Oh, July.

I miss July.  I miss that sandy beach and the warmth and the thunderstorms of vacation.  I miss the me that existed in July when I last blogged, when I last wrote.

August hit like a hailstorm, fast and ferocious.  I searched for an umbrella, a coat, any bit of shelter, but I found none.  She let up on occasion and the sun would come out, but the storm that started in August would last through the semester. 

I drowned myself in papers to grade, assignments to create, assignments to complete, emails to send.  I rarely stopped thinking and doing and surviving, and when I did decide I needed a little respite, it was usually at the wrong time which, upon returning to the whirlwind, left me more breathless than before.

When I think back, though, it wasn't so terrible as it sounds now, as it felt then.  I learned so much, and I grew so much.

I started my second year of teaching, and the babies I inherited are so precious; I adore them.

Hub started his Master's program and is going to school full time, so we had to learn to carefully orchestrate our time together and our conversations--a big adjustment.

We moved two blocks from where we lived--crazy. 

I took six graduate hours.  Plenty of normal teachers work full time and take that many hours (some even more), and they survive. Come to think of it, I guess I survived, but I'm not just about surviving.

The semester was taxing and left me tired and dizzy all the time, and I decided that since I didn't have to live like this, I wasn't going to.  Not anymore.

I got tired of forgetting things and feeling a constant state of panic.  I grew weary of re-prioritizing my life moment-by-moment.  I started resenting my education, and if I'm not learning anything, what good is it doing anyway?  It wasn't making me a better teacher or a better wife; it was definitely not making me a better person in general either.

So I decided to slow down, to learn how to breathe again, to learn to enjoy.  Who cares if I don't finish my program lickety-split?  Does it really matter that I can't multitask as well as it seems everyone else can?  No, I don't think it does.

I think it matters that I learned how much is too much, and I just very nearly crossed that line; now, I'm ready to back far away from it.

Happy January,