Precious

I have been tossing around for about an hour, just a little longer than the yapping dog has been barking outside, it has not stopped. I try my usual fall asleep routines I began to perfect when I was a public high school teacher; deep, slow breathing, the Our Father and the Scientific Statement of Being. It is as if something cannot rest. Each time I begin my prayers, my mind wanders to some problem to solve or a character in the movie, “Precious”, I watched right before bed. As I sit here in the middle of the night, I think back to being in Miami visiting my mom and as I can’t sleep I write a letter to God as a prayer about my mom. I chose now to finally wake up because quite definitely there is something for me to notice. Why do dogs bark at nothing for hours? Why don’t some mothers defend their children? I connected with the purpose of the characters in this movie. Precious wanted only to be someone else, somewhere else and her teacher spent her day with her movie star looks sticking it out as a flashlight in the dark for her students who just by the mere fact of their uneducation, stood alone. Precious admits that as she sits listening to her teacher and her partner converse, she has no idea of what they are saying. I realize tonight that many of my sleep-deprived nights as a teacher might not have been due to stress of my own but that of my students.