The Both

I love people.

I always have. I enjoy being around them, connecting with them, and being real with them. Which is why I always find it funny that I have such an aversion to my return to school each September.

You see, as I mentioned before, I love the people. I also love the anticipation, the school, the content, the hopefulness, and the rebirth. I love the conversations, the colleagues, the students, too. What I don't love, though, is the simple question that seems to begin every interaction during our first week back:

"How was your summer?"

I used to think that it was because I never went anywhere on vacation. Vacation was time off, but it was never time away. Growing up, I always felt a sense of embarrassment at this fact. "Oh!" my friends would sometimes say, "A stay-cation! That sounds awesome!"

But it wasn't a stay-cation...it was just life. Life happening in my back yard, my world. And it was good--awesome, even--but it certainly wasn't impressive or postcard-worthy.

Yet here's the thing. Even now that I've arrived at a point of greater maturity and self confidence, I still don't like this question. It just feels like when someone says, "Hey, today's my birthday," and the only way to possibly respond is by exclaiming, "Happy Birthday!!" When someone says, "How was your summer?" the requisite response that spills out on cue like TGIF's canned laughter is "Great, how was yours?"

But this year, it feels like I finally figured it out.

I think this feeling comes from the fact that summer is never simple. Summer is never any ONE thing. Summer is everything. Summer is so good, but it is so darn far from perfect. It is great, and awful, and hard, and amazing...and we grow, and learn...but we also forget. We fail. We struggle. See, summer as a teacher or student allows us to get close to our own humanity. We get to spend time with ourselves. We have expectations and goals, some of which are manageable and others that are lofty. Yet when it's all said and done, the summer has happened and it's been SO. MANY. THINGS.

And many of them were things of the hard variety that grow us into wiser, calloused versions of ourselves.

So how does one answer, the "How was your summer?" question?

Well I decided this year to just go for it and acknowledge that my summer was a little bit of everything. As Hunter S. Thompson once remarked,

"Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain."

I have a friend who once shared with me that, in his younger years, he and his friends had adopted the phrase "the both" as a way of acknowledging that he was feeling lots of different things all at once.

"Yo, that movie was the both!"

Or, "Yeah, we broke up...but it's kind of, well, y'know...the both."

So, I decided, when asked about my summer, I'd simply hint at the reality that my summer was the both.

"It was hard and easy, amazing and impossible. Thanks for asking. How was yours?"

And by doing so, I would silently acknowledge the dreamy beautiful days I had with my family and the love for my kids and my wife that deepened and erupted...but I would also acknowledge the reality that there were tantrums and accidents and dishes that broke.

I expected that by hijacking the predicted response of my colleagues and students I'd make things suddenly awkward, but you know what happened? People opened right up.

"Yeah, you're right...me too. Summer was great and hard."

"I know what you mean...my dad is really sick right now."

"My parents are separating."

"There were so many points in my summer that were great, but I didn't do half the stuff I'd planned to."

"I'm so grateful I found a really great therapist. I couldn't have done this summer alone"

It's easy to put on a mask and forget that everyone around us is human. And by holding space for the people around me--the people I care about--I now feel better equipped to be myself. I can now get to work doing the things I'm here to do...to teach, to learn, to connect. To rely on relationships. I can fully be myself while I'm doing it, and my hope is that this feeling is contagious.

Today in English class I asked my 8th graders to identify the strongest emotion they felt over the course of the summer, then write about that moment. They didn't share what they wrote, but as I watched their faces, their eyes, in writing, I could tell that summer, for them, was also the both.