Phlox & Zinnia

Alex, circa June 19th, 2015:

“Future me, I hope you look back on these entries and see how much you have grown. I hope you realize that every day has something worth mentioning if you think hard enough about it. I hope this journal shows you that your current struggles will pass, and there is joy in the little things in life. I hope you appreciate the people around you and that you let them know your gratitude. But most of all, I hope you remember that it’s not about you, that happiness and peace is found in God and following his commands. Don’t lose sight of your place in God's Kingdom.”

In my browsing of random Tumblrs that I keep track of from my Nuzlocke days (which is another story for another day), I came across this comic about the plotline of every Christmas movie ever. The only parts it misses is the obligatory activities of ice skating and cookie decorating while a quartet of carolers awkward sings in the village square. My friend Ana sent me this joke tweet about an AI writing a Hallmark movie script (in the interest of full disclosure, an AI did not write this. If you want to learn more about AIs, talk to me, who now has a rudimentary knowledge of them). I see Christmas movies as the foremost reason why we shouldn’t get so caught up in being the most creative and the most original storyweavers: we as consumers go back to the same storyline again and again as long as they make us feel good. I also see them as one of the signs of the Christmas season in the Johnson household.


My mom loved Christmas movies. She would set up our TiVo months in advance in order to tape all the new movies, and from the moment I would get home from college, there would be one playing in the living room. She loved to predict the actions of people in winter wonderlands and laughed as they followed the well-worn grooves of falling-in-love plotlines. Most of the time we wouldn’t even watch them that closely—they’d play in the background while I wasted away my time (on aforementioned Tumblrs—a habitat that I’m dying to break) and she tittered away on professional development twitter or emails. She was working even when she wasn’t.

There were days last year when we watched three to four movies, only breaking for snacks and when Dad would get home (and often times we’d just continue watching with him). As of December 22nd, I’m watching my second Christmas movie. Mom would be appalled.


Last Sunday as we were exchanging farewells, Pastor Sean said, “Going home is going to suck, but you are going to get through it.” I was a little put out honestly. I had told every person who had asked me how I was feeling about going home that I was really excited to see my family, and I was. I was confused to why this pastor who knows me a good amount (but not a crazy in-depth amount) would say something like that to me. On Tuesday when I put my suitcase in the house and left to get the rest of my stuff in the car, I started to cry and I remembered what Pastor Sean had said to me. It did kind of suck.

I thought this homestay would be the same as coming home for the memorial service, but this time there were still jobs that were related to Mom but also more jobs that were basically rewriting the traditions we had staunchly printed in our lives—decorating the tree, making dentist and hair appointments, making family calendar, buying presents, watching a boatload of Christmas movies—and reworking those traditions have been hard. I cried telling my hairdresser today that actually I wasn’t doing great because my mom passed away almost two months ago and this was the first time I walked into a salon without her. I’ve been able to hang out with my friends like I usually do and see some more family friends, but there’s a voice in the back of my head that reminds me that perhaps less people would want to see me if Mom was still here. It’s been busy, even too busy for Christmas movies.

Being home has sucked because I walked into my room and saw her stationary that I associate so strongly with her at LCA sitting in a box on my bed, packed up by one of her coworkers, and when I further investigated my room I found her ashes on my desk. When I visited LCA, I walked past her room, which is now both hers and Jenna’s, the new Bible teacher who has took over the 6th grade. When I come home, she isn’t parked in front of the TV and I don’t have to negotiate for time to play the PS3. Dad and I have printed out a calendar to keep a plan of our lives that used to exist in Mom’s head. It has sucked because she’s so tangible here and so disconnected in Grand Rapids—sure, she was in the Prince Conference Center and met my professors, but she didn’t live her life in the spaces that I was frequenting in GR. I’m seeing more than ever how life is rolling on without her, which made sense in GR but is far from sensical in Burlington.

Life can still be normal at home, like it was last night when I hung out with 10+ of my high school friends and played Super Smash Bros for the first time and no one asked for an in-depth analysis of my life. But there’s a larger cloud lurking in the corner in Massachusetts than there is in Grand Rapids. In Massachusetts, I wonder about if my friend’s newly-minted fiancé knows that my mom died, and I wonder if my friend who was abroad wants to ask me how I’m doing but is too shy. I have relative anonymity in Grand Rapids, but in Lexington Massachusetts, Mrs. Johnson’s fingerprints litter my friends’ hearts. It’s a lovely thing, and I love that they have these memories of her that I lost due to the sheer volume of time spent together, but it’s also hard to forget that they all knew and loved and miss her too.


I’ve pretty much decided that I’m staying in Grand Rapids this next year. I say that it’s because I already have a community out there, which I do, and I have a great living situation, which could only be beaten by moving back home, but a piece of me wonders if I’m making that decision because I don’t have to consciously reckon with death as much in Grand Rapids. I love Massachusetts, and this may be the place where I end up living, but maybe I can’t be here until I’ve solidified who I am as Ms. Johnson and as a young adult rather than as the daughter of a widely-beloved fixture of a school community. I’m not saying I’m running away, but maybe I’m running away.


Pastor Sean, you were right. Maybe Hallmark Christmas movies may sate my romantic soul and family time will heal me, but they also break me up and drudge up feelings that I would rather pack away. Open wounds need air to scab over, and mine need the bitter air of New England.



The recommendations I got for you is The Christmas Prince and The Princess Switch (disclosure: I haven’t finished the latter), two Netflix original Christmas movies, but more importantly Into the Spider Verse (my dudes, if you like Marvel, animation, jokes, or feelings, you should see this movie) and this poem by sam sax that I haven’t read yet but am sure is weird and wonderful.

I’m lying in my bed, ready to go to bed. It’s 6:45 pm. I’ve been up for only almost 13 hours.


When I had my student teaching interview with my potential mentor teacher, I asked him if I could stop by the classroom a couple times during the semester. He seemed taken aback and then quickly agreed. This conversation happened on November 7th, a mere five hours before [insert euphemism for death here]. While I wasn’t able to visit his classroom as many times as I would have liked to and I didn’t have as much time this semester as I was expecting to, I decided to spend a whole day of my exam week hanging out with middle schoolers. My finals are pretty chill, and I wanted a dry run of what my life will be next semester.

I left my house at 6:50am and using the Grand Rapids public transit system (and my own two feet), I made to the school around 7:50. I was immediately enswirled in the chaos of middle school, a welcome relief from the rising panic that blossomed in my chest the moment I saw the middle school sign and wondered, “Can I really see students who are analogous to the ones Mom taught?” I surprised my teacher, who had forgotten I had planned on coming in, and got right into watching teacher–student interactions and tasting the school culture.


After he introduced me to homeroom and I spent the bible period listening from the back, I was talking nitty-gritty citation details and conferencing with students about the themes of dystopian novels. My mentor says he threw me into the class because I basically get paid to conference with college students (one student misunderstood what he said and exclaimed, “You get paid to go to college?!” My dude, I wish), but a part of me wonders if he would have done it anyway. It was definitely a learning curve going from college students who willingly come in for half an hour to eighth graders forced to care about a topic and talk to me, a stranger, for five minutes. I mostly realized this when I tried to help jumpstart a student thinking about her topic of control in The Hunger Games by saying, “Well, you can talk about how the control on Katniss makes her grow,” and she gave me a blank stare. I circled back around to her later, and it was clear that everything I had said went over her head. Looks like I still got a ways to go, even with the part of teaching that I am the most prepared to do.

I sat in on a team meeting, which was my first real time behind the teacher curtain fully. In teacher prep classes, it is all about you and what you want to do. In reality, you got a district, a principal, a grade-level team, and a specialty team plus you, all of whom have certain ideas about what is feasible with students and what isn’t. They came up with a plan to better support and push their students who aren’t getting their homework in on time and occasionally bantered with each other. It was clear they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company.


When I started down Burton at 3:35 pm, I was already exhausted. I had emails to reply to, people to message, rides to figure out, and a podcast to boot. The day felt so long, being in the same space for hours on end, but it also felt so packed. I had forgotten what it feels like to be a part of a whirling ecosystem—the slamming lockers and the blurred voices that all seem to ride on the same frequency. I also had forgotten what it means to see yourself acting in ways that clash with your own philosophies; at times, it felt like I was reliving my own middle school days where the jagged edges between who I acted like and who I felt I was inside screeched against each other all too often.

My dad has been unearthing some cards that she kept, and a couple were from me from middle and high school. In one written for my high school graduation, I said, “I think you may be the only person who truly knows who I am.” I don’t think that’s true anymore, but I do think she is the one who knows me the most (one day I’ll transition to past tense, but that doesn’t feel right currently. Maybe it never will.).


In some ways, I think I’ll be teaching in two shades this semester: my mentor’s and my mother’s. Obviously my mentor’s students respect the heck out of him and learn effectively from him, and I’m not about to (severely) rock the boat and disrupt routines. Despite my eighth grade year being eight or so years ago and the clear shift in what is emphasized in the classroom, I am sure I will find her teaching ideas undergirding and undercutting my own plans.



This next semester was already going to be far from easy, and life has only doubled down, but strangely I’m feeling more hopeful and grounded than ever before. It’s like I’m about to take that first step on a hike that I know is hilly and confusingly marked, but I’ve purposefully left my compass and map in the car. I know I’ll get lost in the plains of Deerfield, NH for a day or two or sixty, but I also know there are other maps in those plains, in the streets of Grand Rapids, in the skies of my dreams, just waiting to be charted. I can’t find my own path when I’m tethered to the footsteps of my mom, and maybe it’s time for me to accept that having my mom’s face and mannerisms and carrying her torch of hopes does not mean I have to match her career.

Today should be a milestone since it's been a month since Mom passed. A month ago I was sitting on Anni's floor, wondering how I was going to get some sleep. Today, at least two people who I know enough to talk to but not well enough to talk to often asked me, “How are you doing?” which really means “Your mom died and it's tragic and I want to express my sympathy,” but I took it to mean “Say you are fine because honestly you are right now” and wondered why they would even consider that I would be vulnerable with them of all people.

The milestone came on three weeks after her death when I had a dream about her. It was one of those dreams where everything makes sense within the dream but not really outside of it—now that I’m thinking back to what we were doing, I think there was something to do with a game about children’s blocks. What I know is in that dream she knew she was going to die, and I was saying my goodbye to go back to college or something. I woke up and thought, “I have so much to tell her before she goes!” And then I remember.

A milestone comes every time I do something that I hadn't done before, like stay out until 3am with friends “working” on homework and getting accepted to present a poster by the major conference for the field of work my thesis deals with, and realize all over again that I can’t pull up the family group chat and text her. Most of the time it's without fanfare, like someone opening a door to a cold wind that overwhelms you before the door swings shut again, leaving you in the shock between temperatures.