The Soccer Ball

I made a soccer ball.  There was a student who was distraught because he let his friend down.  He had promised to spend every recess with this friend and on that day, he chose to spend time with someone else.  I sat there watching this child cry because he felt that he had let his friend down and he felt so guilty.  I understood.  I have spent a lifetime letting people down or feeling like I have.  In that moment, there was an easy fix.  I told him, if he could get himself calmed down that I would help him make a special soccer ball for his best friend. 

Later that week, this child and I sat with a soccer ball and brand new permanent markers.  I asked him,

“How do you want to decorate his birthday soccer ball?”  He replied…

            “How about a rainbow?”

So we sat, this child and I, coloring small patches of every vibrant color we could get our grubby little fingers on.  We sat and made a soccer ball for the birthday of his best friend.  It was one of the best moments I had this year.  It was a pure moment.  There was no major emotions felt, there was no anger inside me at that moment, no frustration, no elation, no glee.  It was a pure moment without major emotion.  A moment of calm before the many storms.

I am the kind of person who feels everything deeply.  I feel extreme pain, extreme sadness, extreme delight, extreme wonder.  I am incapable of feeling anything lightly.  However, this moment, however brief, was a moment of pure ease.  This is not something that I am used to in any way shape or form.  There are very few moments when I am at ease.  Ease is not something that I can do. 

Since a very young age, really as long as I can remember, I have been high strung.  This may come from the fact that I was sexually assaulted as a child.  It is a poison that has been flowing through my veins as long as I can remember.  I have had moments of extreme love, extreme hate…moments of extreme bliss and extreme sorrow.  However, I have rarely known moments of calm.  Calm is not something my life provides.

When I was in high school, I met a boy.  I loved this boy and stayed with him until the summer after our Freshman year in college.  I loved this boy so strongly that I stayed with him.  I stayed with him despite the fact that he left me stranded in a snowy parking lot alone with two tow truck guys at 1 am and drove away after his car was freed, leaving me to fend for myself (a huge thank you to those two young men who dragged my car out of the snow for free and told me that I was better off without a guy like that.)  I stayed with him despite the fact that he brought another girl to his prom and as a result I didn’t go to mine because I knew he wouldn’t like it.  I entered college and I spent the first year waiting around studying in a library for him to get out of classes.  He didn’t like when I drank, so I didn’t drink.  He didn’t like when I made friends with the guy in my Latin American Studies class, so I tried not to be friends with him.  He didn’t like a lot of things, so I tried to form who I was to please him.  I felt that, if someone was willing to love me, that I should find a way to make it worthwhile for them. 

This is just one example in dozens, if not hundreds of moments that I see in my past where I have changed or adjusted myself, or my opinions, or my words to make sure that people love me.  The reason?  Because it hurts too much to think that I live in a world where people don’t.  Some might say that this is me being fake or manipulative.  You may be right.  I really don’t know at this point.  All I know, is that it’s the only way I know how to survive.  It’s the only way I know how to live.  I know the real me.  She is the one who curls up in bed on a Sunday afternoon, cracks open a beer and tries to find a distraction from herself because to look inwards and see all the cracks is just far too much for her to bear.  She’s the one who sits at a bar, surrounded by friends and yet she never stops feeling completely exhausted and isolated.  It takes everything for me to seem normal and functional but I keep doing it because it literally is all I’m good at. 

I once thought teaching was all I was good at.  I was wrong.   Surviving is what I’m really good at, since I’ve been doing it for so long.  I am capable of making it through anything but the worrisome question that has started wandering through my head as of late, “Why?”  Why do I want to survive when I’m just going through the general motions?  Why do I want to fight to be here when I don’t even like where here is.  There are things worth fighting for, mind you.  I understand that.  I have friends, I have family, I have falling asleep to thunderstorms, and watching your kids make it to high school and watching them graduate and watching them reach their goals or raise kids of their own.  And I’m happy, but I’m happy to an extreme that makes me sad.  I am so capable of being happy for the people around me that it serves as a reminder of just how empty my own life feels.  I am not sure that I am even capable of the kind of love and happiness others are. 

Which is why, I made a soccer ball.  For a brief moment, I witnessed a child’s unadulterated sadness, and I was able to turn it into a moment of calm for him.  For a brief moment, I was able to give another child a brief moment of extreme delight at the sight of his rainbow Happy birthday soccer ball.  I was able to bask in the glory of an untainted moment.  A moment not centered on my own tortured past or depressed present or unclear future.   I was able to give those children something that was never given to me.  A moment of pure childlike wonder that they will be able to look back on with a smile not tainted with poison.