Daria Doering

New Years 2003

 

Dearest family and friends,

Sorry this Christmas letter is late, but the college semester system, with its break after Christmas, does not lend itself to writers of Christmas letters!  We hope you are all well, and as cheerful as possible, awaiting a probable war with Iraq and California’s bankruptcy or close to it.

 

This has been a year of repeated desperation and deliverance.  It started off with my student teaching last spring.  Although I was only supposed to student teach at one school, I ended up at three, and call the experience, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

At the first school, Feaster-Edison Charter in Chula Vista, I was placed in a very problematic classroom, and nobody ever told me the main point of student teaching was not to step on the teacher’s toes.  I mean, hey, I thought we were supposed to do a good job!  I did too good a job, which included changing a number of dysfunctional classroom routines, and was summarily fired, halfway through the semester.

After an ominous “hearing” at USD, to determine if I was a total screwup or not, I was placed at Audobon Elementary in Southeast San Diego.  This amounted to “death by boredom.”  With San Diego Unified’s three-hour literacy block, if you’re a student, at least you get to read some good books.  But pity the teachers!!  So I thanked my lucky stars when after two weeks of “intersession,” it turned out there had been a mistake, and they had no place for a student teacher.

At that point USD must have finally felt sorry for me, and put me at “The Good”: Discovery Charter School, also in Chula Vista.  Although it was not exactly a “feel good” experience, having to write eight lesson plans a day, and teach full-time pretty quickly, under critical scrutiny the whole time, the teacher was good and I learned a lot.

In retrospect, even though at the time it felt like I was living through hell, and barely surviving, I’m amazed at how perfectly things turned out.  I got to teach at three schools that were very different, and a lot of experience was packed into that semester!

 

Then it was time for our summer trip.  We had decided it was time to pay a visit to the old Konechne homestead in the little town of Kimball, South Dakota, where Mike’s mother grew up with her 11 siblings.  But from the beginning, the trip seemed ill-fated.  Mike hadn’t wanted to go at all, preferring to stay at home and keep up with hockey.  I talked him into going, but lost my nerve when I heard the weather reports: record heat waves everywhere, multiple fires, storms and flashfloods.  I read an internet page entitled, “Lightning: the Underrated Killer,” which really spooked me, since our popup trailer with canvas sides offers no protection.  We set out anyway, amid my feeling terrified of lightning and wet roads, while Mike brooded over his nemeses of bears and tornadoes.

Our first night out, in Arizona, we were refused entry to a private campground because our trailer was older than 1990.  Okay … Our second day, approaching Phoenix in 105 degree weather, our car started making strange sounds.  It needed a new accessory drive shaft to run the air conditioner, a $900 part.  Sure, no problem … Our fourth day, outside Flagstaff we got into a crash with a huge pick-up truck.  Not our fault, and we were all right, but our right front end was smashed in.  A collision center managed to get the lights working and the doors to open and close.  The engine appeared to still be working, or so we anxiously hoped and prayed for the rest of the trip.  We continued onward, in an exceedingly grim mood, the front end of the car held together with duct tape.  I kept moaning to Mike, “Let’s analyze why our past trips have been so great, and this one is so terrible.”  He yelled back, “They’ve all been like this!  You’re just remembering the good parts!”

Finally something good happened.  We visited Mike’s uncle, Father Louis Koncechne, an ex-boxer, engineer, teacher and retired priest.  He lives at a beautiful Southwest style nursing home outside Gallup, New Mexico, run by the Little Sisters of the Poor order.  We had wanted to visit him for decades, but had never made it.  Although frail and bedridden, Fr. Louis still said mass every day at the home.  We had a wonderful visit, and Fr. Louis said he would pray for us and remember us in his masses.  Our mood seemed to turn around.

After that we did some Southwest sightseeing.  One of our favorite places was the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, which has a legendary spiral staircase, built by a mysterious visitor, after the main architect died.  The staircase has no center or side supports, and stands as if suspended, held together only by the perfection of its design.

Our other favorite place was the “Tinkertown Museum,” outside Albuquerque.  It’s a complex filled with animated wooden dioramas, put together by Ross Ward, an obsessed man who collected many of the figures and carved the rest.   The scenes include western towns, musicians, a circus and much more.  They’re mostly semi-animated: you press a button, and the figures perform various actions, and music plays.  The hallways are filled with Ward’s paintings, which are quite good, and with many signs he’s painted with various slogans.  My favorite is, “I did all this while you watched TV!”

We finally made it to South Dakota, and had memorable visits with Mike’s Uncle Harry Konechne (age 94) and Aunt Margaret, who put us up in their yard.  Aunt Lucille gave us a tour of the Bendon church, built by the Konechne ancestors, which Lucille has made it her life’s work to restore, plus create a museum of Czech history in the basement.  Our kids were thrilled to ring the church bell and play the antique church organ.

We had a fishing adventure with cousin Kenny Konechne, who runs fishing tours in the area, and Nina wrote a nice poem:

Fishing, by Nina Doering, age 7

It was good, it was great.

We used a lot of bait.

We fished and we yelled.

Our clothes really smelled.

 

Eventually we arrived back in San Diego, happy to be home and relatively in one piece.  It took five weeks for my car to be fixed at a collision center, including frame-straightening, new parts and painting.  Meanwhile, I was given a van to drive, which we nicknamed the “lurching breadbox” (due to its handling and appearance), but I won’t even go into that story.

 

Our next big trauma involved Nina’s school.  We had been agonizing over whether to leave her at St. Vincent’s, send her to Grant, our local elementary school, or have her attend a new charter school that was opening.  Mike and I decided on St. Vincent’s, but Nina had other ideas.  She lobbied us to send her to the new charter school, which had a very unstructured and student-led program, and we finally gave in.

Nina seemed to like the new school, but I had extreme misgivings, which I tried to keep to myself for her sake.  However, the period she was there was one of the most painful times I’ve ever gone through.  It wasn’t depression, but rather it felt as if my body were an open wound that somebody was rubbing their finger over.  Just raw pain.  I lay on the couch and cried for hours each day.  Although much as I am passionate about education, I couldn’t figure out why I should feel as if my life was falling apart over my daughter’s school.

Finally, one day, out of Nina’s mouth came one of those sentences you wait your whole life to hear: “Mom, I’ll never not listen to you again!”

“Why do you say that, honey?” I asked, vacillating between grabbing a tape recorder and asking her to put it in writing!

“You wanted me to stay at St. Vincent’s, and I should have!” she sobbed.  “I’m not learning anything at this school!  If I were at St. Vincent’s, I’d be learning multiplication tables and cursive,” she cried …

Mike and I seized the opportunity to put her back in Catholic school; actually at a new and better one, we thought.  We switched her to Sacred Heart in Ocean Beach, which uses the Core Knowledge program.  It is a wonderful school, but my feeling of pain persisted, and I started appreciating things about St. Vincent’s I hadn’t noticed so much before, as well as missing having Nina in the neighborhood.

After a week at Sacred Heart, feeling thoroughly like a moron and a fool, I went crawling back to St. Vincent’s, not even sure if they’d take her back.  However, the outpouring of love and welcome that greeted Nina astounded me.  Everyone from students to parents to office staff acted as if there had been a gaping hole in the school’s social fabric without Nina Doering, and they were so thrilled to have her back

So again, despite the agony I went through (I don’t think the whole thing bothered adaptable Nina much), it worked out perfectly.  Although my feeling is that schools all have their good points and problems, and you “choose your poison,” Nina has had no complaints since returning to St. Vincent’s.  Not to mention that once she was back I immediately felt fine.  I decided this pain must have been God’s way of letting me know in unmistakable terms that I was on the wrong path.

 

Now some of that dreaded bragging, er, kid news:

Nick, at 13, has surpassed me in height, and is on his way to catching up with his dad!  He excels in ice hockey, and is a sought after goalie.  He plays on three teams, and is often corralled into other games as well.

Nick has made a smooth transition from Harborside School to Correia Jr. High, and things seem to be going pretty well there.  Though we haven’t even met his teachers, because we had, ahem, a little lapse in the transmission of information to Mom and Dad, and didn’t know about the open house.

Nick has finally come to accept his curly hair, which is even curlier.  He is mobbed by girls many places we go, but fortunately, seems pretty nonchalant about it.  One day he came home with one pant leg long, and the other one above his knee.  I asked him if he was starting a new fashion.  No, several girls had zipped off and seized his pant leg.  The really annoying thing is that he never got it back.

 

Jake is having a great 5^th grade year at Grant, participating in literature circles, historical simulations and artwork in a multiage class that, thankfully, is creatively taught.  He is incredible at playing the piano, and I get to hear a “concert” each day from my three children practicing; one of my joys in life.  Jake still enjoys playing ice hockey, and is on a tournament team that plays out of town four times a year.

Jake is such a kind spirit, and such a perfectionist in everything he does, but he has developed an alter-ego, “Johnny,” who is quite the opposite.  Johnny has long dialogs with Mom, in which he describes his world.  Johnny’s constant complaint is that he “feels left out,” as well as the fact that he “doesn’t participate.”  However, this might be understandable in light of some of Johnny’s other traits: Johnny is suicidal, murderous, loves to play football “but only when he’s supposed to be doing something else,” likes to eat bananas which then make him throw up, is addicted to Instant Messaging with Nick, and has many other gross attributes.

 

Nina, we may have said enough about already.  One of Nina’s favorite activities is drawing “models in fancy houses.”  The houses include spotlights, microphones, and bags of money.  She refers to “when I’m famous …”  I don’t think she got any of these ideas from her parents.  Maybe Aunt Betsy, the actress.

There is never a dull moment with Nina.  From the family diary: Nina’s new endeavor in life is to throw a fit at her mother without the neighborhood boys noticing.  She will be throwing herself on the ground, kicking, screaming and scratching.  But then whenever a boy shows up, she’ll sit up like nothing’s happening, wipe her eyes, and smile demurely.  When he goes, she’ll go back to thrashing around and yelling.

But we do have our joyful moments.  One is that we are both wild over singers Avril Lavigne and Enya, and sing to their CD’s in the car.  Nina is also a big Harry Potter fan, and is reading the fourth HP book.  She got a Harry Potter chess set for Christmas, and we enjoy playing chess together.

Nina has gotten a retainer, actually a palate expander.  She has been very responsible about wearing it and not losing it.  She also likes to scare us by popping it halfway out and gaping her mouth wide open, producing a frightening, lion-like effect.

 

Mike is continuing to work out of Cal-OSHA’s Anaheim office, mostly at home.  His big coup of the year occurred while I was student teaching, and for the first time couldn’t carry the ball regarding family affairs.  So what did Mike do while I was gone?  He changed our family routine into one of playing ice hockey four nights a week.  On the one hand, I’m really annoyed about it, because of everything that has gotten crowded out, such as family reading.  On the other hand, I feel I owe him a big debt of gratitude, because he’s been so dedicated to have gotten the boys into this, gotten them equipped, and taken them to all their practices and games.  I have to admit it’s been really good for them.

 

Aside from major traumas, last year I joined a new “small church community” out of Sacred Heart Church in Ocean Beach.  Small church communities are described as not social groups, not prayer groups, and not therapy groups, but with elements of all of those.  It’s composed of eight of us who meet weekly, and has been an unexpectedly rich source of inspiration and support in my life.

Also, this is the tenth year that our Family Singalong group has been getting together!  At times we’ve loved it; at times we’ve been annoyed with each other; but we’ve always enjoyed honest discussions about the trials of marriage and family life, and maybe even learned to sing and play music together a bit better!  We’ve watched our children grow from babies to teenagers together (sniff sniff).  At this point, one really nice thing is that we can talk about getting old together!  About the only good thing about getting older is sharing the experience with others.  Well, and hopefully your professional life, friendships and finances improve.

I’m also taking bi-weekly accordion lessons, from a wonderful lady who’s 75, and has more energy than I do.  When I heard that she’d been a special education teacher for 25 years, I thought – maybe finally, somebody who can help me!  She’s not only a great teacher, but has a fantastic collection of sheet music, including Bohemian polkas.  I’ve decided I’m HIP – heavily into polka!  Learning an instrument is difficult when you’re older, but it feels like I’m finally doing the right thing, what I should have done 40 years ago; not to mention joining the kids in their practicing.

Lastly, feminists may snicker or throw stones, but after having read The Surrendered Wife by Laura Doyle a couple of years ago, our marriage continues to improve dramatically.  It’s one of the most profound books I’ve ever read, and addresses a politically incorrect subject I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere: controlling women.  She describes how being controlling brings strife, frustration and exhaustion.  There are many interesting reviews of it on Amazon.com.

It actually reminds me of one of the best pieces I read all year, by Tom Arnold, of all people.  It was his rendition of how all men are jackasses and all women are bitches, and that if you can find a woman who’s only a bitch 5% of the time, you’re doing well.  He went on to say that his new wife is a bitch 2% of the time – well really, more like 5%, but dwelling on that would make him a jackass!

 

Other news … We have now outraged the political corrects by letting not just one, but two, of our cats get pregnant.  Not only that, but they were “teen pregnancies”; both mothers were less than a year old.  In the spring, Wolfy, one of Grace’s litter from last year, gave birth to six kittens.  It was an incredible collection: three gray striped kittens, one orange kitten, one black Manx and one long-haired calico Manx.  In both cases we easily gave away all our kittens and yes, we finally have all our cats spayed.

 

And the most recent news: Recently we were at a friend’s house for a Christmas singalong, and had gone to a nursing home to carol there.  As we prepared to return to our friends’ home, Jake told me, “Follow in a caravan, Mom.”  I told him, “I can find the way; I found our way here!”  Famous last words.  The route was trickier than I thought, and I found myself driving all over Chula Vista in confusion.  After about thirty minutes, Jake said, “Maybe you should just give up, Mom.”  I replied, “Give up and do what?  I can’t find my way to the singalong or even our own house!  That’s the problem!  I can’t give up!”

Jake, ever good-humored, then said, “At least she can write!  She can’t get us to the singalong, or even home, but she can write a journal of what happened!  We could throw it out the window, and maybe someone would find it, and at least know what happened!  Maybe it would even get published!”  And so, my friends, that’s what my children think of their mother.  I may do them in, but at least it’ll make a good story!

 

And then it was time for that blessed day, Christmas.  Only our children received some presents that left their parents crying, “Why, Santa, Why?!”  A black sequined evening dress for seven-year-old Nina … Karaoke CD’s … How could Santa have shown such poor judgment?!

 

Then Christmas night, Mike was gone and I was napping on the couch, when I heard the children start dramatizing something.  Naturally they were acting out a scene at a bar.  Nick was the bartender, Jake acted out being a domineering drunk, and Nina alternated between being a barmaid and a customer ordering food.  Between wondering what kind of parents we could possibly be to have our kids come up with such scenes, and appreciating my children’s dramatic talents, I drifted in and out of sleep.  The children ended up acting out being customers playing checkers …

 

Have a wonderful new year!