It's August, a month I dread every year.
It means that I have a month left of the happiest time of the year. Everything comes to an end on August 31st,
which means one thing: change. If there is something I really hate, it's
CHANGE!!! Change causes me to have
extreme anxiety, and anxiety is a lot of work.
By the end of the month, it will take everything I've got not to have
complete melt-down panic attacks.
Change #1: the season and its
weather – I love warmth and heat. Here
in the northern United States, it seems like we have ten months a year of cold,
and two of warmth. Right now the sun
shines bright and powerful, the trees and grass are green, the flowers bloom,
the bugs and birds are prolific, and the lakes even warm up to the point where
they're not painful to get into and swim around. Yet…already the leaves are beginning to look
old, wilted, and some are even turning brown.
The birds are singing less, getting ready to prepare for winter,
building up body weight for journeys, building winter environments for those
that stay. I've had to replant my
planters with late-summer, early fall plants, and the nights are cooler, making
the lakes cold, too. All signs of
change.
Change #2: my home life. Right now I get to pretend that I'm a stay-at-home
mom and spend my days with my children.
When they were little, we spent all day together: kiddie pools, popsicles, bike rides, trips to
the zoos and museums. Now that they're
older (pre-teen and full-blown teen), we're not together quite as much (hanging
with mom all day is just not cool!), yet we're still together quite a bit. At the end of the month, full-time mom job
will be over as we all head back to school, and then the crazy schedule will
commence. Don't get me wrong, summer has
had its moment of crazy: between
baseball, 4-H, summer bands, Fine Arts camp, and now high school band camp,
life has been busy. But we've also been
able to squeeze in trips to the pools and lakes, bike rides, shopping trips,
and picnics. Back-to-school seems to
mean an end to the fun stuff.
Change #3: back to work. Let me clarify – I LOVE my job! I'm a teacher and I love planning,
curriculum, creation of activities that will hopefully help my students be
creative, explore, have fun, and learn.
Yet, it also causes me complete anxiety.
A whole new batch of student names to learn (I'm notoriously bad with
names); a whole new batch of teenagers judging my every move; new demands from
administrators, adding on to the old demands (they never seem to go away anymore,
they just keep building on); time constraints:
how do I take new, rigorous curriculum meant for 90-minute blocks, and
integrate it with current required writing programs, project based learning,
and technology – all within 55 minutes; and of course, papers: papers, papers, and more papers. Always the bazillion papers to grade, which
means trying to balance being a teacher, mom, and wife, every evening and
weekend for ten months a year.
I've already started waking up early.
Half of June and all of July, I get a peaceful eight hours of sleep per
night. Around August 1st,
this usually drops to seven, and by mid-August, I'm down to six hours. I wake up with my mind whirling, trying to
make sure I don't lose track of something.
(By the way, I'm bad-mom and already dropped the ball on what has to be
done for my high-schooler to try out for the soccer team when he gets back from
band camp.) And all of this worrying
really stems from one desire: life to be
happy and healthy for my whole family.
Will we all come out of this unscathed?
Will my children grow up and remember wonderful years with their mom,
family, and friends, or will I be absent from their memory pictures?
Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety…
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