Month: August 2023

I belong to various and sundry social media groups, but I have never bothered to join TikTok. Nonetheless I encounter snippets from that site quite often and generally enjoy the innovative posts that have come my way. One of the most unusual ideas I have learned about from TikTok is something called “bed rotting.” 

I have not taken enough time to thoroughly investigate this new trend but I get the idea that it involves spending time in bed that includes eating and entertaining in addition to sleeping. In other words it is abut staying in bed not so much to rest or recover from an illness, but just to escape for a time from the responsibilities of life. It is an intriguing concept that I suppose is somewhat similar if not precisely the same as what I have always called a “mental health day.”

I’m a rather energetic, Type A, go getter who adheres to a balanced routine of work, exercise and relaxation in generally the same parts each day. I tend to go through a typical day mentally meeting the demands of a self derived checklist of activities, grading myself on how well I have done in reaching my goals. It’s a lifestyle that has generally served me well, but now and again I wake up feeling as though I have hit a wall full force. On those days my level of motivation seems to be extremely low. I am tired and the aches and pains in my body seem more pronounced. I don’t actually have a fever or any kind of symptoms that might relate to an illness. I simply feel as though I have run out of fuel. That is when I decide that it is imperative to spend a day being uncharacteristically lazy. 

I give myself permission to accomplish nothing on my mental health days and I spend most of my time “rotting” in bed if you will. I take my meals there, read there, and periodically nap there. I might find a good movie to watch or take in every episode of a series. I vegetate alone with the blinds drawn shut and with news of the world unwelcome. 

It is not depression that puts me in that state. It is exhaustion from my attempts at creating perfect days, a perfect life. Sometimes I just need to let the dust accumulate on the surfaces and the crumbs stay on the floor. For a day I indulge in sloth without a shred of guilt. I know that it is something I must do to restore the energy that normally has me racing from one project to another. I’m like an electric car that needs a charge. I plug myself into the comfort of my bed and don’t budge until I feel the electricity coursing through my brain and my body once again. 

I’m not sure how I feel about the nomenclature of “bed rotting” because in my case an extended day in bed is more about recharging. The effect of my lazy day is stimulating. It enhances my abilities to work harder and longer. It brings me back to life. I know when I need such time alone as surely as when I notice that it is time to replenish the food in my pantry. Mental health days are a gift that I give myself whenever my energy and enthusiasm flags. 

I am known for being a bonafide introvert which means that I can be as social as anyone, but I regain my energy from being by myself or at least in a small group setting among people that I trust implicitly. I generally prefer social gatherings that are intimate rather than big parties that only allow superficial interactions. Such occasions are draining for me. They deplete my energy enough that I sometimes feel as though I am rushing toward the act of hitting a wall much more quickly than usual. I don’t always need a mental health day to recover from such gayety, but I usually spend a bit more time meditating alone after such celebrations. 

I can spend days and even weeks with a small group and not feel uncomfortable, but large reunions or travel groups bring me discomfort. I have to find quiet corners to replenish my energy and my joy. It’s one of the reasons that I have never been able to sign up for a cruise. I can’t imagine having to eat at a table with strangers and engage in a kind of forced party mode. I know such things are fun for most people, but they feel toxic to me. 

Ironically I never felt overwhelmed by working in classrooms filled with young people. My teaching work was challenging and tiring but it rarely depleted my energy, The dynamic was such that I knew how to control the pace of interaction and the joy that I felt from having an important purpose each day only added to my store of vitality. I had no need to rot in bed. 

I’ve laughed at the terminology used to describe the supposedly new trend of “bed rotting’ . Doctors and therapists are weighing in with discussions of the pros and cons of engaging in such a practice. They warn that it may be a sign of purposeful isolation or hidden difficulties that may lead to both mental and physical health issues. I tend to think that maybe it’s mostly just a way of getting away for a time.

I suppose that making a continual habit of staying in bed all day might indeed be a bad thing, but my own experience is that now and again it’s like taking a vacation without leaving home. It can be a joyful and restful experience that responds to the needs of the body and the mind to cool down and relax. It’s not for everyone, but for those of us who recharge in quiet ways, it is a godsend that allows us to get back to our Type A personality traits quickly. I for one intend to continue rotting in bed when the mood strikes me. It can be a wonderful panacea for the trials that we face.

I suppose that one of my pet peeves is observing how often we humans judge others. I’m not exactly a scholar of the Bible but there are certain words from Jesus that have inspired my behavior toward my fellow humans. One is his admonition, “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.” In others words, there are few among us who have never done anything wrong and yet we all too often find it exciting to hear about the hidden secrets of people who we know or think we have a right to know. Perhaps because we are all too aware of our own failings, it is a relief to learn that even the mighty have feet of clay. 

People have gathered to gossip for all time. If that were not so Jesus would not have needed to remind us to “judge not lest we be judged.” Somehow we believe his words, but still take delight in hearing about someone’s struggles, particularly if we have never liked that person. History is replete with scandals made even more difficult by whispers. Alexander Hamilton might have been one of the most important individuals in the early days of our nation, but he was not immune from wagging tongues. 

So it has been with people both famous and ordinary. Many private lives have ruined by those who seem to believe that they are perched on the moral high ground. They pontificate about how they would do things differently from those whom they have judged to be among the fallen. They spread rumors and boast of how shocked they are by behaviors that they are certain they would never embrace. Instead of showing compassion and attempting to help they place individuals in judgmental categories ranging from angels to sinners.

I know countless people who have struggled with addictions or who have loved ones who are afflicted with untamed cravings for drugs or alcohol or food or gambling or even money. They are good souls dealing with a heavy burden of sorrow and confused feelings about why such things are happening in their families. They want to do what is right, but knowing exactly what that should be is often confusing. They exist in a constant state of anxiety wondering whom they might trust and who will use their tragedy against them. 

There was a time when we were not bounded with twenty four hour news publicly analyzing every aspect of famous peoples’ lives. Perhaps the story of Princess Diana should be a parable of warning to all us who encourage and devour journalism that invades and judges the most private moments of an individual. Even the most elevated among us are ultimately human. Having their innermost secrets on display tears them down, often leading to tragedies that needn’t have happened. The salacious stories of Diana and the rush to get a headline by stalking her led to her death and in many ways to the emotional difficulties of her son, Harry. 

When we attack someone for our own entertainment we include all of those who love that person in the misery. The feathers of gossip fly everywhere  making it almost impossible to ever again gather them back. Just as we would not want to be on trial for each of our mistakes or for the times when we failed to be our best selves, so too is it wrong for any of us to think that we have a right to spread tales about the people around us or even famous folks whom we don’t really know. How can any of us ever understand the feelings of another or the reasons why they have behaved in certain ways that confound us? Why do we link the actions of one member of a family to others?

My Uncle William was one of the kindest most empathetic people I have ever known. He somehow understood the need for compassion even toward the most evil actions that people perform. He demonstrated this to me time and again. 

Uncle William was a mailman who worked his entire career in the same neighborhood. One of the homes where he left mail belonged to a widowed woman whose son was convicted of a heinous crime. The young boy had ultimately gone to the police to admit that he had been bringing victims to a man who would torture and then kill the innocents. The story of the crimes was almost unbelievable in its depths of depravity and made even more real to Uncle William by the fact that he had often stopped to talk with the boy on his route. 

In his usual mode, my Uncle William grieved for those who had been so viciously murdered, but he also found sympathy for the widowed mother of the boy who had been so heavily involved in the tragedy. He told me that she was a good woman who had struggled to keep her home and to provide for her son, but she pushed on in spite of the challenges. He revealed that the incident had broken her heart and his as well. He even opined that if he had known how desperate the family’s situation had been he might have done more to help both the mother and her son. What Uncle William did not do is attempt to repeat more rumors or judge anyone involved. His response seemed to be an understanding that circumstances can become so dire that terrible choices are sometimes made.

If only we encouraged more kindness and less revelry over the downfall of those around us, perhaps we might begin to heal as families and nations. We never really know what it may be like for those who are dealing with incredible problems. We only intensify the difficulties when we speculate or lay blame. Instead we might simply love those who are attempting to deal with the kind of tragedies that we hope we will never have to endure. We need to set down our stones and first consider our own defects before making ourselves judges and juries.  

Every human has a family saga which may or may not be known depending on how much our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles are willing to share with us. Tracking down my own history has been rather difficult given that my father died when I was only eight, a time before I had even thought to question him about his ancestors. My mother was mostly tight lipped, given to very little discussion about her life as a child or the stories of her mother and father. I have been forced to piece together an incomplete puzzle with many missing pieces and even contradictions. I have only been able to trace the long lineage of my grandmother Minnie Bell Smith. Knowledge of every other grandparent ends with mostly questions.

There are those who see little value in tracking down the names of the people whose lives trickled down to the moment of our own births. They seem to think that knowing our origins does nothing to change who we actually are, but I am of a mind that those names from the past provide us with important knowledge about ourselves. Through them we are able to follow the amazing journey of our little branch of humankind. 

Perhaps the most stunning absence of information comes from my paternal grandfather, the ultimate storyteller who inspired me to record my own tales of living. Even he was somewhat uncertain about just how he came to be. All he knew was that his mother died within days of giving birth to him. He thought her name was Marion Rourke, but I have been unable to find any evidence that she even existed. His father was James Mack, a man who was seemingly overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising a child alone. His response to the tragedy was to take his infant son to a woman named Sarah Reynolds whom my grandfather knew as his grandmother. 

None of these people show up in official records even though they presumably were living somewhere in either North Carolina or Virginia. Their connections with each other are not to be found in marriage licenses, birth records, or even census documents. It is as though all of them were flying under the radar, ciphers in their own presence. Years of research and DNA testing have yielded nothing to verify that my grandfather even had parents or grandparents, but of course he must have had ancestors like the rest of us. 

Grandpa told me that his beloved grandmother died when he was thirteen. Since he was a minor he had to have a guardian to administer the small inheritance that his grandmother left him. At court the judge allowed him to choose the person that he wanted to guide him into adulthood. Given his lack of contact with his birth father for most of his life, he asked the judge to name an uncle named John Little to be his official guardian.

John Little was an honorable man according to Grandpa. He had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and my grandfather so admired him that he ultimately changed his own name from Mack to Little. He kept his father’s name as his middle name which became a nickname among his friends and coworkers who often referred to him as Mack.

I have found John Little and know who his family was. I can trace his ancestry far back in time, but I have never been able to find any kind of connection between him and my grandfather. I even tried contacting John Little’s descendants to find out it any of them knew how he was an uncle to my Grandpa. 

Unfortunately John Little died in Puerto Rico. A deadly hurricane had devastated the island country in 1900, and Captain Little was sent to help in the aftermath. While there he contracted typhus and died leaving a young wife and an infant daughter. It is likely that his early demise left much to be learned about his own story, leaving his descendants to wonder why I seemed to think that he was somehow one of my ancestors as well. 

We humans have a desire to know who we are, how our stories began. I can follow a thread all the way back to Norwegian Vikings in my Grandmother Minnie Bell’s line. I at least know who my Slovakian great great and great great great grandparents were even though I never had an opportunity to quiz my grandparents about their lives before boarding steamships and traveling to Galveston, Texas where their life in America began. 

Three fourths of who I am is hidden in the mists of history, but I have a determination to somehow solve the mystery. I am connected to my ancestors by threads that seem broken, but surely there is a knot somewhere that will lead me back along the journey that those people took. Somehow I feel them calling to me, wanting me to know them even in very small ways. I know that they matter. I believe that they want me to know them so that I might be the voice of their stories. Somewhere out there are the answers. 

I have become more contemplative in the past ten years. Writing has been a kind of therapy for me as I look back on my own life and life in general. I am certain that my father’s death represented the most traumatic event I ever experienced.  Even though I eventually moved on from the pain and fear induced by the suddenness of his passing, I realize how this one event influenced my thoughts and my decisions for decades to come. I walked through the days and months and years after my father’s death in a kind of fog. I was not continually sad or even thinking about him, but his influence over me had been imprinted on my heart and whether I was conscious of doing so at the time, I made choices based on what I thought he would have expected of me.

Just as I had found joy in sharing my father’s love of reading when he was alive, I sought comfort in books and learning after he was gone. School was a place where I felt normal and in control. Whenever my anxiety for my family raged, I was able to calm it with my studies. I suppose that I unconsciously used the gift of curiosity that my father had instilled in me to maintain a sense of direction and calm in what might have otherwise been a childhood marked by uncertainty. Learning gave me a higher purpose and a goal that diverted my attention from sorrow and worry. I was unable to dwell on my loss when my brain was engaged in the tasks of reading, writing, and analyzing. 

When I became an adult and things began to fall apart once again with the diagnosis of my mother’s mental illness, teaching others would become the panacea for my worries. I channeled my anxieties into my work and never failed to find the calm and the happiness that I needed. Somehow I have always been able to turn off the random thoughts that lead me to silly obsessions with worry by donning my armor of learning. 

I have been formally retired from teaching for a dozen years, but in that time I never stopped being an educator. Any thoughts that I may have had about leading a life of leisure soon changed when the school bells rang again and I had no place to go. I was longing for students who were not there. I felt as though an integral part of my happiness was gone. I reached out for opportunities to continue my work in small ways and soon found that the need for my services was still there. Since then I have had more than enough connections with young people wanting to learn mathematics and each August I return to the routines that have seemed to calm me since I was an eight year old child trying to make sense of a world without my father. 

This year I will have a dozen or so students working on mathematics from the basics of fourth and fifth grade the foundations for Calculus. They are sweet and eager souls who look to me to demystify the algorithms and theorems developed by the geniuses of history. I do my best to help them to feel comfortable as they attempt to master concepts that sometimes seem to be irrelevant to them. I show them how the many strands of mathematics all work together in every aspect of their lives. 

I’ve been planning for my classes since the beginning of July and gathering the supplies and tools that my students will need for the coming lessons. I look forward to seeing them again. I suspect that they have little idea how much joy they bring to me. They would never guess that they energize me and keep me from growing old too soon. They would be surprised to learn that they make me continue to feel close to my father. I feel his spirit within me when I am teaching. They are also the best possible medicine to tamp down the worries that threaten to overwhelm me when I have nothing to do but think too far into future about possibilities that probably will never happen.

My mother was also a teacher for a brief time. It became too much for her to be responsible for a classroom when her recurring illness became a constant feature of her life. It made me sad that she had to leave her career behind because it had brought her a special kind of contentment. Sadly the cycles of depression and mania that hit her with great regularity did not allow her to plan ahead or lose herself in her work. It was a loss to the world when she was no longer able to be an educator. There are few who have the devotion and stamina that it takes to be a great teacher and she had once possessed those traits. I suppose that she had inspired me as much as my father had.

The parents of my students are always graciously thankful that I am guiding their children. I suspect that they have no idea how much their children give to me. As I think back on my own time as a student and the many decades of being a teacher I now realize how incredibly fortunate I have been to have memories of education that still vividly bring me comfort. I can honestly say that I found my true purpose in life and I’ve never had a moment’s regret. The joy that has saved me all began when I was sitting next to my father as he explained to me how everything worked. Somehow passing that knowledge on has kept his memory alive.    

The Bible speaks of seasons of our lives. It is certainly true that we navigate through eras in which we have certain responsibilities. Sometimes we do better with some of our challenges than with others. We adapt and we grow as we face down the inevitable joys and difficulties that come with living. So it has always been with me. I learned how to deal with aspects of my story that I was unable to change. Instead I adjusted my own thinking and ways of doing things. I became rather good at being flexible even as I more often than not initially grinched when yet another trouble came my way. Like anyone I preferred the times when life moved slowly and according to a comfortable routine while understanding that such sojourns are often short lived. 

By the mid nineteen eighties I had experienced multiple traumas and found myself still standing. I suppose that the crises I had endured had scarred me while also making me a stronger and more compassionate person. I became far less judgmental than I might otherwise have been. I realized that behind every person was a private story that sometimes weighed so heavily that it was difficult to make it from one day to the next. I saw that most questionable behavior in students, and adults for that matter, is born from pain and suffering of some kind. I realized that the grouchy parent who screamed at me might be carrying a heavy load of despair. I had learned to approach people gently and without prejudice because of the many times when I myself had feigned smiles and energy attempting to cover my pain. 

I had also learned that tragedies come at us from out of nowhere. We can certainly make plans for a day or a week or a month or years into the future, but it’s always best to think about what we will do if things fall apart. It’s okay if our first reaction is to rant and complain, but at some point we have to learn how to pull ourselves together. Sometimes this requires first being gentle on ourselves by letting some of our duties go. 

I reached a point in which working, caring for my family, and watching over my mother had become firmly entrenched in my routines. I was not yet forty years old and I had already lived a lifetime of unexpected surprises that had rocked my world. Things settled down for a time when my eldest daughter, Maryellen, was in high school and Catherine was heading for intermediate school. I was working at St. Anne’s School teaching six different mathematics classes and serving as Chairperson of the Mathematics Department. It was a glorious time when my whole world felt calmer than it had for most of my life. 

The school was housed in a beautiful historic building that one of my grandsons would later describe as resembling Hogwarts in the Harry Potter stories. My classroom was massive with a bank of large windows that provided me with a view of the city of Houston that was both serene and bustling. The wooden floors creaked when I walked over them and the cabinets and shelves seemed to be living things that might have told many tales if they had only had voices. I loved it there and found so much joy in the quieter interim of my life. 

My students came from miles around. Some commuted from as far as forty miles away. Others lived in the nearby neighborhood. Some were enormously wealthy, others were scholarship students who lived in some of the most economically stressed neighborhoods in the city. Uniforms made it difficult to differentiate the rich from the poor. All of them were delightful, but as with any group I soon enough found those whose lives were complex and challenging. Those with money were not immune to sad situations. Life tends to dole out horrors without discrimination.

In the very first month of my sojourn at St. Anne’s we came back to school from the Labor Day holiday to learn that one of our students had endured a deadly car accident while traveling to celebrate the occasion with relatives. Not only was his mother killed in the wreck, but he was severely injured as well. It would be many weeks before he returned, broken and much changed from the happy go lucky individual he had once been. 

I witnessed an outpouring of love from the faculty and the students unlike anything I have ever seen before or since. We began the day by gathering the entire student body inside the church where we cheered the young man to express our joy that he had returned. Then we prayed for him and for his family, admitting that while our words were not sufficient to counter his loss, we promised to help him to regain his footing and hopefully to eventually find his joy. The sense of community and caring wrapped all of us in its warmth and I knew that both that young man and I were in a very good place. 

I suppose that my story became rather mundane for a time, but it certainly felt good not to have to look over my shoulder wondering when the next shoe would drop. I felt like a member of a great big diverse family where hope and joy reigned supreme. I worked with the energy of a continuous motion machine, but I didn’t seem to get tired. I had learned how to concentrate on the moment and give my full attention to whomever needed me and to myself as well. I had become expert at juggling, balancing on a barrel, and spinning plates on my head all at the same time and having fun while doing it. Multitasking had somehow become a breeze. I savored this good time with family and friends. These were indeed the golden years.