I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. To be more precise, I woke up smooshed on a flat pillow by my giant child and an aggressively snuggly cat at 3 am. I am often awake around that time. I find it’s a good time to take stock of every embarrassing or questionable thing I have ever done my entire life, consider how the small things I did not get done yesterday are creating chaos and destruction, and generally lie there in the dark dreading all the things I assess myself to have done wrong. 

Sometimes I am able to get back to sleep, and this time I did, and I had a nightmare where I was at an indoor water park (a sensory hell) with my two children, whom I immediately lost in a huge crowd, with a million drowning hazards everywhere. Then, when I thought I had spotted my son, and called out to him from a balcony away, I saw that it was in fact another boy his age, and he was armed and shooting into the crowd at random. Then the alarm went off. 

I drove to work filled with dread and imposter syndrome, which I am now able to recognize by the grandiose lies it tells me. Today it was informing me that everyone secretly hates me and that I am probably going to be fired. I think it must have surmised that from the fact that I missed work for jury duty and caring for my sick child earlier in the week, thereby letting everyone down? In any case, it was pretty sure. But because I have learned to hear it as a story that my head is telling me, and not as a measure of reality, I got to work and told two people I trust about how I was feeling, instead of saying I was fine. 

That helped break the spell, because of course, it was never true. Then one of them asked me for help with a small thing that I knew I could do, and it was to be there to help a small child with an expected difficult transition into the classroom. I was there, and I didn’t do much, but I was helpful just by being there just in case. Then another child was having a hard time leaving their parent, and they specifically asked for my help, so I went over there.  I also did almost nothing to help that child, apart from just be there while they cried for a moment and then listened to them about the pictures they had drawn. When that child was ready, I walked them outside to play. 

When I came outside, another child spotted me and asked me to help them find a specific book, which they had read the other day, and it just so happened to be my favorite book from my own childhood, The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater. I searched until I found a second copy, the first having been checked out of our classroom library, and we read it together, and I did all of the voices. 

Then, sitting there off to the side of some children making small, calculated jumps from a 2’ raised platform onto soft mats, the reader asked me how old those children were. I replied that I thought they were 4 or 5. He was silent. So I asked him how old he thought kids should be to be able to play that game, and he said six and a half. He told me that they should be wearing strong helmets. I said, “that game looks dangerous to you. I think it’s safe. I see that they aren’t climbing up very high, and they are landing on soft mats”. And then I jumped myself to show him, although I am 45 and I wasn’t wearing a helmet. And I was safe. 

After a while, some other kids had corralled me into playing a game of trying to guess what color they were going to jump to on those rainbow striped mats. I called out close by colors and farther away colors. Some children jumped as far as they could, trying to reach the fourth colored strip of vinyl mat. One child persistently demanded that I keep guessing, and every single jump, landed on the blue, the second closest color, where they felt safe to play. The child who had thought the game was dangerous watched for a while, and then tried it a few times too, before going off to ride a balance bike with another friend. 

Later, I wandered back to where the child who had asked for me in the morning was eating lunch, and they asked me to read books. One of the books was a funny one, and the other one is impossible for me to read without crying. These children often ask me to read books I cannot read without crying, but this was a book about living through the pandemic: Outside Inside by LeUyen Pham. It showed the fear, and the waiting, and the worrying, and the hugs, and the signs cheering medical workers. The children don’t remember the first year of the pandemic because they were so little, but they all wanted to stop and examine the page that showed lots of people in the hospital. They pointed to the illustrations of doctors and nurses and people in beds with tubes, and doctors and nurses in the basement, looking exhausted. I wept and kept reading and answering their questions and hearing their observations, and they didn’t mind me crying. People are allowed to cry.

There were some other adults and one of them gave me a tissue, and I told them, sometimes I wish I was tough so I wouldn’t have to cry all the time. But I’m not. I cry all the time. 

Later still, I said goodbye to the last kid for the day, and realized I was famished, so I sat down to eat slowly, not at my desk. One of the other teachers sat down with me, and we talked, and chuckled, and ate our nourishing food, and before I knew it, more teachers had joined us, and we were talking about how important it is, this work that we do, and how it is changing the world, right now, little by little. How people out there feel free to harm children because they are dehumanized, just like any group of people who might be exploited (under White Supremacist Capitalism), and how the work we do here of humanizing children to themselves and to everyone else, is absolutely revolutionary. 

Today helped me remember the first and most important lesson at Cottage, that I have been saying out loud to people at our admissions events and remembered just in time to let people help me when I needed it, which is that relationships are everything. Our connectedness with other people is the only thing that matters, because it is from our interconnectedness that everything else good comes. My allowing myself to be whole and human and vulnerable and imperfect was the best part of a day that turned out to be pretty great.