I’m in a different state and town than I’ve ever lived in. The mountains outside the window of my classroom belong to the same range as the ones I used to live near. Nine hours apart and from opposite sides, but they still feel half familiar.
I left my job in May after nearly ten months of knowing I would. It was a job I felt lucky to have and a job I really loved. But I left the rural south the first time because I no longer felt like it was where I belonged. I never really believed I could force myself to belong there again.
Even though I couldn’t see myself in the rural south longterm, it wasn’t easy to willingly leave a job that I looked forward to every morning, or coworkers who welcomed me even when I was hired in a moment of desperation two days before school started and looked the same age as the students, and students who made me laugh and made me proud and made me feel like the things I said mattered to them.
I started applying for new jobs months ago in hopes of getting back to the East Coast. As luck would have it, I still have no offers.
I’m teaching two classes at Randolph-Macon Academy’s summer school right now, but it feels less like teaching and more like private tutoring. I have one student in English 11 and two in creative writing. Each class is three and a half hours each day and half a day on Saturday, which makes for a very long week.
But sometimes on slow days, we walk downtown to the ice cream shop where Bill, the ice cream man, lets my students write essays requesting a new ice cream flavor and then invites us to come back so he can teach us how to make it. Sometimes I bring my mentor group to eat dinner at IHOP, even though it means I have to drive a school van. And sometimes I buy my students cupcakes and then walk 8 miles around DC carrying the giant box of them in the 100 degree weather and wanting only to stop and eat them all. (I resisted.)
Being at a military school is a little like being in a foreign country that I didn’t prepare to visit. When my boss explained during our orientation meeting that students who broke the rules would be sent to the commandant and assigned tours I spent a while on Google learning what a commandant was and trying to figure out what exactly they’d be touring. I’ve learned the rules about never (ever) wearing “civilian clothes” or close-toed shoes, which means some stealth is required when I leave to go to the gym in the evenings. I’ve learned not to be alarmed when the Junior Marine campers start chanting things in deeper-than-natural voices during meals.
I’ve been spending my weekends in DC feasting and visiting and exploring. One of my best friends just bought a condo there. It’s beautiful, with these wood floors and skylights and a balcony and a million windows.
I don’t know how I got old enough to have friends who buy condos. I’m still trying to get used to being old enough to rent an apartment. Purchasing an actual home is a level of permanence that feels so far away from me right now.
One of my coworkers asked me the other day if I had any kids. My first instinct was to laugh, and I had to remind myself fast that that was a perfectly reasonable question. That, in fact, that stopped being a silly question many years ago, somewhere around the time that my friends started getting married and buying houses and being something very much like real adults. I can’t decide if they’ve somehow become actual adults or if they’re just very good at acting.
During the spring, I was talking to my students about success and how the concept is completely relative. When I asked them what they thought personal success would look like for them in ten years, one of the girls said, “Well, I definitely want to be settled down by then.”
“Define settled down,” I told her.
“I mean, I definitely want to be married and have a kid or two by the time I’m 25 or 26.”
“You’re looking at a complete failure right here, guys,” I told them. “You’re looking at the world’s worst role model! I can’t believe they let me teach you!”
Another student who grew up in Europe said, “26!? You want to be married when you’re 26?! No one gets married before they’re 30!!”
I hope I taught those kids a little more English than they knew before. But more than that, I hope I taught them that success can look like a lot of different things, and those things do not necessarily involve a spouse, a kid, or a house when they’re 26.
One of my friends is getting married in a couple of weeks. Another friend’s having a baby at the end of the year. Some of my friends teach and some make art and some are still in school, and some make more money than I can comprehend and some make very little money at all, and some own nice houses and some live with their parents, and some are married and some are not, and some have kids and some know they never want them. And I don’t feel like any of those things have anything inherently to do with success or a lack of it.
My friend in DC and I had a long conversation about how few people we know who don’t hate their jobs, how there are even fewer people we know who are genuinely excited about their jobs (regardless of how much or little they get paid). I don’t know why people consider success anything other than being excited about what you do everyday and figuring out how to make a living doing it. And that’s my motivational speech of the day.
Now that the general public of Facebook has been alerted, I can finally announce the news that I’m going to be an aunt! My sister’s baby is due in January. I refer to it fondly as “the fetus” and she and I are perhaps equally excited about teaching it to read when it’s three, which is the approximate age at which I will stop being afraid to hold it.
