Bunk Bed Assembly

I am assembling a bunk bed in an otherwise empty bedroom and the metaphors abound. I am profoundly aware that I am stacking bed frames and stories upon stories upon stories.

I am here because I chose this hard, this stack of hards. I chose to leave a marriage of 17 years this last year. In this, I am not heroic. I am merely a woman who could not see a future where she could model good parenting and good partnership simultaneously, given the way a life’s fabric can shred and fray. I am here, perhaps, because I lacked imagination of a future where we rebuilt our sinking IKEA bed plank by plank. Or maybe I am here because I leaned in to my imagination, where I believed I might be capable of starting over, of co-parenting and reducing the atmospheric tension, and betting on myself.

This bunk bed will not build itself, which is fine as I enjoy the tedious meditation of Allen wrenching screws and double-checking instruction manual diagrams. My co-worker tells me I should invite a friend over to help me, but I have always enjoyed the solitude of a manual task. The times when I have had to share a job and to communicate to someone else the precise logistical maneuvers I intend to make, (rather than simply winging it) has always exposed my feverish independence. I am a firstborn with a stubborn streak and yet I am utterly at peace as I hex key my way through each bar and beam of this bunked contraption.

My bunkmate of 17 years was remarkably gifted in curiosity. He wanted to know how a thing was made, how the machine was engineered, what made a person tick. He knew how to build a thing before he set about doing the dang thing. He knew what people needed before they knew themselves. I could never project so far; my high beams were always too dim. I muddled through, killing plants and misassembling dressers so that the drawers clunked off the rails every time they opened.

This bunk bed is not a twinset but a full-over-full mattress bunk bed for the children whose limbs and senses of self are growing. Their inward and outward journeys are bewildering and beautiful to me. I am the woman who once lied on their bedroom floors for hours until they were fast asleep, but now I assemble the beds they will prefer I never come near, not even to wash the sheets they deny ever need to be washed. They are close siblings and will not allow the other to be left behind, but they will undoubtedly fight over who will get stuck with top bunk. They will stay up late debating the deeper meanings of Kendrick Lamar lyrics. Bars, man.

I carry long metal spindles and hook them into the strange catch-holes of this bedframe. This bunk bed was bought with Amazon gift cards from thankful student families who could not possibly have known how they are allowing me to build something new for my little family. How they are giving my children, and perhaps their mom, as well, a place to find rest.

The Pest

I did not want to admit anything when the dishwashing sponge began to disintegrate, because sponges fritter away so easily, catching on the prongs of dinner forks. When the pears in the fruit bowl became pockmarked, I wanted to blame my children, always so fickle about food.

When we found teeth marks in the avocado -- clear chomps through the peel to the soft fruit within -- my husband named what I did not want to say aloud.

Because I had already seen the rat. The charcoal colored rodent was too large to be a mouse, too rotund to be a squirrel. He appeared in the spring, just after the quarantine orders began following surging cases of COVID-19. He hobbled across the front lawn of the boarding school where we live in faculty housing. He descended unhurriedly into a sewage drain. I watched and knew unequivocally that I would see that rat again.

After the avocado evidence in our kitchen, we alerted the facilities management of the boarding school. I was so ashamed--we had only lived on campus a couple of years, and the prior resident of our faculty home had lived to 100 years until he expired in that same house. I was sure he had never had a rat problem. The facilities folks tried to comfort me. The restaurants are all closed, they shrugged. Where else can rats go but into our homes? 

Traps were set. Holes were patched. The rat still visited every night. 

My son and I decided to stay up late to see if we could detect from where the rat was emerging in the kitchen. With all but one light off, we watched from our perch on the living room sofa. Within minutes we saw the rat slink from behind the radiator and begin his evening rotation, flirting with the peanut butter in a trap, nosing around for other crumbs, and gamely hopping up on surfaces I never wanted to touch again. I began to imagine my son telling his college roommate about the house he had once lived in, describing this very night when he and his mom waited up for a rat.

I couldn’t go into the kitchen that night. I felt stranded on the sofa, until I eventually made a beeline for the bathroom, but then I marooned myself on the toilet for 15 minutes after convincing myself that a radiator pipe was indeed the rat lying in wait for me. 

We hid every particle of food we could manage but still we saw droppings. Facilities planted poison box traps outside of our house and one evening I saw a deranged squirrel pirouetting outside of the box. 

The next morning, my husband said, “I put some compost on your box garden. And I saved you a surprise.” 

I assumed a tomato had finally ripened in the raised bed.
Instead I found a dead baby rat face down next to the green pepper plant. All these months, my home had been a rat’s playground, but now the place that I had been tilling life had become a coffin. 

It was time for a burial.

I thought how I might talk to one of my students if they were having this same pestilence in their apartment. I began to speak gently to myself, reminding myself that this was a terrible thing, but this was not a reflection of myself as a terrible person.

A terrible person would not have buried the baby rat, after all.  

When did we see the last of the rats? I cannot say. The intrusion came at a time when we all felt significantly more vulnerable than usual. 

I have heard and read accounts of people who were careful, so careful, but still contracted COVID-19. Something about their stories, the soft lament in their voices, the hands-up surrender of their tone--it was so familiar. The virus, like the rats, practically knocked at our front doors. Our defenses were up, but not strong enough. 

After the rats, I understand hypervigilance and how it exhausts a system. I know what it means to bring in the big guns because every other lockstop has failed. I know how it feels to believe myself a bad steward of property, and for the helpers to remind me that it could have happened to any of us. It was all just a terrible time to have a terrible time.

A Letter to the Parents Who Dread the First Day of School Photos

Hello, Dear One,

’Tis the season, again. I know how you are bracing yourself for the photos that dance across your feed of Everyone Else’s Children Who Look Happy. They appear thrilled to be headed back to school. You notice their ruddy, sun-kissed faces, their smartly pressed uniforms. Maybe it’s the backpacks full of brand new supplies and so.much.potential that grip you for a moment before you remember this is not your story.

Maybe once upon a time you were in the camp of those who were ecstatic to snap and post photos of your children on the first day of school. The two pocket folders were ready for A papers, the calendar was ripe for new adventures. You felt proud and excited and maybe a touch trepidatious. Would their teacher be kind and inspiring? Who would be their friends in homeroom? What would happen at recess and would your little person be brave and inclusive? Would this be the best year of school ever?

Perhaps you no longer allow yourself to feel this hope, because of how your story unfolded in school years past. You try to put stock in the promise of a clean slate, but all you hear are the calls from the principal or the school counselor or the learning specialist or the math teacher AGAIN, again with the missed assignments or the behavior or the sickness or the mood swings. Your heart is still aching from the bullying or the distracting or the excluding that went down last year. You don’t have to work hard to imagine the dynamics that will replicate themselves— just shuffle the cast and the scenery a bit and you already know the script for Act I.

Or maybe you do have all the hope in the world for this school year, given the only direction to go from rock bottom is up. You’ve already been to the darkest place, to the Upside Down, and you already got that ticket punched. You know what it’s like to watch your kid go undiagnosed or unmedicated or unacknowledged or unprotected. You are far too acquainted with a lack of to not be able to believe in the abundance.

Still, your optimism is guarded. You want to believe, but you are cautious. Your heart has been broken before. You are tired. You’ve had to advocate so fiercely in the past. You think, surely that needle’s got to move. Is this the year when the progress report shows actual progress? You see everyone else’s kids smiling as they board the big yellow school bus and you wonder if yours will ever have a seat on there, or if they will always ride the struggle bus.

Dear one, I want you to know that you are not alone. I have ridden the struggle bus as a parent and as an educator for years. I often feel that I am sitting alone on the bus, looking out a murky window to yards where everyone else is having the time of their lives. It is only when I have raised my hand, though, to let others know that there’s a seat next to me, right here on this busted bench with gum stuck to the bottom of the seat, that I’ve felt such freedom. The journey of shepherding kids through school is so damn hard, especially if your kid’s factory settings are not the default. But it can also be pretty gnarly and hilarious and complicated and enriching. Why would we want to pretend otherwise?

Back to school photos tell the story of A Beginning, but even beginnings, as you know, can be fraught. Everyone else seems to approach the year with ease. To you, the beginning of the school year can feel heavy and anxious-making and downright baffling. How did we get here again?

Except, we are not Here Again, after all. We’re another year wiser, and another year stronger. Our backpacks are a bit more battered, but they are full of lessons and strategies for navigating the difficulties and the red tape. We may again find a seat reserved for us and our kid(s) on the struggle bus, but we’re seasoned students of this struggle. The story of the year ahead may be familiar in theme, but if you thought it would be a solo journey—plot twist—your First Day of School Photo isn’t a selfie. It’s an ussie.

Solidarity,
A Struggle Bus Rider