Water on Concrete
By Audrey Griess, Hammonton, New Jersey, U.S.
I put the loops of the mask over her little ears, being careful not to hook them on her diamond studs. I shuffle her unicorn jacket on her shoulders, pulling it tight around her tiny body. Her eyes, innocent and open, like the eyes of all three year olds, searches my face for support and signs of safety. I can not deceive her. I can not give her false confidence. I simply smile a sympathetic, heartsick smile.
My first born, a moody first grader, appears behind me holding her mask. She had shrugged on her own jacket and put the loops of her pink mask around her ears. Her hair is messy, as it always is when she refuses to allow me to brush it. She pushes up her new glasses, and I notice they are starting to fog from the hot air trapped in her mask. Behind her mask, she whispers, “I don’t want to go.” Her voice is tight– and my chest reacts with a similar tightness.
Neither do I.
I am wearing a simple black dress, riding boots, and a cardigan, but none of that matters, as I know that when I am in the classroom, we all focus on the masks, not on our other attire. I will wear the deceptive mask that my administration gave us. It blazes with bright blue– our school color– and our school emblem. It implies that I am proud to be a masked teacher.
I am not. In fact, I don’t feel like I am a teacher at all anymore. I am now a mental health expert on the brink of mental distress herself. The words grit, resilience, and trauma-informed fill my head. I am constantly thinking of fight-flight-freeze, and I am always thinking of ways to thaw my students, my own children, and myself out of freeze in the face of this year’s trauma. Lessons on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur Miller seem irrelevant– even trivial– and this is something that shocks me. The literature that I have so much passion for and that I have spent years conveying the importance of to my students, has no home in a pandemic.
My students are in survival mode. Teaching them the literature of the early 1900s is like pouring water on concrete.
“I know,” I reply back to my oldest daughter. “But, we all need to be brave.”
My attempt to assuage her fears seems useless. I watch as my words spread like water and run in small rivers off the surface that it is trying to penetrate. Yet, in that moment, I know some of it penetrates, for both me and her, just enough so that we can bravely soak in the reassurance that we are all facing life with unforeseen grit.