The house is eerily quiet. Owen is at his grandmother’s house for a couple of days. We are eating dinner in the living room, drinking wine and shaun is watching soccer on the Spanish channel. Not an untypical evening for us, minus the wine and I try to eat dinner at the table most nights. There is no little boy running circles around the couch, pulling the cat’s tail or throwing a fit until he gets ice cream. Me and Shaun have plans to play a game and go to a movie after dinner……..that is definitely an abnormality. It is weird to think that this used to be normal. There are conviences of course, for example I haven’t had to look at milk, cartoons, or diapers in 24 hours. I didn’t have to re-read the same book 5 times. I went somewhere for lunch that doesn’t have a kids menu. I wandered around B&N for an hour uninterrupted. I slept until an astonishing 9:15 this morning…..but tonight there will be no one to tickle or tuck in or read stories to. It is a very uneven trade.
I remember waking up the day after the election tired and stunned. When I got to work I went downstairs to make copies and make some tea and did not make it back to my classroom until right before the tardy bell rang. I have a large class, full of all kinds of students from all kinds of backgrounds. I had not even thought about how they would respond to the election and that since we begin school so early that I might be the first adult they saw that day. Immediately an African American on the front row told me that she was disappointed in our country. I teach science, not government and thought that I needed to turn the conversation as quickly as I could safely back to the objectives on the board, but I could not ignore her hurt and the rest of the quiet in the room. I told her that regardless of what candidate she supported that this country is run by more than one person, that very soon she would be able to vote, that she had a voice. Behind her, a student that also ha...
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