Dear Wisconsin Republicans

Dear Wisconsin Republicans,

What are the chances that you could visit the wizard this weekend and ask for a couple dozen hearts? Even split between the lot of you, I’m sure they could improve the chances of your being able to pass as human. Then again, maybe the health and retirement security of your public servants will never be important to you. Nonetheless, surely, SURELY, the same people who would never stand for big businesses to be censored or limited in any way can understand that to include provisions in your jewel of a governor’s bill that would silence your state’s workers is unjust. Oh, wait, I forgot. Corporations consider unions to be their arch nemesis under the glory banner we call capitalism. And what is more American than to squelch the needs and rights of a vulnerable demographic in favor of a few rich bastards? Especially when those rich bastards have you in their pockets. I guess you’re just doing your patriotic duty.

Without a shred of affection,

Jessica Stovall

PS: Rush Limbaugh, you just outstripped Glenn Beck as the fool of the week. Trying to claim that the civil servants of Wisconsin are greedy? When you just benefited from the extension of a tax cut for the nation’s wealthiest two percent? I know your horse is high and your waist is too wide to make walking comfortable, but maybe you should get off it. You can get back on when I find a teacher who is compensated fairly.

PPS: Fox News Correspondents—though I really cannot see how you earned that title—REPUBLICANS HAVE CONTROL OF THE HOUSE. Stop using incendiary propaganda to make conservative Americans seems like victims.

My Babies

Even during my first year of teaching I called my students my babies. It always came up casually, like when informing Josh that I needed to buy Halloween treats or new dry erase markers for my babies. I’ve never thought all that much about what I call my students, but I do believe that nicknames can be rooted in our true feelings about a person.

The word my is in fact very indicative of the way that I feel about the group of 25 nose-picking hellions that I am assigned every year. I can’t be their family, but I can be a safe and caring adult in their lives, and for the 35 hours a week that they spend with me, they are my responsibility. As Saint-Exupery so eloquently explained, when we care for someone and make that person our responsibility, he or she tames us. Those children are not my job, they become a part of who I am, and I will always see them as mine. When other teachers make comments about my students—good or bad—I almost always tense up. How could they understand the needs, successes, and shortcomings of my students? Has that teacher listened to every wiggly-tooth story, sharpened 4,000 prize box pencils, or put Band-aids on the knees of my students? Does that teacher know what my students have to deal with in their homes or how much they’ve grown since I met them? And when my babies move on to second grade, it is months before I stop feeling jealous of their new teachers, the grown-ups who have supplanted me as their “favrit teechr,” the new receiver of hugs and smiles, the person who now gets to celebrate their successes.

The other word, babies, can seem demeaning, even if I do work with first graders, and I know that people could interpret it to be a desire to have babies of my own. I think, however, that it is more reflective of the way that I care for them. Don’t get me wrong. Not one of the students in my room is coddled. I dismiss complaints of headaches and paper cuts more easily than I ever thought I could. Stomach aches are usually cured after I cavalierly suggest a trip to the bathroom or a drink of water. But I do care for the students in my classroom, and it is easier to understand their behavior when I consider that, in many ways, they are still babies. It is much easier to forgive a first grader who tells another first grader that they look like a freak when you consider that their ability to appropriately manage their emotions is still developing. It is easier to be patient with a child who cries because they miss their mom when you realize that they are, still, quite young. And when does a child ever seem more like a baby in need of care than when they are proud of their accomplishments and you realize that—despite your honest wishes—they won’t remain your baby forever?

Our Lady of Grace and Mercy

My grandmother recently lent me the copy of "The Secret Life of Bees" that I bought her for Christmas, and I find myself reading again about the mercy and the love and the hope provided by Mary, mother of Christ. While neither the characters of this book nor Anne Lamott are Catholic, they seem--if possible--to find more comfort in the arms of this woman than is normally talked about in the arms of Jesus. Perhaps because she was declared a saint, ready to petition God for the lowly, she seems more accessible than the son of God. Perhaps her complete humanity makes it seem that she in turn understands our failings, our joys, and our suffering, even more so than Christ.

Or perhaps it is because she is a woman and a mother. I know several people who refer to God as a "she," and while I used to think that this was a feminist statement of sorts, I now believe that perhaps these people want to think of a warm and loving God who will enfold them in peace and rock them softly into a state of grace. I think that is why I like to equate God with Mother Nature, because a mother who tends and blesses and brings beauty into the whole world is such a joyful idea.

And thinking about God as a mother is a comfort, but surely God fulfills the role of a father as well; and as it is a stretch to imagine God in any human form, I can see why these women gravitate toward Mary, the mother of thousands. She is tangible in a way that a heavenly being is not. She is the female embodiment of spiritual love. Her hands did good work, her heart experienced great suffering, and her arms are ready for the weary to fall into until they are strong enough to get up and walk again.

Woman Hollering Creek

I just finished this book by Sandra Cisneros last night, and I am in awe. Her writing is beautiful and powerful and heart-rending, and yet it is also simple. Her descriptions are at once original and familiar, as if I had always known the perfect way to describe grackles but had only become aware of it when reading her words. Her depiction of the night sky as a watercolor, deep colors bleeding down from above, moved me. And her women, well. They are women. Women of love and sorrow. Women as fierce and unrelenting as bulls. Women as soft and forgotten as the night wind. I wonder what kind of a woman she is. How many of these stories portray her own grief and passion, and how many of them weave women into being that she wishes she were? They are imperfect women, but they are big. They stride through life with personalities and opinions all their own, and even if the people around them never look twice, they are THERE. The way these women reflect on nature, their histories, their lovers, makes me wonder if they are, in some way, more real than I am. They are present in their world, whereas sometimes I feel that I am not present in mine. I suppose this is my second goal for the summer. To be present, in my surroundings and in my self.

My Summer with the Aunties

Because this summer is the first in a while that I haven’t worked, I decided that I should make it epic, or at least productive. I’m going to read and write, and maybe become more comfortable with myself. I know that loving yourself is more about the inside than the out, but one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, talks about how being kind to your body in little ways—painting toenails, rubbing lotion lovingly into your most despised parts—is a good place to start taking care of a tired soul. So I’ve decided that I need to start loving my body a little bit at a time, and—inspired by Lamott and her Aunties—I’m starting from the bottom up. I realized the other day, legs propped up on the dashboard of my car while my husband drove, that I really have to give my gams some credit. They are not slender or long or tan. They are most certainly not firm, and they aren’t even shapely. But they carry me from place to place without complaint, and they are legs of substance. When I told Josh, he patted them fondly and called me his good little communist wife. A strange compliment, but it made me smile, and it made me reconsider what type of woman might be considered attractive. Imagine if, instead of self-absorbed waifs or even self-confident divas with their sexuality to offer, we idealized round, hardy women ready to do good work in the world. Not necessarily field labor, but work that uses the body as an extension of the inner self, desiring to serve others. I think that I would like to be that kind of woman. Who wouldn’t?