Sunglasses Always Fit

I (40SWF) on a Friday night, finished a paper for my Masters program, dusted, was accosted by my creepy landlord’s husband (they live downstairs and he creeps on me constantly) and yelled the f-word at him for doing so (God, it felt good), flipped my mattress, swept, changed the sheets, took down Christmas decor, cleaned the bathroom, spent an hour on TikTok (RIP) watching housecleaning videos to get inspired, washed the dishes, did a load of laundry and folded it out of the dryer, ate chips dipped into cottage cheese and Tajin for dinner -negating the need for any silverware or dish to clean, answered all my emails and text messages, ATE KALE TWICE IN ONE DAY, hit ten thousand steps, had two amazing bowel movements (those of us with gut issues know we are CELEbrating this and tracking it in some app), taught hormonal, feral fifth graders how to subtract decimals to the hundredths AND about Martin Luther King Jr AND about self-awareness AND let them open Christmas gifts from donations AND had a birthday party for a student.

So. AITA? Am I Totally Amazing? 

More cool things happened and more bummers occurred as well, but those are the ones that come to mind and I think I can say “yeah, I am Totally Amazing” today. We only had four days with students this week, thank Christ, and I crawled towards this weekend like towards an oasis in the hottest desert.

Just thw journey to get back here to Pana alone was a bit much. It goes like this:

I spent three weeks in the States for Christmas, which was lovely. After seven years of living in Hong Kong, which is a 15 hour flight and a 15 hour time difference, it was nice to have only a three hour drive, eight hours and a layover of flying, and two hour jet lag. I fell immediately into a pattern of play with the puppies, putter around, eat all my parents’ snacks and drink all their drinks and pretend I didn’t, hang out with Grandma routine. 10 out of 10. No notes.

At the end of my three weeks, I flew to Nashville to visit my sister and her two kids (with one on the way). The trip was memorable from the moment I arrived at 5am and deliriously got in the wrong Uber after a red-eye, only figuring it out about ten minutes down the road. Assuming I’d been kidnapped for trafficking, I started strategising how to duck and roll out of the car at the next stoplight, before simply asking the driver, a woman, “Is there a problem? How come you aren’t Rafael?” and she said “what?!” because she definitely was not Rafael and she was meant to get a Vivian, and I was supposed to be in Rafael’s identical car – a grey Toyota SUV something. Silly me for not double-checking the license plates. At least I watch enough TV to have some exit strategies in the event of an organ harvest, which is mostly just being charming and telling my captors I’ve lived a goooood life and these organs probably aren’t worth it, please let me out at the next 7-11?

My niece and nephew, like everyone else’s, are scientifically the funniest, cutest, sweetest, most intelligent creatures the Earth has ever been graced with. I’m possibly more enthralled because I don’t have my own kids. But I get a heavy dose of reality with every dirty diaper or “I can’t do it!” or preparing the seventeenth version of dinner because the first sixteen didn’t suit His Highness.

I would throw myself in front of a train for these munchkins. But wow, the smells. The demands. The long conversations to gentle-parent explain every effing thing. The 5am wakeups (I suppose. I did not participate in that). Hard pass on a long term, permanent basis for me. I prefer coming in to start tiny riots, get cuddles, spoil the wee ones with things, give the parents a break, and then bounce after five days, confident I’m missed and loved.

I love being an Auntie. I want to be the warm, safe places my aunts have always been for me – endless supplies of compliments, beauty treatments, a safe place for boy secrets, the source for packs of gum, special lunches and sleepovers, music education, shopping trips, teaching me and my besties how to drink tequila before the senior trip to Cancun, knowing looks and secrets and the weird pact of understanding that your common denominator – their parent, likely your sibling – is great but also flawed. It’s beautiful. 

On my last night in Nashville, I was working on my laptop to send in some papers. Ellis and Sutton were interested in my industriousness, so we sent voice memos to my parents and aunts. I let them type emojis and pretend to “go to work,” which was hilarious. Of course, somehow, my nephew managed to send my dad like 18 middle finger emojis in a row via iMessage. And it hurts the heart to realise “if I lived here, I could do so much more of this, get more snuggles, help raise these kids up right in a crazy world, create belly-laugh memories, be more than a face on Facetime.” 

I’ve been an immigrant for 12 years now. It never gets easier to say goodbye. Never gets easier to pack. It never gets easier to keep track of my effing passport and adaptors and house keys and currencies. Or to load the bags out of the car and onto a cart and stand in line to check in and watch the dot that is my mom and the dogs drive away on Find My Friends. There is no getting used to getting on a plane knowing I’m missing babies being born, people getting older, big celebrations. 

And apparently, I like to make it all harder on myself by choosing sh*tty airlines in the interest of saving about seventy dollars. Like Avianca. Jaaaaaaysus. The seats don’t recline, you have to pour out all your water before boarding, there is nothing offered for free on board. But the worst was, despite paying in advance for extra baggage, knowing I had a wish list that had been fulfilled, and just thinking of the things I wanted to bring back (mostly food like brownie mix and Everything But the Bagel), I had pre-booked and pre-paid for it. When I went to check in, the agent said that I had to choose a bag to put on stand-by. Which meant it probably wouldn’t come on the plane, but would arrive in a few days, and then I would have to figure out how to collect it, when I live four hours and over $200 dollars away. And I was so tired, and sad, and worried, and all the feelings you accumulate when you leave your family, that I just could not understand her. So I cried. 

This didn’t change anything, but everything in me for the last 24 hours of trying to pack and say goodbye and getting last minute vaccines from CVS and a final beer from my neighborhood pub and one last hug with Grandma and then one more and my stepdad slow cooking some beef for a stew and my mom scrolling the last moments of Tiktok and narrating it all for me with the dogs on my bed watching me freak out over packing and days away from another effing tr*mp presidency and a final walk on a trail where I could just be alone and breathe . . . i was ripe for a breakdown. 

So ripe that I had several, for good measure.

But, heyooooo! After hours of terrible turbulence in uncomfortable seats that didn’t recline, without so much as a cup of water, when I landed in Guatemala, so did ALL of my bags! I split a car with two friends to wind through the mountains for four hours back to our little lake, dragged nearly 300 pounds of luggage up to my apartment, and then collapsed on the bed, delighted to be done with the hard work of traveling, delighted to be alone for a bit, somewhat excited to be back in Guatemala but feeling heartsick at leaving so much family stuff back in the States, ready to be back into a routine of working and working out and chores and taking care of myself that I seem to just abandon entirely in an enthusiastic and sometimes self-destructive way wherever I’m on holiday. 

This week back has tested me. Kids are always feral when returning after a long holiday like Christmas break, but they were extra on this one, for no particular reason. On Tuesday, I had a two hour meeting with psychologists and administration and teacher leads to discuss a particular case in my class, a kid I have advocated for and cried over and done so much extra to try to help him. The next morning, 8am, he comes up to me and tells me to hold out my hand for a surprise. And I thought to myself “aw, the universe is giving me some karma back for all the blood, sweat, and tears I’ve poured into this ten year old rascal.” I thought maybe he’d brought some candy or a flower for me. I held out my hand, and he dropped a dead cockroach into it.

So. 

I gentle-teachered him about how not cool that was, battling the internal voices that wanted to shake him by the shoulders and ask “what the actual — were you thinking,” but I know that’s not helpful. Because he’s a boy and they actually don’t think about 99.9% of the time. And it’s not legal to shake kids, as much as you might want to. My colleague standing and watching later said I handled it well, which is good, considering I wanted to drop-kick that kid. I have spent so many hours of my life concerned with his learning and well-being, and . . .unfortunately, as teachers, we often get reminded that it doesn’t mean squat in the cosmic sprinkling of good things. Sometimes even the best intentions still get sprinkled with dead bugs.

We made it through the first week, and we’re looking at months without a public holiday in sight, I started a Masters’ program that already has me pulling my hair out, it’s windy and dusty so we can’t stop sneezing, my heart hurts in many ways to be so far from the big family things happening at home, but. We’re still good. Life is good. I am good.

Thanks for following the madness.