Freeze Frame

Two years ago I had trouble sleeping at night, because I was more often than not overstimulated by the intensity of my day-to-day teacher-student involvement. I was exhausted and crazed from paper-marking and curriculum creating, and cross-eyed from emailing drafts back and forth with demanding students who believed that if they attached a paper to my email I would remain online 24 hours a day to help them revise it. I chose to be at their beck and call, maybe because they begged me to be or probably because I was as needy as they were. I liked making myself available to help them perfect their writing, but I didn’t like how I turned myself into an editing machine who marked up their narrative drafts, paragraph by paragraph (and sometimes word by word). Back then I believed that was the only way I could meticulously guide them through the writing process, kick them up a level, turn them into more polished college-level writers. I have no idea what they believed (except that they all deserved A’s). I used to believe that spinning wheel would never stop. 

Fast forward.

I retire from teaching, but I’m still exhausted and crazed. I continue to get so revved up I have trouble calming down enough to easily fall asleep. The spinning wheel slows down, but lately it speeds up again as I spend time thinking about my two closest West Hartford friends, whose wheels no longer turn. Thinking about them makes me feel future phobic, but I try to project myself forward, even though merely thinking about my future freezes me in the present, just like back in 1978, when I tried to read Gail Sheehy’s Passages past the chapter chronicling my age group (I was 30 when the book came out), and I was unable turn the page, because I was too afraid to read her predictions of what future me might become.

I know - I should be thrilled to be present me, but lately I’m not as thrilled as I could be. Yesterday I imagined I'd feel better if I could see my future projected above me on a huge movie screen, right before the final credits begin to roll – encapsulating my progress before the house lights turn back on. Today I’m not so sure.

I wish I could feel less frozen, but it's hard to thaw unless I am looking back at what now appears to me to be my brighter past. In 1978 I was one year away from moving from Philly to relocate in West Hartford, CT, three years from having my daughter, and four years from starting my children’s bookstore, Kidlit. A few years later, I'd written a few novels and published some articles (I never published the novels, though). I taught part-time, and sat, sat, sat through youth soccer, baseball, and basketball games (and even wrestling matches). I walked an hour a day for exercise with my friend until we couldn't walk together anymore because she died from cancer (1995). I lifted weights to keep my arm flab from turning into Grandmom Rose danglers. I took up spinning to keep my heart healthy. I talked on the phone to my friend, who died the next morning. (9/7/09 - If only I could turn back time.) A few weeks ago I became a grandmother, and I read aloud to my husband (who always reads aloud to me) from the two detailed journals I kept of my son and daughter’s first year of life.

I know, my roll-back-the-sands-of-time self needs to stop living in the past. It's just that I feel safer when I spend time there looking at old photographs, reading old journals, hearing old stories or jokes, and reconnecting with old friends. As long as I scroll backwards, time becomes neat and tidy. One and done. Not scary. Predictable. 

I am trying to move ahead,  I am, but it's hard, because whenever I do, I swear, my soul becomes psychedelicized.