I can come home, as I did last night, after an eleven hour shift of standing on my feet and talking to kids about history and government, and write a thousand word essay. I can finish an eleven hour shift for the second day in a row, as I did tonight, still full of energy, pumped up and ready for more. Energy never dies when you are passionate about what you do.
And it isn’t as though I am tutoring lighthearted subjects. And sometimes even my writing is dark. But I believe in what I do. I believe deeply that what I do makes a difference.
“Thank you. Thank you on so many levels.” One of my students said to me today.
I tutor middle class and wealthy white kids. I tell them things about black history that their textbooks and their teachers don’t tell them. I drill their civil rights into their heads. I tell them about heroic white people, Newton Knight, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that we can be proud of amid all the horrible atrocities white people have committed.
I am fueled by what I do. I planned to come home tonight to write a lengthy essay about the feedback I get, the language I use, the hope I feel at the end of every single two hour session that I may have changed a mind, opened a heart, created a pathway for understanding and communication in these kids’ futures.
Off to Bed
But I walked in my front door, full of fire, ready to sit down here and write, and I found my baby on my husband’s chest on the couch, she apparently won’t go back to sleep in her crib. My five year old is in my bed. She apparently wouldn’t sleep anywhere else; she wanted to be where I would be tonight. And my husband has to be up in fewer than six hours.
So I must now gently remove the baby from the husband, take her into my bedroom, crawl into bed, and turn myself into a mama sandwich like I did last night, with my girls, desperate for their mother, on either side of me.
“Five minutes.” I told my husband, about fifteen minutes ago. “Give me five minutes and I’ll come get her and take her to bed.”
“Why? What do you need to do?” He wants to know.
“I need to write.”