Lucky

As you know, I am in Denver with a group of my colleagues at a Creating Common Assessments conference. So far it has been a decent trip. The conference is not as good as we had hoped, but the time spent with my colleagues has been quite productive. We are talking about some good things, and I'm excited to see where it all goes. That's the good news.

Here's the bad news: this morning, at about 9:30, my principal got a phone call. He said, "This probably isn't good news," picked up his phone and walked out of the conference room to answer it. The five of us left at the table (four of us are freshman English teachers, and we brought our principal and department chair with us) just looked at each other, worried.

You see, yesterday while we were waiting for the airplane, Steve told us about his mom. He'd just been to see her last week because she had been moved to hospice care. She is 82 and has cancer, and she wasn't doing very well.

When he walked back into the room five minutes later, his face was red, but he was under control. He told us, "This morning, 1 a.m. But it's good. The silver lining is that she was in a lot of pain and now she isn't." Then he said, "So what are we talking about here?"

I was speechless. What do you say to someone who just lost his mother? His dad passed away when he was 21, so Mom was it. He very obviously didn't want to talk about it, and he had to step out a few times to make phone calls to his wife and daughter and brothers. Every time I looked at him for the rest of the morning, I wanted to cry. My eyes kept welling up and I had to keep biting the inside of my cheek to avoid the tears.

As I sit here writing this, I'm welling up again. I just want to give him a hug and send him home. But I have to abide by his wishes and keep on pretending like everything is great and all this stuff we're talking about is really important. But in the whole scheme of things, it's not.

Though he didn't want to do a lot of talking about it, Steve did say a few things at different times throughout the day. He kept talking about silver linings, and trying to find the positives in this sad situation. I admire that. It made me think, too, about my own family.

Sometimes it's easy to forget about how lucky we really are. At this time of year, I start to get frustrated and annoyed with all of the travel decisions we have to make. J and I have three sets of parents between us, and none of them live in the same city. It means we have to make decisions about who we are going to go see and when. It's not possible for us to be at all three houses in all three cities in the same day if we want to spend any kind of quality time with any of them.

Our families do their best to make it easy on us, but I suffer from a lot of guilt. I hate feeling like I have to choose between them. I don't like to feel guilty. That makes me cranky. Then I feel guilty that I'm cranky, then I'm guilty that I'm cranky because I'm guilty. Can you see where this is going? It's a never ending and vicious cycle.

I often forget that it's not an inconvenience to have three sets of parents: it's a blessing. There are people in this world who don't have any parents to love them. I have six. And that makes me the luckiest person in the world.

I love you Mom, John, Dad, Mel, Mom H. and Dad H. Thanks for being my silver lining.