Summer Cleaning...Check!

Today I will be able to check off the final room on my cleaning list.  It's a bit of a colossus, our finished basement.  It serves as a family room, play room, laundry room, and office to me.  It typically is strewn with miscellaneous toys, video games, blankets, pillows, papers, dirty laundry, and the bane of the existence...Legos!  I don't touch Legos as far as cleaning up.  They apparently have specific bins in which they belong, but to me they all look the same...little daggers ready to slice into my feet and twist my ankles.

But, after today, everything will have been dusted, vacuumed, wiped clean, Windexed.  It's never all clean, all at the same time, but at least now I'm in a position to maintain.  I'm sorry, but this is important to me.  The number one piece of advice people gave me while working was to not worry so much about having a clean house.  So I tried not to worry and my house became scuzzy and I felt awful.  It actually got to the point where it was physically painful to sit in my living room and look around at the mess.  My skin crawled.  For me, a clean house is sanity.  It represents an organized life and a sense of control over my life, at least my little piece of the world contained in those walls.

Oh, don't worry!  Having three boys and a husband has kept me real in terms of what is realistically expected and "clean" is a relative term.  At any given moment, there is a very high possibility that there is pee on my bathroom floor and something sticky is on one of the kitchen walls.  There is always a pile of something somewhere that belongs elsewhere.  Usually, I take it in stride and roll with it, cleaning it in stride.  Every now and then I have a small meltdown which is a sign to my family that the overall state of a room has crossed the line and they all pitch in and clean. Even they are starting to sense the line of disorder and will begin to straighten up unprompted by me.

My summer projects list, which I guess you can say were "challenges" just not very fun or distracting ones, is now considerably shorter.  The remainder of my list includes the garden--this is a part of my life where the threshold for order needs to be reigned in...A LOT.  I don't have weeds.  I have weed trees.  Part of the reason it gets out of control is the sun.  And bugs.  And it hurts my back.  And things grow much bigger than when I originally planted them.  I guess you can say I don't like gardening.  I like the thought of it.  I appreciate nice gardens.  I in no way know how to design them and maintain them.  It's a problem, but the neighbors are starting to stop and look for all the wrong reasons you want them to stop and look at your landscaping.  Too bad they can't see the inside of my house.  There have actually been people that come in and are literally amazed at how nice it is on the inside.  It's not really all that nice, but I think their expectations have been considerably lowered based on the state of my outside and they are pleasantly surprised.  Maybe I should keep this trend going.

 

People...People Who Don't Need People

One good thing about teaching was that it distracted me enough that I forgot about how I don't like where I live.  Pool season was a stark reminder.  I hate going to the pool for many reasons.  One, I hate the sun, or rather the sun hates me.  My skin prickles and turns beet red in a matter of seconds. It physically hurts me to be in the sun. Two, it's a lot of work.  You have to pack everything up, carry it all to the car, then to the pool, then back to the car, then back inside, and back to it's proper place.  I try to give some responsibility to my boys, but it usually results in our lunch cooler being swung around resulting in either a smashed lunch or a strangled brother.  Three, I have three boys at three different stages of swimming who want to swim in three different pools, some of whom are restricted to certain pools only.  I can't hop in and swim in the deep end with Boy 1 because Boy 3 isn't allowed yet in that pool.  Four, my boys are, well, my boys.  While most 9 and 6 and nearly 4 year old boys are off swimming with their friends in whatever section of the pool they want, my boys are socially stunted, choosing to stay with each other and refusing to learn how to swim.  Oh, don't judge me that my kids can't yet swim.  They've had swim lessons since they were three, every summer.  I don't know why they can't swim.  I'm assuming it's because they are mine. The youngest still refuses to go in any pool other than the one foot pool, which then often results in the other two wanting to stay with him, so there we all are, the baby pool gang.  And finally, my last reason for hating the pool...people.  At the pool is where I feel the most socially self-conscious.  While other moms are chatting each other up, watching each other's kids, there I am alone juggling all three of mine.  There is no place I feel so friendless as at the pool.  There are a few moms I see on occasion, but for the most part I'm flying solo, which wouldn't be so bad if I could just sit back, let the kids run, read a book in the shade.  Be aloof.  But not yet.  I am forced to be present.

I keep telling myself that eventually we'll hit the summer where they're off doing their own thing, and I'm sure that summer is closer than I realize.  Every now and then I catch glimpses of it.  For now, though, I'm stuck keeping vigilance while my mind wanders to the countryside where I imagine my own private retreat, pool included, and allow discontent to wash over me.  I've found myself once again stalking Realtor.com dreaming of a different life.  Seriously, I'm totally pathetic.

So this is where I somehow need to turn the pool into a positive.  Aaannnddd....I've drawn a blank.  I have no idea how to do this.  I think it might just be something I need to suffer through as a sacrifice for the betterment of my children.  And in the meantime, pray for rainy days.

Disclaimer

I'm getting published!  Yep, I wrote a piece for ScaryMommy.com and it got accepted.  Then it occurred to me that people might actually travel to my blog and read it.  That has me freaking out a bit.  Most of my blog was dedicated to my monthly challenges, but I'm pretty sure occasionally I mentioned a relative or two, maybe put their business out there that they really wouldn't have wanted me to.  I've been going over and over in my head whether or not to go back in and delete those parts. The thing is, I really don't have time.  Like I said before, I'm trying very hard to find purpose once again in my life at home, and finding that purpose takes time, especially when it comes to my three little boys.  I can't be worried about what others are going to think.  This I can say, that I never lie, so what you see is true, at least according to my side or perception of the story.  And if anyone was hurt, that was certainly not my intention.  Most likely what was written was in a moment of my own pain, so I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it was what was real for me in that moment.

The second disclaimer when reading this blog is that I have absolutely no intention of making it a work of literary genius. Most times I write in the early morning before the kids are awake, so who knows how well my brain is functioning.  In many ways this is a free flow of consciousness, a dialogue between you, the reader, and myself.  I do try to proofread, but there is very little editing of content.  And despite my English background, there are going to be grammar errors, colloquialisms, fragments, and cliches.  Get over it, snobs!

  

Repurposing Myself

My last post was in early March before I abandoned the blog and I think I remember doing something about monthly challenges to keep me distracted from life.  If I remember correctly, I finished out my February challenge which was to read one book a week from my stockpile of "to read" books, and then I went into full blown survival mode and abandoned the challenges as well.

I thought about jumping into the challenges again this July, but whoa, too much pressure.  I haven't even been off a week nor do I remember any of the challenges I had originally planned.  What I have felt the need to do is put me back together.  I fell apart in the last few months, and as a result, so did everything else, my house, my kids, my marriage.  I am very fortunate in the fact that my husband and children were all very understanding and patient with me, but now it's time, finally, to start putting it all back together.

My life had become purposeless.  Survival mode is very much about just running through the motions without any real purpose, and since before this job I was running through the motions of wife and mother without realizing it, I had a lot of work to do.

My first purpose in life was to make a clean home for myself and my family.  Even the husband agreed on this one as there was mold rings in the toilets and the windows were so dirty you couldn't really see out of some of them.  Last week, for the first time ever I might add, we both set to deep cleaning the house one room a day.  This was always something I did with purpose and passion, but for the first time my husband also found the purpose in it.  I'm sure he won't describe it as the soul stirring experience I've found it to be, but the fact that we are restoring order together is very therapeutic for me and I feel it's a step in the right direction as far as once again finding ourselves on the same page.

The cleaning is still in process.  My next step is finding purpose again with my children.  I mean, they are the ones I really neglected not just while working in survival mode, but way back months, maybe even years ago.  Not neglect in the not feeding leaving them home alone sense, but neglect in the soulful way.  So in the last week, I purposefully planned some activities to do with my boys, things I used to do with them all the time and somehow forgot about.  The first was to create a summer Book Bingo reading challenge for each of them.  I stumbled across this idea last year on Pinterest.  You create a bingo sheet and each square is a different type of book to read or a different place to read to read a book.  Some ideas:

read a book in a tent
read a book the librarian chooses for you
read a book with a girl main character
read a book on the beach

You get the idea.  For the first three bingos they make, I take them to Five Below to pick out a little toy.  Then they have to finish out the page and we go someplace "special."  (They pick Chuck E. Cheese. Blah!)  These bingo sheets are so motivating.  My oldest is something of a reluctant reader.  He would rather me read to him than read on his own.  These sheets have him reading constantly, different material, on his own.  Anyway, I digress a bit.  I promised my oldest a reading nook.  I have two crib mattresses in brand new condition that I can't give away so I told him I'd use them to make a nook and never did.  His room was the first we tackled to clean and I finally fulfilled my promise to him and made him a reading nook in his closet.  He needed that.  He needed a hideaway.  He needed a little kick in the pants to get him reading.  He needed his mom to keep her promises.

Another activity I planned to do over a year ago was paint giant letters, their initials, and hang them in their rooms as decoration.  Saturday was a rainy day and we put the cleaning on hold for a bit so I could call each one up and paint.  For ten minutes at a time, I sat with each of my boys and painted, chatted, and destressed together.

And finally, I'm putting purpose back in not only my relationships with my kids, but in my cooking again.  I actually watched a new cooking show.  My husband and I used to watch the Food Network all the time, and we ate well when we did.  Somewhere along the way we stopped, probably around the same time life lost its flavor, we decided to take a literal turn with that and not really enjoy cooking anymore.  I decided to find purpose again in what I feed my family and incorporate the boys into this.  Each week one of them gets to plan, shop for, and cook a meal.  We started this week and Eli and I made Caesar salad with homemade dressing, grilled naan pizzas, and chocolate pudding pie with homemade whipped cream.  I took my son to the grocery store.  We went to the grocery store and shopped together.  He nearly caused two avalanches of breaking jars, but I was there with him.  I had stopped grocery shopping with my kids.  It had become too stressful and I somehow made it into another excuse not to be with them.  I was cheating them of a life experience.  No more.  I might not take all three of them with me--that's just crazy talk--but from now on I hope to continue to include them in these tasks.  Next week Sal has decided on some sort of soup, so I've been told.

So that's life right now.  Finding purpose in everything I do.  Hell, I'm even watching TV with purpose again.  Before we'd sit down and just settled for sitcom reruns.  Don't get me wrong, Big Bang Theory marathons are awesome, but they lack purpose when you've already seen them a few hundred times.  I've committed to watching Orange is the New Black.  My husband thought it was going to be another Downton Abbey and, well, let's just say his attention is held just a little better by lesbian jail sex than early 20th century tablescapes.

For the last six months, and for up to a year or more before that, I thought that my purpose was to provide (financially) for my family.  And, yes, I did need to contribute.  Most of us do.  But that is a sidenote as a wife and mother.  Repurposing is big these days: cribs into benches, TV consoles into bookshelves or puppet theaters, crib mattresses into reading nooks.  This job allowed me to repurpose myself, strip down my original contributions to my family and find new, more useful, and creative ways to be apart of their lives.

I'm Back!

I'm back!  To sum up the last six months in detail would be impossibly painful, so I'm going to give some very general highlights.  Here goes.  I had the worst group of students ever in my teaching career.  There was no controlling them.  It was every teacher's worst nightmare.  And it wasn't that they were "bad" kids.  No, they were "good" kids and had nothing better going on than to try and sneak out of class and wander the hallways and whistle and throw paper airplanes.  It was like I was in an even worse version of Saved by the Bell.  It's why I had to abandon the blog.  They were total creepers.  I had set up an Instagram account and within a week, they found me and this is why I never learned how to work the Instagram and probably never will.

Now, don't get me wrong.  There were good kids.  Really good, likable kids that I will miss and would have liked to follow through their high school careers.  But, sadly they were such a small part of my day, and pretty much every day was hell, that it was very hard to maintain my focus on them. And then let's add in the crazy co-workers who, let's see, insulted my classroom management, told me I would rip the community apart, questioned my intelligence, insulted my online job, told me how to raise my children, and told me all that's wrong with the community I live in.  So much for colleague support.

And to top it all off, I realized soon into the experience, right after they locked me into a contract, that they never had any intention of hiring me permanently.  They never stopped in to see me teach.  They barely checked in on me at all.  They wanted all the drama from the last teacher to be kept behind closed doors and they threw me to the dogs, basically.  In the end, they cut the position.  They made it sound promising for me and to another long term substitute, and then hung us both out to dry.

(Okay, right now I have to apologize for my overuse of cliches.  I use them so much because this place was one giant cliche that there is no other way to describe my experience than use as many cliches as possible.)

The fact that they cut the position actually did me a huge favor.  I had already decided I wasn't returning no matter what, but this didn't set well with several people around me, namely my mother.  It was easier for her to accept I wouldn't have a job next year if I didn't have the opportunity of turning one down.  It kind of woke her up to the world of education, too.  Teachers are pawns, just like in any other company (though that Sam Adams commercial makes me want to go make beer!) and she didn't get that.  She just assumed because of my dedication and work ethic that they'd "create" a position for me.  Yeah, no.

On my particularly bad days I would zone out on my prep period or during lunch by looking at old Facebook photos and posts.  Once again, Facebook to the rescue.  I found all these posts about things I used to do with the older boys when they were little.  I cooked with them, did (very easy) crafts, took them to little kiddie places like farms and inside playgrounds.  I realized how detached I had become as a mother, running through the paces of feedings, drop offs, pick ups, and so on.

I prayed for this job, as some of you might remember.  I thought going back to work would be my answer to all our problems.  And it was.  It just wasn't the outcome I expected.  Well played, God.  And thanks for the extra cash.

Ha! If I Do Say So Myself

This is my latest Facebook post.  I thought it was witty, sort of, so I thought I'd share.

I have successfully lost 5 pounds in the month of January. I call it the "Go Back to Work and Stop Stuffing Food in Your Mouth Every Time You Pass the Kitchen Diet". Other titles considered:
I'm Too Tired To Eat Diet

My Anxiety Has Finally Surpassed that of Stress Eater; Maybe I'll Be One of those Skinny Bitches Who Can't Eat When She's Stressed Diet

Desk? What Desk? I'm a High School Teacher Who Teaches In Four Different Classrooms Fitness Regime

February Challenge...Because I Need All the Escape I Can Get

Yesterday marked probably one of my worst teaching days ever.  [Three times I have attempted to describe this one class I teach, and I just can't bring myself to do it.  They are awful.  That's all you need to know for now.]  So, I have this awful class and I have been instructed to make every single exception I can in terms of their grades because of the situation with them not really having a single teacher for more than two weeks.  They see me as a complete joke with no authority and think they have it figured out that their old teacher is coming back, which she might...Worse than that, the other teachers seem to also think I'm a fool for doing this job at regular substitute pay while lesson planning, grading, and calling parents.  Maybe I am.  One teacher went so far as to tell me that if I think this will lead to a permanent position, I'm fooling myself.  Maybe I am.

But, you see, this week we went back to the Friends school we saw in the fall.  We met with the Dean of Students and had a small "interview" for us to have some of our questions answered.  We also had to deal with a child who has some severe behavioral issues interacting with Sal and Eli at our current school.  All that said, we want more than ever to be able to send our kids to this school.

[One week later...]

Okay.  Life got in the way of this post big time.  And by life, I mean laundry and grocery shopping and cleaning (not that much cleaning) and other places to go and things to do.  I began this past week with almost as much anxiety as I had my first week back to work.  The week got progressively better. The students got progressively better.  The staff got progressively better.

And I began my February challenge, which is also part of my year-long reading project.  Last year I endeavored to reread all my favorite books, which was so totally fun.  But along the way, I continued to accumulate new books:  free ones from the library, birthday presents, a few Target sales, and ones passed to me from friends saying I should read them.  My little pile I started on my bedside table is now halfway to the ceiling.  The challenge is to get through all these books (and try not to add too many more to the pile) by the end of the year.  This goes against completely everything I am as a reader, but I'm approaching hoarding status (well, as close as I'll ever get to being a hoarder--one stack of books halfway to the ceiling) and I've been seeing these reading challenges on Pinterest, so I thought a little binge reading, just for  a year, might be fun.

February challenge, thus, is to read one book a week for the month of February.  I realize that to some readers this in no way sounds like a challenge, but I'm a very slow reader and I rarely read for more than twenty minutes at a time.  It takes me at least a month to get through a book.  So four books in a month is kind of a big deal.  I haven't done that since college, which doesn't count because reading as an English major in college is sort of your job and you have to blaze through all the material.

I began last Monday night and I am purposefully choosing smaller, quick reads to meet this challenge.  My first one that I'm hoping to finish tomorrow night is Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?  She's funny and nerdy and as cute as can be, so my "binge" reading hasn't been all too painful.  Not sure where I'll go next, but I have a few thinner ones I'm eyeing up.

But, here's the giant monkey wrench...Monday I begin two major units with my classes:  To Kill a Mockingbird and Julius Ceasar.  So, I did read TKaM about fifteen years ago on my own.  Never once read it in a class, and I was suppose to read it with my freshman at my old high school, but I always managed to finagle my way out of it; therefore, I'm co-reading that with Kaling's book.  And as far as Julius Ceasar...I took a Shakespeare class in high school and one again in college.  Both teacher and professor thought it better to choose a small selection of Shakespeare's plays and delve into them rather than plowing through as many plays as possible.  Now I've read a lot of Shakespeare, but not Julius Ceasar, which I kind of need to read, like all of it, this weekend.

So there's my February challenge:  read four new books, a Shakespearean tragedy, and a civil rights drama in about fifteen to twenty minutes each night.  I say doable!