DAY 4. ONE PAGE TO COMPLETE A SENTENCE -- X 3
Write three essays ( one to two pages each).
Begin with or include each with one of the sentences below.
Essay one -- In that moment I realized that…
Essay two -- If only…
Essay three -- It started out as an ordinary day, but then…
Examples
In that moment I realized that my good friend really wasn’t. We had worked together for about seven years and had developed what I thought was a friendship. We talked about work, socialized outside of work, and I shared some of my secret self with her. I invited her into my family and into my heart. At some point, though, things became cool. I started to feel it was a one-way relationship. I was embracing her, inviting her into my activities and life, but I was missing the reciprocity. Even at work, I sensed an effort to avoid interactions with me except for the most necessary to get the job done. When I tried to talk with her, she had other places to go or people to see.
I had helped her out of a major jam professionally, and I guess I expected she would be grateful forever. She wasn’t. And, in fact, she downplayed the whole incident once the threat to her job had been eliminated, and she was safe. At one point, when I brought the incident up to check on her emotional state as a result of it, she said, “Oh, that. You know, we shouldn’t make too much of it. It was just one of those things, right? No big deal.” Thanking me for stepping in and supporting her was not on her agenda.
For two weeks, I wondered how she could just forget the emotional toll the incident took on both of us. In the moment as we sat at the meeting with the supervisor, she was in tears. He was writing a reprimand, her first since she had started teaching, to be placed in her file because she had cursed in an exchange with students. I was sticking my neck out by defending her when she had clearly broken school policy. I spoke of her value as a teacher. He insisted she sign it, and after many tears and pleading, she did. When she left, I remained and suggested he was making a mistake by pursuing the write-up. He insisted he had to. Case closed.
But not exactly. In a few hours, he reneged, tore up the paper, and my friend’s record remained clean.
When I stopped by to talk with her and she gave me the news that he had backed off and said he would not officially file the reprimand, she was a different version of herself. The blot on her record was expunged, as were the emotional strain, the tears, the fears, and as I would learn soon, my role in helping her. She had forgotten it all. But I hadn’t.
I began to feel invisible to her. She avoided places where we might cross paths. When I ventured into her area, she became extremely busy with whatever was on her desk or on her computer monitor. Saying hello didn’t get a response. If we passed in the hallway, she averted her gaze to the wall or to the floor and away from me.
Unable to talk it out with her because she refused to let me in, I became angrier. At one point, as I was carrying a heavy crate full of books and papers, my keys dangling from one hand as I tried to maneuver to unlock a classroom door, she happened to be nearby and moved towards the door, key in hand, to unlock it.
“Here, I’ll get it,” her sing-song morning voice said.
“I’LL GET IT!” I barked in my “get out of my face” voice. I dropped the crate and everything else but the keys. The boom that echoed down the hall caused students and teachers to look in our direction.
She hesitated a moment, looked at me, screwed her face into the uneven eyebrows and curled upper lip look I had seen her make when she disapproved of someone’s behavior, and veered to the opposite side of the hallway, past me to the door to another classroom. Damn, I thought, if someone I knew as well as she knew me, someone who had helped me on a few occasions, someone I unwound with during happy hour, someone I knew I could talk to for anything almost any time, dropped a crate and spoke to me in an angry “get out of my face” tone, I would take about thirty seconds, then follow into the room and see what was wrong. My first inclination would be to blame myself and believe I must have done something to offend. At the very least, I would care about the friend and try to find a way to make her feel better.
Replaying my moments with her – verbally moving her away from unlocking the door and verbally, though calmly, telling her to stay out of things, I realized I was wrong and rude and wanted desperately to apologize. But face-to-faces were not easy for me. Now, I needed to contact her and try to apologize. That was my Christian can’t-stand-that-guilty-feeling ethos. But how? Why not try the way she had been communicating with me, for the most part, all along? She never hesitated to text me with every little thought that came to her. How many texts had she sent me as she was reading student essays, sharing a line or phrase or idea that she thought humorous?
I discussed apologizing via text with my husband and a friend.
“Go for it,” my husband said. “It’s just a text.”
“Is it too impersonal?” I asked.
“Who cares?” my friend put in.
“I do,” I said.
“Why? She hasn’t exactly been a good friend.”
“Hmm,” I thought. It didn’t convey the personal touch of a face-to-face apology, but I was desperate to have it settled one way or another. So, I texted. “I’d like to make peace with you. Do you have ten minutes to talk? I want to apologize for my rudeness and curtness to you.”
SEND.
I believed that maybe she owed me something, and the least I could expect is that she would talk to me.
After a few minutes, the response came. “Talking would not be productive. I think we should keep things cordial, though. No hard feelings. I wish you well.”
DELETE.
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If only I was born thirty years later, being a tomboy would have really paid off. Not that that aspect of me hasn’t had its benefits. It has.
I grew up in a family of athletes. With two older brothers and no sisters, I didn’t have much choice but to play boy games as a kid. And I enjoyed it! I joined my brothers in the typical boy stuff like playing army and cowboys. But I also got to play sports with them. My father played soccer, basketball, and baseball, and made it to the semi-pro level in baseball. So a lot of activities with my dad were sports. I became pretty good at kicking a soccer ball, shooting a basketball, and hitting and fielding a baseball. These abilities really guided my high school, college, and post-college life. I played basketball in high school and was recognized with some awards. I played in college, too, but women’s collegiate athletics was not very big then, so we played for the sheer enjoyment of it. After college, sports, especially softball, introduced me to friends and a lively social life. Today, forty years later, most of my good friends are from those days. I even met my husband through our involvement in recreational softball. Being a tomboy was good to me! And I wouldn’t really trade any of it for another life. It’s just fun to imagine.
How much more productive could I have been if I was part of the generation of women who were welcomed into the world of athletics?
Growing up I had no sports leagues or programs to get into to develop my skills. I learned from my father and brothers. And thankfully, they treated me like one of the boys and included me in their non-league, unofficial games and practices. Many of my favorite memories are of shooting hoops in our backyard, pitching baseball games in our alleyway pitcher-catcher simulator, playing wiffle ball out in the street and baseball in The Junks, and hitting and fielding batting practice in the summer and kicking soccer balls in the fall at Hetzel Field.
Only when I reached high school did I have the chance to play competitively. I tried out for and made the Notre Dame High School girls’ basketball team. Finally I would play in games where the score was kept officially and the rules were enforced. And more amazing, other girls liked to compete, too.
Women’s college athletics was in its infancy when I started. During my second year, Rider funded (barely) a women’s basketball team, its first in about forty years. Our uniforms were T-shirts, one for home and away games, and whatever shorts we owned. We traveled in a twelve passenger station wagon driven by our coach. Our schedule consisted of about twelve games against whatever schools were within driving distance. We were over .500 in each of the three seasons I played.
So now as I watch women competing in basketball, soccer, softball, ice hockey, and more at the high school, college, Olympic, and professional level in regular season leagues and conferences and in state and national tournaments and world cups, I wonder what level I could have achieved. I imagine how competitive I would be if I had started earlier in little leagues.
I also imagine how different I would feel about myself. Having two older brothers who were very athletic and into sports gave me a sense of equality. I played along with them—soccer, baseball, basketball—and loved it. But it also made me an outlier among girlfriends and somewhat awkward around guys outside of playing sports. It’s true that being a tomboy placed me outside the norm. But because of it I was exposed to activities I loved and people who were fun to be with.
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It started out as an ordinary day, but then I checked my phone. It was something I rarely did while working in those days. For some reason ,at the end of my teaching day but before I could leave school, my eye caught the text message signal flashing. When my husband’s name and number came up as the sender, I opened and read it immediately. Thus started a ten-hour journey in a place every parent dreads. The emergency room.
The message had been sent four hours earlier. My son, who had stayed home from school because he was having severe back pain, had seen blood in his urine. He called my husband and, when they didn’t hear from me, they went to the ER. Upon arrival, and after the typical waiting period to fill out forms, check insurance, and wait for an open bed, my son’s examinations began. And after three or four doctors poked and tested, they determined the problem was coming from his kidney.
For the doctors this was unremarkable. It’s not uncommon for a kidney infection to cause back pain. But my son has Tuberous Sclerosis, a disorder that causes tumors to grow on the body’s organs. Often, besides the brain and heart, the kidneys are affected. Unfortunately, TS is considered rare and few doctors at that time were even aware of it. This is one of the difficulties we had faced since he was diagnosed at three weeks. For the most part, the specialists we saw were knowledgeable about it or at least became knowledgeable. But the everyday emergency room doctor didn’t have the resources or time to bone up. Luckily, we had not had ER visits for TS-related problems where it was an issue until now. So we had to fill in the attending and the nurses. It took a while, and while we talked my son suffered in pain. But finally they determined that he could be treated more effectively at Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia. Since we were an hour away, they contacted CHoP and an ambulance was dispatched to pick up and transport my son.
The diagnosis was that a tumor on his kidney was the problem. They kept him for a few hours, determined the bleeding had stopped, and sent him home with some pain medication. He was out of the woods, so to speak. Until the next time. And that next time came a few weeks later on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend when the same pain and blood in the urine sent my husband and son directly to ChOP. I stayed home thinking the visit would be short and uneventful like the previous one. But this time it was more serious and the doctors decided embolization of the tumor was needed. Because of the holiday, the A team was not on duty, so the attending doctors decided to wait a day or two for them to return. My husband called to tell me that, so I planned to make the trip to Philly the next day.
I asked my neighbor, Steve, to drive me to Philly. When we arrived, I found my son being attended to by a nurse. My husband told me that the doctors decided to do the embolization the night before because they thought waiting might result in kidney damage. He didn’t tell me at the time because he figured I couldn’t get to the hospital in time and he didn’t want to worry me.
After we were together for a few hours, my husband left and I took over the bedside vigil. My son had bouts of intense pain throughout the night and into the next morning. As I sat by his bed awake all night, I would feel his hand squeeze mine at intervals as the pain came on. The strength of his grip made me aware of how strong the pain was. This went on until the next afternoon when he started to have longer periods without pain.
For the next four days, we shared a hospital room. To pass the time, we watched TV, played games, read, and chatted. I snuck in a nap or two when he nodded off from the medication.
My son’s strength and calmness through it impressed me. The kindness and efficiency of the nurses and staff at CHop made the ordeal manageable. Once my son was feeling better he was moved to a room he shared with another patient, another young person. Seeing other children and teens being treated and enduring illness and suffering with such dignity was an eye-opening experience for me even though I had experience with my own son’s struggles. There’s a community of suffering out there, but there’s also a community of caregivers compassionate and helpful. It’s a lesson we all need to learn.