What Kind of Day It Has Been
I find myself blaming everything on the Capitalist Pigs lately. Even the kind of mother I am.
One out of every ten Americans take antidepressants
And we’re one of two counties in the world that allow public advertisements for prescription drugs
The ones with fit housewives looking longingly at their children playing outside like the window is a television showing a documentary of her family.
In the second act, her shirt shows more cleavage and she’s hanging off her husband’s arm as he grills dead animal.
It’s a good ad. Sells product. Moves sales. Investors love it.
I think about the Capitalist Pigs because I think someone should let them know they’re doing a good job. They’re winning. I’d like to shake the hand of the CEO of Diagnosing and Prescribing Sadness and Sadness Accessories. He should know he’s a pioneer in the industry. He’s revolutionizing profit margins.
Just like everyone else, I never wanted to make a lot of money.
I just wanted enough money.
Enough for clothes and food and healthcare for my sad pills and a house - okay, a nice house.
And nice clothes that last more than a year, maybe some vacation time, and money to travel.
But I never needed a yacht for Chrissake.
When you become a public schoolteacher, you’re not in it for the money.
No matter how many bonuses they offer me for performance - like I’m a callgirl of grammar putting in the extra work for tips.
Like I won’t give my students the secrets of long division unless the superintendent tosses me a few grand more.
One of my mentor teachers told me about ending each day of work with a trip to 7/11.
He’d get a Big Gulp filled three quarters the way with Diet Coke, then go home and fill the rest with Jack Daniels.
I wonder why I don’t see more ads with dead-eyed teachers, their room in chaos as kids hit each other like their parents hit them.
But then they drink a glass of Jack Daniels and they’ve got great cleavage and the kids sit in tidy rows writing essays about the National Anthem as though it isn’t a song celebrating the beauty of a bombing.
I used to sneak out of my room at night and finish off the half-filled glasses by the sink. Partly to save water and glasses, but partly because we weren’t allowed soda and the dark liquid of my father’s diet coke called to me.
It didn’t taste like soda but a punch in the throat, like my father was a dragon putting out the fire in his chest with flowing amber.
I try to convince my students that there’s an industry for everything. When I ask them what they want to be, they give me the stock photo answers: lawyer, fireman, marine, police officer, nurse, businesswoman. But there is a job for everything. There is a therapist that works at Betterhelp.com and there is an entrepreneur behind them who sees wellness as a business, whis is investing in our hope for health.
For a small fee, of course.
Growing up, my father’s arrival home was THE event of the day. Whether for grim or glory, the house itself would hold its breath for the moment he walked in. The oven would slow itself down to make sure his food was hot, I swear to god.
In college, I thought I hated his return because of all the pressure it put on us to perform at 6PM. Our whole universe orbited around that one man. But it wasn’t until I started shuffling home at 6 to four pairs of beaming eyes that I understood my bitterness:
My god was just a man worn weary by a job he could not leave because we needed money. Not a lot of money. Enough money. So this god gone ghost went straight for his recliner and his perpetual glass of diet coke.
I wanted to work in a school that needed me most. The best teachers should be in the toughest schools like the best bodybuilders lift the heaviest weights. And I spent all day hustling to these students the classic spiel about working hard and defying the statistics, like they didn’t have their parents’ genes, like I’m not burning up right along with them, on both ends, hoping my good deeds keep me out of the sadness industry, or worse, the alcohol industry - a subsidiary of the great Sadness Industrial complex.
Some nights, I can’t move once I sit down at the end of the day. My toddlers crawl all over me and ask me what’s wrong or tell me to wake up. But their play is like a documentary of some other family, like the ad for anti-depressants I can’t afford, and I wonder if my father felt the same way. Did he watch my life like some hidden producer wondering if he got his money’s worth? Is this the film he envisioned when he was still storyboarding me in the womb?
One son kisses me when I’m lost like this. He does it to wake me because this is a fairytale, and I am under some curse. Some big Bad Capitalist Pig told me what it takes to buy the blockbuster life I want for my children. No matter the hours. No matter the diet coke sweating in my hand, this potion eating me up, keeping me going, and staying affordable to boot.
I have internalized that I am only the things I get done. And worse, I am especially the things I don’t get done. The work following me home in emails and planning and grading. I am the stories I don’t read to my boys and the games I’m too tired to play with my girls.
So when my oldest asks me how work was, I barely lift my head because work isn’t over. The pipes need to be looked at and the fridge is busted and somewhere in this goddamn house there has to be a diet coke.
