Pulls You In

A long weekend just isn’t a long weekend when you have to go to work on the day you’re supposed to have off. Granted, the kids weren’t there, but still, I had things I’d have rather been doing than listening to Kim talk and half-heartedly reorganizing our classroom. Sitting around watching TV comes to mind. I got precious little of that this past weekend. Of course, that’s nobody’s fault but my own. I decided to be crafty this weekend and made myself two pairs of sweatpants. The first pair is black with gold stars appliqued to the right ankle. The second pair is gray fleece and very cozy. I should know because I’ve been wearing them all day. See, as hard as it is to find jeans that fit right, it’s even harder to find workout pants and pajamas. So I tore up a pair I had from Old Navy that’s waaaay too short and used them as a pattern. I just added about 3" to the top for a waistband and 5" to the bottom to make sure they were long enough and voila! Pants I can wear without shame and without a draft around my ankles.

I am still thinking about whether or not I want to go to part-time. I know Sarah wants full-time hours, and I know I would be way less stressed and get a lot more done if I wasn’t working so constantly. On the other hand. I genuinely feel like part of the toddler team in a way that I know I wouldn’t as a floater. I also feel like I would be abandoning the families of the kids I care for, as well as the kids themselves. I know it’s going to feel like that when it comes time for me to leave anyway, but I think it would almost be worse if I still saw them on such a regular basis. Because then, instead of leaving because I’m relocating, it would seem more like I’m opting out of the responsibility. And I can’t expect the parents to understand where I’m coming from on that without being on intimate terms with them. Hell, even then it would be a stretch because empathy can only take you so far where mental illness is concerned. I’m not saying that I need to work part-time or I’ll freak out and hurt someone. Not at all. But I am acutely aware of the effects stress has on me and unlike most people, am routinely monitoring my happiness levels.

So now I don’t really know what I should do. Any explanation of why I want this change would have to at least touch on my varying levels of stress and that introduces the fact that yes, it’s a stressful job and what makes me so concerned about the stress, yada yada yada. And how do I explain that without explaining at least some of my history? I don’t know. Even though there are days when I think that I won’t be able to make it even a few more months, and that all I want is to stop working and stay home and do pleasant things, I also feel like it’s important to make it a true transition. I think staying part-time would be… sticky… somehow. Muddy, messy, murky. All in all, unclear.

All this of course raises the question of when I should leave. Do I give myself time before Alan’s anticipated graduation date? Do I work through it, knowing he’ll probably be home for about a month before he gets posted somewhere and we have to move? And here’s another problem. If he misses too much class time, he’ll have to repeat the cycle, which means he’s out in Arizona even longer. Why would he miss any class time? Because he has to have surgery. See, before Basic, they took dental x-rays, but they didn’t even look at them until now. Alan’s x-rays were… unusual. He has more teeth than he’s supposed to and it looks like some of them have fused. Since the Army has to make sure their soldiers are 100% deployable upon leaving AIT, he has to get all the weirdness corrected. So he’ll be missing at least some of his classes.  I just hope not enough to make him repeat. His goal is to graduate AIT in the top 10%. I think if he buckles down, it’s definitely achievable. Still, all this uncertainty with his teeth has me completely turned around about when I should stop working, especially since for all I know we’ll be moving to Japan. That’s going to take a lot more maneuvering than say, Oklahoma. At the moment I’m torn between the end of April and mid-way through May. Intimidating as it may be, I think my best option is to talk to Kim about it. Depending whether she wants to put Sarah in my position or hire someone new, maybe I could work two weeks into May part-time helping train my replacement and getting her familiar with my primaries and their families. ::sigh::

I don’t know. These children, their families, these people I work with… it’s pulled me in.

~Liz