About

Ms. Z is a freelance writer and editor, a National Board Certified English teacher, the mother of a teenager, and an avid runner and tennis player.  She writes literary nonfiction and poetry and edits academic works, most often for her college professor husband and his colleagues as well as for international scholars who were once their neighbors at UC Berkeley’s student-family housing.  Ms. Z regularly draws from her own international family life as well as from her experiences in travel and the outdoors to compose essays, personal narratives, and poems.  Currently working on a memoir, she confesses, “I aspire to write as if Mary Oliver wrote Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” though she admits to spending much of the last six years composing social commentary and what her poetry professor once called “political rants.”  During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Z accepted a teaching position that allowed her to return home to Northern California with her son, Little B, and their rescue puppies, Simba and Nala.  Her husband, Dr. Z, still holds a tenured professorship with the University of North Carolina and is working on the manuscript of a forthcoming book under contract with Lexington Press.  Ms. Z calls their current bi-coastal family life a gift to her husband, “like a writer’s retreat,” and just another challenge to overcome in a twenty-something-year relationship that has navigated oceans and continents, cultural and political boundaries, the U.S. immigration and higher-education systems as well as full-time working parenthood, under-employment at times, housing insecurity in markets that price out educators, and, most recently, living in a red state in the American South as an interracial family under the Trump administration.

This title essay, “Stumbling Off My Soapbox,” is where her blog all began:

Having recently moved east of my Eden,
from the Pacific Ocean to the Appalachian Mountains,
south of the Mason-Dixon line from Northern California,

from sixteen years of unyielding dedication to Title-I public schools
to an unexpectedly early retirement,

from earning a paycheck since I was fourteen-and-a-half years old
and working up to three jobs
in order to put my husband through graduate school
and our child through preschool,
at the same time,

I have surprised even myself by quitting my job,
after the kind of school year that evokes
a 1977 country music song
in a state that has few rivals
for offering teachers
the worst working conditions in the country.

This is how I became a feminist housewife in the American South at the age of forty,
feeling as ridiculously unprepared for this role as a Mark Twain caricature of myself.

And so, I am learning to accept the privilege of this time at home, all of the priceless moments with my son, the precious un-rushed meals as a family, and even some time left over for myself and for my writing.  If you know of the reputation of my new hometown and you relish the feeling of eating barbecue with sweet tea in a rocking chair on the back porch with lightning bugs flickering all around you, then this might read like a cozy little story at times, with its picturesque setting of seasonally snow-capped mountains and deciduous trees, with its supporting cast of wild animals sniffing at the backdoor of the cottage that we now rent in the woods.  (Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in San Francisco anymore!)  Indeed, my precious family, the natural beauty, our friendly neighbors, and, yes, the comfort food, too, have offered me great solace, helping me through what feels like a painful divorce from my identity as a schoolteacher.  And though the never-ending Cinderella chores of housework, accompanied by local turkeys and turtles and bears (Oh my!) might make some other woman seem like a magical Disney heroine, the resemblances to a fairytale or even a feel-good romantic comedy about starting over in middle age (probably starring the beautiful Diane Lane) stop there:

This is my real life.
It’s often as messy as my bathroom floors;
as uncomfortable as the twenty pounds that I have gained this year;
as depressing as my doctor suggesting, “You should probably quit your job;”
and as embarrassing as all of this is to admit,
but I vow to keep it real here.

After leaving the only career that I have ever known and loved, after leaving behind just about everything that I have ever worked for and all of the relationships—save two—that I hold most dear in order to support my husband’s dream job, I have a big confession to make (And to be fair, it’s important to note that my husband did the same for me, when he moved to the United States fifteen years ago.):  Brace yourself!  It’s not beautiful or romantic, funny or polite of me to say out loud, but sometimes I feel as if I have championed everyone else in my life to succeed, except for myself.

That’s a usually unspoken, but time-immemorial lament of the stay-at-home mom, including my own mother, and annoyingly cliché to me, especially coupled with the sneaking suspicion that I might be having some sort of mid-life crisis–not early, as I once thought, but worse–right on schedule.  I know; I know that my mother would say with the fiercest kind of love imaginable that we, her children, are both her greatest gifts and her greatest achievements, and she would mean it with every fiber of her being, as I do about my own little boy and even my former students.  I also know that my mother has more intelligence, imagination, drive, strength, and perseverance than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined.  And, because she is the woman, the wife, and the mother that she is, she invested all of this talent, wisdom, character, and initiative not into a Fortune-500 company, but into us:

We grew up as a family,
so we grew up in privilege,
lucky enough
to enjoy our mother’s homemade Portuguese meals on special occasions,
real enough
to devour microwaveable bagel dogs from Costco on game nights,
and busy enough
to order Michael’s Taquería take-out on crazy school days.

We grew up as a family,
so we grew up in privilege,
lucky enough
to have our mother walk us to school as she quizzed us on our spelling words,
real enough
to know that we should be thankful for sharing our mother with the toddlers and preschoolers that she also cared for in order to pay for our extracurricular activities,
and busy enough
to keep us all out of the troubles of unsupervised peer pressure, while allowing us to pave our way as the first generation of women in our family to graduate from universities.

We grew up as a family,
so we grew up in privilege,
lucky enough
to listen to our family’s and friends’—but none so dramatic or truly heroic as our own mother’s—stories of struggle and survival,
real enough
to know that there but for the grace of God go we,
and busy enough
with our schoolwork to dream of becoming astronauts and teachers,
veterinarians and lawyers, magicians and actors,
and blessed every night
by a Hail Mary, a Lord’s Prayer, and a firm yet affectionate tap from our mother on each of our foreheads.

Oh, so very blessed!

I know that however proud of me my mother is now, she has always wanted more for us than what she ever dared to ask for herself.  This makes me cry sometimes, when I’m scrubbing mildew from the grout.  Still, I have upmost respect for parenthood and manual labor, as most of the opportunities that my family has worked so hard to give me have come from both.  After sixteen years in the classroom, I can attest to the fact that hardworking, loving, and supportive parents that teach their children right from wrong will give any child a fighting chance in this world, and ours most certainly gave us this privilege.  And so, I will follow in my mother’s footsteps, doing the best I can for my family, making the effort to fold laundry cheerfully, learning to scrub toilets more often and vigorously than I ever have before, and even optimistically trying my hand at gardening, after a lifetime of rarely being able to keep a houseplant alive.  Thank goodness I’m better with children!

And now, if you are still reading out of curiosity or solidarity, you know the “short version” of how I came to this place and this time and to the conclusion that I need an outlet for expression.  To give due credit to my inspirations, the idea to write a blog, called Stumbling Off My Soapbox, came to me after an exhausting summer morning trying earnestly to do my best at this new gig as a stay-at-home mom.  Rising early to run and listen to NPR, making green smoothies and green salads, exercising my passion and intellect in an online political debate, tutoring my son in a standards-based math lesson, and multi-tasking chores around the house, as he read to me from a chapter book, I was feeling pretty good about myself . . . until I just didn’t.  So, we got out of the house, into the hot, humid world, and indulged in frozen yogurt at a place we had never visited.  As my child, who eats like a bird, nibbled slowly at the enormous cup of chocolate toppings and strawberry dessert that he would never be able to finish and would definitely ruin his appetite for any other meals of the day, I had the time to jot down my reflections on the day’s events as follows:

With one hand,
I washed dishes, tables, floors, laundry, and small hands
over and over again;
with my cell phone in the other hand,
I fervently debated against defenders of a certain political candidate
and texted my siblings a photo of myself
with a caption confessing,
“I am becoming a high-tech version of our very feisty mother,
a 21^st-century Rosie the Riveter
with a sponge in one hand and an iPhone in the other,
twitching my nose, feeling ridiculously smug and triumphant,”
just like our mom does when she knows that she is right or funny,
and usually both,
because I mopped the floor
both figuratively in the online political debate
and, yes, literally, in my home.

But my reflections did not end there; as my son still worked away at his small bucket of froyo, I continued to write about the morning’s debate in terms of my own humbling overreaction to a weird technological glitch on my social-media platform. I ended up mistakenly accusing my political opponent, who was well-known in high school for being both a character and a devil’s advocate, of deleting some of the thread of our online sparring match–specifically, my most salient points–to make himself, I thought, appear to have had the upper hand.

I publicly cried foul,
venting that all I have left are
my thoughts and ideas,
words and ideals . . .
and, only temporarily, a clean kitchen!
And because it seemed rational to me at the time,
I scolded him:
I did not appreciate being “censored” in the public record, 
I said,
or what I called his revisionist version of “his”-story!

Though he didn’t owe me any favors, his response taught me an unlikely lesson, not about politics, logic, freedom of speech, or online etiquette, but about kindness and generosity, as he patiently directed me to the full transcript of our debate, which hadn’t been deleted after all.  Ever so graciously, he never called me out, even when I sheepishly and ironically removed my own rant about censorship.

I thanked him and admitted to stumbling “off of my own soapbox.”
We both resumed the normative gender roles:
I, to the dishes;
he, to work;
we both need to get a life.

And so, Stumbling Off My Soapbox is a blog born out of–and dedicated to–more than just offering my personal opinion or experience; it’s also about humility, humor, and humanity, forgiveness, empathy, and making a lot of mistakes, all while having my hands in soap bubbles, my thumbs in books, and my fingers on keyboards throughout my days, sometimes a dangerous combination.

I invite you to join me from the comfort of your own living room, cubicle, or corner office, if you have the time. When I’m not driving my son to school or the public library; to soccer, basketball, or baseball practice; to the YMCA or the corner grocery store; I’ll meet you in my new “home office,” usually standing at the kitchen counter, because my desk chair is strewn with my husband’s clothing and the desk itself is piled too high with a former professional library that I’m selling book-by-book, both at garage sales and online marketplaces near you! Let’s face it, since a sponsorship from Nike is unlikely, and I’m really not yet efficient enough at cleaning the house to endorse any products that actually come from a soapbox, Mommy’s going to need the used book sales for a brand-new pair of running shoes every now and then . . . that is, maybe, until a book deal of my own.

–Ms. Z, 2016