The Pain of Becoming

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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For the flower, it is fully open
at each step of its blossoming. – Mark Nepo

My Nana had a rose garden for many years.

She tended each bush with great care and attention: special rose food, just enough water, protection from cold and heat. There were probably a dozen bushes in her rose garden. Each bush had a Jackson Perkins name (Double Delight, Tropicana, Kentucky Derby, Heirloom) and its own way of blooming. Some took longer to bloom than others. Some were huge and others small. Some were more fragrant than others. Some blooms lasted a long time and others withered more quickly.

I loved Nana’s rose garden.

I loved how she loved her roses. She cherished each bush and saw each bloom as a gift. Every fall, she would prune the roses and cover them with mulch and netting putting them to sleep. Every spring, she would wake up the bushes up by removing the covering and adding mulch. They would then begin to grow and eventually bloom. I watched each step every year, learning the meaning of tending and the importance of timing. There was beauty in the rhythm.

Nana’s rose garden was a lesson in becoming.

Her roses embraced the natural flow of the seasons. They knew the exact right amount of time each blossom takes to become and move through each moment with grace. They embraced their natural beauty – color, fragrance, size, how quickly they bloom, or how long their blooms last. Pain comes from not embracing they way we become – our uniqueness, our gifts, our challenges, our needs. Pain comes from wishing we might become differently – that we might be skinnier, taller, smarter, funnier, or more or less anything. Pain comes from becoming at a different speed than we are meant to become. Pain comes from repeating negative patterns as we become, and become, and become. Roses simply become: year after year. I aspire to tend my life the way Nana tended her rose garden. I aspire live my life like the roses: in love with my beauty, aware of my strengths and timing, beyond the pain of becoming.