Skip asked me in an email for some thoughts on what it feels like to retire. Here is my offering:
Tonight is the last Sunday night of my career. Sunday nights have been typically hard for me, the hardest time of the week, as I, totally a night person, have tried again and again for thirty-seven years to force myself into the strait jacket of sleep without success. I didn’t want to, but I had to get up on Monday morning, because I was a teacher.
Many of my colleagues probably just tossed Sunday night off as any other, but for me it just wasn’t that way. Sunday was never a good day, except in the summers, because of the Sunday Night Fear that I knew was coming as the day progressed into the evening.
Doing the math, I experienced my Sunday Night Fear approximately 1,332 times (36 weeks X 37 years) and now tonite is the last one, because God has been so kind as to bring me to this point where I am retiring, and He has done so against my own internal beliefs that I would never make it to this week.
How to celebrate? I don’t like noisy celebrations. For me, this week leading up to Friday is a meditation in pure thankfulness and gratefulness to He who has kept me going through all those years. As He promised but I never could quite believe Him, He loved and cared for me every Sunday night and that is just really cool that He did that.
And look what happened! After the first thirty years or so of the train wreck that was my career, He has put me in touch with real people! I could start naming names like Carol Hill and Jody Noble and Skip Crosby and Anne Matava but I would never stop with such a list of the names of my heroes, those who fought alongside me in the trenches and who also felt the heat and pain of battle just as much as I did. Stephen Krashen. Blaine Ray. Susan Gross. Laurie Clarcq. Diana Noonan, Paul Kirschling. Joseph Diedzic, Bryce Hedstrom, the awesome blog crew here. The list would be a mile long.
I still can’t believe it in a way. There are people who love me. I thought it was just going to be one big unending solo train wreck in my classroom and I would die before the train came to a halt in a tangled mess. But the train did stop and I climbed out and started a new career! I never saw that one coming! Being happy in a classroom? Looking forward to going to work? Laughing over cute things my students said? Making authentic eye contact with my students? Feeling happier in my personal life because of the way I was teaching? At one time it was unthinkable and now it has happened!
This last Sunday morning represents the beginning of a life in which I can now turn to more mundane matters like cleaning dog shit out of the backyard on a more regular basis and spend a lot more time in my garden, and bike even more, and love more on my family, and spend more time paying detailed attention to things that come up here, because everything we go through is important.
This Sunday morning is a morning in which I no longer have to get ready to steel myself for the coming Sunday Night Fear. I don’t have to ready myself (which I could never do successfully) for another week of fun and games in the odd hell state that is teaching.
Tonight I can stay up as late as I want, because I don’t have to get up any more, except to give exams on Tuesday and for those exams I will just do one last story, as a celebration, an Anne Matava story of course, so that my kids and I can know that what we did this past year was real and had value and resulted in something.
Would I change anything? Hell no. The lessons I got when being whipped so hard by the cat o’ nine tails of teaching on a daily basis over all those years were much more valuable to me than I could have ever guessed while it was happening. It seemed so hard at the time, getting up all those mornings to go in again and teach, but now, as I look back, I see the delio. Each day, each class, each jerk student, parent or administrator, was my chance to become more myself, the person I have always wanted to become, and they more than the superstars were the ones who helped me do it, in an odd twist of my own perception and understanding.
Had I known all that when it was happening, that teaching was good for me, had I embraced the truth of that thought on Sunday nights as I lay there trying to go to sleep because I had to, I would have had a more agreeable career.
Had I invisibly embraced every one of those difficult people – and there was a carload of them – whom I thought I hated so intensely in the moments of their making my life difficult, in their moments of trying to ruin my class and make me give up, I wouldn’t have given up so many times.
Today is a perfect Colorado morning. It is a perfect 67 degrees with no wind. There is deep appreciation in my heart for my having chosen in this life to become a teacher. Yes, I would do it again in spite of all those awful Sunday nights, which seemed so bleak at the time. They weren’t really that bleak. They were launching pads to a better life. It just didn’t seem that way at the time.