What Now?

What do you do when your whole world gets turned upside down.  I’ve been teaching for about 25 years….yes, I’m old.  I’ve always been one of those approachable, on the edge, they don’t care how much I know until they know how much I care type of teachers. The community I live in has a lot of kids who could use a little extra “parenting”.  Because of a serious of decisions surrounding my willingness to step in and do that, and the way those decisions turned out, I’m on administrative leave.  I’m actually enjoying the time off, haven’t been board yet, but what now?  I finally read the rules.  I think I’ve only violated one part of one part of the liscensure rules and from what I can tell I’ll probably get some kind of reprimand.  I’ve been flipping out about getting fired, but I don’t think they have cause to do that.

But…the situation has caused me to think about all sorts of stuff…most of it really scary, even though it’s also exciting, maybe …definitely stretching and growing.  I recently got married…sort of…ok, I did .  He’s been amazingly supportive, and loving, and understanding, and….I say kind of because we’ve only lived together on weekends because our current job/family situations make that the way things work best.  The possibility of getting fired or needing to keep a distance from my students has caused me to seriously consider moving in with him and his elderly mom permantly which would mean selling my house and removing myslef from the community I’ve become so involved in.  It would also mean losing some of my independence.  (I’m 51 and only got married for the first time the day after Christmas.)  That’s scary.

Okay, true confession time, I don’t know if I’m ready to be married full time.  There’s all this stuff that comes with that, like how do we not have time to do whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it most of the time. I still have “my kids” that are a priority.  I don’t know how to balance that with being married.  I’ve never even been real good at figuring out how to balance things with my biological family.  I think I do a lot of things based on what I think people expect of me rather than “be here now”.  My husband doesn’t seem to have many expectations, but I’m afraid he feels put aside when I miss time that I would usually spend with him to spend with the girls or in another way.  I love him, I want to be with him full time, eventaully, sometimes I want that to happen now….IDK…I just need to stay in the moment and let things work themselves out.

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