I miss the bad kids.

Remember last year?

The horrible, terrible year?

The year of tearful Fridays and 60-hour weeks and anxiety so bad that my legs often locked up, making me look like a peg-legged sailor?

It was a rough year.

But over the past two weeks I've felt sharp pangs of loss because, gosh darnit, I miss the kids.

I don't know why it's hitting hard now; maybe because this time last year was filled with a lot of sentiment.

No, I DO NOT miss referrals, bullying reports, parent emails, and constant emotional triage...but if you offered to let me take each of those kids out for ice cream, I wouldn't hesitate to say yes. 

Why? Because with all of the crazy came a love and loyalty that you don't find in every class.

So I miss them.

I miss the kid who made me fresh-squeezed orange juice from his breakfast fruit cup and brought me chocolate milk from the cafeteria every day.

I miss the kid who really wanted to get me a mug for Christmas.

I miss the kid who hated teachers, but wanted to tell me mundane things about his life because he knew that I cared.

I miss the kid who danced with me and sang "Keep Holding On" after a horrid day.

I miss the kid who said he'd punch the principal if I ever got fired.

I miss the kid who threw down all of his football gear and leapt up the bleachers when he saw that I'd come to his game.

I miss the kid who wrote to me about her life in her weekly journal assignment, even though she wouldn't talk much in class.

I miss the kid who gave a very convincing argument in Social Studies that made half the class think that Hitler wasn't so bad.

I miss the kid who always fessed up about saying bad words.

I miss the kid who pretended to be a t-rex with me.

I miss the kids who stayed after school to help me cover the walls before T-CAP, and then uncovered the poster of Abraham Lincoln's face so that he could stare at everyone while they were testing (though, YES, I covered him back up before the test).
I miss the kid who wrote a story about Josh and me getting married during the time of the dinosaurs.

I miss the camaraderie that came with that bad class.

I miss the day we decided that our class name would be "Love's Lil' Gremlins".

I miss the behavior talks--particularly after a sub day ("We were terrible! We all deserve demerits!").

I miss telling the kids to have compassion and empathy, and then watching them have it (if only for a little while).

I miss the great discussions about how history wasn't fair.

I miss group hugs.

I miss their demented, Hot-Topic sort of humor and obsession with angsty teen bands.

I couldn't do that year again, but I am so very glad it happened, and that it was filled with enough love to miss.

Engagement is weird.

Scratch that.
The beginning isn't all that weird. It's exactly what you'd expect--a couple days of glitter, butterflies, and warm fuzzies. A thousand congratulations. More facebook notifications than you know what to do with. It's like your birthday and Christmas came at once and tiny fluffy puppies miraculously rained down out of the sky.

After that comes some wedding panic, which is also an expected feeling.
VENUE
DRESS
COLORS
FLOWERS
FOOD
MUSIC
FREAKING GUEST LIST

But once the big things get checked off the wedding list--that's when things get weird. Because then it settles in that holy crap I'm actually going to live with this person as long as we're both alive, and we're going to have houses and babies and teenagers and disagreements and vacations together. 

And at this point of the game, the two of you actually have to start making big decisions together. 
As a single unit.
Where you once simply had to decide on what to do and where to eat dinner, you must now decide on things like
a phone plan,
a car insurance plan,
where you're going to live,
where you'll go to church,
how your money will be spent,
when and how many kids you'll have,
how you'll keep from having those children until it's time,
what you'll do about the holidays,
what your future goals are,
and
so on,
and
so forth.

Like me, you may know (or have known) that these were all things that would come up before marriage. But it's one thing to KNOW that you'll have to make these decisions, and another to go through the process of making them.

You really get to know yourself AND your significant other in these decisions, in a way that you'll never know anybody else. It's like digging into each other's souls with sharp little shovels.
I've never done that before.
It's a weird thing.

Josh and I are more solid than a lot of engaged couples, and even we still have cold feet moments.
Why?
Because we know this is a big deal, and it's scary.

Every day, we will have to sacrifice our desires for the good of our sacred union.
We will come face-to-face with our selfishness.
We will have to swallow I-told-you-sos and Why-can't-you-justs and I-deserves.
That's all noble and whatnot, but isn't it easy to pick at and criticize people you know really well?
I don't know about you, but I'm super good at finding the flaws of others, and I'm also good at correcting them because I'm a teacher and that's what I do.

Josh and I have always had pretty healthy, open communication, but in the last two months of making these kinds of decisions I feel that we've really gotten to know each other.
And guess what.
Our brains work differently.
Our baggage is gross.
And even clear communication isn't always crystal.

It's hard to describe the shift that's taking place in our relationship, other than to say that it's deep, it's good (though it doesn't always feel that way), and it's weird.
We are both, however, becoming more excited about the marriage than we are about the wedding.

Pretty sure that's the way it's supposed to be.

Now, here are some examples of our great communication:

Why weirdos with snuggies shouldn't have blogs.

It's time for a really great story about when I was a college sophomore and was foolish enough to think that nobody read my blog.

Yes, I was a nineteen-year-old with a blog, and it was a crazy-random collection of all the spastic things that I was doing with my friends. It was also a free-for-all on my thoughts and opinions because I was certain that no more than five people were interested in what it said.

The beginning of sophomore year (and that blog) overlapped with an epic breakup, after which I was determined to prove my independence in a way that would prevent anyone sane from dating me. So I asked for a snuggie for Christmas, and I named it Jacob Snuggie because I was really into Twilight at the time. I even went as far as making a facebook page for it and putting us in a relationship, because, you know, that's HILARIOUS.

WHY DID I DO THAT. WHY DID ANYBODY LET ME DO THAT.

Anyway.

Imagine my surprise when I returned to college after Christmas to find out that the boy sitting next to me in Doctrine class was named Jacob Snuggs.

I am not kidding.

And he had shaggy blonde hair which was ENTIRELY my jam at the time.

Thinking myself safe, I blogged about the irony of this for all five of my readers.

Mentioned how much I'd like to, you know, snuggle with him.

A few weeks later, he cut his hair and I found out that he was engaged. Of course, I had to blog about the tragedy of that, too.

I even used the words "long, majestic, honey-gold locks" because I don't blog halfway.

The following paragraph in that same entry included some whining about my weight.

Not long after, he moved to a seat at the back of class. I couldn't figure out why.

I spent that summer interning in Uganda. Towards the end of the internship, my teammate--who I had not been friends with before this trip--and I had the "first impressions" conversation that all girls like to have after they've gotten to know each other really well.

Her: "Yeah, I thought you'd be a total weirdo because of that blog you wrote."

Me: "What."

She went on to tell me how she'd heard about those specific blog entries through the grapevine, and about how he had read the blog--at which point I was fairly certain that all the popular people at Covenant knew about it, because he was in that circle and my college was tiny.

Later, I went back to my blog to check the phrases that people had entered to search for my blog, and there were things like "laura love jacob snuggs blog" and "laura love snuggs" and "all your dignity is gone you sad and shameful weirdo you". 

Then I found out how to block people from finding it, and I stayed single for the rest of college.

Moral of the story: 

Don't do that. Don't ever do that.

(Though I'm fairly certain one of those popular people will magically find this blog post, too. Then again, I've not got much pride left to lose.)

The end.