I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 42 of 100.
Orchid drawing is hard!
I have had two orchids. Their fates were radically different.
The first orchid came from a boyfriend. I won’t say this boyfriend’s name, but there are two boyfriends to whom I no longer speak, and this was the second one.
This was not a happy time in my life. It was the end of my first year in New Orleans, and I lived on the top floor of this house that had two kitchens. One of the kitchens was full-sized and spread out beyond the back side of a fireplace. The other was tiny — the sink was halved, the cabinets could hold one sack of flour and two sacks of rice each, the fridge was like one in a dorm room — and, like me, it was on the top floor. The tiny kitchen had an oven, so I made a lot of frozen pizzas. I didn’t keep it very clean. My sponges were the kind of sponges that people have in beach houses, where they don’t need anything to be scrubbed too much. Once, I left a biscuit out on the counter and came back to eat it and found a thumb-sized cockroach nibbling away at it. The thing I disliked about the cockroaches in this house is that they didn’t fear me. This cockroach made eye contact with me and kept right on eating.
The boyfriend from this time was good to me. He showed up once in the middle of the night when I called him hysterical that a cockroach had crawled on me while I slept. This likely happened because my mattress was on the ground and against the wall, as this was my first year out of college and no one explains to you to get a bed with a bed frame or a pillow top or not-the-cheapest pillows from Target. You have to figure that out when you’re older, after enough cockroaches have crawled on you and you’ve had enough back pain. The boyfriend planned formal dates. He bought me things like books he thought I’d enjoy, or pies. He bought me an orchid.
And not just any orchid: a Whole Foods orchid. This was a $29.99 orchid, at the low end. The orchid had five flowers, and they dangled impossibly like Christmas bells off its stem. In return, I baked the boyfriend a sheet cake that had blueberries to make it look like a Greek flag. I was good to the boyfriend back.
Mostly. The area in which I was not good to him was that I wasn’t forthright about how I didn’t really want to have a boyfriend. To be fair to me, I didn’t know I didn’t want one. My thinking was, “How could anyone possibly ever not want to have a boyfriend?” Especially this kind of boyfriend, who could take you to the airport or buy you the name-brand acetaminophen when you showed cold-like symptoms. The more we dated, the more I wanted to want to date him. I breached the topic of exclusivity, thinking it might get me on board for the relationship I didn’t yet have enthusiasm for.
This was not the boyfriend’s fault, by the way. Like I’ve said, he did a good job at being a boyfriend. But from another window, you’d see me, 22 years old, living in a house that was too big with girls who were too cool wearing clothes that didn’t fit well. You’d see me buying plastic silverware and microwaving disposable Tupperware and not knowing what to do with the tiny mice my cat would terrify and leave shaking on my bed.
I had a job that leveled me. I had no idea how to do it or how to tell anyone that I had no idea how to do it. I often sat in the girl’s bathroom with my feet up on the stall door reading comics because I didn’t know where I was supposed to be during the day. I started smoking a lot more than I wanted to because it was acceptable for staff to take multiple smoking breaks, and being outside smoking with the friendly janitor was preferable to no knowing how to do my job. And the school had metal detectors, and this was right after Katrina, and at least once a week the school would go “on lockdown” and When it was really bad kids who went into the halls would be pepper sprayed. That’s all to say that the kids who went to this school had some next-level trauma and were suffering in ways that I was not going to begin to be able to understand because I was 22 and I had only ever known privilege and relative safety.
And so anyway, the boyfriend moved away, and we broke up, and I ate too much ice cream, and the orchid died.
The second orchid came from a student. I won’t say this student’s name either, but I’ll tell you she was a college student and she also sent me phone videos of pigeons once after she’d left my class.
It’d been nearly ten years since the first orchid. Now I lived in an actual house that I’d recently purchased with my actual fiancé in Chicago. Now I had two different teaching jobs, and I knew how to do them very well.
Granted, the house needed a lot of work — we had to put in a new floor in the kitchen, for example, and there were plumbing issues, and the furnace was old and dismal, and the previous owner had let yellow grease build up over the sides of the oven for what had to have been decades on end without ever seeming to consider the potential impact of a soapy sponge. And granted, the teaching jobs didn’t exactly pay the bills, so I floundered to find freelance writing gigs, and sometimes I did, but other times I didn’t. And granted, I still ended up in bathroom stall with comics, or in regular bathrooms crying on the floor, or saying out loud that I had no idea what I was doing. But I never did these things at work, which was a notable improvement.
I’m not sure how I learned this, or when, but I figured out somewhere between the first orchid and the second orchid that children need to be able to be children, and that this required that someone be a grown up. If you are the teacher in a classroom, you’re the grown up. The grown up can be having a bad day, but the grown up’s bad day should never rest on the shoulders of the child. The grown up is a listener more than she is a speaker. The grown up isn’t so much a person with well-written advice or a well-organized brief case as she is the person who makes the child feel completely safe. That’s all.
So that I could come to class and say to the kids, “I’m a 4/10 today, emotionally. It’s a rough day. But luckily, we are going to learn about the first amendment, and that’s my favorite of all of the amendments.” So that the kids could say, “I’m a 4/10 today,” and I could say in response, “OK. We will be gentle with you and not ask too much of you today.” There are times when it is your very important and crucial job to be an adult. Not every adult knows that. When I was 22, I didn’t know.
And: this requires being able to take care of yourself. Being gentle with yourself so that you can be gentle with others. Telling your boyfriend that you don’t want to have a boyfriend right now, or asking for help when you’re stuck. Seeing yourself as valuable so that you have all you need when the time comes to stand in front of 20 kids and make them believe, like really believe, that everything is going to be ok. Even if it isn’t! Being a grown up means you let children believe that it is.
Two years ago, when I brought the orchid home — “a student gave this to me; it’s from Target” — I felt intimidated. But, I figured, I’ll follow its directions, and put one foot in front of the other, and then who knows? Maybe it will survive.
I give this orchid three ice cubes every week. The first winter, it seemed to die, sort of. All the flowers came off and the waxy leaves gathered dust. Still, I gave it three ice cubes every week. I’ve come to believe in consistency, even when results aren’t clear or balanced. And then in the spring, the blooms came back, and there were more of them, and it’d survived a whole year. This year again: the flowers fell off, I worried this was the end, I kept giving it the ice cubes. And this year again!: This week, I’m seeing buds. Tons of them. It’s bud city. It’s only a matter of days.
The only REAL secrets I have to tell you are: (1) Place the orchid in indirect sunlight, and (2) give the orchid three ice cubes, once a week.
But be in a place in your life where you can do that.
PS - I don’t want to be holier-than-thou about any of this, because it’s hard. Today a student said to me during break, “Hey, I want you to know that I can see you’re having a hard time, and that I care about you, and you deserve care, too.” And I had to say, “That’s so, so kind of you. And I appreciate your ability to empathize and see me. But I promise there are people taking care of me, and it is my job to take care of you. That is literally my job. So you have to know that I am fine, and that I will keep you safe, no matter what.” I was embarrassed. Still just doing the very best I can.