We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

One kid raises their hand.

They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?”

This is a classic time-killing move.

My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.”

Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes.

They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint.

What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning.

Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching.

Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession.

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We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash. I like to say shooty-pooty, which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity, which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit.

This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration. It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn, gosh for God. They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves.

Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive stimulus of pleasure or awe or humor. Cuss words and phrases, whatever they may be in our individual vocabularies, are the most potent words we have for expressing emotion.

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We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905

The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job.

I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail.

When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry.

On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. “Play with us,” they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth.

I love my stepdaughter, but I don’t love being a stepmother. It’s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn’t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn’t belong to you.

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We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett

Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong.

Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.

Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.

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We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

© Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik

Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author.

I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk.

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