Being the ninth of forty daily blog posts whether I have anything pertinent to say or not. Because discipline. And stuff.
Last night I went to bed Responsibly Early. In fact bordering on Ridiculously Early. I was asleep before 9:30 I think. Woke up before the alarm went off. And was well-rested. Weird. I had already arranged clothing for all the children, made lunches and done something else... oh yes, made sure I knew where my keys were. Saw to it that the children were bathed and dressed in passably unstained clothing for class pictures. I was beginning to feel rather cocky about the whole thing. Not my regular routine, you know, but with Spouse out of town I need to single-parent. This feeling of pridefulness in my own adequacy as a parent lasted until we got to school (on time... early even!) and daughter refused to get out of the car. Crying. Because she forgot her backpack at home. Luckily middle child was better equipped to deal with making her feel better. He put an arm around her and said nice things. I just shouted at her to get out of the car and go to school. And then also angrily mentioned that I would deliver her bag before lunchtime. So there was a lot more driving around than necessary. When I had time in my schedule (thankfully my prep is before lunch) I drove home to fetch her things and drove to school. While I was on the road I was listening to the radio and Sheryl Sandberg was talking on NPR about the sudden and unexpected death of her supportive and awesome Spouse. And I thought... Oh crap! I can't even manage to get my kid to school with a backpack for a single day. And Spouse is going to die and everything will totally suck! It will be like this every day. But worse. This was not the message that Sheryl Sandberg was trying to convey. But I drove around in my car crying about how sad it was that her Spouse died and being fairly certain that I would be in a similar situation at any moment. There is no sign, by the way, that Spouse's demise is eminent. But nor was this the case with Sheryl Sandberg's Spouse. Which was further proof. In my afternoon class the journal topic was "What are your bad habits?" I often share an anecdote as a prelude to student writing so they can have a listening and speaking activity prior to writing. So I told them that my bad habit was taking small problems and immediately imagining them into GIANT and HORRIBLE problems. Like going from "shoot, my daughter forgot her backpack." to "OMG SPOUSE IS GOING TO DIE!" Note that I did not call to confirm that Spouse is not, in fact, dead. If as I am writing this he has suffered an aneurysm while using a piece of exercise equipment at his hotel... then all of my irrational panic won't seem so irrational will it? Grateful Crap: telling my students about this made it funny rather than scary Equatorial Actions: going to work getting kids to school doing regular stuff meds 200 mg lamotrigine blogging Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |