A Lot

I know it’s been over two weeks. Yet, the blog has been on my mind so much as there was so much I wanted to say lately. So a quick recap of events.

Monday two weeks ago, the shootings at VT occurred. What a horrible thing to happen. As I sat watching the CNN reports between classes, I was so shocked. Many years ago, I spent one of the most delightful afternoons of my life there on the campus in the company of a very sweet boy that I had been pen pals with for a year. He took me to the quaintest little natural amphitheatre nestled in the woods. We sat and talked for over an hour there. Either way, it is a very pleasant memory of that place. The event itself saddened me so much on so many levels, but the icing on the cake was that it marred that beautiful memory.

Friday a week ago, I had my blood pressure taken and it was 140/100. I’m on medication now. This is a bad thing. So I had to sit in the dark office for 20 minutes to see if it would come down. It did. They let me go home. Oh and I’d gained two pounds but lost two inches… Very confusing.

Saturday a week ago, Mom called. “You know if I left right now I could be there by Sunday morning.” And come Sunday morning she was. Yet it was not the disaster so many predicted. We really did have a nice time. When she started to say things I didn’t want to know, I asked her to stop, and she did and we moved on. My therapist says I get two gold stars for that…

Monday a week ago I had 5 (count ‘em, 5) Melanoma biopsies performed. Right forearm, Right shoulder, stomach, butt/lower back and behind my Left knee. These hurt! Oh, and then I get to go home to “The Queen of Oncology” aka my mother and let her spin me up about the horror that is cancer. It’s funny. She was just being a mom. That took two days to sort out, at which point I told her to quit it! All better now. I will get the results next week.

My principal caught me outside my room on my cell phone in bare feet. After my assistant principal and I got a fir of the giggles lasting nearly twenty minutes (we don’t see the bare foot as a big issue and I was on my planning) I emailed a very sincere apology admitting my lack of professionalism. Thankfully e-mail is visual and not audio so he couldn’t hear the continued giggling.

Thursday a good friend turned 21, so he called me the night before at 10:45 PM (!@#$@!#!@) so I wouldn’t forget… Though he said it was just to say hi during a study break.

Saturday I received what was supposed to be the acceptance letter for my PhD program. Only it was a rejection letter instead. I am very disappointed. I have decided to view it as their loss and tell myself God has something more important for me to do this year. Sometimes I almost believe that. It stings worse than the biopsies… It doesn’t help as much as you’d think that so many people have stated how stupid that university’s graduate program must be.

Mom left Sunday after we had a very late dinner at Sonny’s. It was possibly the best visit we’ve ever had. I may really be growing through the hurts.

I’ll try to write more this week, I promise, but…

I have a wedding on Saturday and surgery on Monday…. So we’ll see.

SAHM’s: Priorities

(Sorry I haven't posted recently. I was on break and my computer at home is not really effective for blogging. But I'm back now!)

Over at Mommylife.net, there is a discussion about Stay-At-Home-Moms. This discussion was raised because of some articles and a book that says that women should reconsider staying home with their kids because they could damage their careers by staying at home.

I read one of these articles in either Allure or Jane magazine or one of those kinds of ‘zines. The thought struck me as I read it that the author of the article, and book the article was about, had a priority problem. I’ve written about this before. The idea that children are a right and commodity that is second to our happiness, but something we should have and deserve. This idea scares me. As a teacher I see it as a real problem.

That is not to say I have an issue with working parents. I know lots of really good working parents. They work because it really is a financial necessity or because they really find joy and value in their work, but their kids are still their priority in life. They recognize that they chose to have these children (right or wrong, apparently we really do have the choice these days…) and they take that seriously. Sometimes they only have one or two kids, just as often they have more, but they are good parents because of their priorities, not their occupation or status as working, single, married or SAH parents.

Rachel Ray is a really interesting TV personality to me. She didn’t get married until 35 and has said, point blank, that she is not having kids because she is too busy to make them a priority. I admire her for that. She advocates a lot for kids, for parents cooking with kids and even paid for the Prom in Enterprise, Alabama, where those high school children were devastated by a tornado that killed five at the school. She understands how important parenting is. That is why she has decided not to be one. I imagine there are people that think she is crazy, selfish or think she doesn’t like children. Maybe in the sense that her own success is her priority they are kind of right, but with no children who is that hurting, and it allows her to focus on other things that are good and helpful in the world.

I am not married and I do not have children. I am responsible only for myself (OK, and Nana, but that’s an odd situation). I have to take care of myself. I have to know that I can take care of myself. I also need to find satisfaction in what I am doing, feel like I matter and am making a difference. If I had a husband and children, my priority would be different. My first priority would be to my children and what was best for them. If we needed the money, then my working would be best for them, but they would be the priority, not my own success. If we didn’t need the money, then I would stay home. That’s not to say that I would do nothing with the work I have done so far in my life. I might write or home school or be involved in educational organizations (especially if I had my PhD) but my kids would still be my priority.

Also, it would matter to me to know that I was at home, trusting my husband to provide for our children and I, in a word – submitting, not because I had to, or because I had no options, but because I wanted to and choose to, for my sake and for the sake of our children. It would also matter to me that if something happened to my husband, I could still provide for my children and not be afraid of how we would be able to deal with the problem. It is true there is insurance and financial planning, and I would hope the kind of person I would marry would think of those things in case something happened to him, but I also have seen enough of life to know that sometimes it is not that simple.

I also do know that my career is very satisfying to me. While I don’t think of myself as ambitious, I have been told that I have some characteristics of professional ambition. I guess mostly that is just that I want to do the best job I can, I want to be effective and I want to have a positive effect on my world and my profession. However, if I choose to have children, then I have to choose to be effective and effective the world positively first and formost through them.

Anyway. The article really disturbed me. Not because it attacks SAHM’s as ambitious or making poor choices (that is kind of the icing on the cake) but because again parenting is relegated to something we do to be fulfilled, yet secondary to our own needs. This is why I find myself so exasperated with so many of my students. If their parents think like this, it explains a lot about their behavior.