Checking in

Well, hey. It's been a little while.

School is back in session and somehow it is almost late September already. I am working very, very hard right now. Every teacher I know is working hard right now. Things feel intense in a seriously unsustainable way. Looking at my calendar in the past few weeks has made it difficult for me to breathe; last week I had seven meetings in five days. This week, I had almost that much, with a beast of a cold on top. On Tuesday of this week I left the house just after six o'clock in the morning and didn't return until six-thirty in the evening, and Matt came home to find me nearly in tears on the couch announcing that I didn't give a shit about dinner or if I even ever ate it again. I've been drinking too much coffee in the mornings and too much Nyquil at night. It really all seems pretty stupid for someone still technically working "part time."

Part of it is just the unavoidable crush of September. Open Houses. New routines. Planning for new classes. Also: new trainings that will ultimately be good and valuable but are, at the moment, just overwhelming. And some of it I chose; like, I also decided it was a good idea to take a ten-day intensive writing workshop at the same time school was starting. (It probably wasn't my best idea, but also, I don't regret it one bit.) I also decided to take a month-long break from eating grains, dairy, or sugar, because! I am at the top of my game when I'm not eating those things, and at the beginning of September, I thought, "Why wouldn't I want to feel amazing at the beginning of the school year? Let's do this!" I did a strict Whole30 in January and realized I'd never felt better in my life, but over the summer I was pretty careless about when and what I ate, so I thought it was a good time for a reset. I've drastically reduced my overall consumption of grains and dairy in the last eight months so that didn't feel particularly hard; what was hard was not being able to come home at the end of an exhausting day and just order a pizza and pop open a bottle of wine. But I married a man who chops vegetables like a champ, and in the end, I always felt better after eating real food at home. I've had tons of energy and I've been falling asleep at a reasonable hour and I've been waking refreshed before my alarm! Until I came down with this monster of a cold and everything just went straight to hell.

So I'm tired, and sometimes I have a terrible attitude about everything. I have one class that feels really hard right now for lots of reasons. Today someone asked me if I would be "interested" in committing to a particular thing and, as important as this thing is, I twisted my face into a polite smile while feeling intense hostility, like, back away slowly, Lady. I blow my nose two hundred times an hour and it is so sore and I am utterly pitiful. I coughed my way through two Open Houses this week, mine and the kids'. I collapse uselessly in the living room at night. Or I become insufferable, scrubbing the bathtub at six-thirty in the morning before breakfast, announcing loudly that if Hillary Clinton can campaign with pneumonia like a badass, then I sure as hell can stick to my cleaning schedule when I have a damn cold. My husband thinks this is misguided and bizarre, and he shakes his head and mutters things about how if I ever skip cleaning the house it's probably a sign I need to be hospitalized, but there are certain things I cannot tolerate and feeling like crap in a grimy house happens to be one of them.

But even in (and perhaps especially in) the midst of these tough weeks, there are moments of deep gratitude: When two of my colleagues make me hot tea and another slips me packets of Emergen-C while I'm teaching. (I really work with such great people. Truly. That is worth everything. I think part of what's been so hard lately is that I spend my entire planning period hunkered down working in a total frenzied panic because I hardly even know where to start right now and I don't have time to check in with my people, to wander around a bit and say hi, and that has me feeling as unmoored as anything.) When I huddle in front of my junior classes with my mug in hand, croaking at my students, and they respond with sympathy and generosity and are, generally, just purely delightful. When I teach three classes of kids who call me out of my stress and my feelings of total inadequacy and make me forget how wretched I feel, when I can genuinely enjoy a class on a twelve-hour day that leaves me weeping at the end of it -- that's a good deal. Last night at our Open House I told several parents how much I just adore this group as a whole, how much I love coming to school every day because of them, and one mother pressed her hands over her heart and said, breathlessly, "Really?"

(I am clinging to such moments because today a freshmen boy informed me he wanted to be in "any English class besides this one." Which, I mean...I kind of feel the same way, at the moment. That was at the beginning of class. Things did not feel better at the end of it.)

And there are other good things, things I must remember because I romanticize September. My children love school, and I love their teachers. Suzannah's class is this wonderful, dorky bunch of kids and her teacher, whom she also had last year, is a perfect fit for them, and she has a classroom library to die for. Isaac's teacher is exactly who I hoped he would have, and he seems to be doing really well. I could not be happier with the teachers who spend their days with my children. We walked through the halls of their school and every adult -- the principal, the P.E. teacher, the music teacher, the teachers who have taught them in other years -- greeted them by name. What a wonderful and necessary thing, to feel known and loved at school.

Suzannah plays soccer on a team now, and while practices add hours to a couple of our weeknights this season, she loves the game and I love watching her become part of this team. And I find myself unexpectedly riveted at her games. I never wanted to be a soccer mom, but I do love watching my girl play. Isaac tears around the playground next to the field with the coach's son, or he plays ball with a group of other little brothers, informally "coached" by one of the soccer dads. I love watching him play, too.

And the thing I have loved and craved every night this month is bedtime. Not just because it's bedtime and that means going to sleep (which is a beautiful moment for every single reason, whether it's my children or me) but because it means I lie down with my son for a moment and say, "I love you so much," and he says, "I love you more, Booger." And two nights ago when I went miserably bed before my kids had even brushed their teeth, Suzannah crawled under the covers with me and twined her fingers with mine, and when Matt poked his head in the door she said, "Sorry, Dad, we're having a little Mother-Daughter time." Those are the moments when the snotty freshman boys and the extra meetings and the endless coughing and the exhaustion and the desperate clawing through my to-do lists just falls away. And those are the moments in which I find myself again.

Happy Friday. I hope we all rest well this weekend.