The Paper Dart
An ode to creativity and distraction

What My Kids Are Reading: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Margot: 3 Years

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Many of my days, especially this past year, have started with me spilling coffee on myself in the car, or breaking the photocopier 5 minutes before class starts, or forgetting to put underwear on my daughter. Oftentimes, these events are just the first domino in a day-long chain of fumbling and flailing that usually ends with me falling face-first onto my couch at the end of the night. On these days, I like Alexander, the protagonist of this week’s book, will lay in bed, roll my eyes, and tell myself: what a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

If you haven’t read it, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst is about a kid who also spends his day being personally victimized by one misfortune after another. Throughout it all, he just can’t seem to understand why all of these terrible things keep happening to him, and no one else. When I was a kid, I was 100% “Team Alex.” I harbored heart-felt sympathy for him, and believed that the injustices he faced were both real, and relatable.

But the part of this book that I didn’t necessarily pick up on as a kid is how Alexander is certain that these terrible things are happening to him, when, in actuality, they are happening because of him.

For example, at one point in the story, Alexander gets mad because “Mrs. Dickens liked Paul’s picture of the sailboat better than my picture of the invisible castle.”

An invisible castle? Really Alexander?

And while this is meant to be funny, and it is funny, reading this page, during this past week made me cringe a little.

It made me cringe because I know that when I spill coffee on myself in the car, its usually because I was too lazy to clean my travel mug and, instead, filled my “Home of the Monster Trout” mug to the brim, and tried to balance it on the edge of a cup-holder it didn’t fit into. And when I break the copier, it’s usually because, despite having read approximately ten thousand books, I will forever refuse to read simple directions. And when I forget to put underwear on Margot, I really just forgot to wash her underwear because I was watching Bravo instead.

So when I think about this past week, and this past year, and my whole life really, and I start to consider the things that have made me angry or frustrated, I have to ask myself whether these things are happening to me, or because of me. When I’m honest with myself, the answer makes me a little uneasy.

Throughout this past week in particular, I have been guilty of pulling an Alexander and making the situation about me. I’ve been trying to pick out the little things I’ve been doing right, as a person, an educator, and a parent, but not really spending the time to feel the feelings attached to my burgeoning recognition of what it means to be complicit in the problem(s) our country is currently facing. This story has reminded me of just how crucial it is to stop and ask myself: am I really on the right path, or am I just drawing an invisible castle, and then getting mad when it doesn’t make waves on the art scene?

What I love most about this book is that, at the end, Alexander complains to his mom about how horrible everything is, and she just responds with “some days are like that.”

She doesn’t cuddle him, or tell him that it will be better tomorrow, or validate any of his experiences from the day. Instead, she just serves him a little reality check and sends him off to bed.

Based on the uncomfortable look on his face on the last page of the story, it is clear that Alexander is having trouble making room for this newfound truth about the world: that some days suck, and sometimes the suckiness is your own fault, and oftentimes you have to go to bed at the end of the night without having made any of it any better.

On Tuesday, I read this book to my daughter, put her down for a nap, and then listened to Tiffany M. Jewell (author of This Book is Anti-Racist) talk about what we can do as parents to break the cycle of racism and injustice and teach ourselves and our kids how to better show up in the world.

One of the things that really stuck with me was when she said that consuming and trying to fix things right away is privileged behavior, and that we need to “check the urgency.”

This hit home with me because in the moment, I was doing exactly that. I think a lot of us, especially teachers and parents and teacher-parents, have this deeply ingrained impulse to fix and control. Kids grow up fast, and we only have so much time, and I oftentimes feel a great urgency to do it all, and teach it all, at once. But I need to remember that before I can fix a problem, I have to take the time to figure out whether I caused it in the first place. Otherwise, no matter what I do, the next day is just going to be as Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad as the last one.

So I guess my takeaway and my hope is that this week, and forever really, I can do as Alexander’s mom is teaching him to do: I hope that I can sit in my bed at the end of the day without a lot of answers and let myself feel uncomfortable. I hope that I can use this discomfort to help me figure out where I went wrong, and how to do better. And I hope that I can push aside the impulse to say “tomorrow be better,” when there is really no certainty that it will.

At the end of this book, readers don’t get to find out whether Alexander gets woken up to his ignorance or not. Does he eventually realize that he got the cavity because he didn’t brush his teeth? Or that his dad is annoyed with him because he’s just super annoying? My best guess is that if his week was anywhere near as Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad as ours was, he probably did.

Max: 14 Months

Max is reading nothing this week, as he is getting two molars and is having his own Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Mom and Dad Don’t Sleep Week.

Click to buy:

What My Kids (And I) Are Reading: Swing Time & Five Minutes Peace

Margot: 3 Years Old

Me: 32 Years Old

I find that I have a lot of sensory memories attached to children’s books. When reading Five Minutes Peace by Jill Murphy, for example, I was transported back in time to a very specific night in my childhood, when I sat on my older brother’s bed with my mom, dog, and younger brother. My dad was probably there as well, but he is not in the memory. I wonder now if that’s because the memory is shaped around the book, and Mr. Large, for some reason, is nowhere to be found in the story. (When you read the book, you might feel, like I did, a little miffed at this fact, as he could have easily provided the “5 minutes peace” Mrs. Large is so desperate for.)

In my memory, I recall laughing at the book because I thought it was intended to be a joke. I thought that Mrs. Large was just pretending to be annoyed by her children, because why in the world would a mother want to be anywhere besides right next to her adoring, loving, obnoxious, mess-making children!?

When I read this book to Margot for the first time, I, of course, laughed at the naivete of my past self. I also felt a little disoriented in identifying so completely with Mrs. Large, and almost not at all, like I used to, with the middle elephant, Laura. (My family, in case you’re wondering, is structured exactly like the Large family: two boys, and a middle girl, all with different, but equally irritating character flaws). While I was once an over-dramatic child, desiring nothing more than to make everyone else in the house listen to me read aloud, for the 100th time, from my favorite Harry Potter book, I now stand firmly in maternal solidarity with the poor Mrs. Large, who loves her daughter something fierce, but also kind of wants to incinerate her beloved book. 

Last night, as I was reading my current “grown-up” book (Swing Time, by Zadie Smith), I came across a quote that, at first, I considered very serendipitous (as I knew I would be writing about Five Minutes Peace today). 

In the novel, the unnamed narrator introduces the complicated relationship she has with her mother by saying: 

“As a child, no, the truth is it’s a war of attrition, rationality doesn’t come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn’t do it, then it’s really a war”

Zadie Smith, Swing Time

This war is exactly what Mrs. Large (on much simpler terms of course) is engaged in with her children. As the book progresses, each of their requests, demands, and complaints chip away at her resolve, and drive her deeper into frustration and overwhelm. The kids also grow more frustrated as they realize that their mother is ignoring what they see as her sole purpose: to pay attention to them. Mrs. Large gets a minute of peace at the end of the story, but definitely not the five that she desired, before the kids troop in and the war begins again. 

In Smith’s book, the mother character also rebels against the restrictiveness of her role. However, she does it a little more aggressively than Mrs. Large. She’s a complicated character, and one I think I am supposed to admire in some ways, but also not really like. Like Mrs. Large, the narrator’s mother is trying to manage fulfilling her own intellectual and personal desires (Mrs. Large reads the newspaper in her one minute off after all), with her responsibilities as a mother, and finds it nearly impossible to do. 

However, to me, the message is not that these women fail, and that all mothers are doomed to suffer through decades of martyrdom for the sake of their children. Instead, I think we are supposed to learn that the conflict they all experience is actually a natural and essential part of the relationship. 

Our kids demand our full attention and, oftentimes, try to control us, because they think that they are us (or, I guess, that we are them, because they are, of course, the sun, and us mere planets in orbit around them). Later in life, when my daughter is in her teens, or twenties, I’m sure that I will have similar thoughts, and start to exert what she will feel is a “stifling” degree of control. The bigger she gets, and the more mistakes she makes, the more I will have to come to terms with my feelings about whether or not she is an extension, and a reflection, of me. 

But all this pushing and pulling and arguing and running away from will hopefully end up teaching us that we are not each other. That while I made my kids, they are separate from me, and that there is only ever one healthy way for the war to end: with the liberation of both parties, and the right to say a firm no thank you to the recorder performance. 

Even though I would like to believe that being thoughtful, educated and prepared (if I am even any of these things) will allow me to avoid a few battles here and there, it is becoming clearer that the struggle is going to happen anyway, because it is the way we grow up, and change each other, and hopefully come to some kind of understanding (albeit a fluid one) of who we really are. 

The more I think about this parallel, and my initial feelings that it was so odd for these two, very different books, to touch on such a similar theme, the more I realize that it’s not really serendipitous at all. Because Mrs. Large’s plight is the plight of all mothers, and all books, being about humans, are also very much about mothers. 

Click to Buy: (Do it, they’re really good.)

What My Kids Are Reading: Jabari Jumps

This book is important because it is beautiful, and pure, and well-written. It is also important because Jabari is a little African American boy, going to the pool on a summer day, and doing normal, sweet, everyday little boy things. 

This second fact is especially important, especially today. 

Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall is about a young boy who is both thrilled and terrified by the prospect of jumping off the diving board (which is playfully depicted in the illustrations as being about 70 feet too high for current safety standards) for the first time.

He gets in line, smiles at his dad, and then does what we all do when we’re sitting at our desks before a big meeting, or phone call, or lunch-date: he finds anything and everything else he can do besides jumping off the diving board. 

Eventually, the book ends as it should: with Jabari’s dad teaching him a lesson about the relationship between fear and fun, and Jabari leaping joyfully into the pool. 

As a teacher, and a human being, I see a lot of myself and my students in Jabari. 

At the beginning of my teaching career, I, a middle class white woman, taught in several different inner-city public schools in Los Angeles. I also traveled to Israel, to teach English to upper-elementary kids in Nazareth. 

Sometimes, when I shared anecdotes from these experiences with other, middle class white people in my life, they would ask, “what were the kids like?”

And I would answer, “they were like kids.”

Now I don’t mean to disregard or in any way diminish the unique life experiences of the kids I worked with. Many of the students I taught in Inglewood and Boyle Heights were struggling with, and rising above, situations that I am sure would have defeated me: experiences that were likely instrumental in shaping them into the people they are today. The students I worked with in Israel had to have been defined, at least in some way, by the constant conflict around them. I don’t think it is possible to evacuate from your classroom to a bomb shelter several times a month as a missile siren blares throughout the school hallways and not be changed because of it. 

However, the students I taught in Israel were also pretty goofy. A lot of them didn’t want to listen to me, and some talked about me behind my back in Hebrew (I speak very little Hebrew). They ate Cheetos, and peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch, and listened to Pitbull at recess on the yard. My students in LA were also a little goofy. They thought I was pretty “uncool,” and ate Cheetos (with chile and lime) and peanut butter sandwiches at lunch. Many of them also listened to Pitbull at recess on the yard. 

Throughout my 10 years of teaching, I have worked with a lot of different kids, from a lot of different backgrounds. Yes, they are all different, but they are also mostly the same. 

Most kids are at least a little bit scared to try new things. Most kids want to do well in school, even if they pretend they don’t. Most kids like junk food, and the music their parents tell them not to listen to. Most kids want to have friends, and be accepted by their peers. All kids have parents who would do absolutely anything in the world to keep them safe.

The world today is a weird one. We’re so connected online, but so separate from each other in real life. So many people have forgotten, or maybe never learned, not only that kids are kids, but that people are people, and that, at the end of the day, we all just want to be safe and loved.  

If you have a kid, or know a kid, or, hell, even see a kid, buy them Jabari Jumps. Once we start remembering that Jabari’s feelings are just human feelings, maybe we’ll stop spending so much time pushing each other away. 

Click to buy:

What My Kids Are Reading 5/26/2020

Margot: 3 Years

Bedtime for Bear – By Bonny Becker

This book is a personal favorite of mine, and one that I have been meaning to send to all of my past college roommates, camp cabin-mates, and siblings, as the character “Bear” and I are truly kindred spirits. By that I mean we’re both pretty difficult to live with (lol, but seriously).  

The protagonist, Bear, is introverted, particular, and emotionally high-maintenance. When the book opens, a doorbell rings, and Bear is suddenly reminded that he had invited his beloved friend Mouse to sleep over. It soon becomes clear that Mouse is the antithesis of Bear, and readers may wonder whose mom forced this match in the first place. After greeting mouse, and spending a few pages spiraling into some pretty poorly-concealed regret and denial about the situation, Bear starts to loosen up a little. Soon, however, it’s time for bed and Bear commences compulsively reminding Mouse about his requirement of total silence after lights out. If you know me, this probably sounds a little familiar. 

Naturally, total silence does not ensue and, despite his goading of Bear, Mouse still comes out on top as the hero of the story. He not only puts up with Bear’s infuriating eccentricities, but also rises to the occasion of providing support when it becomes clear that Bear’s particularities are really just a mask for his fear and vulnerability.

I often tear up when I read children’s books to my daughter (much to her chagrin), and this one was no different. While I am sure it is intended to be a cute story about an unlikely friendship and the importance of protecting the hearts (and egos) of those we love, it hit a little deeper for me.

I spent a lot of time, especially in college, attempting to mask my anxiety. I had one friend even tell me that she envied my “laid back” attitude: a comment which made me actually laugh out loud. In college, and even today, the night is always the hardest, as literal darkness tends to welcome the figurative kind with open arms.

Anne Frank once said, “look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” This image of a tiny light in the nighttime sounds a lot like what Becker’s brave Mouse is for the apprehensive Bear, and what my husband, family, and good friends are for me. While my daughter loves this book because Mouse is “silly” and my husband always puts on a show when he gets to Bear’s trademark line of “WILL THIS TORMENT NEVER CEASE,” I love it because it shows us that real friends will find you in the darkness, even if you’re trying to hide.

Max: 14 Months

Ditty Bird: Children’s Songs

My mom sent me this one and, in all honesty, when I opened it, I raised a metaphorical fist in her direction. It has batteries. And it sings. In an Australian accent. 

Despite these initial warning signs, I was completely won over by this book when I watched Margot spend a WHOLE 5 MINUTES teaching Max how to press the buttons, turn the pages, and pat his head at the right point of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” He bounced, and clapped and didn’t take his eyes off of her the entire time. When this book broke (which is a testament to how poorly we treated it, not the quality of craftsmanship) and my kids were back to body-slamming one another into walls, I immediately purchased a second copy. In short, I highly recommend it. 

The Bear and Mouse Series:

Ditty Bird: Children’s Songs (and others!)

Why I’m Here.

“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Last week, I started to feel a little crazy. I have been self-isolating with my family for a long time and, as the weeks have turned into months, I find myself spending more hours of more evenings lost on the internet. I know I am not alone in the fact that I have always used social media as an escape – a way to check out from my messy reality and “recharge.” I have also, at times, used it as a substitute for real social connection. During times in my life when real community was lacking – my first years in new cities, and my first months as a new mom to name a few – I have found myself turning to my phone to fill the empty spaces. The current state of the world hasn’t made things any easier, and I know that many of us have been clinging to technology even more obsessively in a desperate attempt to ease the loneliness.

My son Max and our shared love: my phone.

About a week ago, I found myself starting to become so preoccupied with content I was following online that I felt distracted and out of focus in the truly important parts of my day. When I complained to my husband about how I was feeling, and the compounding guilt I felt about feeling these feelings, he laughed at me. In the way, of course, that only someone who is lovingly aware of your self-destructive behavior patterns can. 

“You’re living through a pandemic,” he said. “You’re lonely and probably a little depressed. You should put your phone down and read a book.”

Sounds easy enough, right? And some nights it is. But other nights, I still find myself so caught up in the things I know are bringing me down. Like Instagram. I have deleted and re-added this app to my phone about 129497394 times since quarantine began. 

I’m not going to hate on Instagram entirely, despite the fact that I am definitely going to delete it from my phone again at some point this week. Instagram, and the internet in general, has been positive for me in a lot of ways: it allowed me to reconnect with childhood friends, and find support and community when I was dealing with infertility. Yet, while I am SO grateful for many of the people I have connected with online, I also find myself struggling to balance the good with the toxic. More often than not, I turn to Instagram, not for real connection, but to be voyeuristic, and feel the thrill of “spying” on people who have purposely thrown open the curtains of their lives for me. I search for things that are pretty, or low-stakes. A cute summer dress, for example, that might distract me from the looming sense of dread concerning the state of mine and my children’s futures that is often lying in wait at the back of my brain. When I turn off my phone at the end of the night, I’m usually in a pretty weird place. My brain feels elated, but I certainly don’t. 

Books, on the other hand, are kind of messy. When my husband suggested that I pick the book I was reading back up, I reminded him that I was reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and that it probably wouldn’t make me feel any less depressed. But then again, that’s probably part of the point.

Unlike mindless scrolling, books don’t always make me happy. Sometimes they actually make me super sad. But, they do push me to put my problems into perspective. They take me out of my own head, and into someone else’s. Books remind me that it is possible to really know someone, even when they are always changing. Writers who understand humanity so completely that they are able to create characters out of thin air give me so much faith in our ability to really see and be seen by others, even when the people we are painting for each other aren’t real. 

In the world of Fahrenheit 451, everyone has turned away from books. People defame authors as confusing and contradictory and seemingly pointless. A lot of people (myself included) have drawn frightening parallels between our world and that of Bradbury’s novel, claiming that the next generation is so lost in their phones that we’ll never find them. 

However, I don’t think you have to be a literary scholar to benefit from book therapy. I think the teens (and adults, because, let’s keep it real) can keep learning TikToks and worshiping confounding YouTube celebrities, and still keep one foot rooted on the ground. I, myself, can keep hunting for the perfect floppy hat to help me achieve the ever so elusive Anne of Green Gables-Lauren Conrad vibe I’ve been going for, while also putting down my phone at 8 to read Dracula before bed. Everyone’s attention is being pulled in a million directions, and I think asking for all of it or, honestly, even most of it, is unrealistic. 

In addition to being a phone addict and an over-thinker, I’m also a middle school teacher. When I read with my class, most kids only connect with a small portion of the book. It could be a chapter or a page, or, more often than not, a single line. A lot of it, they can’t understand because they aren’t ready yet. After I read a book, I definitely don’t remember most of what happened either. Usually, what sticks with me is a line or two, maybe a page or a chapter. There have been times when I forgot most of a book’s plot, but was truly shaken by a single word. I have read such small pieces of text that have opened my eyes to errors in my judgment, or pointed me in the right direction. Quotes that have helped me better understand myself, someone I love, or someone I don’t. Paragraphs that pointed out my ignorance, or highlighted how I actually might know more than I thought I did. 

So I guess my goal for this blog is two-fold. I need a reason to write, because it makes me feel full and it keeps the worry at bay. And I want to share pieces of what makes teaching English so special to me–those small paragraphs, sentences, and phrases that snap us out of our own heads and ground us in reality. 

In January of this year, not long before I had to shutter the doors of my physical classroom, I was reading the above quote to my class. One of my students, who had been flicking paper-airplane darts into the ceiling for the prior 20 minutes suddenly stopped and looked at me. “Woah,” he shouted, without raising his hand. Several kids laughed, and I’m pretty sure I did as well. But I really hope that everyone in the room saw what was happening. That this student was experiencing, maybe for the first time, that feeling of being 12, or 32, or 90, and someone you’ve never met, who seems so insurmountably far away from you, saying something about a fictional character, in a fictional world, that so perfectly resonates with the very real present you find yourself in.

Where to next?