By Tabitha Bozeman
“What goes around, comes around” is a saying that has really shifted meaning in my world as I’ve gotten older — especially now that I am a parent. My girls are currently wearing clothes that look eerily similar to what my friends and I wore in high school and college. Every time I turn around, I see band t-shirts, flare jeans dragging under their heels, or cute little hair clippies. Cross-body bags, stacks of bracelets, jelly shoes, even lace-trimmed camis are back. The other day, I saw body glitter spray while shopping. Hello, 1999!
This week has been full of reminders of the cyclical nature of life and parenting. My youngest has leaned into another blast from the past: the show Full House. Each afternoon, I’ve heard the theme song playing along with her cackling over the antics of Uncle Joey, Uncle Jesse, Danny, Michelle, DJ, and Stephanie. It has been fun watching her enjoy a show I loved at her age, and revisiting the characters with her. Entertainment is not the only thing reappearing this week, though.
The other night, a friend and colleague sent a group text of a picture of several instructors during 2020 on the first day of fall semester. Our 2020 selves each smiled behind our masks and face shields as our current selves laughed and reminisced over how simultaneously long ago and dizzyingly recently that day feels. Having friends at work made that really weird year bearable, and even hilarious at times. In fact, remembering music, fashion, TV shows and worldwide pandemics has had me all in my feels this week, and I’ve thought a lot about how much time we spend with our work friends and framily. Serendipitously, I’ve also run across some articles on friendship in the workplace this week.
In my workplace, we share students and classroom ideas, celebrate birthdays, and help each other out. We know favorite colors, coffee orders, kids’ names, book picks, go-to grading comments, class schedules and more. Work friends have helped me run errands, celebrate successes, grieve losses and brave hard days. We have laughed and cried and listened together, won trivia games as a team, delivered soup and Gatorades to each other, discussed teaching philosophies in hallways, and we continuously solve world problems no one asked us to solve. We are teachers, counselors, life coaches, cheerleaders, collaborators, sisters, brothers, moms, dads, uncles, cousins, aunts, siblings and community members. But, statistics show that these important connections and friendships at work are becoming less common as there has been a decrease in reported workplace friendships in recent years. I am sure COVID and post-pandemic remote work arrangements played a part in this, and I’m grateful we are back to normal these days. But, in the back of my mind, I worry occasionally about all the ways previous situations (like pandemics) might cycle back around in my lifetime. At least, I remind myself, I already know my colleagues and I are going to be supporting one another. As Sheryl Sandberg reminds us, “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.”
This week, classes started back at GSCC, and my work friends and I celebrated the halls full of students and planned ways to encourage growth and learning in our classes. Students have shared with me the ways they can connect new ideas with their previous experiences. My girls have discovered Fiona Apple and Nirvana, blue mascara and low-rise jeans. Seeing trends from the past in my classroom and at home with my children has been a lot of fun recently, and I have rediscovered, one “remember when” photo at a time, how lucky I am to work with incredibly smart, funny, resourceful colleagues I can call friends.
Jonathan Swift said “What’s old is new again” regarding ancient philosophy and approaches to living, but this week I had another quote ringing in my ears each time I saw a blast from my past, and it sounded a lot like Uncle Jesse saying “Have MERCY!”
Tabitha Bozeman is an instructor at GSCC. Email at tabithabozeman@gmail.com.
