February’s penultimate week is a week without children in the classroom. We sit in staff meetings and professional development workshops; address our paper work back-log; clean, and restore our classrooms – to a certain extent; and visit our students and their families at home (strengthening that home-school connection!) Our workshops, with the splendid Lesley Koplow of The Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice, were, partly, on trauma, on working with traumatized children. We reflect on the way that benign features of the environment (our classrooms...ourselves?) can trigger intrusive, overwhelming memories in the child who has suffered trauma. There’s part of my notebook page quoting L. Koplow: “BODY INTEGRITY: what about me is always going to be here? What about me is incidental?” This is an important question for two-year-olds. Sometimes older children, if traumatized or under stress, will return to (or be re-seized by) this question. Nereida and her pee, for instance? Next to the words there is a drawing of a booted foot belonging to a colleague. My foot is me, my shoe is actually also me, my hands are me, my hair, my tears are me. My classroom is me. What is incidental, what is not always going to be there? The answer is the same - what is actually me is also, eventually, incidental. All of life is deciduous.
Wednesday PM: I am sorting through lists and piles, making new lists and piles, restoring stray buttons, miniature bears, pebbles, rubber bands, and unifix cubes to their proper places, and, generally, preparing to leave the classroom for the evening, when I hear the somewhat familiar sound of rain in our supply closet. We have two trash cans against the back wall there, below two large waste pipes (gray water…not sewage!) which traverse and sometimes irrigate our ceiling. The sight of water pouring down from the clamp on the mighty, blackened u-bend trap is captivating…how would I paint that, the water is just a distortion of the mottled black iron, a distortion in the form of flame, or a hank of hair, with gleaming patches of moving light. But there’s a lot of water coming down fast. I run out to solicit help from the building staff and run back to begin dragging things clear of the splattering, pooling water. I drag a towering baker’s shelf half-way through the closet door and am startled and pained to find that something has hit me hard on the forehead and nose – a tall box on top of the shelf has caught on the door frame and thrown a smaller box down on me. I can’t tell whether I was struck by the box itself, or a large black toy horse that fell from it. For a moment I think about crying, the pain in my face is noteworthy, but by some strange, nonlinguistic – and nonmathematical – calculation, I find my body does not need to cry. It takes me a while to remove the boxes from the top of the shelf without pushing the whole thing back under the splaying strands of water. I’m really angry and tired and then I notice that water is gently pouring down from several other parts of the classroom ceiling, one directly over my unzipped backpack. It is clearly time to go home. The super comes in. Dragging out the last few things that I am going to drag, leaving some green pretend play cash in a puddle without a backwards glance, I say, “It’s a lot of water, right?” It's a lot of casual water, forgotten by someone else, witnessed (and now remembered) by me. "It's more than usual?" I continue, backpedalling. He radios the security guard, “Hey, can you call ____ in 2K and ask her can she check her tub?” “Ok,” I say, “Thank you so much! I’m going to go.” My posture is, by this point, really quite bad. Only my good posture is me.
Friday PM: because I got hit on the head with a horse or box and because I dragged everything out of the closet on Wednesday, my assistant teacher cleans the things that need cleaning following the flood. And because she dealt with the flood fall-out, it fell to me to do the laundry. But, because I did the laundry (rest-time sheets and blankets, pretend play fabric/hats/bags, terry towels for sopping up and waffle weave rags for wiping down) it fell to her to fold it. She pulled a sheet from the mesh laundry bag and shouted, “Wuah!” “What?” I demand to know. “These are disgusting, they’re covered with hair.” She pushed the sheet back into the constricted mouth of the bag, “I’m going to wash them again on Monday.” “No! They’re clean, I just washed them. It’s probably my hair.” “NO! It’s not your hair.” “It’s just some hair from the dryer, then.” She tightens the bag’s drawstring and slides the cord lock down emphatically. “This is disgusting. They’re COVERED with hair. I’m not folding these. I love you, but I’m going home.”
Our school is located in an apartment building. In essence we borrow our plumbing, our ceilings, our laundry room from the tenants of the building. We borrow their tub water, their hair, the blending scents of their meals and after-meal cigarettes. It is an uneasy home-school connection. Alone in the classroom, I pull the sheets out; long, wiry hairs are clinging to them. I spread one sheet at a time over the top of a long shelf and pounce it with loops of masking tape. I remove the hair from 13 sheets. The blankets aren’t so bad.
As I work, I think about all the short stories I have not written about a woman who discovers her husband’s infidelity. Hair makes compelling, but inconclusive evidence that a husband is screwing around. Wife finds a hair, she recognizes a truth, next come grief and stress and wife’s own hair begins falling out. Her hair, is it part of her? Her husband, her marriage, are they incidental? The cell phone which dials by accidental pressure was another favored plot device: wife’s phone rings, she can hear her husband talking but he doesn’t know she is on the line, listening in as he and his girlfriend sit hip to hip in his car, the phone in the narrow space between them, revealing their broken but conclusive conversation. I don’t think I started even one of these stories but they are me. Then, remembering them, my mind skips from HAIR to HERA, Zeus’s much-betrayed wife. She engineered the occasional punishment of Zeus’s lovers (Io, transformed by Zeus into a heifer, was pursued and tormented by a Hera-sent biting fly) but Hera was, herself, never transformed by her misfortunes. “I have been transformed by my misfortunes!” I remark with satisfaction, “I have.” I fold the blankets, the sheets, the pretend play fabric, I put each thing into a good place where it can be readily found. When I’m done there remains a heap of crushed and hair-covered tape loops – like mobius strips that have encountered and been transformed by misfortune. Alas, I throw them all away, and with them all the intrusive, allusive hair, so full of stories, but they are not mine to remember or to tell.
