Bowled over with blessings

I am not known for my optimism and positivity. I was once told by an acquaintance that I was the most positive negative person that she had ever met and I was perfectly okay with that description. But lately, having spent more time than comfortable in the doldrums, I have been making a concentrated effort to look for blessings in my daily life. It's going exactly like I would expect.

Take yesterday, for example. As I was driving to work, I caught a glimpse of silver flash out of the corner of my eye and slowed down to see a majestic heron wading through a trout stream, enveloped in a soft curtain of fog. I took a deep, cleansing breath as I gave thanks for this, the first blessing of my day.

Soon, I arrived in my classroom and was surprised to see my chair occupied by a GIANT present proclaiming me "The Best Teacher Ever." I immediately knew who to thank:  My darling friend and colleague Jill who has been a source of unwavering support since I taught her son Ryan over EIGHT years ago. I am still not sure what I did to elicit such devoted loyalty but Jill's confidence in my abilities comes in handy whenever I am feeling like a complete failure and fraud. I took another breath as I logged in my second blessing of the day.

Ask any pessimist and they'll tell you, a streak like this is unsustainable. I should have hauled Jill's present to the truck and immediately drove home. But no. Instead...I looked to the left.

What is the opposite of a "blessing?" A "hex?" "Affliction?" "Curse?" "Plague?" 

Let's go with "plague." Except, instead of a horde of locusts, my desk was baptized in a river of blood. Or...that's what it looked like. Turned out to be a container of grape juice that one of my cherubs had tossed into the snack basket yesterday. The tell-tale "drip...drip...drip" delivered a consecrated current across my work area. I took a deep breath; attempting to stem the flood of foul language that threatened to spill from my mouth. Then, I gave thanks to the charitable contributions of parents who had answered my beginning-of-year call, begging for paper towels that actually ABSORB liquid. I grabbed one of those rolls immediately and then noticed that, miraculously, the blood bath had somehow missed my waiting piles of worksheets and the yellow field day t-shirts that were perched on my desk like sacrificial sheep. Okay, I thought to myself as I finished cleaning up, that wasn't as bad as it could have been. Maybe I could squeak this event into the "blessings" column.

The math project was next. I always think I like tessellations until we actually start doing them.  Creating the tessellation template required some skill...namely listening to and following directions. Yes. You guessed it. Room 24 was in trouble. Once we were finished wrestling the templates together, we then had to deal with the abstract idea of "mapping out our vision." I soon became embroiled in a War of Wills as one of my little honeys saw a bird where I was certain there was a mermaid. "Whose project IS it, Mrs. Mosiman?" you might gently interject but, c'mon! Look at the template!

While the debate raged on, a couple of high school boys wandered into the fray, lugging a red bowling pin with them. Fortunately, it was enough to distract us from our disagreement. Turns out, ironically enough, that I had been selected to receive an award of appreciation from our school district's middle and high school students. Yes, as I was throwing a GIANT, immature temper tantrum and attempting to foist my will upon a nine-year-old, I was being recognized as a terrific teacher. Talk about your divine metaphors. I was really "striking out as an educator." That little slap of reality was enough to get me to re-set and encourage my artist to meet with me after school so that we could calmly direct her project in a way that best reflected her artistic interpretation. We started from scratch and somehow ended up with a prairie dog next to a cactus. It was perfect as I had been feeling pretty prickly. There's a pun in there somewhere, linking the bowling pin and the cactus, something about being on pins and needles but I am too exhausted after a day of counting my blessings to verbalize it. So, just spare me, already.