So, I'm Going to Talk About Money

I wake up too early, with a start. Realize all of a sudden that it's a day later than I thought it was. Still Monday, but the date is a number ahead of the number in my head. Meaning, an automatic withdrawal for a monthly bill is happening today, not tomorrow. No time to teach a private yoga class and then rush that check to the credit union before closing time tomorrow. I've been counting on that check to cover the withdrawal.

Now I'll be counting change.

I turn it into a homeschool lesson. Pour the change jar onto a blanket on my lap and the kids help me separate coins. We talk about the worth of each coin, the difference in sizes, copper versus silver. My husband brought to our marriage a series of red plastic coin containers. We fill them up to the line at the top, and the coins slide right into the paper sleeves in the perfect amounts, all ready to go.

We have more than we need. Means we can put some gas in the tank this week. Not a full tank, but a half tank will do.

My emotions, during the course of this exercise: Worry and anger over what I keep seeing as our lack. A simple pride that I can turn it into a lesson and allow my kids to help. A certain sense of detachment, of knowing it will be okay, and that I needn't be overly attached to the details. Just count the pennies, Katy, and collect them in the sleeves. Just do the thing before you to be done. (That's all there ever is to do. How many times must I learn and relearn this?)

* * *

Sitting on the bench at the beach with two stay-at-home-moms of my recent acquaintance. The short-haired brunette is watching her two children climb on the slide. The long haired brunette is watching her only son dig in the sand and fill a dump truck. I suppose I'm the medium-haired brunette in this vignette. And my eyes are darting across the playground and back to the sand, because I have three kids to keep an eye on. No, I don't have three kids of my own, but I babysit to pay the grocery bill, so I spend less time sitting and talking, more time moving quickly to and fro, counting three heads, three heads, three heads. Everyone's accounted for.

* * *

I often think about how I wish I didn't have to do childcare. I'm so over the ten hour days. Then my husband comes home and I toss the children in his general direction, hop in the shower, and rush out the door to teach an hour or two of fitness classes every evening. My coffee intake is strategically planned to the hour of each day. I eat in the car, sometimes, to be sure I have enough energy to make it through the evenings. I miss bedtimes for work. This is precisely the full-time-work-life I never, ever wanted.

But I spend all day with my little ones. And they are so happy. They love this life, full of friends who arrive first thing in the morning, stay all day, go with us wherever we go. I resent it sometimes, but they think it's simply wonderful.

* * *

Suddenly I hear the long-haired brunette finish the tail of sentence I'm sure I must be misunderstanding . .. since I'm trying to keep the grocery bill to $50 or $60 a week. 

I take my eyes off all three children, and plunk my backside right back onto that bench. I lean in, and ask: Did you say $50 or $60 a week? For groceries? She nods. How do you do that? I ask, We spend $250 a week for groceries and gas. Both heads whip in my direction: short and long-haired brunettes, faces aghast. I mean, I hasten to add, $100 of that is gas, so... but then I spurt out the rest: If I make $300 a week, we easily spend that. 

They look at me like I'm crazy.

I mumble something about organic meat. They nod knowingly. The long-haired brunette assures me she could get my grocery bill down to $70 a week. I wonder in my head if she could possibly be serious.

* * *

Later, I ask my sister, who assures me that she spends about the same amount as I do. So does our other sister, she confides, and I feel better about it.

I think it over, and realize I would not trade my too-busy, babysitter-by-day, yoga-instructor-by-night, life for the simpler pleasures of factory farmed meat.

Funny, how I can feel scarcity in the face of such obvious abundance.

Schooling

My mom tells a story about my first day of school. I walked out of the red brick building at the end of the day and when she asked me: How was your first day? I replied: Well, I won't be going back THERE again. We laugh when she tells it, but I believe I was dead serious. I still remember my kindergarten teacher as one of the meanest people I've ever met. She brought her newborn baby to school one day in the middle of the year, and although I was a well-behaved and generally kind little kid, I vividly remember thinking: I'd like to hurt her baby. So she knows how she makes other people feel.

Another one my mom tells: Shortly after I started kindergarten we were driving through the city, and I was sitting in the passenger seat (back before the dawn of booster seats and airbags), gazing out the window at the passing scenery. Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" began to play on the radio, and I grew animated and emphatic, singing along with the lyrics: We don't need no education! We don't need no thought control!

In light of these stories, it's amusing that I became a teacher. Or it could be that I had strong opinions about education right from the start.

* * *

The first time I heard of the school where I've been planning to enroll my son, I gasped loudly in the middle of an Irish pub and then read aloud from the newspaper to my husband. Our city had just moved from an open enrollment plan to neighborhood schools, and kids were being moved from the schools they'd previously attended to whatever building they were assigned by a street-by-street district map.

We live in a middle-class neighborhood backed-up against poverty stricken pockets; our whole city looks like this. We didn't live here back then, but I was familiar with the name of the neighborhood. And parents from this neighborhood were being asked to pull their kids from a school with a decent reputation to send them to one that ended up being closed down a few years later by the federal government under No Child Left Behind (Remember how the government could come in and close down failing schools if they didn't make adequate yearly progress? That's what happened here.).

A group of parents banded together to sue the district. Their lawyer was quoted in the newspaper, commenting on the fact that these kids had to leave their school of choice to attend the newly-assigned school with the bad reputation: This school isn't suitable for middle-class children.

I gasped aloud over my entree, because I couldn't believe he'd say that out loud, to a reporter. But it's suitable for poor kids!? I said to my husband.

Of course, once we moved into the neighborhood, and I did my research, which school do you suppose I wanted my son to attend?

* * *

No Child Left Behind expired in January, along with parental rights to school choice. The transfer request form disappeared from the district website; the woman who answered my call in the district office chuckled when I asked about my chances at getting my son into the decent school.

She chuckled.

I'm guessing that means my chances don't look very good?

* * *

Because I'm at home, teaching these babies, and I have no colleagues to talk to, I've been reading voraciously: everything I can find on early childhood brain development, activities for learning in the home, self-directed learning, promoting literacy in young learners. I'm bursting with excitement every day for all the amazing potential that education contains!

I look at my boy, who never runs out of questions and ideas. He's full of stories and theories; he overflows with energy and joy. His mind races like his heartbeat, only faster, and I imagine I can see the neurons pulsing, the dendrites reaching out in every direction. They only grow when you feed them, you know. Some of them grow like weeds, and others shrivel and die, and this is just how the brain works, you know? But you have to feed the ones you want to grow.

* * *

All this is to say: I'm thinking about homeschooling. It's never anything I thought I'd do. But things change, and here we are.

Choices

It's 1996 and I'm in the woods with a bunch of strangers, backpacking through rural Arizona. We're about to embark upon what's called a "solo," where we split up and spend three days completely alone: sleeping on the ground, fasting, drinking from streams after adding iodine drops to our water bottles.

This will change you forever, my guide intones. At the end of my solo I had streaked my face with mud and discovered a side of myself I didn't know existed.

I knew it wouldn't change me. All the things they say will change you: travel, falling in love, becoming a mother: they've only ever made me more deeply myself.

I spend those three days naked on a rock, looking up at desert trees, writing bad poetry and making lists in my mind: all the things I'll eat when I finally get out of the woods and back to civilization; my various perfect dream jobs, in order of likelihood of actual occurrence; all the religions I'd be willing to try out, knowing I'll never find one that fits. Then I plan my wedding dress, even though I'm not engaged, or even dating. I haven't met my husband yet; I'm decidedly single, just out of a long-term relationship that held on longer than it ought to. And I'm not a wedding dress planning kind of girl. I've never dreamed of that big day, never played wedding with my barbies, never particularly cared about weddings one way or the other before.

But here's what's inspired me: I bought a dress at the Salvation Army before the backpacking trip began. It's blue, with chiffon layers starting at the neckline and running all the way down to the floor. I want my Salvation Army dress remade in white for my wedding. My grandmother will do it; I know she will.

I don't meet my husband for another year after that trip. We're engaged within three months. My grandmother makes my dress: a replica of my thrift store find. My husband's grandmother makes his suit out of hemp; we order yards of it from somewhere on the Internet. We make our own invitations on homemade paper and the wedding is held in my parent's backyard. Our flowers are bought from the farmer's marker and stolen from farmer's fields the morning of the wedding. I make the arrangements myself, stick them in mason jars, and place them on the tables. My grandmother also makes the bridesmaid's dresses; she teaches me how to do the last one, and I stay up with her and sew the maid of honor's dress for my sister late into that summer night. The sky is dark when we finish, and I've made my first --and last, at least for the next decade, as it turns out-- dress.

Someone calls it a hippie wedding and I'm half-offended and half-amused. But of course, it was.

My father, a year earlier when he heard of my engagement, had asked: what's he going to do?

I knew he meant for a living; my fiancee was an art major with no job prospects after graduation.

I don't know, I answer honestly.  But we're smart, dad, and not afraid of hard work. We'll figure it out.

I can hear my father's grin through the telephone wire; he approves of that sort of answer.

The point is, we've always been the sort of people to look at a bright, shiny, perfect wheel right off the assembly line, glance at each other, smile, and say:  Bet we could reinvent that!

That's who we are. For better or for worse.

Unpacking Privilege: Reality

This is Part 2 in a series examining privilege, and how it plays out in my life. For Part 1, go here.

I walk into work, fresh from a weekend of nursing my resentments. My tiny wounds --grudges borne carrying the weight of class consciousness around on my shoulders for years, though no one has asked me to do so-- blossom like blooms in May, fed by images of a life I imagine easier than my own. I'll be laid off at the end of this month; I'm going to be a stay-at-home-mom, but money will be tight, and I will have to juggle. I want to be a stay-at-home-mom with money that is not tight; I don't want to have to juggle. What I want is so very close to what I have, but rather than recognizing my good fortune, I feel slighted so close to the goal. Why can't I have just a little bit more?

My office phone rings. A student tells me her name, but it takes three times before I can make it out. She's practically whispering, and her voice just doesn't sound right.  

I'm sorry I didn't come to school last week. I'm going to come this week. We had a terrible week, our family, last week... her voice breaks off.

I've learned not to ask too many questions over the years. They'll tell me if they want to.

Some people think if you accept any kind of government aid, representatives of that government have the right to ask you any questions they want. To insult and harass you, to accuse you of lying. To insert themselves into your personal business, into your bedroom, into your very soul. To determine your worth as a human being before the eyes of God and the Government before they help you eat or feed your children, receive medical care, earn an education.

I'm not one of those people, so I shut my mouth, listen, wait.

My brother was shot in a drive-by, she chokes, the bullet went in his back and came out his face. I want to finish school, I do, it's just ... last week, I just ... couldn't. He's alive. I'm the only one he'll let near him. They released him, but I have to bathe him and everything. I want to finish though. I'll come this week. I'm sorry I didn't call. I didn't make any calls that day. I didn't answer my phone all day. But I'll come back this week.

This student is the only one who's been here longer than me. I've bought her Christmas presents, held her babies, taught them the letters in their name and listened to her fears about raising them in the same streets that claimed her brother years ago.

Once in parenting class we were discussing spanking, and she yelled out: If spanking worked, my brother wouldn't be running the streets the way he is! 'Cause I know he got his ass beat enough times, if it was gonna work, it would have by now! Shit, it MUST not work!

That evidence was far more persuasive than the research I presented, for many of our parents. They argued my research, loudly, point-by-point, but when she spoke the room got quiet. I saw heads nodding as they considered her first-hand evidence, anecdotal but no doubt echoed by experiences of their own.

I reassured her that it was fine to miss a week; that we'll be here this week, and then help her figure out where she needs to go next to finish her education. She's lucky, in that all her kids will be in school starting this fall. She can attend classes during that time; she won't need childcare. She has options. Lots of the others don't.

So if she's lucky, what am I?

I hang up the phone and pass the rest of the day in a pensive fog. My heart is heavy.

But I'm through feeling sorry for myself.

Unpacking Privilege: Resentment

I spent this past weekend with the kids so my husband could continue attacking our home repair projects like the one-man construction crew he is. I have home projects of my own to do: there are bags and boxes of outgrown clothing to store behind the attic wall, and other bins to pull out, unpack, fold, put away. There are baseboards to scrub and bins to buy; books to stack and art supplies to arrange. In the rush to make our home presentable before the start of the school year we've moved a lot of things up into our attic bedroom. These things need to be sifted through, organized, made sense of.

I need some time to make sense of everything, but there is no time. My husband has heavy lifting to do, and I need to corral the kids so he can get it done. This is the way our marriage must function, for now, --and this is neither the first nor the last time it will be so-- and both of us struggle with it. He doesn't want to be a one-man workhorse, and I don't want all my work to be pushed to the back burner until his is done. But this is how it is. It's temporary. It's going to get us where we want to go.

In between entertaining the children and attempting to mop the hardwood floors I tried to sooth the rough edges of my anxiety by perusing blogs online. Rather than finding any solace, I found myself resentful of the following things:

• Beautiful houses (that do not need ridiculous amounts of work). (In my state of mounting resentment I was sure -absolutely sure!- that nobody but us owns a fixer-upper. Nobody!)
• Expensive accessories, including, but not limited to:
• purses (I have about 12 trillion purses upstairs that I own but never use, but no matter)
• shoes (ditto)
• jewelry (yep, ditto there too)
• Pinterest boards of all types, especially those featuring:
• clothing (I haven't bought clothing from anywhere but the Salvation Army since 2007; I'm feeling a bit peevish about it, can you tell?) 
• home decor (I want new throw pillows. I can't have new throw pillows. This makes me grumpy.) 
• anything nautical (get out of my face with your adorable beach house!) 
• uplifting or inspirational slogans (if I wanted to be uplifted or inspired, do you really think I'd be sitting here feeding my resentments so voraciously!?)
• And finally: anyone with any certainty about God and "his plan". (If God is involved enough that he cares about the minute details of your homeschooling curriculum then where the fuck has he been when it comes to the entire continent of Africa for the last several decades?!?) (And er, um, why do we have to fix up our own house instead of hiring a professional to do it?) (I think I somehow managed to think both of these things, with a special sort of resentment-fueled cognitive dissonance.)

It was one of those moods.

For Part 2, go here.

On Outrage, Determination, and Faith

Three of my facebook friends posted the same link over a period of a few weeks.  I got a very vague idea of the content by the comments on the first post, and I didn't bother to click and read it.  Second time, same story.  The first two friends were people I really like and admire.  I wasn't in the mood to ponder our differing political philosophies.  The third time was weeks later.  This time it was the sibling of an old high school friend.  I barely know her.  For some reason, when she posted it this past Sunday morning, I clicked on the link.

It was a letter to Obama, or the Administration, or someone in Washington, the exact details escape me.  Written by an emergency room doctor, it told the story of a woman without healthcare who could afford cigarettes, fast food and a gold tooth.  Based on this single interaction, the author suggested that rather than a healthcare problem, we have a culture problem.

The Culture of Poverty.

*Sigh*

Where do I begin?

* * *

I found myself furious, sick to my stomach mad, swinging punches and sneering lips and everything I had to say came out in a hiss.  It was all fuck you and fuck this and fuck that, bare feet stomping on the hardwood floors while my husband slept peacefully in our bedroom and my toddler played trucks, bathed in the warm sunlight from the bay windows.  I argued with imaginary critics; I got all up in the faces of the smug and sanctimonious; I lectured like a pissed off college professor in a class full of freshman I wanted to cow; I sighed heavily and explained things laboriously in my most earnest imaginary voice; I threw my hands in the air and gave up, too disgusted to bother; I thundered my righteous judgment down on anyone who dared to disagree with me.

I muttered under my breath while pacing in my pajamas, making emphatic hand gestures that no one -save my child- saw, and no one understood.

* * *

I sit with "the culture of poverty" every day.  I teach parenting classes to (mostly) mothers and (some) fathers in poverty. I read the latest research, ask questions, listen, observe, theorize; I meditate on that shit when I wake up in the middle of the night.

I also come from a childhood of relative poverty.  I always say relative, now that I've been sitting with other people's poverty for all these years.  My poor is not someone else's poor.  But according to the federal guidelines, I qualified for free government lunch.  And because I had the mother I had, who made me sandwiches every morning although I was the oldest of six she had to care for, I never once had to eat it.

So I ask myself every day what poverty is, if there's a culture to it that offers any insight.  My whole life has been spent with one hand empty, and the other hand holding a book, trying to find out what it means to live in the richest country in the world, and still have people hungry.  I haven't ever stopped studying the subject.

And yet, I'm in no position to judge.  No position to make sweeping generalizations, even based on interactions with people I've known for years, people who share the most intimate details of their lives with me, people who trust me to hold their babies and their hands as they navigate circumstances you frankly can't imagine unless or until you have been there.

Or even then, oftentimes.

* * *

I have a tough crop of parents this fall.  We teach them: you are your child's first and best teacher.  But what happens if they don't want the job?  I find them sneaking out before parenting class, texting in the hallway when they're supposed to be teaching their lessons in the children's classrooms, coming up with a suspicious number of appointments requiring early dismissal already in the month of September.

Oh, it would be easy to demonize.  So nice to blame them; damn students don't want to learn.  So much nicer than stepping up my teaching efforts.  So very much nicer than catching them in the hallways with a smile, an open ended question to temporarily trap them, followed by a firm escort down to class while stubbornly continuing the conversation they would clearly prefer not to have, my demeanor too decidedly kind and oblivious for them to confront me, too much faith in their potential to let them slip out the door before I have a chance to peddle my medicine, even though they already think they know I've got nothing but snake oil.  So much nicer to place the blame than to overlook rolled eyes, repeat directions ignored the first time, strategize with my teaching team every day until I'm almost late to pick up my son, and repeatedly remind myself of the virtue of patience.

I don't do the authoritarian, big boss, my way or the highway thing.  It's not me, for one, and for two, I'm not here to force feed anybody anything.  This is not compulsory education.  This is people who ain't buyin' what I'm sellin'.  I take it back to the drawing board.  I step up my efforts at marketing.  I dig my heels deep into what I believe to be true, pull out every tried and true teaching trick in the book, work at it every day, and I wait.  And wait.  And wait.  I believe I will prevail.

I don't go to church on Sundays.  But I have faith so as to move mountains.

* * *

My husband awoke and asked me how my morning was.  I did not rant and rave; I did not rage against the dying of the light of intellect on my facebook page.  I spoke in measured tones, and I told him the story of my morning.  I calmly spoke my desires for fuck you and fuck this and fuck that, and in the open air of my kitchen over pancake batter in a big, glass bowl, the futility of the authoritarian, big boss, my way or the highway approach --even disguised as David rising up against Goliath, for don't we always cast ourselves in the role of David?-- revealed itself in the silly emptiness of my words spoken into the air instead of inside my head.

People believe all kinds of ugly untruths about human beings in poverty.  Sometimes we have to, in order to live with the status quo.  It's also very easy to judge that which you do not know.  And there are sometimes very ugly truths about human beings in poverty, just as there are about all of us.  The world is full of beauty, and still, we are savage beasts.  And time rolls on.

But none of that is really my concern.  I have to get back to work.  I have mountains to move.

A Teacher's Thoughts on Unschooling

I spent a year as a special education teacher in a classroom for kids labeled "emotionally disturbed".  What a terrible label, no?  But, as you would expect, these kids were not easy.  I did a great many things wrong that year.  I did a few things right.

One day, in the midst of a math lesson that no one understood, I stopped teaching, grabbed a hunk of clay from a cupboard, carried it to a table at the back of the classroom, and began to punch it, hard.  Stupid math!  I shouted at the clay.  I hate you, math!  I gave it a number of good blows, and then looked up at the class, and very calmly asked:  Who wants to go next?

Another time, after being teased mercilessly by my students for the state of my car (it was an almost twenty year old car covered in dents, and I worked in an affluent suburban district), I offered the following journal question on the whiteboard in the morning:  If you worked for Pimp My Ride, and my car came on the show, what would you do to improve it?  I prayed my principal would not enter the classroom and see the word pimp written at the front of the room, but I got my best creative writing pieces of the year that day.  One kid hooked me up with an aquarium full of live fish in my rearview window.  Perhaps not the best safety feature, but I have to admit, pretty awesome.

The best thing I ever did was to admit to my students, one day in a moment of dire frustration, that I, too, found their curriculum boring and stifling, and that if it were up to me, we would take off together in a bus and learn about what we saw while traveling.  I didn't plan to tell them this.  I blurted it out, because teaching fifth grade curriculum was boring, and stifling, and because it was true.  I'd have taken my chances in a bus full of students they called "emotionally disturbed", and to this day I'm convinced it would have been a good sight better than the classroom.  We had a long, engaging conversation about traveling, and learning, and we bonded as human beings, rather than in the roles we had been assigned, and poorly acting out, for the rest of the year.

*************************

The hardest pill for me to swallow would be to continue teaching, but not get paid.  Teaching is my profession.  I have two degrees, and four certifications!  I went to graduate school!  I would have a hard time continuing the work, but sacrificing the paycheck.  I say the hardest pill; that would be the only pill.  Everything else about unschooling sounds less like a pill, and more like heaven.  The more I read about it, the more I want, want, want!

Still, I think I probably won't do it.  I plan to send my son to public school.  To our inner-city public school, to be precise.  The test scores are rock bottom, and the graduation rate is deplorable.  But our neighborhood school is highly recommended by parents, and I think it's worth a shot.  I believe deeply in the ideal of a public education, and my son will learn to read on my lap, so I'm not afraid, at this point in time, of his being stunted by our city schools.  Now, if he starts off there, and I see the endless twinkle in his eyes beginning to dull, or his spirit beaten down by some rote, repetitive, curricular crap, I reserve the right to change my mind.  Only time will tell.

*************************

The motto of the program where I teach now is:  A parent is a child's first, and best, teacher.  We attempt to teach our parents, who spend most of their days honing the skills they need to survive severe poverty, to provide their young children with the experiences they require to develop strong literacy skills.  As with any skillset, some are better at it than others.  Some struggle, and some walk in the door and blow me away.

The first mother I met whose skills were so good she should be teaching the class instead of taking it was an exotic dancer.  She talked to her babies, and all the others in our classroom, like she was born to be a baby whisperer.  In another life, she could have had my job.  In another life, I suppose I could have had hers.

She won't homeschool, because she'll need to work, unless she meets a man who sticks around long enough, and has the skills, to provide her the financial security to make that choice.  It's unlikely, given the track record of the last two.  It's also a shame, as she'd make an excellent teacher, especially to her own children, who lit up her eyes like a Christmas tree every time she gazed at their little faces.

But she, and most of the parents in my program, are learning to homeschool their infants and toddlers, preparing them for the same supposedly substandard education my son will receive at the city schools I'm not sure what to make of yet, and hesitant to judge, as my experiences have shown me that conventional wisdom overlooks an awful lot of possibilities.  If, indeed, a parent is a child's first, and best, teacher, then we are all homeschoolers in a sense, and for a time.

*************************

Although I call myself a schoolteacher, I work mostly with the students who slipped through the cracks, the ones who were failed by traditional schooling.  I, myself, was well-served by school.  I'm cut out for it.  I like to sit quietly, and read, and write about what I've been reading.  School was a haven for me.  But if all those books taught me anything, it was that the most important thing to do with your life is to follow your deepest joy.  It might not be easy; it certainly won't be without sacrifice.  But it will always be worth it.

And so, despite the fact that a school district pays my salary, that I have - at this point - every intention of sending my children to public school, of marching into those old buildings to join the overworked, underpaid, sometimes wonderful and sometimes worthless professionals, to help educate all of our babies, in the very best ways we know how, despite my personal commitment to public education, to those parents who choose, for whatever reason, to homeschool their kids, I can only say:  Bravo!  I hope you find magic in those moments with your children, and I hope we're lucky enough to find some of our own, behind those old walls of brick and mortar.

And who knows?  It's never too late to take off in that proverbial bus, if the curriculum grows too boring and stifling.  Whatever the setting, I want our lessons to be alive, moving like a lump of clay under the force of a good, strong punch, swimming like a fish in the aquarium of a pimped-out car, connecting like a classroom of teachers and children who stop for a minute, to be human beings together, despite the sometimes steep institutional odds set against it.

Straddling The Tracks

In the city where I live, if you head uphill, chances are you're entering a nicer neighborhood.  If you go downhill, you're likely watching the 'hood get worse.  Our house is on a steep hill.  We're the first house at the bottom of the street, as it heads up.  I always have one foot in each world.  I come from poverty, or working class, or blue collar roots, whatever you want to call it.  Now I have a masters degree, a professional position, and a student loan back in forbearance for another year because I still can't afford to make the monthly payments on all that fancy schooling I bought myself.

I leave my house to go for a walk.  I walk uphill, because I like the cardio.  Except that's not always true.  I also walk uphill if I'm pushing the jogging stroller.  You can't rock a golden yellow double jogging stroller walking in the ghetto.  That shit just ain't right.

So if I walk uphill with the jogger, I see other moms, mid-thirties, early forties, also rocking jogging strollers and toddlers.  We smile at each other as we pass.   I don't know any other middle class moms around here.  Our circle of friends fell apart right before I got pregnant when everyone else got divorced or procreated and high-tailed it to the 'burbs, and we never got around to making any more.

I wonder when I see these mothers walking with their jogging strollers and yoga pants, while I'm walking with my jogging stroller and yoga pants: are we the same?  I don't think we're the same because I don't want to smile as we pass.  I want to look down at the ground, avoid eye contact, walk fast, hide in the hood of my XXL black hoodie.  But maybe they don't want to make eye contact either.  Maybe they do it for the same reason I do it: that's how shit's done in this neighborhood.  And it has nothing to do with them that I'd rather avoid eye contact.  I've been known to pretend I don't see my own friends at the grocery store.  I'm just like that sometimes. 

If I don't take the jogger I might go uphill and I might go downhill.  Usually I start off going up for the cardio, but eventually I take a turn that leads me back downhill and I cross that notorious street--every town has one, cities have a bunch of 'em--that street where the neighborhood officially becomes no good anymore.  The windows in the houses are boarded up; there's garbage in the streets and the sweet smell of blunt wrappers and weed wafting through the air.  If I pass someone walking here, we both do the same thing: look down at the ground, avoid eye contact, walk fast, hide in the hoods of our XXL black hoodies.  Aaaaahhhhh.....

There's always a certain sense of relief for me when I cross that invisible class line, over to the the wrong side of the tracks, a sense of freedom, like I'm going back home, like I'm safe in anonymity and no one will bother or question me.  Unless I have the jogging stroller.  Then I just feel like a tool who probably stumbled into the wrong part of town accidentally.

I wonder if I'll always breathe a little easier on the wrong side of the tracks.  I don't know.  I have to walk back uphill to get home.  And that golden yellow double jogger is mine; I chose it myself after searching long and hard on Craigslist.  But so is the oversized black hoodie.  I think I'll always be standing right at the intersection of that street that separates us.  No matter where I walk: uphill, downhill, or for how long, I'll always have one foot on either side of the tracks.  Maybe that is where I belong.