A full week of vacation spread out before me, so blank and beautiful. I'm loving it. I'm sitting in the office, listening to music and calmly, slowly working on getting lesson plans finished for the last two weeks of the semester, figuring up grades to this point, and straightening out and going through the many piles of paper and books on my desk. This is such a change from my usual stressed out, freaked out, frantic pace.
Here in a bit I'm going to go home and eat leftover pizza and possibly clean out my refrigerator.
Now that I think about it, this isn't exactly what a vacation used to represent to me. Actually, it's not even close. I'm so much more thankful now just for time to slow down and do the things that need doing. I have no idea what I did with my time before Eliot was born. Where did all those hours go? Hours that are now spent feeding, changing, playing, etc.?
*****
I was telling Mom the other day about these last two weeks of classes coming up--what one of my colleagues calls "the slow slide into hell"--and how crazy it feels, like I'm running out of time and the semester is going to end whether I'm ready for it to or not. Anyway, Mom's general reply was that she prefers to see the glass as half full.
Gag.
I told her that not only is the glass NOT half full, it's not even half empty either. Actually, all the glass has left in it is someone else's backwash.
We were on the phone, so I couldn't see her face, but she made that noise like she was thinking to herself (not for the first time), "Can this woman possibly be my biological daughter? And if so, what did I do to make her so negative???"
Then I felt kind of bad.
So the moral of that story is just to make a note to myself: When Eliot, as an adult, seems so foreign to me that I wonder how he sprang from my womb, remember that it probably isn't the direct result of anything I did or didn't do. He's simply a different person. Eliot does not = Eli + Rachel, just as Rachel does not = her mother + her father.
There, Mom. I hope you're relieved. Smile. I am.
Okay, now back to my vacation / work...
1 comment:
We are a lot alike in some ways, and I figure this is one of them. We come from a family full of glass half empty people and glass half full people. No need to point a finger at anyone, we all know who they are. Anyway, I figure we are somewhere in between. Some days the glass is drained faster than a shot of vodka on a lonely night. Other days the glass is filled to the top and there is always someone there to refill it in case you drink some.
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