Balance This!

I realized tonight how badly I suck at balancing my lives. I bet that most working mothers/wives feel this way from time to time. I blame it all on my nerdiness.

I am obsessed with reading things about teaching. Books, magazine articles, blogs, my teacher friends’ Facebook statuses… I just love to learn more about my profession. (Read: I love to steal people’s ideas that are better than mine. Shakespeare said, “Everyone I meet is in some way my superior.” Preach it, Shakespeare, preach it.)

Anyhoo, I am spending my evening like I usually do, browsing the Internet for something fabulous I can incorporate in my own classroom. (Go ahead and say it, “Nerdy, nerdy, nerdy!”) I order some books from Amazon that I think my students will love after reading teacher and media specialist recommendations on their blog (readingyear.blogspot.com). I research a little bit about an idea that one of my teacher friends says is effective in her classroom and contemplate how it could work in mine. I pull up one of my favorite teacher blogs by Mrs. Mimi (a teacher blogger from New York, sheer hilarity and in-your-face truth about teaching at itsnotallflowersandsausages.blogspot.com).  I get lost in her stories and nearly pee my pants laughing at situations she describes, knowing I’ve been there, done that, and gotten the cheap teeshirt.

Well, I all of a sudden remember, at 10 pm, that I promised my students earlier that if fifteen of them got pledges for our school fundraiser, that I would bake them chocolate chip cookies. As luck would have it (I really am proud, really), exactly 15 of them got pledges. Lucky for me, I have two packs of break-and-bake cookie dough in the fridge and can “make” them cookies. I am baking both packs because at this point, girlfriend needs a cookie too!

Then I realize that my son’s laundry is in the dryer, wrinkling his fave blue jeans (he is six, by the way). I have to say, though, that it’s a miracle that I’ve done laundry on a weeknight anyway.

I love my job. Teaching is my life. I recently did an interview with a newspaper about teaching, and the writer asked what I did outside of school. In my response, I realize that I eat, sleep, live, and breathe teaching. Add to that an equal love of technology and the Internet. Unfortunately for my family, I end up forgetting to do family things, like make dinner and fold laundry. I end up keeping my husband up past his bedtime so I’m not in the kitchen by myself making cookies that I promised the little darlings I would bring.

Lucky for me, however, I have a family who loves me and, if not fully impressed by my dedication to my students, they are generously tolerant of it. I may not win a wife-of-the-year or mother-of-the-year award, but I love the crazy pace of a teacher’s life. I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

Hopefully my fashion-savvy first grade son will feel the same way about my life in the morning when his jeans are wrinkled. Whoops. And hopefully, I won’t burn the cookies.

Comma Queen