Finding My Way Back

Gate 46. San Diego Airport

I’m sitting at the gate after four days with my daughter, trying to take a breath without opening things up even more, but it doesn’t really work like that.

David Gray’s The Final Order coming through my headphones:

“Down the road we will return to fire and water…”

There’s a way my mind and body move in moments like this, everything lighting up at once, connections forming faster than I can track, feeling arriving before I have words for it, and for a long time I thought that was something I needed to get under control. Sitting here now, I can feel it happening again, that same opening, that same intensity, but instead of pushing it down I’m just watching it move through me as best I can.

I don’t really care that people are watching me right now.

When something in me opens, it brings everything with it. Joy, grief, gratitude, regret, all moving together without much separation. I close my eyes for a moment, but it doesn’t quiet anything. It just brings her closer and me closer to myself.

There’s something about being with her that returns me to myself in a way nothing else does, not gently and not in a way I can manage, but in a way that exposes something essential and doesn’t leave much room to look away. Being with her these last few days brings a sweetness that also carries an ache, like something in me is still catching up to what was lost and what’s being found again at the same time.

When we first started the school, she was nine months old, and I can still see her on my back in one of those kid backpacks, moving through the space while everything unfolded around us. She would sit there quietly, taking it all in, occasionally reaching forward to tug at my ear, not to get my attention, more like a small signal that she was there, awake to everything, already part of it. I didn’t have language for it then, but looking back it feels like she was absorbing something essential about how to be in the world, and in some quiet way, so was I, even if I didn’t yet understand what was happening.

What I didn’t understand at the time was how much of my own history I was carrying into these moments.

My sixteen-year-old self is sitting here with me at the gate too.

I can feel him in the way everything opens at once, in the part of me that still braces when the intensity rises. There are flashes of it, being locked in that hospital room, the lights coming on through the night, voices and movement in the hallway, the constant sense of not knowing what was happening or how to hold it.

He’s still here, still carrying that fear, that feeling of being too much. I’m not surprised by his presence anymore. In some ways, my deepening of connection with him and my relationship with my daughter have been moving together all along.

I’m staying with him now in a way no one stayed with him then. That same kind of unconditional presence helping me find my way with my daughter, as well.

For a long time, that part of me was seen as something that needed to be controlled, and I saw it that way too. It felt unpredictable, intense, too much to trust. But what I’ve come to understand is that same part of me is also what allows me to feel this deeply, to notice what others might miss, to sense what’s happening beneath the surface, and to stay when things get uncomfortable instead of turning away.

I didn’t know it then, but that part of me came into the school too, not in any obvious way, but in the way I was drawn to children who felt deeply, who moved through the world with a kind of sensitivity that didn’t always fit. Over the years, being with them has done something to me, not just as a teacher, but as a person. There is a kind of honesty in young children, a way they stay close to what they feel, that doesn’t leave much room for pretense, and they don’t let you hide for long. They keep inviting you back, again and again, to something more immediate, more real.

And slowly, without me fully noticing it at first, something in me began to return. Not all at once, and not in some clean or linear way, but through years of small moments of staying, of being present, of allowing what was there to be there. In many ways, these children have been guiding me back to something I lost long before I had language for it, and as that has happened, something else has begun to shift too.

“Break my eyes that I can see eternity now,
Break the ties that I can free the child in me now…”

Back in San Diego, we were sitting together when she said something that caught me off guard. A bright light revealing a blind spot. It wasn’t heavy, just honest in that way she can be, and then she smiled and we were both laughing. There’s something about the way she does that, how she can say something that lands and still leave space for connection, that makes it possible for me to actually hear her without needing to defend myself. I could feel it in my body when it happened, that familiar place where I would usually tighten just didn’t, and I found myself staying open in a way I haven’t always known how to.

The shared laughter some of the best medicine I’ve ever experienced!

It’s hard not to feel the connection between these things, the years of being with children, learning how to stay with what’s real, learning how not to turn away from intensity, and now finding myself sitting across from my daughter, able to stay in a way I haven’t always known how to.

There’s a part of me that feels like she’s always known who I could be, even when I didn’t, not in a way that puts anything on her, but in the way relationships sometimes hold a kind of quiet knowing. As if something in her recognized me before I could fully recognize myself, and as I’ve found my way back, we’ve been able to find each other more naturally.

For a long time, I thought healing would mean becoming less, less reactive, less sensitive, less affected by everything. But that’s not what this is. If anything, it’s more, more feeling, more awareness, more moments where everything is right at the surface. The difference is I’m not trying to get away from it in the same way.

There’s still a part of me that wants to. There’s still a part of me that feels like that sixteen-year-old sometimes.

But I’m staying longer now.

There’s a thread that runs through all of it, from those early days with her on my back, quietly tugging at my ear, to the years of being shaped by children who refused to let me drift too far from what’s real, to the part of me that once felt like too much and is still learning how to be here.

If I could go back to him now, I think I would do something very simple. I would sit down next to him. I wouldn’t try to explain anything. I would just stay.

I’m sitting at the gate now, holding the feeling of these past few days, and what feels clear in this moment is simple.

I’m not trying to feel less anymore.

I’m learning how to stay, and my daughter is at the center of it.

“Pour out the wine, I’ll wait in line for purity now.”

I can't publish this without some pics. The current pic has an expiration date.

Much Love!

The Mad Preschool Teacher (He/Him)