Dear First Time Teacher {who wants to change the world}

August 4, 2017August 3, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

Dear First Time Teacher,

I know you’re excited. I know you’ve spent days (maybe weeks) assembling bulletin boards and organizing shelves and color coding plans and reciting your “welcome to my class!” speech while driving across town to chase the best office supplies sales.

I know you think you’re prepared to change the world one first grader or eighth grader or graduate at a time. You are and you will. It just won’t be the way you think.

Your first year teaching will be both the hardest and easiest of your career. The easy comes because it’s the year everyone around you nods in understanding when you say, “It’s my first year.”

Except the parents.

Parents don’t care if you’ve been teaching one year or thirty years, they want the best experience possible for their child because, like you, they’ll never get a do-over on this year.

Remember that when you think they’re your friends. They’re not; they are your employer and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. You, likewise, should expect the same from them because in a conference you are there as the professional.

So be professional and understand, you can be a great teacher and still, not everyone is going to like you.

But sometime later, when this year is over, and you establish a relationship that’s not founded on homework assignments or detention, some of those parents will become your friends and your greatest champions.

The scariest moment is going to come when you close the door to your classroom for the first time and realize you’re alone with close to 30 students who are waiting for you to make the first move. They’ll size you up that first day and study you more that first week, and then they’ll decide how they’ll treat you. And their decision will always be most impacted by the way you treat them.

It’s your classroom, your routine, your heart that will give those lesson plans in that thick binder plenty of life, and before long, those students will be your kids. You’ll love them more than you ever thought you could love someone else’s child. Of course, there will be plenty you’ll wish you could send next door to someone else, but when your colleagues see them in the halls and the cafeteria and they gym, they’ll be yours. You’ll be responsible for them the whole time they’re on that campus, and there will be a precious few for whom the burden of responsibility will transcend an 8-hour day.

People will judge you by them. This isn’t some new outcome of years spent with NCLB, it’s how it’s always been. You may not be able to control whether someone fed them dinner last night or if they got up alone in the dark to catch a bus just so they could get breakfast, but you can control your classroom. You can make it a safe place and you can make it, first and foremost, a sanctuary for learning.

I promise you can.

You just have to remember that you can’t save them all.

You are one person in a long line of educators and counselors and coaches and administrators, so sometimes all you can do is pray that someone else succeeds when you feel like you’re failing.

That’s okay. You don’t have to be everything to everybody.

Chances are, when you’re a teacher, you’re everything to at least one.

Have a wonderful first year. Learn from your mistakes (you’re going to make them). Make new friends with those in the trenches with you. Build a community. Cling to grace.

You are a teacher.

Dear Twenty-Two (a lesson in marriage)

July 27, 2017July 27, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

Dear Twenty-Two,

Look at you, so flush with love and naivety in your crinoline and Scarlett O’Hara curls. Wedding day dress up. But you don’t know, twenty-two, what I know now. Thirty-seven and fifteen years later. You don’t know anything about marriage or motherhood or making every moment count.

You don’t know about mortgages and missed opportunities and meeting in the middle. You think you do. That’s the lovely beauty of youth. The endless idealism and optimism that rides the top of the waves, cresting right into the shore of adulthood, so certain and pure.

Bless your heart. You’re only twenty-two.

Fifteen years will pass quickly—in a blur really. You’ll have four different homes and four different children and the constant love of a steady man. You got that part right, twenty-two. You picked a man who’ll stick it out through the thick and thin and threadbare years of lean tables but baby-plump waistlines.

Fifteen years later you’ll understand a smidge more about the mystery of a good marriage. But only a smidge. Because there’s folks like grandparents and church leaders and pillars of the community who’ve been sticking it out for much, much longer, and when you tell them it’s your fifteenth anniversary on that hot July day, they’ll smile with knowing.

Fifteen is barely beginning in the long journey to fifty or sixty or seventy-five.

Oh, twenty-two, you thought that one day was perfect and nothing could be more right, more true, more content. But more is coming.

More blessing. More sadness. More love.

If I could have told you then what I know now, you’d never have believed me. You’d never believe you’ll make selfish decisions or impractical ones; you’ll say hurtful things you nurse into the night on your side of the bed. You’ll say proud things too, and brag about how he loves you even when you’re broken, even when you’re wrong, even when you’re ridiculous with fatigue and deadlines.

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Twenty-two, you believe all the right choices add up to a just right life. But standing on the other side of fifteen years, you’ll learn it’s not about right or wrong decisions. Making a life is about handling the choices you weren’t given—like the child with the neurological disorder or the job he believed in until the bitter end or the responsibilities that come with melding two families into one.

You’ll learn, sweet twenty-two. But when you do, promise me, you’ll never lose that spark of naïve idealism—that eternal, hopeful belief everything will all work out in its own time. That dark days can only get brighter and bright days will shore up your soul for the ones to come. Marriage is hard; life is difficult. But the journey through these years, the beauty of growing old with the one person who knows you inside out? More than worth the bumps along the way.

Keep smiling, twenty-two. That look of joy on your face? I want to see it there in another fifteen—or fifty—years.

Originally published in The Elberton Star, July 26, 2017.

P.S. My debut novel, Still Waters, is available for pre-order! It’s a Lowcountry love story about the power of family and forgiveness.

summer · writing

On Camping Despite the Rain

July 18, 2017July 18, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett3 Comments

We camped. It rained. Again.

I don’t know why I continue to put myself through this.

Truthfully, I think I wanted to hide from cell phone service for a couple of days. There’s a gap up in our mountains with a swimming lake and a jumping dock and a two mile radius before phones register any outside world. We went there even though two days is hardly worth the trouble and the forecast featured lightning bolts.

I went for the quiet. No texts. No emails. No notifications.

But the woods are not quiet. Birds trill their morning songs and streams rush and tree canopies plop raindrops even when the monsoon has passed. Drippy tent rainflies and wet towels and long legged spiders who crawl across the breakfast dishes uninvited do not make my escape peaceful.

But the woods are simple and I was seeking that. There are no choices beyond what’s in the cooler or the kitchen box or the pack of clean clothes. There are fewer decisions and fewer distractions.

Yet, the rain still came down hard and the shelter didn’t always hold.

There’s a lot of prep work that goes into camping or a vacation or publishing a book. There’s a lot of thinking through the “what ifs” and the “how tos” and the “maybe this.” There’s a lot of rigging that ties off a tarp that might keep the rain from drowning the picnic basket but sacrifices all the dry towels.

Fact is, sometimes the rain comes down and shakes the shelter and you get wet despite all the preparations. Sometimes, there’s not even enough time to seek the shelter before you’re soaked to the bone and forming a puddle of your own.

I’m puddling a lot lately. Soaked to the bone.

I keep waiting to be told what to do next. Which agent to submit to. Which marketing trend to follow. Which interview to give.

I’m tying up my shelter, expecting the high and dry when truth is, the rain comes no matter how secure the knots. And the question is–when I get wet, do I rush for the place that’s dry and safe?

Or do I look for the lesson in the rain?

As long as you’re reading, I’ll keep looking. Maybe we’ll find the answer together.

Life here isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it isn’t all thunderstorms and clouds either. It’s a healthy mix of hard and easy, simple and complex, praise and criticism. I hope. My little space here is evolving with my career, and I’d love you to join me in the journey by subscribing to my monthly-ish newsletter, following my author Facebook page, or please consider purchasing my debut novel, Still Waters. The book just received a 4-star review from the Romantic Times. For that moment, I came out and danced in the rain.

just write life · writing

Five Symbols of the South

July 6, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett4 Comments

An Edisto sunrise. But we’re not there right now. Just dreaming. Photo credit Jocelyn A. Conrad.

I’m on my back porch and the air is hovering between heavy humidity and storm-blowing breezes. Either way, rain’s been skirting all around our southern summer all week long.

The book has a cover now and if you’re in the know you’ve seen it. If you’re not, what are you waiting for? Sign up for my newsletter or let me know you want to join the launch team. Or just wait because we’ll be revealing it officially soon. It’s swirly and lovely and very southern romance–Gone With the Wind keeps popping up as a comparable, which makes me laugh because (don’t hate me), I don’t love GWTW.

I think I might have read it too young and need to re-read it now as an adult who can appreciate the history and the sweeping grandeur while hoping none of my daughters turn out like Scarlett.

You don’t get much more southern than Gone With the Wind, but I was recently asked if I’d write about what I saw as five symbols of the South. I settled on these and left off the hot-button topics, because at the end of the day, we’d all rather sit on the porch with a glass of sweet tea and the cicada chorus than sit at a table and talk anymore about that late unpleasantness.

Five Symbols of the South (that don’t hang off pickup trucks)

Food. The rule of true southern cooks raised in my mother’s generation is this: if it stands still fry it. I adhere to this each summer with okra and sometimes squash and on Father’s Day, I fried chicken for the first time in years. (Although my own mother has admitted it’s just easier to go by the Bojangles.) But I think southern cuisine is changing a bit with the times. I love seeing the shift toward locally grown and farm to table restaurants that make greens so good, you’ll slap your mama. But if you do, she probably won’t make you anymore fried okra and you’ll have to take your own self to Bojangles.

Fashion. I know very little about this myself, but I do know this: pearls go with everything. Sunday dress? Check. Funeral dress? Tasteful. Wedding sundress? No doubt. T-shirt and jeans? Why not. My sisters are far more fashion savvy than I, which is how we all wound up dressed alike for my sister’s wedding, right down to our cowboy boots. I got mine at Rack Room but now my almost-thirteen year old is wearing them out. If my novel makes loads of money, maybe I’ll spring for a sweet pair like these, handmade at King Ranch in Texas, by people who know boots.

View More: http://candiceholcomb.pass.us/al-wedding — This is my family. All my sisters and our one brother. And Jasper, the golden retriever. Because when parents of 7 kids become empty nesters, they need a dog who’s treated like a child.

Football. I still can’t tell you the rules of football. I just know if our guy has the ball, you have to holler until he crosses the end zone. This helps him run faster. But I do know that Friday nights and Saturdays are sacred down here. That wedding with the boots was strategically planned on a day UGA was off because certain family members said they’d wear earbuds. Which didn’t match the boots, obviously. I believe in the football tradition enough that it’s the background for my next novel and I might have a slight obsession with Friday Night Lights. Or just Kyle Chandler. Or both.

Faith. I tell people I write southern fiction because that’s true (even though Terry Kay told me I’m too young for that title), but I don’t tell people I write Christian fiction because here’s the thing–I am a Christian, so of course anything I write carries that viewpoint. I believe in happy endings and redeeming love and saved by grace. It permeates who I am. Down south, our culture is permeated by the Bible Belt and Southern Baptist and Methodism and Vacation Bible School. Sending my characters to church on Sunday is as natural as having them say “y’all” and “ma’am”. Where I make a story, however, is when that faith gets shaken by its culture and has to learn to stand on its own.

Family. Every good southern book has one iconic scene at the family dinner table, and the more dysfunctional and offbeat the family, the better the tension and the narrative. I love my family, but our little idiosyncrasies are finding their way into everything I write. Makes for good storytelling but awkward family dinners. I close ranks, though, when somebody from outside wants to comment. This family is mine. We’re allowed to poke at one another, but nobody else is getting through. Find your own family to write about. Trust me, everybody’s tree has some crooked branches and those make the best stories.

What defines your home place? Your culture? Ever thought about it?

writing

18 Summers Slipping Through My Fingers

June 9, 2017June 16, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett2 Comments

Summer kicked off officially this week, huh? Forget the rained out Memorial Day plans and the fact an umbrella is your new go-to accessory. Summer is still upon us in calendar pages if not sunshine.

School’s out and the season of juggling kids around camps and swim lessons and jobs that don’t take eight-week breaks has begun. My husband used to remind me all the time—he still had to get up and go to work even if the rest of us didn’t. These days, though, I’m the one squeezing writing hours in between the runs to Jan Walker’s art studio and MOSAIC at Cornelia First Baptist and volleyball workshops and GA camp at Pinnacle Mountain. I’m the one wishing everyone would get back on their routine already so I could finish a project.

Except—eighteen summers.

I know a writer who’s built an entire brand around that concept. Eighteen summers. Think about it for a second, fellow harried parents. We get them for eighteen summers. That’s it. Eighteen summers worth of schlepping to the lessons and the camps and expressing delight over modern artwork that we can’t imagine hanging right now. I’ve been told, give it a decade. You’ll dig out that canvas and put it over the mantle just to remember the summer they were six.

Or eight. Or eighteen.

It’s really not a long time in the grand scheme of life, is it? Eighteen summers to hold them close, give them memories, control their activities, their play dates, their bathing suit choices. Eighteen summers to let them go to bed late because fireflies come out at dusk. Eighteen summers to let them wake up early because the sunrise over the ocean is a precious gift to see. Eighteen summers to remind them to turn off the television and get outside and jump on that trampoline and how about weed the garden? Eighteen summers to teach them tomatoes grow on a plant and the Tallulah Gorge lake is always about sixty degrees.

My oldest is twelve going on sixteen and I don’t have eighteen summers left. Truth be told, I barely have four before she’ll be driving and too cool for mom and playing in the creek at Unicoi State Park. Only a few brief years separates her plans from mine.

I wish I could give them every day this summer. But no parent can really do that and this is the truth of real life—the laundry and the grocery store and the work all still have to be done. Sometimes a movie has to substitute for a sitter and some days the van doesn’t need to leave the driveway.

But on the days I can, the days she’ll remember from the first eighteen years, we’ll make the memories. We’ll float the river and eat the ice cream and watch the fireworks. We’ll chase the fireflies and can the tomatoes and split the watermelons on the back porch.

We’ll forget our umbrellas and dance in the rain.

Originally posted by The Elberton Star and The Northeast Georgian, June 2017.