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Posts about our travelling family circus.

Teaching, Travel, Writing

Almost Alumnae Speech

Today was the “Almost Alumnae Luncheon” at my school.  Graduating seniors and mothers/special friends are invited to a lunch each year.  There’s a student speaker, a faculty speaker, and a mother/alumna speaker.  I was asked to be the faculty speaker.  It was such an honor, and I want to share the text of my speech below.

(A quick note before my speech.  Amy Grant is an alum of Harpeth Hall and she graciously performed three songs and played her acoustic guitar after the speeches.  It was a moving performance that filled my soul in a way I didn’t realize I needed.  When she came up to sing and started strumming and setting her capo, she said, “Meg, I wish I’d had you as a teacher.”  I died.  I am dead.  Amy. Grant.  You can write that on my tombstone.  “Here lies Meg, Amy Grant gave her a shout out.”)

Here is the text of my speech:

Good afternoon.  I am so honored to have been asked to speak to you today.  In my high school, senior speeches happened at the end of the year, at a time much like this when regular class content was finished, and graduation was still a week or two away.  Seniors met in a large room, and we took turns going up and giving a speech to our class. It was a chance to process, to remember and to say goodbye. Teachers were also allowed to give speeches, and I’ve been waiting, hoping that someday I might get a turn to speak as my teachers did.  And how fitting that I too am in something of a senior year at Harpeth Hall. I’m in a similar position to you, preparing to leave the home I’ve known for seven years. I am poised on the lip of a new adventure, about to speak myself into the world, to utter a new existence for myself, just as you are.  

Perhaps you are feeling a lot of pressure for the next four years.  Someone might have told you that college was the best 4 years of their life.  With no disrespect to the lovely memories of those folks, I’ve always been bothered by that.  My best years will be behind me at 22?

I’m not here to say that college is not wonderful, magical, special.  It can be. Certainly, it’s the first time you will take off into the world alone.  But it is not the only time this will ever happen, it is just the first time.  It is the beginning of beginnings, one of many fresh starts that you will be granted during your tenure on this earth.  My adventure teaching in Brazil next year should serve as a tangible reminder of that. And as a person lucky enough to have had more than one new beginning, I have a few words of advice to share–as much a reminder to myself as lessons for you.  

First, embrace impatience.  Anyone can tell you to be patient, serene and calm.  But I want you to be impatient.  Chill is overrated.  You’re excited for this new chapter to start.  You want the rest of your life to start now!

Good, I say.  Be hungry. Want it.  Then, use that impatience as fuel to learn, to grow, to move somewhere new.  

In 2011, I’d been living in New York City for 6 years going to grad school and then teaching.  But I was impatient to leave. A teaching job in the upper school at Harpeth Hall popped up in the listings. I was hungry for a new beginning.  

After embracing impatience, my second piece of advice is to be foolhardy.  Not foolish, mind you, but foolhardy.  To be foolhardy is to be bold, and recklessly so.  Chase those goals with confidence. Sit at the table, even when you don’t know anyone; knock on the big door; raise your hand in a crowded room; bite off more than you can chew.

Who was I to apply to Harpeth Hall?  I didn’t know anyone, I lived in another state, I was only in my 4th year of teaching.   I had a million reasons not to apply. But I wanted to teach at a place like this. So I was impatient and dashed in with a foolhardy confidence.  

Then, I showed up.  Show up–that’s my next piece of advice.   Showing up is more than going to class. Showing up in your own life can be incredibly hard.  It feels easier to run, to hide.  To cancel or to sit out. It’s easier to come up with an excuse, to find a distraction.  Showing up for yourself is harder than it seems.

We spend too much time waiting for perfect conditions.  I’ll write that book when I have the time or the perfect idea.  I’ll apply for that job when my resume has exactly the right things on it.  When I have the courage to move to another country, I’ll do it.

My secret is that I’m not brave, or honestly even ready.  But, being impatient and bold and showing up is what brought me here.  After a phone interview with Ms. Powers for the upper school English job, they flew me to Nashville to interview and teach a lesson.  I still thought my chances were slim. Who was I? Some public school teacher from New York with a theater degree. But I showed up. And I poured all of me into it.  

After 2 agonizing weeks of waiting, the call came in that I got the job.   

So, you’re going to let yourself be impatient and foolhardy, you’ll show up even when you aren’t ready, even if you’re scared.  Then I want you to listen. Pay attention. So, cliche, right? A teacher telling you to pay attention! Let me tell you something about adults.  The path to getting where we are now may seem so inevitable when you see us up here. But in the beginning and the middle of the story that leads to this moment, the ending was anything but certain.  The path doesn’t go in a straight line. You’ve got to pay attention to the signs along the way.  

Some of you may know this about me, but I was a STEM kid.  In addition to theater and the humanities, I took advanced math, and I even doubled up in higher level chem and bio in senior year.  And in high school I needed an answer when people asked what I wanted to be. I was good at bio and chem and I didn’t really love physics, I liked working with kids, so… pediatrician.  I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re good at STEM and like working with people, right?

So, I went to college hungry and impatient.  In freshman year, I showed up and volunteered at the children’s hospital, and worked in a research lab. I took all the math and science classes, and I got straight A’s.  

Then, near the end of freshman year, I was sitting in my chemistry class, looking to the world like the ideal student.  But in my head, I couldn’t make myself care about it anymore. I was miserable. I was so unhappy. I had been steaming forward with such vigor toward med school, doing everything I was supposed to do.  And yet, when I paid attention, the signs around me were so clear. I paid attention to the truth, deep down, that this path wasn’t right for me anymore. Just because you’re good at something, doesn’t mean you have to do it.

So, what now?  What was my life going to be?  I felt a deep sense of despair, something akin to a major break-up.  Despite the despair, I dropped my biology major and pre-med focus. Theater was the other thing I loved doing, so I turned my impatient energy toward a career on the stage.  I went abroad during my junior year to London, and I studied Shakespeare and classical acting all day. From 9 am to 6 pm, I immersed myself in theater.

And then, second semester…you may have a sense of where this is going…I was miserable.  In March, when the cast list was posted for the play, for the first time in my life, I didn’t care what part I got.  I’d never felt that way before. But I listened to that feeling.

I came home that summer and regrouped.  I got an education internship at the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival.  That summer, teaching kids about Shakespeare, I felt a happiness and fulfillment that–finally–lasted.  

It may sound totally obvious now, seeing me standing here, that I was destined to be a teacher.  But as a 21-year-old, I had no idea. Even though I realized education was a good fit, it would take a year of graduate school for me to realize that teaching English was where I belonged.  

So I want you to pay attention.  Forgive yourself if the career or field you picked perhaps as far back as elementary school doesn’t end up being the one you land on.  It’s not bad to admit you don’t love it like you thought you would. It’s not quitting to follow where you are most happy. And you don’t have to do something just because you are good at it.  

My husband, David, likes to quote a math teacher who says, “Find what you love.  Do more of that.”

You might find that the thing you love was not the thing you were known for being good at at Harpeth Hall.  College is a new beginning so that you can start anew.  You are not a fixed person.   And you will not always be the person your parents and classmates thought you were while you were here.  When I won the English award in high school, my mom said after the assembly, “I thought you weren’t good at English.”  Going to college and then into the world let me see myself beyond the lens of my parents and high school peers. It’s good to get out and see yourself more clearly.  

So, pay attention.  Find what you love. Do more of that.  Listen to mentors and professors when they compliment and encourage you.  Try to silence the voices that tell you that you aren’t “that” kid. The kid who’s good at [blank].  Trust that you don’t know yet exactly what kind of person you are. Trust that you are still forming.  I’m 35 and I have three kids and I still see so much change happening in my life. I’m still forming. I hope it is ever thus.  

Be impatient.  Be foolhardy. Show up.  Pay attention. Find what you love, do more of that.  

It’s what brought me to be standing on this stage, after the seven most formative years of my teaching.  Like you, Harpeth Hall has been an incredible education for me. I have learned things here that I never imagined.  I have accomplished things I couldn’t have done had it not been for this place and the people in it. And now I will take those gifts that this beauty on the hill gave me, and I will, as poet Thomas Lux says:

boil and boil, render
   it down and distill,
   concentrate
   that for which there is no
   other use at all, boil it down, down,
  then stir it with rosewater, that
  which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
   which you smear on your lips

And go forth
   to plant as many kisses upon the world
   as the world can bear!

 

Thank you.

Travel

Shedding

For our upcoming move to Brazil in July, we are only taking 15 suitcases.  No furniture, no shipments.  For all five of us, just clothes, books, toys and kitchen items that will fit in suitcases on the plane.  Since November, we’ve been selling, donating, and giving our stuff away, preparing to eventually shed 95% of the contents of our house. 

As each weekend approaches, I start to peer into cabinets and closets. I find an excuse to go survey the basement crawl space. I’m making mental lists: the mitre saw, the Halloween decorations. The old coolers, the potty training toilet, the roasting pan and the ice cream maker. On Saturday morning, my hands are positively itching, and when the baby goes down for his nap, I throw on sneakers and head down into the crawl space.

Like a classic southern crawl space, it doesn’t literally require me to crawl, but it has unfinished dirt walls, exposed beams and a dirt floor. It has some patches of concrete poured onto the ground, but it’s basically a dirt room under my house. The walls show the red Tennessee clay that holds up our 1935 bungalow. I can see where tree roots were severed to dig the foundation, probably done by hand by someone grateful for job digging foundation holes after the Depression. And like a slowly-decomposing work of art, the dirt walls continuously shed a dermis of dust and dirt onto everything down there. The longer something has been sitting in the crawl space, the thicker the layer of red dust.

The dust is a way to date oblivion.

It’s creepy down there. The stairs are rattly and there are strange cricket-spider creatures. I inevitably track dirty footprints around the house when I emerge. But I also love it. That crawl space is living. It’s walls are slowly crumbling, dust to dust. It is the pull of entropy on my house, a measure of the passage of time. I don’t have the energy or desire to go down there and sweep up the dirt that mounds at the base of the earthen walls, but I could. I could fight the decomposition, or at least tidy it up. It would always win, though. And it’s just a room for storage. No one sees it but us. So we feel free to hide things in it, usually things we want to pretend don’t exist. It’s a room of decisions deferred. There’s the antique wood rocking chair that I rocked my firstborn in. I broke the caning on the back of the chair within the first few months. Perhaps I was rocking too vigorously, jamming my shoulder blades back too hard in my first-time-mom agony and exhaustion. Either way, the back split and so it went into the basement.

There’s the cable box we never connected and the landline phone for the line we canceled. The only people who called it were my dad and telemarketers. My fins and snorkeling mask are down there along with my scuba certification. Two camera tripods, even though I no longer own a camera. There’s a gourd that’s been painted to look like Santa. Baking dishes from dead grandmothers’ kitchens. Empty file folders. Ice skates and roller blades. This whole basement ages me. I don’t roller blade or scuba dive anymore. Honestly, my children might want those items before I ever get a chance to use them again.

It could be called the Kingdom of Might down there. I might need that landline again. I might want to rollerblade again some day. I might find someone who can re-cane that rocking chair.

No. No I won’t. I know that for sure now. It’s amazing to clear away all that might clutter. Now I focus on can. I can finish my next novel. I can move to South America in July. I can go blow bubbles outside with my kids instead of reorganizing all the crap I’m storing in the crawl space. And now that I’ve given away the rollerblades and the mitre saw and the empty folders, I am no longer burdened with the weight of all the things I might be doing, all the things clamoring for my attention.

I know now what deserves my attention. My family. My teaching. Travel. My writing. I don’t need a mitre saw or a snorkel. Those are not the things I wish I was doing. I want to be writing. Or reading a new book, or playing Memory with my kids.

And I can.

Teaching, Travel

In the bowels of bureaucracy

In the past 6 months, we have gotten: new passports, new drivers licenses, TSA precheck, Global Entry, FBI background checks, and Brazilian visas.

Applying for our Brazilian work visas was by far the hardest part.  We had to go through a process called apostille, which is basically an internationally recognized certification of documents that is recognized by other countries.  You have to get a document notarized by a notary, then certified by the county clerk, then apostilled by the secretary of the state you live in (not the national Secretary of State).  That’s three confusing government buildings and their correspondingly obscure parking lots.

But we did it!  After we had all of these documents apostilled, we mailed them to Brazil and eventually our visas were approved.  Then more paper work (and FBI background checks), and we sent all of that to the Brazilian consulate in Atlanta.  It’s a little scary to put your passports and your kids’ birth certificates into a mailbox.  But they got there, our visas were affixed, and they got back to us safely.

Everyone loves to have an opinion about bureaucracy, but I have a few thoughts of my own, now that I’ve spent some time navigating multiple levels within two national governments.

The Tennessee county clerk and secretary of state offices were clean, well run and easy to navigate.  People were kind and moved with efficiency.  I kept asking about where to go for an apostille like I didn’t quite believe it was a real thing (it is) and every time they knew exactly what I needed and how to give it to me.  It was also cheap, costing only 80 bucks to get 10 documents done.

The harder thing to apostille was our NYU and Columbia transcripts.  We have to submit those for our work visas because we are applying for a work visa as someone “highly qualified.”  We aren’t in NY state anymore, so we paid a company $150 (each, for David and me) to go get our transcripts and have them apostilled (notary –> county clerk –> secretary of state) and then mailed to us in Tennessee.

Oh, and once our visas were approved, and we mailed our passports to the Brazilian consulate in Atlanta, we had to include $1,450 in money orders .  Yes, $290 each for our visas.

I told a co-worker in a professional development session on mindfulness that we are becoming immigrants to another country.  That’s how Brazil sees us, and it’s correct.  But it’s a strange thing to think about as someone with an American passport, and may strike some as surprising.  She asked me how it felt to be an immigrant to another country.  That’s an interesting question.

First, it’s made me feel even more compassion for immigrants to the US.  We have a company guiding us through this and doing some of it on our behalf and it is still hard.  And I have 2 degrees, a solid income, and a support system.  The school in Brazil is reimbursing us for all visa-related expenses.  This is so hard in the best of circumstances.  And not the kind of thing you enter into lightly.

Second, I feel so lucky that I happened to be born in Ohio and was able to have the opportunities that led another country to consider me “highly qualified.”  It was the luck of the draw that I was well educated and was able to get 2 degrees from great universities and 11 years of teaching experience.  If I’d been born elsewhere, it’s likely that as a woman I would not have been educated or offered those same opportunities.  I’m very, very lucky.

And yet here I am leaving it.  That’s not lost on me.  I’m a very privileged immigrant with a passport to a country that exists and that I can return to and making a living in.  I’m not destitute or desperate.  I think about the images of bombed out buildings and people fleeing Syria.  They don’t have the luxury of smooth bureaucracy and duplicate copies of all their vital documents.

I feel fortunate to have bureaucracy.  Yes, the DMV took an hour and a half, but I got a license.  I have ID.  I can show someone who I am.  How many millions of refugees don’t have any records like that?  How many people live without documents?  Maybe these documents are lovely and this bureaucracy is a sign of privilege.  If so, I’ll take my labyrinthine hallways and always-full parking lots, if I get what I need at the end.

Teaching, Travel

Vamos

The Griswolds have big news!  In July 2018, we are making a big international move.  Below is something I’ve written and shared with my students and colleagues at my current school.  NB: All of the seniors at my school give a speech during their senior year.  I’ve been here seven years, so I’ve heard roughly 700 speeches.  I decided that as I am moving on to my next chapter, it was fitting to write my own “senior” speech.

This semester I’ve been teaching my students about the Hero’s Journey.  Developed by Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey is a way to describe the pattern of stories throughout different cultures and eras.  Even across oceans and millennia, there is a pattern to the stories that we humans tell, and Joseph Campbell studied it and described its features.

The first stage is the hero in their normal world.  The status quo.  But something happens: an inciting incident occurs, and the hero receives the call to adventure.  It’s the moment that turns a regular day into an extraordinary one, one that kicks off a journey that takes the hero far from home.  

How fitting that just as I’m teaching this story structure, I write to share with you that the Griswolds are heeding the call to adventure.  In July we will be moving as a family to São Paulo, Brazil to teach at The Graded School, an American International School.  

Many of you know that I grew up overseas with my family.  When I was 10 we moved from Cincinnati to Mexico City, and at the end of 6th grade, we moved to Caracas,Venezuela, where I lived until I graduated from high school.  I attended an international school in Caracas where 27 languages were spoken.  I became fluent in Spanish and conversational in Portuguese.  And I always thought that some day my life would lead me back to an international life.  

Now that our oldest, Calvin, has started Kindergarten, we started thinking about the educational experience we want for him.  We also started to think about the next adventure and challenge for us as educators.  Now that our family is complete, the time feels right to set off.  

But none of this would be possible if it hadn’t been for Harpeth Hall.  When we moved here in 2011 from New York, I thought seriously about leaving the profession.  I was coming from 4 challenging years of teaching in New York City public and charter schools.  I was approaching burn-out.  Borders Bookstore had just declared bankruptcy and I thought, “Well, there went my back up plan!”  

I was so lucky to get hired to teach at this amazing institution.  Far from burning out, I reached new heights as an educator because of Harpeth Hall.  Collaborating and learning with my amazing English department colleagues was a transformative experience.  Their experience and expertise, their commitment to the students, their reflection and openness on their own teaching: these things inspired and uplifted me.  I became the educator I was always meant to be because of Harpeth Hall.  I learned not just from my department, but from all of the faculty and staff.  I learned about what a team of people can do when they are all united to work for a common goal.  From our administration I learned about grace, about strength, about humanity.  And all of these lessons have been formative.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned from teaching amazing students.  The students at Harpeth Hall let me be creative, let me challenge myself, let me learn more than I thought possible about teaching and learning.  Over my seven years at Harpeth Hall, my students’ dedication, effort, and creativity have made this such an amazing place to work.  I will always carry with me the earnest desire to learn and grow that they brought to school each day.

Moving to Brazil and teaching at an international school would not have been possible had we not spent these 7 years at Harpeth Hall.  When we were told that we were attractive candidates, I knew that Harpeth Hall was to thank.  

So, I feel that I am now writing my own senior speech.  I imagine that I am looking out at a theater of my chosen family.  I feel gratitude for each and every one of you.  For how you’ve pushed me, supported me, questioned me, cheered me on.  Our departure, our call to adventure, is not an unhappy ending, but the beginning of an exciting new chapter.  It is bittersweet for us, to know that we will be leaving a fantastic place filled with wonderful people.  But it also feels right.  

We will take each of you with us when we go.  Your ears will burn next year with tropical heat because we will be singing your praises and carrying your lessons with us.  We hope that we can keep our connection to Harpeth Hall alive, and see this new chapter for us as a new chapter for you as well.  A new partnership with the southern hemisphere.  Come on, I’m sure Harpeth Hall will spring for plane tickets to Brazil so that you can come check out what we’re doing!!

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.  

With Love,

Meg Griswold, Class of 2018

Teaching, Travel, Writing

New Site!

As I begin to query for Improbable Girl, I decided it was time to make an author site.  I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, which is mostly true.  My built in IT department, also known as my husband, is busy writing math textbooks and has pushed me out of the nest to muddle through myself.

I just imported my old Writer, Reader, Teacher, Spy blog posts and a few of them have some issues with pictures.  I’ll try to get those fixed over the coming weeks.

Thanks for stopping by.  These blog posts will showcase the many hats I wear, so it will be a mixed bag.  I hope you enjoy!