It's not the end of my life

Tomorrow I begin my next grad class. I've been on break for over a month now, and it's been glorious. I had a luxurious weekend away with my husband filled with lots of time to look uninterruptedly at each other. Except for those darn waiters. Ha! There was one restaurant manager who came to the table to ask how our meal was. He asked if we had any plans for the rest of the night. I should have told him, but I didn't have the guts.

Yes anyway. I'm taking 7 credits this semester. I didn't quite mean to. But that's how it goes. 5 credits consist of advanced linguistics and phonetics and phonology divided into two courses taken online. Another 2 credits is my research. Yes! And I'm loving it. I get to go to four 7-hour meetings in which a group of us are walked through the steps of doing research in our own classrooms.

And then I teach two nights a week. And I write curriculum for my class (which I'm paid to do). And I'm the lead teacher for my section of the program which means I hold meetings, write minutes, outline curriculum for other people, arrange speakers, make decisions, and get paid more than the others. This is all good. And I rock at it. Mostly. The next speaker who's coming, . . . I don't actually know her name or have her contact info. Hopefully I'm right about what she'll be presenting.

So, I'm also a mom. And I have great kids! Toby has been giving us riddles lately. He gave me one tonight and I wrote it down for you.

It comes in a box.
It's white and sugary.
It has corners.
It is the yummiest thing in the world!
(Toby, what letter does it start with?)
It starts with an I.
(ice cream?)
No, it starts with a 'sh'.
(I had no idea.)

Yeah, so the answer was sugar cubes. They are talking about the five senses at school and they had sugar cubes today.

Alicia has an ear infection now. It hasn't been fun, but now we have the meds, so here's hoping for a good night's sleep tonight.

Ooooh! If you haven't talked to me, you haven't heard me boast that Alicia is smart! She had her developmental test at the NICU follow-up clinic and she more than passed. She is 37 months according to her birth date but tested into the 40-42 month range for cognitive ability! For gross motor she was in the 37-39 month range! Yeah Baby!

Back to me. With school starting again, I bump into others' assumptions about my activities. The assumption that I find lurking out there is this idea that I'm doing too much. And is it my assumption too? I have, maybe, 20 hours of work to do in a week that gets tucked into nooks and crannies of time. I've been doing this for a year and a half now. I'm getting used to it. I know what I need to do to survive it, and I know where I stumble in it. Josh is well used to my rant regarding his ability to work during the normal day while I work in nooks and crannies. But it's my choice, not his. It's unfair of me to blame him. Well, I don't blame him. Is it unfair to rant at him?

What I'd really like to cut back on in my life is time with my children. How can I even say that? I 'say' it all the time, but writing it brings more guilt. But there it is. And what really bothers me is that no one else suggests it either. When I'm discussing my schedule and commitments, people may make negative comments about the time that a Master's degree takes. People may make comments about how it's hard to work at night. They may ask when I get it all done. But when they ask that last question, they aren't really wondering about the location of my nooks or my crannies. I feel like the question implies that I have taken on too much 'other than my children' work. Then there's the 'balance' question. I can't define why the 'balance' question is so offensive to me.

Ooo, and it also drives me nuts when a woman says to me, "I'm not really interested in getting ahead in my career." What the hell is that? An assumption that I'm working so that I'll move ahead on the pay scale or have more tenure? For the record, I get neither. I happen to like explaining verbs more than I like wiping bums, cleaning the kitchen, and coloring.

I love the work that I do. I love teaching. I love my students. It makes a critical difference in the lives of my students to learn English. It makes a critical difference that they have a teacher who is present consistently, establishing a classroom family, challenging them, being honest with them, and providing the best instruction possible. And I feel like I just kick ass at it.

I love working on my Master's. It's not a chore. It makes me think. It makes me feel proud of my ideas, contribution to each class, and contribution to my field. This is what I do. This is how my mind works. I don't want less of either of these. I enter back into my grad classes tomorrow with joy.

My children deserve to have a mother who is happy. My children deserve to have a mother and a father who kick ass in their fields. They also deserve to have a family who eats meals together, goes on outings together, and does bedtime together.

Eh. You know, I can hardly make decisions for the sake of my kids. I asked Toby what he wanted for dinner tonight. He thought about it and then got very excited. He wanted ham, peas, and pasta, just like two nights ago. Okay. No problem. We still have more of all the ingredients. I made it again. He ate two bites.

Life will be what it will be. My children and my family and I will all get what we get in terms of time, happiness, and togetherness. In the meantime, I need to do better at lining up childcare that allows me to work some during the day. And I need to not rant to my husband when I get too stressed.

See you in June.