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,
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Oh, boy. I hope this is the beginning of a new posting season with a renewable contract.
ReplyDeleteGodspeed.