June 22, 2020
Dear Lauren:
We’re updating the school’s website and need a new faculty bio from you by August 19, since you’re moving into a new teaching position this September.
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
Sincerely,
***
The Communications Team
June 25, 2020
Dear Team:
Here’s a bio for consideration. Thank you.
-Lauren
Lauren worked as the school counselor for many years. She loves reading and writing, and she will move into the sixth-grade ELA position this fall.
***
June 29, 2020
Lauren –
Thanks, but we need something that speaks to the depth and breadth of your service here. C’mon, you’ve been here since 2002!
Think of crafting your document this way: Do you have certifications, areas of expertise, or experiences that connect back to our academics and signature programs? Go ahead, brag about it!
We need to broadcast who you are and how you’ll engage with students, families, educational consultants, and everyone else out there. Please get us a draft we can publish in the directory by August 19.
Best wishes for the summer break and be in touch if you need any assistance with writing this important and valuable document.
Sincerely,
The Communications Team
***
September 27, 2020
Dear Team,
I am sorry this is so late. I’m still trying to make sense of the pandemic protocols for the classroom.
I was able to craft something that sheds some light on who I am and how I got here.
-Lauren
Lauren felt nostalgic for her childhood on a small farm and hopeful for the untapped future, upon entering campus nearly twenty years ago. It was a glorious August day with ample sun and an endless blue sky. The horses in the pasture were framed by the mountains, rustic school buildings, and the split rail fence. The gardens were bursting with flowers and vegetables, and groups of children at the summer camp walked barefoot in slow motion, wrapped in towels, and whispered to one another on their way to the Lake Hill.
Her six hours on site was the longest job interview she’d ever experienced and, thankfully, she brought along her breast pump. Her younger son was only five-months old and while she hadn’t planned on returning to the workforce so soon, she applied for the counselor job anyway. The independent education niche—spanning only elementary and middle grades—intrigued her. She landed a visit to campus. By the time she was scheduled to meet with the school director, Lauren blew up from a B-cup to a double-D. The director waxed on about the transformative effect of the place and made impassioned remarks about John Dewey and progressive education while Lauren—not one to pray—prayed for relief. His assistant, responsible for keeping the interviews moving along, whisked her away before she leaked all over her dress. She pumped. She got the job. She stayed.
Lauren joined the school when she was in her early thirties, still so young and enthralled with the camp-like, whimsical, and progressive feel of the place. She wasn’t worn down by hour-long discussions during faculty meetings about the quality and quantity of snacks for boarding students in their residences, the river of molasses that bogged up the raft of change, and the long-ass, seemingly endless weekend coverage shifts that left her depleted and often angry, pushing her to engage in the very coping skills she warned students against, when she arrived home after 10 p.m. Alone in the dark and quiet kitchen, she’d pull a beer from the fridge, move over to the counter, open her laptop to scroll, click, and drink, getting up every now and then to open a cabinet and scoop handfuls of chocolate chips straight out of the bag. After making her way upstairs to bed, close to midnight, she’d lay down. Her husband would whisper, “Hey,” and kiss her or hold her hand, and ask about her day. She might joke that she was ready to be the stay-at-home parent, and he could put his MSW to work.
The school counseling position allowed Lauren to help students and families navigate multiple crises and dilemmas, embrace the mindfulness wave, and align herself with articulate and passionate educators on staff. She even took the UC Berkeley Science of Happiness Course online and traveled there to participate in a Summer Institute for Educators in 2015. Lauren bragged about earning a scholarship for this adventure across the country; she got to attend a private screening of the film Inside Out on the Pixar campus, which included a Q&A with the director, something she continues to bring up whenever a new Pixar movie is released.
She met a fellow parent in the school’s store before Thanksgiving one year and struck up a conversation about their respective seventh-grade boys, by the table of t-shirts, fleece jackets, baseball caps, and bumper stickers that have undergone so many logo changes in the intervening years. (She’s especially grateful one that looked like clipart was retired relatively quickly.) That conversation led to a strong friendship that sustains both today. She had no idea then that the concept of thanksgiving would reappear again and again when that friend said the only thing you can say when tragedy strikes: I love you.
Lauren became an anxiety expert, sharing her knowledge with a cute and zippy presentation she designed and called The Worry Workshop. She secured grant funding so she could travel to local libraries and offer the workshop to the public for free during the summer of 2017. Lauren sprinkled anecdotes about how she’d shared and discussed the slides with her own kids.
She feels lucky to have grown and evolved along with the organization. Despite the flashes of frustration, she recognizes there are no other workplaces (besides other private schools) where she can have 17 weeks of vacation a year. It’s a place where her children crafted art that’s gallery-worthy: weavings, woodwork, and screen-prints. She knows the stories behind these independent projects, like the paper-mache ermine headgear her younger one made in fourth grade and with which he played a prey vs predator game, he and classmates donning their respective creatures, on the upper field. There was a video. It’s lost now. She placed the ermine head on top of his dresser, where it faded and became brittle over the years. He wrote about it in one of his boarding school application essays where he had to talk about the contents of his bedroom. Lauren let it go last February, taking several photos and then throwing it into the fireplace. When she drives onto campus now, she takes the time to look at the colorful rooster sculpture atop a boulder in the barnyard. Her older son and a classmate soldered the metal scraps to create the regal figure. It’s a constant reminder that you can fashion something visually pleasing from debris.
Lauren decided to leave the school counseling position because her younger son died by suicide at age sixteen in September 2018. She became a statistic, something she never envisioned. Lauren returned to work five weeks later, helping to paint posters for the traditional Halloween celebration, but she shook with tears because her boys adored Halloween while growing up and attending the school. She had to leave the painting party to sob in her car, torturing herself with an award-winning costume parade of years gone by: the eyeball, the elf-wizard (best use of pajamas), O-bot the robot, the traffic light, and the ultimate family costume of a mailbox, an enormous postage stamp, and—because she didn’t want to wear any cardboard—Lauren as the mail carrier. What was she thinking, returning to campus in the evening when she’s really a morning person anyway?
The last two school years were filled with the same thoughts churning around in her head. First: Where the fuck were the teachers at her son’s school? And then: Where the fuck was she during their last phone call together, when the conversation about visiting Middlebury on his long weekend home at the end of October, caused him to shift into a shaky, high-pitched, panic-laden voice? How many times had she thought about calling him the next day, after she’d put in an appearance at carrot harvest, thinking she’d catch him after soccer practice and before dinner?How long had she thought about him earlier that afternoon, when she stared at a photo of his young actor self in the performing arts classroom?
Lauren left the counseling job at the end of the 2020 school year because she was burned out, just a wisp of smoke on an ash pile. She put on a pretty decent show when wrapping up the counseling role, as the gifts and cards she received at graduation ceremonies can attest to. Those cards are mixed in with all the other ones she keeps in an enormous box from that September. The school organized a meeting with students to let them know her son died. Would they write to her? She could picture her friends, carrying stacks of paper, crayons, markers, magazines, glue sticks, and scissors. She could see the large handmade pack basket on the long table in the center of the room, to place the cards in when they were done. It was so early in the term. A new sixth-grader, Angel, didn’t know Lauren at all. The neon green eight-and-a-half by eleven copy paper is folded into quarters. The cover is blank. Inside, the script is neat, legible, and written in two different colors, starting with a deep red and ending with a bright orange. Lauren digs through the box at least once a year. Dear Lauren: I am sorry this happened to O., but this is not your fault. Don’t blame this on yourself. We are very sorry this news came up.
Lauren sent herself to therapy, trying all the EMDR, CBT, DBT, and EFT, she’d researched throughout her long career as a trauma-informed helping professional. She was not a patient patient. She fumed over dinner one night with a friend, a real anxiety expert with a thriving private practice and who’d authored several books, about the inane things her therapists did or said or tried. The friend listened. She suggested a catalog of video courses about post-traumatic growth, taught by leaders in the field whom Lauren could never afford to see in person. It turns out that accessing therapeutic material online, in the comfort of her home, and on a schedule that was convenient, made a difference. She also tried a nice sampling of self-help titles, meditated (Of course!), and when she resurfaced, she knew she wanted to stay at this school in the mountains.
Thankfully, the school wanted her to stay, too, and let her shift from counseling to teaching sixth graders. She has her weekends and evenings back. This gives her time to unload and examine the bags of textbooks, lesson plan binders, and art supplies she carts home every night.
Lauren guides the students through reading comprehension tasks, inhaling deeply. Every morning she slathers the essential oil, Blissful AF, directly inside her mask. Blissful AF takes the edge off the recurring thoughts of that long weekend when she wept at her son’s bedside for two days, wishing he’d wake up healthy and whole. The rhythmic sound of his ventilator punctuated those brilliant New England autumn days outside the hospital’s fourth floor window.
In writing class, she walks students through every assignment. The mini moments of plugging the adapter into her laptop or turning on the projector, lead her out of the present and down the hall of memories; it’s there she sees her baby’s time in sixth grade. She finds “The Grasshopper’s Children,” the short story he wrote about Steve the Ladybug, Linda the Fly, and Nick the Mosquito, who must go off into the world and build their own houses, but a dragonfly terrorizes them. Mama Grasshopper saves the day. “The Math Worksheet”poem. The letters to authors Philip Pullman and Christopher Paul Curtis. Then, the car ride home when he shared a joke he made up, with the whole carpool crew: Where does a pig park its car? In the PORKING LOT!
Honestly, she’s trying. The exuberant students bounce on the ball chairs or perch on wobbly stools, looking directly at her, eager to absorb the material she’s prepared. They are at that confluence of dread and desire, knowing they are no longer little kids, but hoping and holding out for a growth spurt. They can’t help but laugh at the conjunction exercises that feature because, but, and so. Butt. While reviewing an essay about fast food restaurants and confined play spaces, they veer off into descriptions of different kinds of farts. Don’t ask. All of this, though, does give meaning, purpose, and focus to her days and weeks. It’s not nothing.
September is here again. Lauren’s summer birthday is long gone. Before blowing out the candles, she’d wished for a time machine. Nothing special. She didn’t ask for the rarest, most intricate model with the captivating features. Going back 200-plus years is not her thing. She just wanted something simple and easy to use, stripped down to the basics. The one with the raised, red “D” button for DO OVER. The one with a huge, backlit keypad, so she could be transported to 2013 with the knowledge she has now. Even 2014 or 2015 would work. She has the same one everyone carries. It only moves forward.
Lauren McGovern lives in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York. She is a teacher at North Country School in Lake Placid, NY where you can find a much shorter faculty bio on the school’s website. Her writing has appeared in Greater Good Science Center Magazine and What’s Your Grief. Find out more about Lauren and her work at laurenmcgovern.online.
Helena Barbagelata is a model, multidisciplinary artist and activist. She has a PhD in Philosophy of Science, Applied Cognitive Sciences & Mathematics from University of Salamanca/University of Athens. She is the recipient of several awards and grants from the Onassis Foundation, Università di Trieste, Universitat de Barcelona, among others, a member of the Society of Jewish Artists (SoJa) and the Organization for the Democratization of the Visual Arts (OBDK). Her artworks combine mixed media, sculpting, painting, video, sound art, and printmaking techniques. She has held numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Europe, South America, Australia and the United States. Her artwork takes a personal approach to social, political, cultural and environmental issues, drawing her inspiration from different human and natural subjects, combining real life experiences with poetical symbolism and arranging them into new conceptually layered pieces. Helena is also an author and curator in several cultural publications.