love – Pernille Ripp

The man I love turned 50 yesterday.

A milestone event, cataclysmic in its ordinarity really. Just live long enough and you too will reach this day. And yet, it moves the ground beneath you, Makes you stop and pause. 50 is for grownups, for less life to live than lived (more than likely), for adult-decisions, and adult wisdom.

And so we celebrated in a busy ordinary day. Squeezed in a birthday song before drop off and pick up. Planted birthday flags in a school dinner for the Project Pig meal our daughter had been a part of with a local butcher (Danish schools are wild). Fell asleep on the couch at 9, filled with love, and also all of the responsibilities of two working adults with 4 children.

This morning, the alarm still rang at 4:30. The tea tasted the same. The bubble of excitement for the weekend felt familiar. He didn’t look any different. Our love hadn’t changed.

Life is lived in the ordinary. In the moments of familiarity, in the ease of the couch cushions that embrace us on good days and bad. In the routines that keep this neurodivergent household afloat. We long for freedom in our weekends. We celebrate the big moments, the befores and afters that mark the turning of the page. But really, life is lived in the ordinary.

It makes me think of our reading identities. That we may have the markers of the big experiences – the first book you couldn’t put down, the book you had to share, the first book we ever read to show the map of you. But the steps in between, those are ordinary events if we make it.

The invitation to read every day, for every child. The read aloud that children can count on will happen during the day, with voices, of course. The everyday access to books of their choosing. To have adults who care about the way they experience those books. The questions posed about who they are as readers and who they want to be. The books returned, the books abandoned, the books finished.

All ordinary moments.

Or they should be.

Because we build a life in the ordinary.

We build our reading identity in the flow of access. In the invitations into reading that happen every day. In the steady faith that reading is a place for all children, and adults, to find a home, even if it feels unfamiliar and wasteful right now.

The door remains open. There is no time limit on becoming a reader. There is no extraordinary celebration you must attend in order to be made a reader. You show up, you try, and you try again.

And we keep that door open for all. We fight the poor policies that shut the door on our readers. We fight the bans. We fight the lethargy.

We reserve the right to make reading an ordinary experience, one to be counted on, much like the school bell will ring. Kids should be able to count on that books, and reading, and moments of silence await them in our spaces. Not just on special days, but on every day.

This afternoon, I will run errands, get my flu and covid shots, and gather our family for our weekly Friday night movie night. If the movie is terrible, I will read alongside them, present but engaged in my own make believe world. Tomorrow morning, I will go run on a treadmill, do my laundry, and walk my garden.

Mundane perhaps, ordinary, yet extraordinary in that I get to live it.

I keep the door open to my ordinary life so that we can look back and see it for its beauty, for what it really was. A life lived between breaths. A reading journey built between pages.

Won’t you live an ordinary life with me?

It’s been so long since I wrote, that I forgot my own website address.

It’s not that there haven’t been things to share, it’s more that I don’t know where to begin. That I have lived back home in Denmark for four years now, and been a teacher here for nearly three, and yet still feel like Bambi on ice. Trying to find my footing but knowing that I am more than likely spinning in circles and sliding farther away from my intended target.

So instead of trying to catch anyone up, don’t even know if there is anyone to catch up here, I am simply beginning again.

Hello and welcome to my thoughts about teaching, about life, about being a mom, a woman and living in this world right now with all its complications and wonders.

I am supposed to be the one that teaches children to read and write in my first grade classes. This is a burden I never wanted to have and yet the puzzle of trying to make the pieces click into place, of trying to help children find their way into story, and place their stories into the world, is one I relish. Will this little thing work? What if we do this? Try this? Stop this?

My students are both willing and unwilling participants; while happy to be in school still, they don’t get to choose that they should learn how to read or write. Like so many other things, that choice has been made for them.

But how we do it, together, that can be rife with choices. Some we are exploring cautiously, some we throw ourselves into just happy to try something new.

There is so much we can do together that I feel paralyzed at times. The weight of this wondrous world of literacy so heavy that I am not sure of what is best, what to do, what to keep. Imposter syndrome at its finest.

Because am I enough for everyone? Probably not. But can I show up and try my best, yes. Can I plan something every day that is one part of an expansive path that will expand these readers and authors? Can I teach strategies, offer practice, and pull them into the magic of what it means to read and write and leave the door so wide that even the most cautious of children can bumble through. Yes. Always yes.

I can observe, and tweak, and dream, and wonder and try. I can try again when it didn’t work. I can offer myself grace when it feels like too much to do and not enough me.

Because the power we have to experiment and pilot cannot be removed when we sit in our classrooms. We are allowed to try again again and again.

Because that’s really all this great big thing is. Whether it be life or teaching. An invitation to show up every day and try again. To leave knowing that you tried something. To leave in a way that makes you want to come back.

So I may not always know what I am doing, or even how to do something well, but I know how to show up. And for now, that’s going to be good enough.