I.

Minutes 
into that first class –
two and a half full
decades since she’s done
anything like this –
she has to admit
there is a kind of poetry:
the manipulation of numbers,
a focused search
for the pattern
that will represent it
all.

II.

Older now,
she is surprised
to find she grasps
the why better
than her younger self did,
can almost
almost
envision the interconnectedness
of deriving numbers,
integrating expressions.

She laments
the insecurity of her youth –
oh! if only she hadn’t equated
“getting it” with intelligence;
if only she had understood what she does now –

the necessity 
of struggle 
in growth.

III.

She wonders how many of her current students,
(especially the girls)
fall prey
to the same misperception.
After all, what does a person long for
more than the placid comfort
of fit-in-edness?

IV.

Sometimes the calculus is an immovable weight
on her chest, an opaque blur of numbers
she can’t reason through.

But

sometimes the calculus is a haiku –
the beautiful flow of numeric manipulation
to fit the form just
right.

V.

Her younger self
was too afraid to love
this process,
and her current self worries
about teasing out
these intricate connections
among 

     the cooking
     the exercising
     the teaching
     the cleaning
     the parenting
     the the the

the parameters 
of her female adulthood.