Tenure as the gateway to careless teaching

Katelyn Waldschmidt Associate news editor

valentine’s day is a huge deal in America. even if you ignore the unbridled consumerism (candy, flowers, expensive gifts) there is so much emphasis on celebrating the day even if you’re not in a romantic relationship. Just walking around my residence hall, with most of the bulletin boards awash in various shades of pink, emblazoned advertisements for love themed events.

Though the day’s fixation on love can be a bit much, I’ve enjoyed the chance to celebrate the people who’ve seen me through two and a half years of college. so far my valentine’s/Galentines celebrations have involved accepting my roommate’s spontaneous invitation to go to the bee club’s meeting in debart to drink tea with honey, color apian themed valentines (pre-school style, with actual crayons!) as the most iconic film about cross species love (“bee movie” 2007) played on the projector.

I also upheld some consumerism (for a good cause!) by helping to deliver flowers to dorms as part of P-dub’s carnation sale. It was heartwarming to see the cute notes people had written to each other and fun to talk to the obliging strangers who helped me locate their fellow dorm mates’ rooms. other Galentine’s day plans are in the works from rounding up friends for ‘all you can eat’ sushi to meshing different friend groups to paint pottery. honoring love one random Tuesday a year seems trite but it gives us a nice structure to remember our friends. Amidst the chaos of college life and people’s parents visiting for JPW, I know that these plans will take around a month to actually happen.

but that’s okay because I love when love is like pleasant background noise, instead of punctuated.

I love how love sneaks into my daily life.

Love is when my dad will read every line of a twelve page essay and give me feedback over WhatsApp. Love is his questions about the progress of various drafts of pieces that others may not even realize are subtly different.

Love is conversations with my close friends where we commiserate — about not getting a certain internship, about people who don’t respond to our texts, new friends who don’t seem as enthusiastic as we are. Love is whining about being busy and gossiping about people we both know in rapid back and forths that would be unintelligible and annoying to most other people. Love is listening with interest as they talk about clubs or jobs you know nothing about.

Love is phrases from my favorite books living rent-free in my mind, materializing whenever I have writer’s block and letting me remember stories I’ve re-read too many times. some of my favorites from “Americanah” by chimamanda ngozi Adichie are:

“her joy … a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her.”

“With him, she was at ease: her skin felt as though it was the right size.”w

And some whimsical ones from “The God of small Things” by Arundhati roy:

“The loss of sophie mol stepped softly around the Ayemenem house like a quiet thing in socks.”

“The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzz.”

Love is spending christmas eve in pajamas peeling 12 potatoes with my mom who took on the valiant task of teaching me how to cook. With our other festive plans cancelled because of family members being ill or only coming home closer to new Year’s eve, we spent the day making biryani — a dish of spicy rice, mutton, fried onions and potatoes (in our version). Though that day and the following weeks of break were spent chopping, shelling, stirring and steaming, I am by no means a good cook. however, I’ll always value those times with my mom a lot, especially when I’m contemplating ordering overpriced biryani from India Garden in south bend.

Love is a friend asking the question “What are you excited for?” when you run into each other after months. catching up on the highlights of each others’ lives and getting thrown back into the memories and mindsets you had the last time you spoke, as if the conversation was a sort of time capsule.

Love is my sister taking time out from her days working in a hospital to share pictures of cute cats with me or to tell me theories about Jane Austen, v ikram seth, George r r martin and her other favorite authors who I don’t know much about, except from her.

Love is telling college friends about my hometown, about my favorite street food and bookstores, about art-deco architecture, crowded footpaths and the salty air.

Go celebrate love wherever you find it!

You can contact Katelyn at kwaldschmidt01@saintmarys.edu o ne of my earliest memories is gripping our kitchen’s cold stainless steel table. It was originally a h ome d epot work bench that my dads thought would look modern and hip as a dining room table. o r maybe it was just them trying to save money. m y legs swung unable to touch the ground. Their nervous energy replicated in my body. m y mind raced, we never had family meetings unless I had fudged up — big time. o riginally over the moon, I thought, “how many kids are cool enough to have T hree bedrooms ,” one at each of my dads’ and one at my mom’s. Those feelings subsided when I figured out what it meant, a fracturing of my family as it was currently constructed and a destabilization of the world that had been so carefully constructed around me. m y family has always been a little weird to explain. Two gay men. s ingle lesbian mom of three. A hodgepodge of queers thrown into the c atholic blender—my dad was kicked out of his house when he was 14 for being gay and my mom 17. s omehow, they were all crazy enough to come together and have me. m y dad Paul, the sober one, decided this was a decision that had to be made to protect me,as drug dealers and other potentially dangerous actors were now clouding the spaces around us. h e loved my other dad more than life itself, but made the decision to cut off his own heart to protect me. A few years later, I lost my mom too. e very parent makes immense sacrifices for their children — getting up early to make them breakfast and lunch, putting away boatloads of money to send them to college or pulling an allnighter to bake some insane array of cupcakes to take to school the next day.

The views expressed in this Inside Column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

Like the time I tried to steal a paper lantern from my elementary school art room, thinking I was slyly hiding it behind my dad’s jacket as I tried to push him out the door. h e wasn’t fooled, making me bring it back to the teacher. This was followed by a family meeting about stealing.

This time it wasn’t about me. It was my dads letting me know that they were ‘separating for a little while’ and that one of them would get an apartment down the street and we’d go on living our merry lives.

That theological blender left deep scars inside my dad and mom. s cars they attempted to medicate with drugs, opioids and alcohol. s cars that festered and never quite went away. s cars exacerbated by family, churches, and the state which had—in many ways—disposed of them. m y dads were taking a break because, unbeknownst to seven-year-old me, one of them was now severely addicted to methamphetamine.

In the span of 4 years I went from having three parents to one. Three tree trunks of support, to one stilt carrying all the weight. I don’t know how he did it. Working 60-hour weeks, making dinner and coming home to read the “ c hronicles of n arnia” or some other adventure novel to me.

In the “Five People You m eet in h eaven” by m itch Albom, one character professes, “ s acrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. b ig sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.” b eing a parent (or guardian), at its core, involves these types of sacrifices to give their children the type of life they deserve. n ot a single person is capable of being at a school like n otre d ame without someone believing in them and sacrificing parts of their life to get them here. We all work hard and have different backgrounds that have made it easier or harder to get in here, but the linchpin of our success is guardians who are willing to risk their own happy endings for ours. o ne of my favorite songs is Zach b ryan’s “ s now”. m y favorite line is ”You bring heaven down to me / c ourse it through my blood as I breathe”. I think that’s my dad, and truly all of our parents at their best. They bring heaven down to us. There is nobody who makes me happier or forces me to think more passionately about the world than him. m y life could have been better or happier had addiction and deep-festering scars not impacted my other parents so intensely. b ut some of the holiest families in my life aren’t always a father, mother and kids. They’re two grandparents taking over for their children that aren’t able to take care of them, lesbian saints that make your toes tingle from all the half-finished woodworking projects they have scattered throughout the house or a single mom doing her best to do right by her kids. m y dad just proposed to s teve, the new love of his life. At first I was scared because for so long it’s been just my dad and I against the world. b ut love only grows and this year we’ll be celebrating my family getting a little bigger and a little holier.

I would not be at n otre d ame, maybe even alive, without my dad, Paul’s constant support, guidance and will to help got me through the seas of my rocky middle years. h e sacrificed his ‘happily ever after’ again and again and again all in the hopes of making sure I was able to survive my odyssey.

If you ever get the chance to read my inbox after one of my columns is published you’ll realize that I have a lot of unpopular opinions. h owever, in my personal life, I receive the most hate from my friends for my unabashed love of country music.

For the longest time it has been us against the world. This has not been without its challenges—from me running away from home for 12 hours barefoot to him grounding me from being able to go to a baseball game with my friends because of a fly in my mac and cheese—we’ve yelled, been so deeply upset with one another, but always come back to forgive each other.

At the bottom of the h oly h andoff statue on b ond Quad there is a quote by George b ernard s haw, “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” m y heaven has come a little closer and has become a little bigger thanks to s teve and Paul. o ur relationship isn’t ‘normal’ and our family isn’t ‘normal,’ but Paul e dward s herman, my dad, brings heaven down to me every single day. To my dad, truly to all the parents, guardians, and funky families celebrating Junior Parents Weekend at this time, thank you for bringing heaven down to us kids.

Dane Sherman is a junior at Notre Dame studying American Studies, peace studies, philosophy, and gender studies. Dane enjoys good company, good books, good food and talking about faith in public life. Outside of The Observer, Dane can be found exploring Erasmus books with friends, researching philosophy, with folks from Prism, reading NYT op-eds from David Brooks/ Ezra Klein/Michelle Goldberg or at the Purple Porch getting some food. Dane ALWAYS wants to chat and can be reached at @danesherm on twitter or lsherma2@nd.edu.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.