I've always been an overscheduler. In high school I'd go from early-morning seminary to school to dance practice to either work or swim team to home and several hours of homework. In college I often took 18 or 19 credits a semester and worked. I continued the trend after college, teaching four different classes my first year as a middle-school teacher, then going on to holding a full-time job and going to grad school. In that first figuring-things-out year of our marriage, several of the few fights we had were over our weekend plans (with me wanting to go out on Friday and Saturday nights and do something fun on Saturday afternoons, and Eddie perfectly content to laze about our 400 square-foot apartment).
I come by my type-A pace honestly. My mom is busier than pretty much anyone I know. She doesn't have a job and has only one (adult) child living at home, but she manages to cram her days full. She pays for it too-- crashing and burning every once in a while. When we were little we'd go on vacation to visit my grandparents at the beach in Florida. Once she got her chair in the perfect position in the sand, she'd be impossible to rouse. After two or three hours of boogie boarding and building drippy castles, my brother and sister and I would be ready to do other things, but after running so much in her daily life, my mom was too fried to move once we got on vacation.
One of my most vivid memories from when Bryce was a newborn was pacing around the dining room, hoping that the motion would get him to stop screaming. I heard the clang of the MetroLink as it came rushing into the station a few blocks from our house. And I remember thinking that everyone on that train had somewhere they were going, and the only place I'd be going that day would be in circles around the dining room table.
After running at breakneck speed for the first 25 years of my life, I don't think I quite knew what to do when Bryce was born and I quit my job. The whole focus of my life changed. I had always thought I'd be THE BEST stay-at-home mom, but I wasn't prepared for what an adjustment it would be. After a few months of feeling unmoored, a friend mentioned that the university a few blocks from our house needed freshman English teachers. I jumped at the chance and found the balance between working part-time and being a mom was perfect for me.
I've taught on and off since having kids, and I love it. When we moved to Minnesota I really, really missed my friends in St. Louis and desperately missed teaching. The first winter we spent in Rochester, hanging out with two babies in our dreary basement family room, was a pretty dark time for me. When I started teaching the next fall I felt the fog lift (and painting the basement helped, too). We moved again this summer, and I expected to go through the same kind of mourning, but it never came. Eddie has mentioned a couple of times that if I wanted to go back to work part-time, we could find a way to make it work. And even though there are similar jobs available to what I was doing before, for the first time in my adult life I don't want to work. I don't need it. I don't even miss it.
At 4:00 this afternoon I realized that I haven't left the house all day. This is a fairly common occurence these days. I often stray no further than the corner of the subdivision, where I drop Bryce and his carpool buddy off to cross the street to the elementary school. I still crave social interaction-- book group, chatting with friends on the phone, my online friends, skipping Sunday School to talk with friends in the hallways (Isaac won't sit, that's my excuse), but I find that I don't need it in the same way that I did when Bryce was a newborn.
Maybe Eddie is rubbing off on me.
--originally published 2/22/06
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