Not a Wasted Word

I can’t believe my mental health day was just a week ago. This has been a loooooong week.

A loooooong week with some shiiiiiitty sleep. My kingdom for 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep! (Clearly the sleep powers that be do not think my kingdom is worth that much shut eye).

I’m teaching absolutely NOTHING today and it feels marvelous. My students are catching up on work and I’m checking in with a bunch of them, but I’m not standing in front of the room at all. It’s a lovely way to spend a Friday.

I got some new kn95s from MASKC and I really like them. I think we now have enough quality masks to get us through our summer travel. I have to admit that I almost want us to get Covid before the end of June, so that we don’t have to worry so much about it derailing our plans. I know that is a horrible way to think, but it’s where my head is at these days.

There is a lot of Covid going around at my school again. I never really stopped wearing a mask so it hasn’t been hard to go back to wearing a mask. I do look forward to the summer when I don’t have to wear one for most of every day.

The fact that neither of my kids has gotten Covid yet is totally crazy. I really can’t understand how that is the case.

I am so, so tired. And there is really nothing I can do to try to improve the situation. I already take vitamins, and workout, and practice good sleep hygiene (no screens before bed, dark, cool room, sound machine, etc). I’ve even been listening to guided meditations! It sucks to feel like something so important is so totally out of my control, but I guess that is what perimenopause is all about!

We’re getting our daughter an Apple watch (with service) for her birthday next month. She’s shown she can handle one with the Gizmo she had this year, and while we do not plan on getting her a phone before 8th grade we think an Apple watch is a nice next step especially since Apple has ways add parental protections. I have to admit, looking at them makes me want to get one. I already wear a watch every day, and it would be pretty nice to have one that does some cool stuff. But I also don’t need one. At all. My current watch is also on the fritz though so that is not helping.

{I don’t actually plan to get an Apple watch, but I’m annoyed that after all these years of not caring, I’m now interested in one.}

The Apple watch is all we have planned for our daughter’s 12th birthday – it’s in exactly one month – and it’s starting to freak me out. I need to start planning.

And that’s all the time I got so I’m going to post this as is.

Happy Friday!

Yesterday was a bummer day. I got into a fender bender on the way to work, and even though the other car barely had a line on the bumper, the guy asked for my insurance info. The front of our car was cracked (it’s made out of plastic) but I will probably not fix it if insurance doesn’t get involved. I really, really hope insurance doesn’t get involved.

It was hot down by work and my run sucked. I didn’t have time to make it to the coast, which was a disappointment.

The news cycle right now is at turns infuriating and terrifying. I really do not have the words for how disappointed I am in this country. I feel like everything I was taught as a child was a bald faced lie. I really do not know how to engage with any of it anymore.

I also spent a bunch of money on teacher appreciate gifts. I really hate this week (and weekend) because I feel like as a parent and a daughter I put in way more effort toward my kids’ teachers and my mom than my own students’ families and my kids/husband put toward me. I don’t need someone to specifically appreciate me for Teacher Appreciation Week or Mother’s Day, but it’s hard when I feel obligated to do so myself and others clearly don’t feel obligated to do so towards me. Obviously, I can stop feeling obligated, but that isn’t who I want to be. It’s just not a week (or day) that I very much appreciate.

I didn’t get much sleep on Sunday and Monday nights, and I was determined to make up some of that last night. I took a sleep aid and even listened to a 20 minutes “sleep tight” meditation at 10pn when I went to bed, but I was still awake 11:30pm when my husband came in, climbed under the covers and immediately started snoring. It was a really frustrating two hours trying to fall asleep, and now I’m more exhausted than I was before.

Today is a rough day at work, and now I’m really tired and have far less patience than I need to get through my five classes with no prep. The only silver lining is that I don’t have to ferry any kids anywhere this afternoon.

Some days are just bummers and you have to stand up and dust yourself off. Yesterday was one of those days. Today probably won’t be much better. I just hope I can get some better sleep tonight and that tomorrow is finally a relief.

Well this is why…

I’m home with my son right now, because he has a cold. I went to work and taught my three morning classes, but I left during my prep so my husband could get some work done during the afternoon.

My husband has A LOT more flexibility than I do, and 95% of the time he stays with the kids when they are sick. But sometimes that is not possible, or not preferable, because he also has a job and things to do.

One of the reasons I have not taken any days since early September is because I was terrified of Covid making its way slowly through our family, requiring I quarantine at home for two weeks or more. Now I wouldn’t have to stay home if one of my kids tested positive, so that takes some of the pressure off. We still haven’t had Covid yet, which is part of why all those days are still banked, and I want to keep some days banked in case I do get Covid before the school year ends.

I also want to keep some days banked so I don’t have to go back to the scarcity mentality around sick days in the future. It sucked tracking my every hour away from work and I don’t want to go back to that.

Finally, substitutes remain incredibly hard to find. My colleague also took a mental health day on Friday but there was no sub for her, so other teachers had to give up their prep to take her classes. I, personally, do not feel comfortable with that arrangement. When I’m sick, there isn’t anything I can do about it and if someone needs to cover for me it sucks, but I don’t feel guilty. I would, however, feel very bad about someone giving up their prep time so I could go see a movie with my husband. That does NOT feel okay to me. So as long as there aren’t enough subs (which will probably be for as long as I’m teaching), I will not feel comfortable taking numerous days off just to give myself a break.

I know it’s really hard for lots of people to call in sick, but teachers have to be on the high end of the taking-a-day-requires-crazy-work spectrum. The amount of time spent planning for your absence, and then scoring the work the kids did while you’re gone, is usually equal to the amount of time you were away. It’s just an insane amount of work. This is why it’s good that teachers have so many breaks built into the year!

Do you have to do a lot of work to take a day off? Is harder to prepare before hand, or catch up after?

Well the weekend is over. And now it’s May.

May is always a crazy month. The weather has been kind of cold, and very windy, but I can still sense summer coming. It’s really just around the corner, but its a very long, busy corner indeed.

My kids have 4.5 weeks left of school. I have six. That is crazy to type out. I actually just went and checked my calendar app to make sure I was right about that. But I am. We are definitely in the home stretch.

In a couple weeks my son has his red belt test and the weekend after that I’m going to Portland for a martial arts retreat. My thoughts will be directed at those two events, and by the time they happen the school year will officially be coming to a close.

My daughter turns 12 in early June. I really can’t believe that.

The long weekend was lovely. I’m so glad it worked out for my husband and I to take Friday off. Wednesday and Thursday we were very short on subs and I was starting to freak out that they would poach my substitute from me on Friday. This is the main reason I never take a day off – because we never have enough subs and I can’t enjoy a day off knowing my colleagues have to give up their prep periods covering my classes. But they didn’t poach my sub, so all was well. I have to admit, knowing my friend is around makes it hard not to take every Friday off… I mean I have the days…

But obviously I will not be doing that. And that’s okay because I don’t need to do that. I can get through these next six weeks.

I can do it. It’s only six weeks. It will be over before I know it.

After a couple months of quiet slumber, my perimenopause has awoken! Oh how I have NOT missed you perimenopause.

I have been having night sweats all week. I have to admit, waking up soaked in sweat is… an unpleasant experience. I am thankful I haven’t had to deal with it too much so far, and I hope this isn’t the start of it being more common.

I’m also getting my period, which feels especially unfair. Boo perimenopause! You suck!

It’s strange because I’m the youngest person in my mom friend group (of seven women) by far. I’m 41 and everyone else is at least ten years older than me except for one woman who is 47. And yet I’m the only one going through perimenopause already. One of the women just had a baby! In her early 50s!

I love that my OBGYN says starting perimenopause anytime after 40 is “normal.” Please. That is such bullshit. I think what she means is it doesn’t require medical intervention (like hormone replacement therapy), which I’m thankful for. But it certainly isn’t “normal” to be 41 and going through perimenopause. Most of my mom friends had their daughters at 41 or later (that is why they are 10 years older than me!) 41 is young to be going through this, and it’s alienating and strange and is a reminder of my reproductive systems overall shittiness.

I’m also breaking out. And I’m feeling especially aggrieved, which isn’t a good look on a straight, white, cis gender woman of immense economic privilege so I’m keeping it to myself. I know it’s my hormones taking me for a ride, throwing me a one two perimenopause punch, but it still sucks.

All this to say, I’m very happy that I’m taking tomorrow off! I finished my sub plans at school today, and now I’m finishing some stuff for Monday, which is a prep-heavy day that I kind of forgot to get ready for. By tonight I should be able to put my work aside for 72 blissful hours. I am so glad that I took this day off. My last day off was Thursday, September 2nd*! It is clearly time.

*I obviously get lots of breaks, it’s not like I’ve been teaching every weekday since mid-August. But I don’t think of breaks as “days off” so this feels special. Taking a day off is actually a giant PITA, but tomorrow a bunch of stars aligned and I’m so happy that they did!

I’ve been trying out my alternating week schedule for about two months now. Instead of always going to the dojo, or running, or driving carpool on the same days, I have two different schedules that I alternate between. This allows me to take advantage of my early release Wednesdays (which I will be losing next year) to run some weeks, and allows me to take advantage of the one day a week when my son and I can train the same time the other weeks. It also allows me to trade off carpooling with one family that helps take our boys to the dojo and two other families that help take our daughters to boxing. So far I’m really liking it, even though it can be complicated and it definitely requires more advanced planning (not to mention coordinating with other people).

I never really recapped what I learned from my time tracking in early January. I was already pretty well aware of how I use my time, so I never added up the exact number of hours I spent, say, messing around on my phone (probably the thing I am least likely to gauge accurately), but I did think a lot each night about how I felt on the days when I had a lot to do after school, as compared to the days when I didn’t have to ferry anyone around or train at the dojo. What I realized was that I didn’t feel much better on the days that I had some time to sit around at home. In fact, I only really felt good about that kind of time when I had something else going on most other days of the week. I think I really only need one afternoon a week to decompress, as long as everything else feels relatively manageable (like I don’t feel totally behind at work or at home).

And this is a good thing because I generally only get one of those kinds of days a week. And I’m learning how to maximize my use of that time to decompress, so that all the driving and carpooling and martial arts training feels manageable (carpooling) or even pleasant (training).

When you’re alternating your weeks, you quickly realize that a month only has four of them. I have staff meetings on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays, and I’ve been scheduling my allergy shot on the 2nd Tuesday (so that a carpool dropout on Monday or Thursday doesn’t require I reschedule it), which means I only get one Tuesday a month with an open afternoon. I was switching driving my son to the dojo and doing the boxing carpool on Thursdays, but a new, longer high belt class started on Fridays, so now I only have to do the boxing carpool every other Thursday and I get the other two “off” and it’s nice to have those margins (especially when a hole opens in the boxing carpool). Fridays used to be my one day to get stuff done at work, but now I only get about half an hour before I to leave to pick up my son for the high belt class at the dojo. I also committed to assisting on the mat on Fridays until mid-May, when they have their red belt test. Fridays used to be a pretty chill day for me, but now they are not. I’m still getting used to that change.

I will say that when I have something most afternoons, and then one day I don’t have anything (say on a Monday when both kids are being ferried by OTHER people to their activities), it feels pretty amazing to have 1-1.5 hours to myself. Sometimes I’m not really sure what to do with that “found” time.

And things keep changing. I actually got a text an hour ago that one of the girls is stopping boxing at the end of the month, so who knows if we can keep that up in May. My daughter is interested in wrestling at her school, so maybe she can just transition to that instead. I certainly can’t take her to boxing twice a week all by myself.

Once my son takes his red belt test we’ll feel better taking more days off at the dojo. I think by then we will both need a break. And the last four weeks of school (mid-May to mid-June) always have lots of unique events like Open House and “promotion” activities at my school. So far my alternating schedule has had the flexibility to absorb random one-offs (like the dojo being randomly closed today), but these final months of the school year will definitely stress test it.

{My in-laws are also in Texas for two weeks in May, and then flying their daughter and her kids back to SF for two weeks, so they will be out of pocket for pretty much the entire month, which changes my schedule some too.}

A final thought – right now our weekends are a little packed for my liking. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but at this point in my life, I want a few solid hours at home at least one afternoon during the weekend. I certainly don’t want to stay home all day, but having a morning AND afternoon (or evening) activity both days is too much for me. I’ve talked to my husband about it, and he is also pretty exhausted after the super packed weekends, so we’re trying to scale down a bit. I think that will help us get through the next two busy months.

How do you schedule your weeks? Does every week look pretty much the same? Different? Do your weeks change during different parts of the year?