Mindful Moments Workshop

Brief mentions of nudity, violence among children, mentions of food/eating, references to mental health, destruction of property

The heat rose in waves above the school’s blacktop parking lot in late August, and I was wearing a cardigan and wool socks. The Foulis School for Behavioral Health was a place of rusted over doorknobs and dripping faucets. Every year, staff orientation took place in the sixty-year-old auditorium, a windowless cavern of dull paint and dark wood, fluorescent lights always fuzzing out of order and creaking seats always threatening to snap. The one aspect of Foulis that functioned was the HVAC system, but it overcompensated its own success to the point of failure. Every year repairs were attempted, fruitlessly, and every year, warm weather heralded blasts of 49-degree air into every room.

               Annual orientation was a good time to size up the veteran staff against the first-years, Bermuda shorts versus buttoned sweaters. This year, however, every person slumped into an uncomfortable chair facing the gloomy stage was dressed for a brisk October trip to the local farm. No new hires, the second year in a row.

               The morning was a rehash of the usual. An overview of Applied Behavior Analysis, tedious scenarios demanding that we define whether each situation was an example of fixed or variable reinforcement, a recitation that we could all do in our sleep and at least three people were. Over the fuzz of the lecture, whispered exchanges about how we’d spent our summers fell into two predictable patterns. Teachers had gone on trips, to the shore, up the mountains, even a lucky one to Europe. Support staff had taken summer jobs, mostly at day camps, and had the sunburns to show for it.

               Lunch would be provided, today and no other for the remaining two weeks until the kids returned. Pizza and fruit salad, individual bags of off-brand chips, and a single two-liter Pepsi to be shared among 15 people. This, too, was par for the course, and we all supplemented our meager offerings with stuff from home. My roommate had made macaroni and cheese the night before, and I’d taken a thermos full, still hot.

               “Don’t forget to save some of your lunch for our afternoon seminar! We’re going to show you some simple ways to alleviate stress this school year!” the coordinator trilled from center stage. A small brunette wearing a wool jersey dress that cost more than my car. She’d come from a corporate environment and refused to be disabused of the notion that schools should be run like businesses. She promised to help us maximize our output, and never elaborated upon what that meant. She’d be gone in a year. A very long, annoying year.

               I was very nearly done with my fruit salad, but saved a chunk of watermelon. It looked sad, sitting alone in the Styrofoam bowl, slick under the harsh yellow lights, though the fruit itself had been sweeter and fresher than we were accustomed to at Foulis. The whole afternoon was given over to something called “Mindful Moments Workshop”, which seemed to have little to do with lunch. The speaker for the afternoon was approaching the podium with a sleek laptop. She wore a bright pink tank top, Lululemon leggings, and open-toed sandals, any one of which would’ve gotten a staff member dress-coded, sent home to change, and docked the pay for as many hours as the process took. When she stepped out from the podium to fiddle with the projector, I noticed with smug satisfaction that her toes were curled against the cold. She was probably being paid for today’s lecture what I would take a month to earn.

               “Welcome to Mindful Eating” was emblazoned on the projector in sickening shades of pastel pink and green. The presenter smiled at us with a mouthful of unnaturally white, even teeth, the grin of a shark to a school of guppies.

               “Welcome, everyone!” and I hated her even more for the sing-song cadence of her voice. And for the audacity to show up a stranger and welcome us to our own workplace. “Today, I’m going to teach you about mindful eating. This is a practice, where, if you incorporate it into your daily routine, it will drastically improve your overall stress levels and keep you present in the moment. So, if you’ll all just take whatever it is that you saved from your lunch and place it in your dominant hand.”

               For the next half hour, Lululemon led us through considering the shape, texture, and content of our bite sized morsels before we were allowed to smell them, at which point juice had pooled all over my hand and dripped onto my jeans. A row in front of me, Jenn’s peanut butter cup had melted into her palm. Only Frank, who had saved a baby carrot for this exercise, seemed poised to get through this unscathed.

               At last, at shudderingly long last, we were allowed to actually put the food in our mouths, but the heat of my hand had left a once cold, sweet chunk of melon warm and rubbery, so as I was implored to savor the textures and take note of which teeth I used to consume (her word) my treat, all I could taste was my resentment at having sacrificed a once tasty bite for something that was called mindful, but only seemed to waste both my time and perfectly good fruit.

               Lulu was wrapping up onstage, nattering on about how eating mindfully and paying attention to our food would cause us to be more in tuned with our bodies and focused on our needs, and then, for the first time since we’d started this insubstantial attempt at actual thought, the glistening grin was wiped from her face. “I know the pandemic might seem like old news after three years, but we are still in the midst of it, and this new school year will bring even more challenges as we try to serve the diverse needs of our students.” Our students? I thought, as I scrubbed my hand with cheap napkins and hand sanitizer. She talks like she’s going to show up in those flimsy sandals to help catch Evangeline when she barrels toward the highway, buck naked and screaming for the ice cream truck. Lulu had clearly never run anywhere except a Treadmill.

               “That’s why I really want to encourage you to practice mindful eating every day, and I really want to make sure that you’re doing it during the school day. Ideally, you would set aside the last fifteen minutes of your lunch break specifically for this purpose. After all,” and here the shark smile returned, with a sympathetic head tilt to boot, “if you don’t practice self-care, then you’re not being your best self for the kids.”

               My hand shot up, still sticky and covered in bits of napkin. “We don’t have a lunch break.”

               “Huh?”

               “We don’t have a lunch break. We eat with the kids. They eat, we eat.”

               “Oh,” and her smile faltered, ever so slightly, “well, there’s no reason you still can’t dedicate the last part of your meal to mindful eating. You can even invite the children to join you, and make it a learning experience!”

               Up went my hand again. “Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I can’t do that. Because if I stare at a grape for fifteen minutes, India, who’s my one-to-one, will eat out of the trash. Or flood the bathroom. Or Jonah, who had a one-to-one aide that quit two years ago and hasn’t been replaced, will run up to Jeremiah and punch the back of his head, because he thinks it’s funny. Or Braeden, who doesn’t have a one-to-one but should, will rip all the pages out of the guided reading books. Or pull the heads off all the dolls. Or yank the stuffing out of the teddy bears. Things will be destroyed, is what I’m saying.”

               “Well,” and the smile tightened into a threat, “you’ll just have to make time for it in the day. It needs to be a priority.”

               “Okay,” said Melina, an aide who’d been with the school for so long she was as much part of it as the faulty HVAC, only a billion times more useful, “But I think her question is, how?”

               At this point, I knew I’d pissed off Lulu and the coordinator so much that the only thing to do was slink down and stay silent the rest of the afternoon, or go for broke.

               “I think if you hired enough staff, it would be easier to make the time. We’ve all been doing the work of three people since 2020, and I don’t think that counting the number of bites in a potato chip is going to fix that. I think if you really cared about our mental health, you’d give the support staff health insurance so that we could actually go see a therapist. Or pay us enough that we wouldn’t need second jobs.

               “I know you won’t do that, and you know you won’t do that, and I still keep coming back here. I don’t really know why at this point, but I do. And it’s fine. I mean, it’s not, but it is. But I won’t sit here and let you all tell me that if this job burns me out, it’s my fault for not carving out fifteen minutes to eat a single almond. And if this is the agenda for the rest of the afternoon, you can count me out.” I hoisted my bag up on my shoulder, and was gratified to see Melina and Jenn doing the same. The other support staff gazed at us in awe. The teachers kept their eyes stoically forward, facing Lulu and very decidedly not looking at us.

               “You can’t…” the coordinator pushed past Lulu to chastise us, but the microphone shorted out before her tirade could begin in earnest.

               My car was less than fifty feet from the entrance. Beads of sweat had popped out over my forehead, and pooled under my arms and behind my knees before I opened the door, and I sat for a few minutes while the air conditioning cranked itself up to a respectable blast. Melina and Jenn were doing the same in their cars, but no one from higher up had followed us. I’d get an earful tomorrow, in front of everyone, alluding to me only in general terms, and probably a righteous chewing out in private with threats of write ups and suspensions that wouldn’t come to fruition, because despite how little I was paid and how lowly I was considered, for the moment I was irreplaceable. There had been no new applicants in months, and those that had been hired had quit before the year was out. I hadn’t exaggerated when I said I was doing the work of three, and Lulu and her cronies knew it.

               On the ride home, I was mindful of more than red lights and road signs. I noted the dazzling green of late August leaves against a vivid summer sky. I smiled at the shrieks of laughter from the playgrounds I passed, children soaking up the last moments of sulky freedom, and observed every lyric, every guitar solo, every corny joke on the radio. It felt like self-care.