the basketball court outside my window, and my contacts are scratchy in my eyes. The Beatles are singing, "Here comes the sun," and I am thinking, "Here comes a nap." Still, I can't nap--gotta talk to the yearbook printer after school, then Lark Rise to Candleford with a group of friends, then crashing face-first into bed.

Everything is ending, and it's exhausting, but it's really more like beginning than anything. In three weeks, we'll be done sorting and selling and grading. All the life we've poured into making this last year a good one will be relegated to the pages of the yearbook for safekeeping. The past. Kinda like when we flip our calendars to January and talk about "last year," though it was only a day away.

I'm trying to keep the kids, and myself, from skipping too far ahead, even though we're all straining to get to this summer, to next year. And when we get there, we remember what it really means. New students. New teachers. Families leaving for three months. Families leaving forever. It's not quite so comforting then, but we can't help ourselves. The popcorn is swirling through the air. The pile of toys is ever-widening under the Rastrillo tent. The heat is tugging my eyelids down, but the tiniest breeze is peeking around the corners of my classroom and poking me alive.

Metamorphosis. All the cozy caterpillars are breaking out of the chrysalis and tasting summer, sticky and sweet.

The Holding On and the Letting Go

I thought it'd be a little different by now.

I have wiped the blood from cuts and rubbed ointment across rashes, filled garbage buckets with soaking diapers, held hands in the back of an ambulance. I've stayed up late to talk about boys and to rub backs as someone pukes. I have spent hours rewatching the High School Musicals.

I have a hundred children, and none of them are mine.

When I moved back to North Dakota, my initiation into youth-group-leaderhood was a ski trip to Canada. A skip trip for me is just as nice as a field trip to a manure processing plant. Death by T-bar. I spent the whole trip thinking about the things I'd write into my will if I had one.

The silver lining during those two days of horror was the time with three high school girls, 10th graders. The four of us shared two beds in a room with mismatched curtains, without heat. We sat on the edge of the tub, soaking our complaining feet in hot water and hand soap from the dispenser attached to the shower wall.

And I was done for.

My heart was already crammed full of camp kids and CYIA kids and babysittee kids, and they graciously scooted over to make new room for these youth group kids. Funny thing, a heart: it never runs out of space. You fill it and fill it; as long as there's something to fill it with, there's always capacity.

I'm not certain what it is about teenagers that captivates me: the mingling of weirdness and vulnerability, the humor, the awkwardness I can still identify with. When I was packing up all my worldly possessions last year, I realized that my movie collection tends toward Disney animated features and Pixar films. The DVDs of a 12-year-old girl. So maybe my love for teens ultimately stems from the fact that I've never completely stopped being one.

Needless to say, teenagers are my favorite. I can't think of anything better than working with them. And sometimes, I can't think of anything worse. Because teenagers, they grow up and change, and you change, and you wonder if you could've done more for them. You hope they remember you, even though you sometimes forget them because there are always other kids growing up around you. Your campers become counselors; your babies have babies; the girls you scooped up in hugs return your hugs in the receiving line at their weddings.

It's been hard this year to fall in love with a new group of kids when my kids back home are getting ready to graduate. Correction: it isn't the loving that's hard; it's figuring out how love is supposed to look from a thousand miles away, to make it seem like something other than I moved overseas because missionary kids are more important. It smacked me hard across the face the other night as I grazed facebook, saw all the open houses I can't attend, realized that in a year, I'll be going home while my students here will keep growing up. Leaving my heart behind, again, just as it gets rooted.

Once, in a long-ago time called college, I thought it'd be a little different by now. At 27, surely I would have my own babies. I'd adopt, foster parent, watch my solitary life writhe together with others until we became family. My house would be overflowing with the holding-on and the letting-go and the growing-up, library in the basement full of neighbor kids and bikes scattered over the lawn, grilled cheese sandwiches and countering I hate yous with Well, I love you anyway.

But I'm in Spain instead, borrowing other peoples' babies.

Last Friday night, the middle-schoolers had a campout behind the school in on-again-off-again rain showers, and as we sat around a damp campfire, one of the girls rested her head on my shoulder. A few minutes later, I could feel the silent shudder of tears. I whispered, "Are you okay?"

She whispered back, "I'm crying because I don't want to go back to the States." The inevitable packing-up-and-goodbying of a six-month home assignment. I let her cry.

This Friday, the one that was yesterday, a different girl came into class looking tired and red. I asked if she was okay, thinking that she was upset about the previous day's cheating lecture. "Can I talk to you after school?"

"Sure," I said, mentally steeling myself.

But she didn't want to talk about cheating. She wanted to talk about drama in the middle school, and about feeling left out, and about fighting with her friends, and she sat there nearing tears, shaking almost imperceptibly. Then she said, "You are...not like a normal teacher. You...see things. I don't know how to explain it. At my old school, a teacher never would have asked if I was upset. You're just...you are different than most teachers." And then I had to fight tears for a minute myself.

I don't know if I'll ever have children of my own, and I wrestle with that possibility daily: the freedom from diaper bags and parent-teacher conferences, balanced with the fear that all those tall genes, all this quirk won't be passed on to plague the next generation. Still, I always end up surrounded by kids, and I get to love them and cry with them and then send them home to their parents. It's wonderful and difficult, maybe easier than having kids of your own, maybe worse. You worry just as much; they still make you proud; they still break your heart.

And I don't know what life will look like five years from now, ten, if my life is still going to be this constant rotation of other peoples' children shuffling in, shuffling out. All I know is that, really, nobody gets to keep anyone forever. So we wipe the blood and rub the backs and have the talks, and we love as much as we can, and it all matters. I pray to be content to watch the changes, to hold on and let go in the right places, to feel the breaking of new growth. Like a tree holding still while a thousand hummingbirds brush past, holding out empty branches just in case they return, looking for a place to land.