StacEy. Twenty-five. Zero husbands. Zero kids. First Grade Teacher. One year of experience.
LOVE.MY.JAY-OH-BEE.
It was a year ago when I first met, what I call now, my twin separated at birth. I was scared to death of interviews. I nervously walked into a room with the principal of the school and three of the teammates that I would be working with if I was offered the job. She sat to my right and had a smile that put me at ease. We laughed, I cried, and I left feeling confident. A teacher I had done a lot of subbing for always told me I would just know when an interview went well and I would have a “feeling” after I left if I was going to get the job. I had A feeling, but I didn’t know if it was THE feeling . About three hours later, my phone rang and I saw that it was the District Administrative Offices. I immediately walked outside on my deck, because no matter what the news was, I was clearly going to need some fresh air. I didn’t know if I was going to hang up the phone crying and feeling hopeless or if I needed the deck as a platform to scream to the world that I got offered my dream job! Either way, I would be prepared! At the end of my interview when the principal asked if I had any questions for her or the team members who were grilling me, I said laughingly, “Actually, Yes. When do I start?!?” Luckily, it was the right crowd, and they laughed too. Fast forward to the phone call... It was the voice of the superintendent on the other end and she said the normal hi and how are you. I answered, but my heart was skipping beats and I was sweating, obviously. She said, “Well I have the answer to your question that you asked at the end of your interview today.” I answered innocently, “What question?” She replied, “When you start. You start August 9th.” “SHUT UPPP!!! Are you serious?!?” Yes, I told the superintendent to SHUT.UP. Clearly, I’m great at first impressions. I heard laughter on the other end, followed by, “Well, you’re the first person to ever tell me to shut up, Stacey.” I apologized, listened (kind of) to the information she gave me(I was trying to figure out who to call first!), and then hung up and stared into space in disbelief, relief, and excitement. I walked inside and told my dad, and brother, who happened to be randomly stopping by, “I got the job! I’m a freaking real-life teacher!!!!” Word travels fast when you have a big mouth and your family and friends have ones to match! My phone was blowing up for the next hour and I couldn’t have been happier to share the best news I had ever gotten in my life. I was ready to change the world! Ha ha.
Later that day, I get a text from a random number telling me she would be my mentor and her name was Stacy. (She spells it wrong, but it’s not her fault.) Anyway, we met at school a couple of days later and she had a cuteashell, that’s CUTE.AS.HELL, not CUTE. A. SHELL. binder made for me with my name and favorite colors and of course it was perfectly done. Confession: I have never been someone that has had a knack for doing anything cute-sy. I’ll never forget when she broke the news to me as we were sitting at the computer in the lab, “Our team is the kind of team who will spend hours looking for the right clip art for a smart notebook slide. I hope you’re like that too.” Pa-pa-pa-pardon? Did this bitch just say HOURS…..looking for clip art? I’m pretty sure I gave a neutral laugh so she wouldn’t be able to tell if I was frightened or if I was ONE OF THEM. I was NOT one of them, but she was NOT going to find that out just yet. We just met for goodness sake. I needed to win her over with my charm before I let her know that I was going to need major help in the making everything cuteashell department.
Alright, fast forward to September. At this point, I think my team is full of super human women. They have husbands. They have kids. They are way better at their job than I am. How did they find the time to do everything so perfectly??!? I was practically living at school at night and going home in time to go to bed and get up and do it all again the next day. I was barely keeping my head above water and they were soooo much better at everything! (Insert 20th day of school breakdown somewhere around here, but we won’t talk about that. My team HAD to think I was a shitforbrains. Embarrassing! ) Back to the Stac(E)y’s. Sometime early in the year, Stacy and I realized we were going to be good friends and we shared similar and passionate views on our classrooms, correctly spelled words, music, reality tv contestants, and people in general. The latter two being the most important, obviously. I kid, I kid. Anyway, somewhere along the way, I changed from not caring if something was copied a little bit crooked to...... one of them. I started spending obscene amounts of time looking for the perfect font, the perfect clip art, the perfect border to put on notes sent home, the perfect everything. I wanted everything to be cuteashell. Around the middle of the year, Stacy (thank you baby Jesus) shared top secret information with me. Ya know, the type of information that if she told me, she would have to kill me. Thank the lawd she doesn’t have the murderer bone in her body. She let me in on, as we jealously lovingly refer to them now as, “The bitches.” The bitches are all of you. All of you bloggettes out in bloggerville who have inspired us to start our very own blog. I spent countless hours jumping from one blog to the next and pinning them to the home screen on my phone. This is when we first started saying we were separated at birth. We would call or text each other at random times during the week or the weekend and tell each other to check out something on one of your blogs and the other one had JUST got done reading it or had JUST got done printing out whatever it was. This happened NUMEROUS times and continues to happen on a regular basis, so we say we are separated at birth and this is how we came to be Stac(E)y Squared, hence the name, “Hip 2 be Squared.”
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