When I got divorced at 27 I kept the house—a little bungalow in south Etobicoke that I couldn’t really afford on a single teacher’s salary. But I was determined to figure out a way to make it work. I ended up renovating the little basement into two dorm-like rooms and rented them out to students from Humber College’s Lakeshore campus. I didn’t know how to do any of the labour required to make my house a home for these kids but desperation is a great teacher.
I called on a few connections, had some drywall put up, threw on a few coats of paint, and before the beginning of the Fall term I had two students living in my basement. In some ways it was my first experience of mothering. I had been teaching “in locus parentis” for years but having someone else’s children under your roof takes the experience up a few notches. I would do small repairs in between terms. I’m not sure what was more work: caring for someone else’s child from a distance (thin walls!) or maintaining the space. People and places take effort.
I remember standing in the little rental bathroom, staring at a broken toilet and with my pink flip phone tucked under one ear and a wrench in the other. I didn’t cry but I know I felt alone. The plumber on the phone with me was an older man who had no intention of making the drive into the city for such a small job. He adopted a grandfatherly tone and said, “You can do this.” He was right. The toilet flushed.
For my birthday that year my mother gave me a pink hammer. Like the plumber she believed I could do “this.” She believed I could do all the things I was trying to do in that little house: tear things down, care for others, love myself, build a new life. A couple of years later I moved to a loft. A big open space in which I could start again. No students. Just me and my pink hammer.
These days my son uses it to unearth dinosaur bones from his archeological dig kit.
When Barbie and Oppenheimer came out this summer I was taken with the Barbenheimer portmanteau. It gifted me a solid life metaphor. (Certainly not Mattel’s marketing intentions but my link-making game is strong):
The home (the life!) I have gone on to build with that pink hammer would never have been constructed had I not blown up one life and made another. The learning I’ve continued to live is not obvious nor linear. I doubt those students who lived in my basement learned much from me. I was never their prof. Just a sad landlord. But maybe there was something gained in my hammer-wielding example. That someone in pain can still show care.
We can do this.
P.S. I’ve been told the the president of Yorkville University highlighted my book on teacher care and the importance of collegiality at her monthly talk…and I missed it! But you don’t have to—easy link for you right here.