There comes a time when writing a blog where you have to take it over just for yourself and not worry about anything else: links, writing awards, interviews, offers, responses and reviews. Today is such a day when I’m taking it over for myself even in the midst of my hiatus.

Indulging in some self-love, I’m reading a book by Kim McMillen entitled “When I Loved Myself Enough”. This one is dedicated to me. It goes out to me. It’s love for me.

McMillen writes: “When I loved myself enough I could remember, during times of confusion, struggle or grief, that these too are part of me and deserve my love.”

I write: “When I loved myself enough I realized that it was ok to make mistakes, take a day or two to ponder, and let some things go in the name of sanity.”

“When I loved myself enough I stopped fearing that I was letting everyone else down and focused on feeding my soul.”

“When I loved myself enough I aimed to meet the needs of my mind and my capacity to love and forgive.”

“When I loved myself enough I searched out joy at every opportunity and found myself smiling.”

While I continue to keep up my hiatus, I strongly felt urged to write here today in the event that it offered even the slightest bit of encouragement for anyone else. But still, this is for me.

Fall comes around and I’m useless to you. I don’t get into real or imagined football. Television doesn’t show any promise until I’ve determined which nights I’ll be watching it. Basically, I have no ties to pop culture. What I do, in a nutshell, is hole up in my own head and try diligently to find rest once the school year has officially sunk its teeth into me and I’m not allowed me to visit the many blogs I’ve come to know and read and love.

For the season, I am absurdly busy and tied up in the busy life of a mother and a career woman and being a rather shitty friend. Just thinking about all I have yet to do makes me tired and I’m looking to remedy this by eating better, drinking more water, and nourishing my soul the way I know I can and should.

Last week I went to get my teeth cleaned. My sons came with me as we always schedule this together so as the two of them waited I got called in first. I had hoped to go visit them in the dentist’s chair and sternly look over the doctor’s shoulder while smugly raising my eyebrows which translates to See, I Told You To Floss! For some reason, it was a quick trip for me and I was done in a matter of 15 minutes. The dental assistant told me that it’d be a while before the dentist would get to me.

“No problem. It’s quiet in here and I could use a moment to quiet myself.”

She didn’t say another word, just pushed the right buttons to move my chair into a reclining position, turn off the lights, and she left me alone. I fell asleep in a matter of moments and she instructed the dentist to check my teeth out last and to leave me alone. Basically, she let me sleep for 25 minutes and woke me gently, smiling at me like a mother would when knowing her child needed that rest.

Sunday afternoon I found myself on my mother’s couch (she’s quite the cheap therapist and sleep retreat for me) reading the current issue of JPG Magazine and found a quote that punched me right in the gut (page 19):

I sense myself falling, plummeting into the uncertain. Reaching around, I panic in search of something to pull me back up. I find your face, diving alongside, and remember why I jumped in the first place.

Primarily, I need some things. To feed my soul, to protect my heart, and to rest, rest, rest. I’ll jump back into blogging when that’s somewhat under control.

See you then?

Sure you are. You have deep, intense desire to know what the hot color is this fall (purple!) and you want to know if that new lip gloss is shiny enough (it is – can we reuse some of that to shellac my chest of drawers?) and you simply MUST know if your trench coat is in or out this season. Much as I’d like to help you out, you’ll have to go here to see what I wrote for BlogHer Beauty Hacks.

I’ve just about broken my neck to get to a computer lately since mine has taken to suddenly shutting itself off and re-booting. I swear, Apple knows that I’m ready to purchase that MacBook Pro and they’re daring me to get through the next year without succumbing to the pressure. Rascals.

In case you are here for fashion, I offer this specifically for those who asked nicely. Because Sizzle said so, I did, indeed, wear it with the collar up. I popped the hell out of that collar.

You might notice that I even posed like the chick in the picture. These are how I spend my nights, dressing up and posing for pictures that my children get to take of me while they dissolve into laughter about my antics. After what I experienced today, it was entirely compulsory.

It is true that I say this often, but I must be very careful not to divulge the personal and identifiable things that occur with my students so let me loosely set the stage for the episode which occurred today.

Many other adults were involved with a delicate situation and I needed to release a student to a parent so that she could go home, but the student wouldn’t go until I offered to take her with a police escort. We have an officer in our building at all times and I must say that I appreciate having an officer both as a colleague and as a person who could potentially get me out of a speeding ticket. (“But officer! I know people!” to which he’d reply “Ma’am, I don’t care.” and then I’d be all “I work at a high school!” and he’d be all, “Let’s convoy there and please, take my gun”)

When we got to the house I tried calming the girl down and her guardian was taking me on a tour of the house to show me, what, evidence? I didn’t need to see anything, but I wanted to ensure my student felt safe and cared for so I chose to go that extra mile. None of this was required on my part. During the course of the conversation with the guardian, the police officer and myself it was brought up that this girl had a boyfriend and it was clear that prior approval was not given to her. Not that I questioned this. I hear parents tell me all the time how they feel about their child dating. But then, the guardian offered this to me:

“I don’t want my girl dating a black boy. They shouldn’t mix. It’s not how God intended.”

When I write about race relations it’s because I have a wee bit of experience with it. When I seem disturbed by the divide that so many people see and others choose to ignore it’s because I have been this race, this human, this color for 37 years and it comes with the territory. When it sneaks up on me I always take a pause before I’m able to respond.

This “race stuff”? It’s personal to me. I don’t go looking for it and the above statement from an adult came, literally, out of no where. There was no basis for her telling me that information. Some of the comments from yesterday’s post (a few were deleted, some were emailed directly to me, and one I left up in order to respond to it) seemed to insinuate that I am the one creating the cultural divide. For instance:

“Comments like yours just make everything get more and more divided all the way around.”

Let me be more clear, then. Let me plainly state that I felt left out during Palin’s entertainment portion of the evening. I didn’t draw the line, I merely noticed that it was there. If paying attention to underlying themes and denigratory speech is your inculpation, then accuse away. But I’ll be damned if I take the blame for having the fortitude to pay attention.

After hearing this adult tell me that God intended for races to be separate I took a pause. In fact, the officer later told me that when she said that he looked at me to ensure I was blinking. I was not. It was all I could do to stand there while going above and beyond, doing another “other duties as assigned” task and realize that she was entirely serious. Whoever came up with the idea of counting to 10 before reacting was a genius, because there was nothing left to do but respond with humor.

“You probably wouldn’t want to meet my parents then.”

Generally speaking, I steer clear of writing about politics which even I find is odd because my own politics are so deeply wound into my life and work that one would expect me to write about it easily. If I tried hard enough I could probably blame the patriarchy for encouraging me to keep me political opinions to myself. The only truth in that is owed to the fact that every time I open my big mouth some troll comes out of hiding and decides to get nasty while ineffectively removing the large stick from its ass. I try to help it along though. That’s just me. I’m a helper! I like to help!

With that said, I’m going out on a different branch today. Remember when it was simple and I just wrote about coffee? Those days are long gone, though a delightful iced Americano is somewhere in my future. You may wish I’d had it prior to writing this, but let’s live dangerously, shall we? After all, the latest product review I was asked to undertake was this one. If anyone knows anything about enhancing the male penis by harnessing the power of magnets, it’s me.

Apparently.

I’m going to forge ahead before I get sidetracked again.

Last night I watched the RNC and the previous week I watched the DNC. Both times I asked my children to watch along with me and yet it was last night’s speech by Sarah Palin that made me ill. There’s no bone in my body that wants to beat up on a woman so I should plainly state that McCain isn’t off limits either. What is off limits is poking fun at Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter no matter how many times she trots her out there as a show pony. There is something very bizarre to me about how when teen couples decide to marry after getting pregnant it all somehow becomes OK in everyone’s eyes. That’s a story for another day and a post about religion (which I also steer clear of for good reason).

While I don’t give much credence to people who can read a teleprompter or pronounce nuclear correctly because it was phonetically spelled out for them or even for people who feel they must rid libraries of books, I have to state here that neither McCain nor Palin speak for me. They don’t even KNOW me.

What I heard last night in her beauty pageant comedy show was a person who didn’t take seriously any of the things that affect me.

I don’t know what a snow machine is. She clearly wasn’t talking to me.

I don’t know anyone who plays hockey. Do hockey moms somehow replace soccer moms? At last night’s high school soccer game that I had to attend as an administrator, I saw a sea of faces that crossed cultural lines. In my experience, white wealthy kids get to play hockey. She wasn’t talking to me.

She scoffed at Obama’s community organizing and pushed for her own small town agenda. You know what I heard in that thinly veiled line? Her lack of experience with people of color and the power of community organization. She doesn’t know cities or poverty that way or even what that does for education. She is keeping that dividing line bold and prominent by letting me see what she thinks about that: small town = hard-working white farming families vs. city/community = blacks and latinos and asians and other people she knows nothing about. She so wasn’t talking to me.

It’s clear that policy was not on her agenda. Nothing was said about education or health care or even the racial issues we have in this country. She’s not ready to tackle it and neither is McCain because, and yes I’ll say it, THEY HAVE NO EXPERIENCE WITH IT. They’ve run from it or lived in their hermetically sealed worlds without having to deal with that nastiness. Even if she had mentioned education, my stronghold, my brain would have exploded anyway. It’s probably best that she didn’t.

I thought that maybe she’d capture me with her lipstick joke, but I’m still not certain if the hockey mom or the pit bull wears it. That’s how little I know about hockey moms.

But I do know bullshit rhetoric when I hear it. That performance last night at least let me know where she’s coming from and I don’t want any part of it.

There was a moment back there last week when I wondered if I’d be able to make it. I mean that by every way you think I mean it. It was as hellacious as I’ve ever experienced, both personal and professional.

Yet, I can’t possibly leave it at that. There’s no way that in my writing I can be desperate and hopeless. Hopeful is all I have and as I keep being reminded by the Lovely Karen of Chookooloonks, I must choose joy.

Yesterday morning was completely hijacked by a parent and it wasn’t a fun conversation. No sooner had I set down my briefcase then I picked up the phone to hear a mother accusing and blaming and excusing – three things by which I cannot live. This, of course, on the heels of getting accidentally hurt in a student fight that occurred outside my office where some bones in my hand are…well, they’re not where they used to be. Let’s leave it at that. After listening to her spiel, I finally got my say and while I can’t reveal everything I said to her I can say this: I said everything I wanted to say to her. Parents are not to blame for their child’s behavior, but they are to blame when they behave like a lawyer and petition each little wrong their child committed.

Yes, I want him to take driver’s education and No, I am not punishing him by making him wait until 2nd quarter.

Yes, I want him to be considered a sophomore but No, I cannot give him credit for failing four semesters of classes last year.

Yes, I sent home grades and progress reports and mailings about how he should take summer school but No, I won’t be picking up the phone to call you every day to tell you how he’s doing in class. He’s in high school now and I won’t baby him.

Yes, I heard he was in the group of students who got into trouble on the bus and No, he will not be excused from that behavior.

Yes, he will get his driver’s license later than he anticipated and No, I won’t just accept you calling me when your child can’t get what he wants because I want you to communicate with me when he’s failing classes.

Yes, I want him to be successful in school and in life and No, I will not treat him any differently than life will nor will I lower my expectations of him thus lying to him about The Way Things Work.

Those are basically the things I wanted to say and somehow, as uncomfortable as it was, I said them. Sometimes I cringed wondering if she would extract herself from her own body and reach through the phone and choke the living shit out of me.

Yes, she was pissed. No, she didn’t leave it at that conversation.

She came in this morning and wanted to talk about how to better reach out to his teachers and what she needed to do for him to support him. No, it wasn’t a bad conversation, but a healing one and one in which I realized the potential of what I get to do in education.

And yes, I cried when she left.