Más Fragments

The Grind

I don’t really know where to begin. In the past month, I’ve driven back and forth to Santa Fe more times than I can count. When the semester started, and I knew I’d be working at Amy Biehl Community School two to four times a week, I thought, I’ll use the time well. I did my best. I called my mom. I called my friend Lisa who lives on the East Coast, and even if she didn’t, would still be receptive to my calling at six-thirty Mountain. I caught up on National Public Radio. If I knew I wouldn’t have time later that day to write, I’d talk story ideas into a recorder for thirteen minutes. I thought I would make time to have lunch or coffee with friends in Santa Fe. But then I remembered that this was not the only job I was doing, and I have kids who get out of school at two-forty in the afternoon, and if I hope to do any writing at all, I better go home immediately after class. Sorry friends.

I don’t like being in my car so much. By the end of the week my butt is the shape of my bucket seat and my spine is about as tall as a matchstick.

The week after the project ended, I made my way back to yoga, and much to my surprise, I didn’t snap in half. Perhaps those weeks of jogging and swimming and my erratic morning sun salutations were working after all.

Kitty Kitty Cat

He showed up in the backyard about a month ago. He was scrawny, his orange fur matted and dusty. He followed me around the yard as I worked on the garden. Each time I reached for the water hose or hand rake to aerate the dill and tomatoes, he followed, nose first, as though he might discover a wad of catnip in my palm. Henry shredded some leftover chicken into a plastic bowl and set it on the porch. He devoured it and was soon crying for more. We refilled the bowl with chopped turkey slices, then bacon crumbles, then diluted half & half. (We were out of milk.) He rubbed against our legs and tried to follow us into the house. I knew he needed cariño as much as he needed calories, but I was afraid to touch him. Fleas, ticks, feline leukemia, mange, ebola…who knew? He slept on the porch that night and was still there in the morning. Henry bought him a bag of kitten food. He hung out in the yard, drank water, napped, ate, lingered near us but not too close until that night when he tried to bed down in the office closet. He slept on the porch again.

The next day P. and her little friend from across the street gave her a bath. When P. wants something she will surmount any obstacle to get it, even if it means dunking a strange and hungry kitty in a tub full of water and holding him still while instructing her six-year-old friend to shampoo the knots out the kitty’s belly fur.

P. was the first to cuddle the kitty.

She made a bed for him in the office. Henry bought a litter box and a bigger bag of kitten food. We discussed names. P. wanted Hobo. K. wanted Garfield. I thought about Herbie or Cubby or Scout.

Turns out Hobo/Garfield/Herbie/Cubby/Scout is a girl. And she doesn’t have feline leukemia (or mange or ebola).

Henry, the kids, and I each put a name into a hat. P. drew Sasha. K. drew Andréa. We said, “Sasha Andréa,” looked at the kitty, said it again. It didn’t work. We scrapped those names and tried again. K. drew Kitty. P. drew Kitty. Henry and I drew Cat. That’s her name. Kitty Kitty Cat.

I think I love her.

Endings and Beginnings

Anna Marissa Otero and Sara Luz Otero graduated from their respective high schools on Saturday. I’m a proud Auntie.

All in a Day’s Work

Friday night the students with whom I’ve spent the past semester showcased their work at Amy Biehl Community School. New Mexico’s Centennial Poet and dear friend Levi Romero kicked off an evening of student readings with excerpts from Sandra Cisneros’s children’s book, Have You Seen Marie? and his own poem, “De Donde Yo Soy,” based on the George Ella Lyon poem, “Where I Come From.” Both works are a cornerstone of El Otro Lado: The Other Side, The Stories That Connect Us, an art and storytelling workshop series created by visual artist Chrissie Orr and now in its second year in Santa Fe Public Schools.

Levi with some of the work his poem inspired.

Friday was a long day. I left my house at six-thirty in the morning, drove to Amy Biehl, and spent the next twelve hours coaching students through their readings, hanging silhouette collages and watercolored journey maps, arranging shoebox shrines on work tables pulled from teachers’ rooms by Mr. Martinez, who has hosted Miss Alicia, my fellow teaching artist, and me in his sixth grade classroom this semester, and another teacher whose name escapes me, but who greets me each time we pass in the hallway. I slipped out for twenty minutes to grab some lunch from the little store down the road. It sits across the street from a park so instead of driving right back to the school, I walked to a shaded bench, sat, closed my eyes, and chewed my tuna sandwich as slowly as I could.

The day before Miss Alicia and her husband had been at the school until eight o’clock, hanging artwork and prepping materials for the sixth graders’ final push on their portfolios.

Storytelling is serious business.

journey map in progress

Ask A. who likes to move around and forgets what he’s doing when one of the boys at his table starts talking to him. A few weeks ago I realized he wasn’t going to finish his shrine in time for the show, and he still hadn’t finished painting his journey map. I wanted him to experience taking a project from start to finish, so we created a quiet place for him in the art room, and while his classmates glued images onto their shrines, he painted. It took a few more class periods, but he finished. And when he finished, he asked us to take his picture.

Ask L. who has been so diligent all semester. She takes her time. She focuses. She creates deep, heartfelt poems and paintings. And because she is so eager to create, I forgot how shy she is. She signed up to read the praise poem she’d written for her mom, but the night of the event, she pulled me aside and said, “Miss Michelle, I just want to read my poem to my mom. I don’t want to read in front of everyone.” I asked if she’d like me to stand with her, if she wanted Miss Alicia or me to read for her. She said no. But then, as the last reader made her way to the cafeteria stage, L. approached me and whispered, “I do want to read, but I want my friends to go with me.” When they took the stage, the friends, two girls and a boy, formed a protective shell around L. One stood behind her, the other two on either side. And then, they each lay a hand on their friend, one on each of her shoulders, one at the base of her neck. And L. read, “Alabanza, my mom.”

Alabanza. Praise.

Fragment

Most names have been changed.

Sometimes my PTSD kicks in when I am walking through the front doors of the school where I am a teaching artist, and the buses are dispensing kids like so many Pez pellets, and I think of how school was a safe place for me, even when two of my best friends waged their battle for an oblivious boy’s affection, even when Rhonda Macias used to corner my friend Stacey on the patio at Deming Junior High, and Stacey was so terrified she joined every club at school just so she’d have an excuse to stay indoors for a lunch meeting. Once I survived the band of small Chicanas that plagued me through sixth grade catechism, I had little to fear. Rhonda even invited me to a basketball game and gave me advice about Eric Green, the tallest boy in seventh grade (I think because he was really supposed to be in ninth), when he asked me to go around with him via a note passed in Mrs. Hall’s sixth period math class (possibly the worst period for a group of twelve and thirteen year olds to have math). Mrs. Hall was six feet all and walked like her hips were made of stone. She taught us algebra, which was the last kind of math that I ever really liked. (Although now that I run our household budget, I get a rush out of making the numbers work every month, the harmony between the total in our checkbook and the bolded figure on our Excel spreadsheet.)

I was in the green room at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, minding the child actors in Farolitos of Christmas (paying special attention to P. who was making her theatrical debut as Luz and was just recovering from a bad case of stage fright), when my mom texted: “Elementary school shooting in Connecticut. 19 dead.” And in those moments when all the kids were on stage, none trying to eat in their costumes, or sneaking food into the dressing rooms, I googled “school shooting Connecticut” into my iPhone and wept as the picture materialized.

We know the names: Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Newtown. Newtown. This one is the hardest to look in the face. This is the one that haunts me some mornings as I arrive at school feeling a little off because I haven’t slept or exercised or written enough. Morning announcements: the Pledge of Allegiance in English and Spanish (which I learned in seventh grade under the tutelage of Señor Rodriguez, who wore pointy boots and a thin combover), a heart healthy tip from the P.E. instructor, and a reminder to NEVER open the side doors of the school for anyone, even a teacher you know.

It sounds crazy, but I have planned our escape route, the children’s and mine. I think of how someone with a gun might get into the school, wonder how we might run from so many rounds, can’t remember if the patio area is enclosed.

I don’t know the Newtown families, that community. I take P. and K. to school in the morning. Some days they practice lockdown drills. Bullets are the atom bomb of their time. I feared Communists, nuclear war (Remember The Day After?), getting stuck. There were fights and once rumors of a satanic cult, led by the boyfriend of a childhood friend. I think I remember the police leading the boys out of the school in handcuffs and a front page article in The Deming Headlight that read like the stories we told each other at our lockers.

They were his mother’s guns. What did she fear?

I take comfort in the smallness of the places I live and work, neighbors knowing each other, people with shared history.

How many more people have to die before we do something?

More People in Your Neighborhood: The Guy Next Door

With the exception of Sister Rosalie, all names have been changed. 

George is not a nice person. The first several months I lived next door to him, he never said hi or acknowledged me, even if he was sitting in my yard shooting the breeze with his son and the other farm guys, his toddler grandson beating a stick against an amaranth stalk or unearthing a flattened beach ball from the sandbox under the playhouse.
I don’t remember the first time we had an actual conversation across the low chain link fence separating our yards. Maybe it was when he pulled his new yellow Camaro into the parking space behind the house where he and his siblings grew up, and I couldn’t resist teasing him. He gave it right back, joking that Henry had bought him the car and, “He didn’t get one for you? Maybe it’s because you never cook.”

I remember deciding one day that I would always say hi to George no matter what. Part of this was knowing that we will live next door to each other until one of us dies.

But another part was the challenge. I have met George again and again throughout my life. He is the mean uncle who probably yells at small children, hates his ex-wife, and reserves his affection for a pet canary or a Chihuahua named Frankie. He is the smug fifth-grade boy in the corner of my storytelling workshops who sits with his arms folded across his chest and says in response to any question about what interests him or his favorite memory, “butter.” George is the mean girl in ninth grade P.E. class who jumped a senior in the Sonic parking lot by walking up to her car, sticking her arm through the open window, and slamming said senior’s head into the steering wheel.
I am emotionally tough, maybe physically too, but not in a fist fight kind of way. Throughout my later elementary school years, I was taunted by a band of short, skinny Chicana girls who ruled Bell School where my mom was a first grade teacher. Thanks to a district boundary line drawn to include the children of a judge, a county official, and Deming’s Coca Cola magnates, who lived a block and half north of us, I attended the nice school in the white neighborhood. The Bell School girls and I met up once a week for CCD classes at Father Stanley Hall. Things came to a head the day we had mass at Saint Ann’s and Jennie Alarcón accused me of calling her a bitch. I was twelve years old, in sixth grade and, though I would go through potty mouth phases in high school and later, I was too afraid to call Jennie or any of her friends the b-word. Next to Rhonda Macias who was, unfortunately, in Jennie’s corner, I was the tallest girl in 6th grade CCD, but more than one Monday afternoon, I got into my mom’s Oldsmobile crying because one of them had pulled my hair or called me “school girl,” and Sister Rosalie, the meanest woman in Deming, didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re bigger than they are,” my dad would say. “Just hit ‘em.”

Then I would cry harder. “I can’t.”

The first day of junior high, each of those girls walked one by one into my first period library science class. I wanted to sink into the floor or move to California or spontaneously combust. But something happened. At first they didn’t notice me. Perhaps I had learned to become invisible.

And then one day Rhonda said, “Hey, Michelle.”

I turned around, a nervous smile pasted on my face.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“What did you get for number six?”

I was the smart girl. I had the answers. And once they knew I had the answers, then I got to be the funny girl too. I made them laugh.

More tomorrow

Fragments

Because some days all I get is thirteen minutes and I piece it together as best I can

Aside from the instant weight gain the morning of February 7, 2012, I loved turning 40. I loved being 40, growing into my canas, being able to turn down work, feeling wise, still kicking a••. But 41…sigh. It’s like the day after Christmas or having to clean up the kitchen once the party guests have gone home. Kind of a letdown. But now that I’m one month into this new age, I am paying closer attention to my body, sleeping when she says, “I’m tired,” drinking water instead of eating a brownie, jogging the streets of my old neighborhood at sunset because I’ve been sitting all day, and the streets are well lit, and people are out walking their dogs.

I’m taking swimming lessons for the first time since 1980. Back then Tommy Trujillo was my swim instructor, and my mom says I had a crush on him. He went to our church, and he was one of the tallest boys in Deming, and even though I was just a little kid, he would always say hi to me when I saw him at the Safeway after mass.

Two of my Otro Lado boys got in a fist fight. I don’t know what it was about. It happened on Tuesday a few hours before I arrived at the school, maybe during lunch. They are in different classes but play together on the basketball team. One spends most of the class walking around. The other talks constantly. Both are really smart, a little cynical for their age. Both are easily distracted. Both challenge me to plan engaging lessons, give clear directions, and to pay attention. They’ve each been suspended for three days. Whey they return, most of their classmates will have finished their journey maps. (Think the voyages of Christopher Columbus or Billy from Family Circus walks home from school.) The one who talks wanted to map the journey from the desk to the classroom door. I might say yes to this when we meet again. The other was going to sketch a trip with the basketball team. It’s hard not to personalize it when they don’t immediately take to watercolors or poetry. But each student comes with a story. Expression is difficult for some. One wants to get it perfect. Another doesn’t know where to begin. We started on Tuesday with eyes closed, just feeling the paper. Rest your finger on a spot. Start there.

The kids’ backyard playhouse is a one-room, open air casita on stilts that shelters a sand box where they would dig tunnels and bury toys until the afternoon we discovered two black widows under the cross beams. Then a colony of yellow jackets built their nest above the play table in the upstairs room. The playhouse hadn’t seen a child until two weekends ago when Henry and K. “relocated” the arachnid and insect inhabitants, swept, dusted off the furniture, and pulled out the stake that held the climbing rope taught between the roof and the ground. Now K. has reclaimed the space. He swings from the rope and is negotiating with P. to turn the place into a Power Ranger headquarters (I’m the Purple Rhino Ranger). Today we did homework at the play table. For every three sentences, K. got to swing from the rope. This arrangement works much better than forcing him to sit still at the dining room table.

Sometimes the men return to our yard. Jimmy went to rehab. Now he’s back in the neighborhood, working out, cleaning offices with his brother-in-law, going to church. Trying. Joseph’s cousin has been sober for eight days. He’s working on the farm, harvesting, planting, weeding, anything he can to stay busy.

Pope Emeritus. Hmmmm…

I think the sequester (should this be capitalized?) was John Boehner’s intent all along. Thanks to gerrymandering in states like Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, even if voters turn their ire toward the GOP, Boehner’s party will most likely retain control of the House. Read all about it here.

I’m thinking a road trip is the best way for my mom and me to travel to Laredo.

February is the longest month.

We’re getting ready for a yard sale at Casa Rael/Otero, so my side of the office is packed with old clothes, household items, and toys. In search of props, I raided the Playdoh bin and found lids embossed with turtles, flowers, butterflies, and ponies. I stuffed the lids in my bag of tricks and headed out the door for an Alzheimer’s Poetry Project workshop at Barelas Share Your Care. (Read our onion poem from January here.) We did some call and response with William Blake’s “The Tyger,” and Hilaire Belloc’s “The Frog.” I passed out the Playdoh lids, and we sang “Old MacDonald,” inserting the animals from our lids.

and on his farm he had a horse, EE-I-EE-I-O

with a clappity clap here and clappity clap there

here a clap, there a clap, everywhere a clap clap

Old MacDonald had a farm, EE-I-EE-I-O

and on his farm he had a nightmare, EE-I-EE-I-O…

and on his farm he had a flower, EE-I-EE-I-O

and the flower said, “Look at me, I’m beautiful

New Day

Due to my nutty schedule, “Vessel” will now come to you on Wednesday. Look for a brand new installment of “The People in Your Neighborhood” tomorrow morning. 

Mommy Diary

 

Because there are no bad nights, only good material

It’s five in the morning, and I am in a deep sleep until I hear K. calling, “Daddy. Daddy.” Daddy is snoring because he slept four hours last night and got up before the sun to finish a presentation he was giving at an eight-thirty board meeting in Santa Fe. So I go to K., and he is crying because he can’t breathe through one of his nostrils and nothing will come out when he blows his nose, “even when I stick a tissue up there.”

“Do you want a steam bath or a little tent like we did this afternoon?”

He wants a tent. I boil water, move the purple ottoman into the bathroom, set a bowl on top of the toilet seat. I pull the tea kettle off the stove just before it whistles. Pour. One drop of peppermint oil. One drop of eucalyptus. I am thinking that Henry is selfish for sleeping and doesn’t care about any of us, and in a few hours, he will wake rested and happy, and everyone will like him more just like they always do because he’s the real dad, and I’m just the stepmom.

“Okay, little guy,” I whisper from the foot of his bed. “Bring the Kleenex.”

In the bathroom, I drape the towel over his head and close it like curtains around the bowl.

“Close your eyes. Just breathe. Stay under as long as you can. Then we’ll blow your nose.”

Every time he blows his nose, I swear he’s losing brain tissue. He coughs, which is good, because it turns my thoughts away from selfish, sleeping Henry and to the cough syrup on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet.

Eight years old. Two teaspoons. I pour and hand it to K. He doesn’t take it, so I put the spoon to his mouth and tip. He holds the syrup in the well under his tongue, and at first I think he’s playing, like that night almost a year ago when he woke itching from chicken pox, and I fixed him an oatmeal bath and he froze like Han Solo in carbonite, or like those mornings when he takes twenty minutes to make his bed because he twists himself up in his sheets and wedges his head between his pillow and pillowcase, and walks around, bumping into doorways and furniture and calling for help.

It sounds like he’s laughing, but he keeps on, and he’s not swallowing.

“You gotta swallow it, okay?”

He’s crying.

I say, “This is the same cough syrup you took yesterday, and it was fine,” as though reason were what this parenting moment required.

He’s still crying and trying to talk, “I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” and every time he moves his mouth, he spills purple syrup onto the dinosaurs on his pj bottoms.

“Okay, spit it out,” I say, handing him a tissue, and of course, the tissue is too small to catch everything, and it’s five-thirty in the morning, and we’re a little uncoordinated. So then he tries to clean his pj bottoms with that tissue, which only makes things worse. I hand him a damp washcloth from the shower ledge, where I’ve been sitting this whole time.

“We’ll change bottoms, okay?”

He nods. Wipes his eyes.

“How’s your nose? Can you breathe through that nostril?”

“Now it’s open, but the other one closed.”

By this time, the water in the bowl has cooled, and I’m thinking maybe it’s best to change tactics.

“How about a bath?”

He shakes his head, so it’s back to the kitchen and the teakettle and the peppermint and eucalyptus oils, and how could Henry sleep through all of this? Any minute now, he’ll get up and take over because he always knows what to do, and I’m just making this up as I go along.

While the water heats, I pour cough syrup into a half teaspoon.

“Let’s try this a little at a time.”

K. opens his mouth, but he won’t swallow.

“If you just swallow, it will be over faster. Honey, you’re making it worse.” There I go with my reason again. “Do you want some sugar? Do you want some water?”

How about twenty bucks? A new Lego? A puppy? Please, for the love of God, swallow the damn cough syrup.

He’s shaking his head, his mouth open. And then a wet booger creeps out of his nostril and is just about to hit his lip, when I say, “Ooh! Blow your nose.” It happens so quickly, he swallows without thinking.

This only works once.

The water boils. I set up the facial tent, rub his little back, hold tissues up to his nose each time he pulls the towel off his head, look at his cute little face, how long his hair is now, how much he’s changed in the five years I’ve known him. How much I’ve changed. The first time I gave him a bath, I forgot to put my hand like a visor on his forehead and got shampoo in his eyes. He cried like I’d cut off his arm, and I left K. and the bathroom to Henry to finish.

I learned how to keep the soap out of K.’s  eyes. When he calls for his dad at five in the morning, and I show up, he does not send me back to my room.

“Can you breathe through both nostrils?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he answers.

And now I’m glad that Henry is still asleep because when I tuck K. into bed, he asks, “Will you lie down with me?”

He offers me some blankie, and I cuddle him until he falls asleep.  

It’s six-thirty in the morning when I get back to bed. Henry stirs enough for me to scoot next to him. Too soon, P. is out of bed. I can’t move. Henry gets up and gently closes our door behind him. When I open my eyes again, it’s ten o’clock. I never sleep until ten. I feel rested. I hear Henry and the kids chatting in the living room. I smell bacon. I get up, open the door, and step into another day of life.

 

 

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda

Before Malinche’s Daughter, my unspoken, deep-seated belief about my work went something like this: As long as I don’t finish this essay/poem/short story/book, it will always have the potential to be perfect.

I love potential. In my twenties and early thirties, potential helped me fall in love with inappropriate men. It kept me in more than one difficult living situation. Potential trapped tens of thousands of words in my laptop, in three-ring binders, in manila folders I’d pull out in the hope of finding an undiscovered gem every time I had an upcoming reading or submission.

In my busy schedule, days with no appointments, travel, or family commitments hold great potential. Since my abrupt transition to Casa Rael following the fire that destroyed my apartment in 2009, I have craved those days. If only I could have a week of free days with no appointments, no interruptions, no obligations, then I could finish my book and do yoga and write lesson plans for El Otro Lado and send out a link to my TEDx talk and mail those long-overdue wedding thank you cards. If only…

But those days don’t come, or if they do, they bring with them potential’s BFF, perfection, and their step-cousin, guilt. The day begins with I could go running or clear out my Gmail or revise that short story about the chubby waiter in Veracruz, and as the day passes, and I don’t run or write, and instead try to lose myself in cleaning or Sudoko, could (beautiful, perfect could) vanishes, and in its place stands a formidable should.

A wise and gentle therapist once advised me to be careful with the shoulds. That was a rough time, full of shoulds and should nots: I should not take things so personally. I should not be so hard on myself. I should suck it up and deal. I should go to church. I should be my own best friend/partner/sister/ cheerleader. If I were my therapist now, I’d tell me to watch out for those coulds too.

Could and should paralyze me. One is seductive, the other brutal. Ultimately both suck the joy out of my life. Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Over the next forty days and nights, I am phasing out could and should to make room for something stronger, simpler, and life-giving: be and do.

Última: Reconciling the Masculine

TEDxABQWomen
December 1, 2012
South Broadway Cultural Center
Albuquerque, New Mexico

The Stories That Connect Us

I’ve spent much of the last two and a half weeks trying to catch my breath. Family medical emergency (much better). Training for an April “sprint” triathlon (coming soon: a what-was-I-thinking-there’s-a-difference-between-hanging-in-the-pool-and-swimming blog post). Kicking off a new year of El Otro Lado at Amy Biehl Community School in Santa Fe. Two teaching artists, six teachers, ten class periods, one hundred plus fifth and sixth graders.

Last year I worked with seniors at Capital High. I remember standing in front of that first class with my fellow teaching artist, a hip filmmaker, much closer in age to the students than to me. As I introduced myself (I’m Michelle Otero. I’m a writer. I live in Albuquerque, which always felt like a big city when I was growing up in Deming… ) and talked about the program (El Otro Lado is an art and storytelling process developed by visual artist Chrissie Orr. It explores who we are and where we’re from through writing, painting, recorded oral history… ), a voice in my head shouted, “Who is that woman? Why is she talking? Someone tell her to shut up.” This happens every time I start a project with a new group of teenagers. Suddenly I am seventeen again, trying to corral the popular table at the student council meeting into helping plan Spirit Week.

Fortunately, the feeling passes. As the project unfolds, as we tell our stories, we begin to see each other. The girl with the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder makes a shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe. The boy who never writes in his journal doesn’t have a home. He sleeps one night on his auntie’s couch, the next at his cousin’s, a few nights at his girlfriend’s place, and then back to auntie’s for a few days.

I like working with high school students, watching them reconnect with something pure as they run a paintbrush across a canvas or pound the bubbles out of clay. Some have never used watercolors. Some haven’t worked with clay since kindergarten. Some hate poetry–and then they write a poem.

So now my students are ten, eleven, and twelve years old. My mom taught elementary school for thirty years, and each time I’d visit her class, I’d wonder how she held their attention all day, every day of the week, for nine months. I’m lucky. I come in for one hour at a time, and I have poetry and collage and flip cameras and colored pencils on my side.

Here’s one difference between seniors and fifth graders: when you walk into a room of seniors, even if they really like you, even if you’ve helped them write the most beautiful poem or paint a self portrait, they might lift their head and say, “hey.” But fifth graders. Fifth graders cheer. Really. As in, “She’s back! Yay!”

The art teacher has a photograph of her fifth grade self on the art room door. “Do you recognize this fifth grader?” I try to remember who I was at that age, one of the tallest girls in school, my parents recently divorced (only to remarry each other two years later), ugly glasses, good grades, teachers who liked me. Back then, school was made for the kind of student I was: eager to participate, to please adults, ambitious, articulate, perfectionist.

Maybe school is still made for that kid, I don’t know.

What I do know is that some boys cannot sit still. A few girls talk and talk. One girl cried all through art class. I remember those tears from late elementary school and junior high, how quickly a group of friends could divide into factions, the girls who would always cry, and those who would comfort. Tuesday afternoons the students are energetic in a pinball machine kind of way. I think of K, how he runs straight for the playground swings as soon as the last bell rings, how homework is sometimes a struggle, not because he doesn’t get it, but because he’d rather stand on his head or make up a different story to go with the book he’s reading or run around the yard or play ninjas.

How could anyone who’s spent any time in a classroom advocate for cuts to arts programming or physical education, for less recess, and more tests? Why would anyone think to deprive little people of recreation or creative expression?

Here’s why I am a teaching artist, why I am thankful to the teachers who have said yes to El Otro Lado. Stories, however told–with paintbrushes, crayons, ripped up magazines, words on a page, looking in the eyes of someone who really sees you–connect us. Stories make us whole.