Not a Wasted Word

Well, it’s Friday. Again.

I have an okay day planned at work. The stations I had planned actually went well and most of the kids got the two big things done, so today won’t be too stressful. On Monday and Tuesday of next week we’re watching Coco to end our Day of the Dead unit (and to get through Halloween proper and its aftermath), so I have that to look forward to. I need a break and that movie should provide it.

This afternoon I’m running a table at the Harvest Festival at my school. I don’t usually volunteer for stuff like this, but I like the teacher running it and I don’t really have many friends at work anymore so I said yes. I’m not actually dreading it, so there’s that.

This weekend is pretty low key. My daughter js spending the night at her grandparents’ house on Saturday and my son is going to a birthday party that evening, so my husband and I get to go out to dinner. It will be a short, but hopefully sweet date night.

Sunday my daughter has a birthday party and the grandparents will pick up my son so my husband and I can run some errands without the kids. So many birthdays in October, but I appreciate that we can use these two to our advantage (thank you grandparents!)

Monday my daughter and her friends will Trick or Treat without adults in tow for the first time. They will all have some kind of communication device that also provides tracking, and they’ll be walking a route we’ve gone together for years. I’m excited for them, if it’s also bittersweet because I actually enjoyed walking behind them with my mom friends, and now we won’t be doing that. It’s definitely a metaphor for the ways our mom friendships are changing as our girls get older and need us less.

Luckily my son’s friend’s family is okay with us tagging along on Monday, so he has someone to Trick or Treat with. He has a big group of friends now and it’s definitely time for him to do more with them, and less in the shadow of his sister. Again, this simple change on one night feels like a harbinger of the future with older, more independent kids. It’s definitely butter sweet.

And I suppose that is it. I woke up before my alarm today, and was able to fit in this post. I’ve been using a sleep aid pretty much every night since my cat died, because laying in bed inevitably leads to me thinking about her and crying and I’m trying to avoid that. I don’t love that I’m using sleep aids consistently, but I have been getting a decent amount of sleep. That is nice.

Happy Friday.

Yesterday was a weird day. My mom responded to an announcement with totally unexpected vitriol. I wasn’t sure if I should be upset at how much my feelings were hurt, or the fact that the only possible explanation for the outburst was mental decline. It left a heavy weight on me that I couldn’t shake all day.

(She later apologized profusely, but the anxiety had already been caused.)

Today was better. We didn’t have our regular Wednesday staff meeting (you called it P&R!) and I was able to fit in a short run before taking my daughter to a swimming assessment downtown. She qualified for the pre-competition team! But it won’t have openings until (maybe?!) January. Still, at least there is the chance she’ll be able to swim. She’s been wanting to since before the pandemic, but most teams in the city never came back after the shut downs, so a glimmer of a possibility is a huge improvement.

We got home early enough to watch a couple episodes of Stranger Things season 2. It takes a long time to finish a season of Stranger Things because our ADHD asses struggle to stay focused on the show (and we can only watch it when the 9yo is not around).

Also some plans came together for this weekend, which I’ll talk more about later.

All in all it was an okay Wednesday. I really needed an okay day.

October 2022 has not been my month. The first week was the roughest parent conference role out my school has seen. The next week I was grieving the cat I’ve had for 13.5 years. (I grieved so hard for that cat. I still am.) And last week I was managing a yeast infection that ravaged my unsuspecting lady bits. (I have not had a yeast infection in years, and holy shit was it horrible, especially the Monistat which made sleeping for two nights almost impossible). I was also preparing for my son’s 9th birthday weekend, which includes a three hour party at Dave and Busters (full disclosure I am writing this sentence there, the most horrendous of child entertainment spaces).

About half way through the week I realized that at least some of the overwhelm I’ve been feeling is hormone related. My skin is a mess, half of it is red and itchy, the other half is oily and broken out. I’m sure the yeast infection is hormone-fluctuation related. Even my under arms smell different! So my hormones are clearly doing some perimenopause related dance, which probably explains why everything feels so hard right now.

But things are looking up! Thursday was a pretty good day. I even attempted a run after work and I felt okay! I was also able to get an Rx for Diflucan filled Thursday so that is when I started feeling better ::cough, cough:: down there. Right now I’m 20 minutes away from this birthday party at Dave and Buster’s…

…and it’s now Sunday night and we got through it! Saturday night was Lucha Libre in San Jose for my son, husband and I (our daughter was at a birthday party sleep over). We bought the tickets for Lucha Libre back when we thought the Dave and Buster’s party would be on Sunday, and when we had to move the party to Saturday, we couldn’t get our money back, so we just went for it. It was a late night, after a long day, but it was a really epic two hours of Mexican wrestling.

Sunday we slept in! (Thank god!) My husband and I picked up the house for the family birthday party. The grandparents arrived right when our daughter was dropped off at 11:45am. We ate lunch, opened presents and hung out. By 1:45pm everyone was gone and my son was building one of his new LEGO sets.

I hung out with the kids for a bit while my husband worked, then he hung out with them while I ran. It was good to run. It was what I needed after all the hosting and socializing.

This week should be pretty low key, though my daughter came home with a new cold, so we’ll see how that goes. I swear my kids have been sick ALL FALL. It’s exhausting. I guess wearing masks really does prevent the transmission of most viral transmissions. Now that we aren’t doing that anymore at school, they are transmitting the shit out of every respiratory infection in the vicinity.

I really ready for a quiet, uneventful week. I feel like October owes me as much. We’ll see if it can deliver.

How has October been treating you?

This fall has been a tough one. Everything feels really hard. At the very least, everything is taking a lot of time. I’m bringing work home now, almost every day. I get to work at 7:30 (or earlier) and have over two hours of prep time during most days, and I’m still bring home work to grade, and plan and prep. I don’t even have a new class this year! I can’t figure out why I feel so underwater at work always.

My house is a mess. I can not get out from under it for more than 24 hours. I’m mad at myself for letting the stuff accumulate to the point where it’s unmanageable, because there is no way I can do a real purge anytime this school year. Maybe when the kids have a different spring break than I do, but by then the school year will basically be over.

Parenting feels hard these days too. My daughter is 12 and in 7th grade and of course that is hard. You’d think I would excel at parenting a 7th grader, since I spend all day with 7th graders, but I honestly think my job makes it harder. By the time I get home I don’t want to deal with middle school stuff anymore, but I can’t avoid it. I’m swimming in middle school angst and disorganization and attitude ALL DAY. I knew these years would be hard, when I had a middle schooler at home, but honestly I didn’t realize how hard it would be.

It feels harder to take care of myself. We have meetings every Wednesday now so I can’t run during the week (and I especially won’t be able to run once the time changes). I miss running. The dojo changed its schedule so my son and I can’t really go at the same time anymore. Martial arts, like everything else in my life, just feels like so much work.

I just want something to be easy.

The one thing I have going for me is my marriage. Things aren’t always great, but it’s definitely not the hardest thing in my life right now, and for that I’m very thankful. There were many years where my marriage was really difficult, and I’m glad those years are (currently, though I’m sure not forever) behind me.

And now I have to go because I have so much work to do and not many Sunday night hours to do it. Blerg.

I was already in a pretty deep hole after Conferences week, and then my cat died.

Now I’m pretty much buried in this hole.

The next couple of weeks are not going to help me dig myself out, so I’m just trying to make sure there are pockets of air big enough to breath, and to keep still so it all doesn’t come down around me.

And that is where I am, or at least it’s where I feel like I am.

The next couple weeks are packed with events I am not looking forward to. All the reserves I will be able to muster will be spent just getting through those events. Hopefully, in November, there will be some time and space to take care of myself.

And now I need to do laundry and wash dishes. At least I’m listening to a good audiobook (though it’s almost over, boo).

I hope you’re all having a better start to fall.

We had to put down our cat yesterday.

It felt sudden, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have been. Looking back the signs were all there, I guess we just didn’t want to see them.

The only saving grace is that we knew it was the right decision. She wasn’t doing well and hated the vet. Prolonged care in an attempt to keep her with us would not have been a mercy.

She was 13.5 years old. She was my miscarriage cat. She came to us when my grief was so wide, and she filled up that space with some love. She was our family and our friend.

I am just devastated. I can’t believe she is gone. I see her everywhere. I’m about to go upstairs and she won’t be waiting for me for breakfast or a treat. I don’t want to go upstairs and see that she’s really not there.

I took the day off. My eyes barely open and I don’t want to spend the day pretending I’m not fighting back tears. Tomorrow is a better day to go back, so that is what I’m doing.

I’ll write more about my sweet girl soon. For now I just need to put these words out there, to help me make it more real.

I’m so sad. It hurts so much.

Thank god it’s the weekend.

I finished conferences at 3:30pm yesterday, then assisted at the dojo, and finally graded two class’s worth of projects before I called it for the weekend.

It felt so good to shake off all the stress of conference week, and to know we had a three day weekend ahead of us.

But this morning I’ve felt very… blah. I think I have a bit of a stress hang over honestly. And there is still stress to be had. Our cat isn’t doing well. My periformas syndrome and lower back pain are returning, and I’m almost sure martial arts is the cause. My neck is a mess from looking up at my TV at school (I project my computer screen on to my TV to teach). I have a ton to do around the house, which has been neglected for weeks. There are more projects to score.

But we’re going to a free concert in the park near our house today. And I don’t have to do a ton of lice-related laundry. And I think we found a Halloween costume for my son, who has been melting down about not knowing what to be for a couple weeks. I have next week planned at work, and I got my Día de los Muertos decorations up yesterday in the 30 minutes before conferences started. I already cleaned the cat’s boxes and have loads of laundry in the washer and dryer.

And I left this post sitting for a bit while I folded laundry and talked to my sister.

Right now I gotta work out, then roll out my legs and back.

I hope everyone has a restful weekend.

You know when you are sure something is going to be unpleasant, but you try to talk yourself into a better attitude about it, and then it comes and it’s even WORSE than you were originally expecting and you’re like, oh hell fucking no. Enough of this shit.

Well this has been one of those weeks.

I knew it was going to suck. I KNEW it. But I tried to go into it with a positive attitude. I told myself maybe it would be okay to have short periods, and maybe conferences wouldn’t be as exhausting as I was expecting, and maybe they would even feel gratifying in some ways.

But nope. Having short periods all week was even more energy intensive, and yet less productive, than I was expecting. Conferences have been even more exhausting than I worried they would be, and since students were not given a chance to complete a reflection they haven’t been “student led” at all. We just sit there trying to think of things to say about students who are doing fine, but whose parents requested a conference anyway, and who are supposed to be showcasing some of their early school year accomplishments but instead are just sitting their responding to our questions monosyllabically.

I leave work every day super late and super drained and feeling incredibly resentful.

Today I asked my principal if next week we could unpack what worked and what didn’t this week and she said, no, we have too many other things on our Wednesday meeting agenda.

So we’re not even going to learn from this ridiculously ineffectual experience, which means we’ll probably repeat it next year.

I’m thinking of sending out a google doc or form and asking people for their input so at least we have SOME RECORD of how awful this felt, because I really do not trust our admins to understand what a mess this week was.

I have really been struck this week with how hard it is to parent a middle schooler with ADHD. Especially since I also have ADHD and struggle mightily with executive functioning myself. And when my husband, who is incredibly well meaning and handles most situations calmly and effectively, periodically forgets what is developmentally appropriate for middle schoolers who are not neurodivergent, let alone those who are.

So many of my students this year seem very needy. I need to have directions written a million different ways. I need to have copies of my notes for them, since they can’t seem to write effectively with a pencil. They are absent all the time which means I’m constantly creating supports so they can finish work at home, and then following up with them when they never get the work done at home. I gave our first assessment last week and seven kids missed it between the three classes and I’ve spent my lunch and after school half hours ALL WEEK giving make up tests. Everything is requiring twice as much effort and time as it did before. I swear it’s worse than last year, and I can’t tell if that’s true or just that I expected last year to be a raging dumpster fire and expected this year to be just a smoldering dumpster fire and so the fact that the dumpster fire is, in fact, still raging, is throwing me off guard.

Oh, and lest I come off as the glue holding all sorts of shit together, let me exemplify one of the ways I am a hot, hot mess, that is surely contributing to the chaos.

Remember how I couldn’t tell if my daughter still had lice? That is because she probably never had lice. What happened was that, last Thursday night she was scratching her head like crazy, so I asked her what was wrong. When she showed me her head, it was covered in white stuff, and her scalp had red, patchy spots. Then she told me that on Saturday, at her friend’s birthday party, a guest’s hat had fallen off and when she picked it up and put it on, he told her he had lice.

So of course I assumed she had lice.

And I stripped her bed and combed out her hair and did all of those things, which in retrospect I think were probably the right moves.

But then I didn’t really see anything I was sure was lice on the towel, but I just assumed I didn’t know what I was looking for and decided that lice was still the problem. Which means I kept washing bedding and towels and kept combing out her hair every three days, even though I didn’t have concrete proof she had lice.

Except the third time I combed it out I saw all the white stuff again and I freaked out. And then I realized the white stuff was probably just dandruff, which my daughter has never had before so I wasn’t used to seeing on her head. But what about the kid who said he had lice?! And of course it hit me, that kid was just fucking with her. He probably didn’t want her putting on his hat and told her he had lice so she’d take it off. Kids do dumb shit like that ALL THE TIME.

So yeah, my daughter doesn’t, nor did she, have lice. But since I didn’t trust my ability to figure it out for myself, and just started blindly following the directions I was given years ago, I didn’t realize that.

But honestly, the fact that parents have to know how to diagnose and combat lice infections, or cough up hundreds of dollars to have someone come comb out their kids hair, is some serious bullshit. Still, I should know this is a weak spot of mine because our bed bug experience, and the many tens of thousands of dollar wide hole it blew up in our savings, has me seriously scared when it comes to small bug infestations. Like I get blindly terrified when my kids get a bug bite I cannot immediately identify, even if it’s clear it happened at a park. I just need to accept that I can’t be level headed about any of it without professional guidance, and I suppose that is what I learned from this experience.,

See! I’m trying to learn from this dumpster fire scenario, instead of just looking away and pretending it never happened! Even though every time I think about it I want to punch a hole if my own reflection, I’m so, so mad at myself.

Okay, enough of my pity party. Tomorrow is Friday. Maybe I’ll feel better after a three day weekend.

A girl can dream.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I went to bed at 10:30 and read until 11pm, but at 1am I was still up.

I feel sleep at some point in the next hour I think, but refused to look at he time after 1am.

And now it’s 6am and I have to start my day.

It really throws me when I can’t sleep like that for a night. The nights when my son wakes me up and interrupts my sleep for a good thirty minutes are hard (and still happen way too frequently to be honest), but the nights when I just can’t fall asleep myself wreck me. I’ll be trying to recuperate from last night all week. 

I guess I should just be thankful that it doesn’t happen to me too frequently. Some people deal with insomnia on the regular. Or they wake up every day at 3am and can’t fall back asleep. I know elusive sleep is a big issue for a lot of people.

But it does feel like, what’s the point of any of it if sleep is always so hard to get. Between my son and my own sleep issues, it feels like I’m rolling be dice every night.

God I’m so tired. I want nothing more than to sleepy for another three hours at least. But instead I have to get up; teach, administer retests, go to several hours of conferences, come home and manage my kids, including helping my daughter catch up after missing a day yesterday (she came down with a bad cold suddenly on Sunday night, while I was combing out her hair).

And if I don’t start now I’ll be late to work.

This post barely makes any sense, but there are some photos if you keep reading. You’ve been warned.

It’s officially October. I like October. I like Halloween, I love Day of the Dead (which is actually November 2nd, but which we study for much of this month). I like celebrating my son (his birthday is the 22nd). I like when the weather gets cool, and the heat waves finally stop making surprise appearances. I like fall, and I like knowing the holiday season is fast approaching.

I have already pulled out my Halloween leggings and we put up our Halloween gel clings. I’ll be getting the other decorations out this week.

So I’m trying to be excited for October, but right now I feel really beaten down.

I did laundry all weekend. At least it felt like I did. I combed my daughter’s hair out again today. I honestly don’t know how to look for lice or nits – I’m the worst when it comes to identifying what is a bug and what is dandruff or something else. So I have no idea how my daughter’s head looks. But I’ve used the Kapow! treatment twice and combed it out twice and put coconut oil on it in between, so I’m feeling pretty confident that it’s a lot better than it was on Thursday. I think I’ll take her to one of those combing places next weekend, or later this week, to see what they say. Or ask my friend’s mother-in-law to comb her out. She is really good at it, and doesn’t mind doing it for others.

I think I managed to avoid getting them myself. I’ve had a few people check for me, but I haven’t combed my hair out, or asked anyone else to do it for me. Maybe I’ll do that this week as well. Except this week is going to be really busy,

This week is Conferences at my school. I HATE conferences. There is never enough time and the students’ you need to meet with the most never show and it’s an exhausting week all around. We see all our classes for just 35 minutes every day, then we have a short 30 minute lunch before we start conferencing for two or more hours. By the end of the day I’m just wrecked.

Our admin really dropped the ball this year too, and we didn’t start planning for conferences until basically last week, which means we aren’t at all prepared. We started a week later this year and I swear NO ONE is taking that into account with planning. It’s driving me nuts. This year has felt so rushed and chaotic. I’m over it and we’re only six weeks into the school year.

But at least this week zero period starts at 8am instead of 7:45am. I will ABSOLUTELY take those extra 15 minutes and put them to good use.

Saturday we stayed home and got shit done, but Sunday we went to the Presidio for the first Sunday of the month event at the new Tunnels Top park. It was a beautiful day and the views were stunning. The kids had a great time, and I was grateful to get out of the house, because if I’d stayed there all day I would have just kept doing laundry. Last Sunday I did chores all day and was in a foul mood by the end of it. I’m glad we made it out of the house this Sunday.

My daughter and I were actually in this same area last weekend, but the bridge was totally covered in fog. You couldn’t see it at all. So it was nice to have such a beautiful view this weekend.

On the way home last weekend I got this shot of the city, which is my new favorite. San Francisco can drive me crazy, but she really is a pretty city.

It’s almost 11pm and I’m still finishing up a presentation for tomorrow. If I have what I need ready from last year, I can keep my head above water, but when I need to create new materials and resources, everything goes off the rails. My Spanish 1A class is pretty much set for the year, but there is a lot I have to make for my Spanish 1B class, and it hasn’t been easy to find the time to do it.

Next weekend is a three day weekend. I’m just counting the days until that Monday off. Maybe then I can catch up a little. Maybe.