toddlerspit

It’s something like day ten of my “vacation” from work and I’m only now beginning to relax a little bit.  I went through some seriously strange emotions in relation to checking my email, for example.  I worked like crazy the last few days before break so that there wouldn’t be anything pressing for me to attend to while we were in San Diego, but then I found myself with a wicked email addiction that didn’t go away when the work went away.  So for the first several days of the vacay I had to fight powerful urges to open the inbox.

It passed, thankfully, and so did thoughts of work.  Of course, the India trip looms, and I haven’t prepped hardly anything for my spring class, so when I did happen to think of work, a regurgitation of panic wells up in me over everything I have to do before next Monday, and I have to hum and rock myself a little bit just so my head won’t explode.  This has happened a few times, and makes me want to throw my computer against the wall so that I won’t ever have to check email again, so loathe am I to even think about getting back into the swing of things.  I am like the smoker who smokes like a chimney, then quits, then gets all righteous about quitting and can’t even stand the barest whiff of smoke.  Email (i.e., work) is my cigarretes at the moment.

Of course, all of this is made more difficult because of the fact that there really was no “vacation” at all.  Nolie barely slept a wink the entire time we were in San Diego, and Eric developed a snore that emanated from the depths of hell, and we slept on a hide-a-bed (need I say more?).  So I was tired and probably crankier than I realized (sorry everyone).  There were many awesome moments, no doubt about it, and I love my in-laws deeply.  The weather in San Diego was gorgeous, and I was overwhelmed with the love and generosity of this family.  I was a little wiped out by the whole thing, though.  And maybe also a little bummed that I wasn’t able to relax more.  I think I was just wound so tight from the shenanigans of the fall semester that it’s taken this long to unwind a little.

Just in time to head back to work on Wednesday.  I’m guessing my presentation on nanotechnology (which apparently has been given 12 minutes out of the entire ten days, one minute for every hour of time change I’ll be making.  Not that I’m complaining!  I have no idea what I’m going to say, even now, a week before I leave) will get done on the plane, and the paper due for another conference will get emailed out from the airport.  I was kind of hoping to not begin the semester that way, but here I am.

Why is it such a battle to stay centered?  The struggle sometimes makes me wonder if I’m doing the right thing.  Is this the life I want to be living, so busy and fast?  I’m not sure, not sure at all.  I find myself facing another spring where I’ll need to do more questioning, more reflection, to make sure I’m not just on the hamster wheel for the spinning’s sake.  I need to envision what I want for my life (a big component of which needs to be peace).  So, does this mean some tiny adjustments (a massage once a month?).  Or a bit one (like a career change?).  Scary work to be done.

I was talking to another working mom the other day who was dealing with the fact that she was going to have to find a new preschool for her son because the preschool we use now has too many kids in each classroom, and it freaks him out.  She wasn’t worried about her son per se, but more about the disruption of having to find a new school that would work for him, and about having two drop-offs (her older son is really happy at our preschool), and about just having to change the whole routine they were all accustomed to.

I totally empathized.  Sometimes I think the only way working parents can make everything gel is by adherence to a pretty strict routine.  Knowing what time you drop your kids off, where, how you sign them in, and that there going to be relatively safe for the eight or so hours you’re at work is pretty priceless.  If you don’t have the routine, then you’re much more likely to forget lunchboxes, class pictures, briefcases, meetings, etc.  Then you’re more likely to be cranky, more prone to conflict with your kids, more likely to think you can’t hold it all together.

And, of course, the whole “holding it together” is mostly an illusion.  Things come up all the time over which you have no control, and staying organized is really unimportant in the face of big things (I’m not totally screwed up in my values here) like loving your kids, and spending time with them, and just letting everything go to shit once in a while so that you can relax and be together.

But in realistic, day-to-day terms?  The routine is really, really important.  And when those unexpected things happen to mess up the routine, it’s amazing how it can throw everything else off.

Like the kids being sick for the last week.  Eric had to stay home with the girls today again, and I was home with them yesterday and last Friday.  Eric was on two days last week, too.  So that’s a lot of missed work, a lot of stress on the parents missing work, a lot of worry about the sick kids, and so on. 

We hung in there pretty well until today.  Eric was grumpy from the get about having to stay home with the kids (I had a five-hour meeting at work that was pretty much mandatory).  Then I got to feeling grumpy at him for being grumpy, and felt guilty about not being home to do my job as mom.  Then I had a bad day at work that made me wonder if I had made the right decision going on the tenure-track, which made me wonder why I was busting my ass at a job I was going to fail at, all the while also failing my family at home. 

So, recap:  Feeling like a failure as a mom?  Check.  Feeling like a failure as a wife?  Check.  Feeling like a failure as a professional?  Check.

The reality, of course, is that I’m not failing at any.  What was happening is that the routine was disrupted, and the illusion of control and management was disrupted.  One area–parenting–was getting the shakedown, and so the shakedown spread to the other areas.

Snowball of parenting guilt-anger-resentment poo.  Making it a pooball, I guess.  Which is what I felt like I was eating all day long.  Big, stinky pooballs.

Here’s to eating less poo tomorrow.