Family and Work: Finding a Balance

Some weekends I get by okay. I do a little work here and there and no guilt is felt. No tears are shed (by either Cole or Mama). But other weekends are tougher. I feel incredibly guilty for doing too much work (what Cole now refers to as homework) and not enough quality time with Cole. And then if I don't do that work, I feel guilty and stressed on Monday morning scrambling together lessons for the rest of the week, trying to catch up on grading. It's a vicious cycle, and one I feel I am constantly caught up in - with no stopping it, no solution to the problem.

The problem is that I feel as though I am not good enough at anything I do - not a good enough mother, wife, teacher. There's always something else I could or should be doing.  Sometimes I am not efficient with my time. Yet, sometimes no matter how efficient I am, I still don't complete half of what I need to get done. Sometimes at work there's something in my way - a broken printer in our department office, interviews for my leave replacement that - that take too much time. Sometimes there's nothing in my way but the pile of things that needs to get done - gotta grade the quizzes, gotta check in the homework, gotta look at the illustrations I assigned, gotta plan Lit Lab, gotta re-plan honors, gotta make 20 extra copies of something.

And then at home the list from work continues and I'm all - I'm going to get this stuff done this weekend. But I don't, because grading takes so much time it's ridiculous. So much time that I have little left for planning and then I'm screwed again on Monday. Then when I'm not doing work work, I'm trying to help with the housework, watching/playing with Cole, chasing him around, trying to be a good enough mother so he doesn't think back to his childhood and say to himself - "My Mama - she was always doing homework." I never want my kid or my husband to think that my work is more important than them. Because while it may be on my mind a lot- they always come first in my heart.
I grew up thinking that I was never good enough that my dad had no time for me - that I was the reason he had to work so much - he had to keep that roof over our heads by working at his part-time job at home. It wasn't his fault I felt this way, I just had a fragile self esteem to begin with, always wondering why my mother didn't want me. So when he had little time for me, it stung and stuck with me. I don't want to be a workaholic, but my job is not a job that I can simply not bring home with me. One 42 minute period a day is not enough to plan lessons for three totally different classes and get all of their grades done. Teachers always stay after or bring their work home.  If half the people in this world understood that teaching is not as simple and easy as they think it is, they might have a little bit more respect for the profession and for teachers in general.

What compounds the issue is this: I come home from working all day and trying to get out of the office at a reasonable time and sometimes Cole is miserable. He's having a fit about something, or he's directing his anger at me - because I haven't been around all day and 3-4 p.m. is the first time he sees me ALL day. Because I work so early and so far away, we do not have the luxury of seeing each other in the morning. And I think he resents that and takes it out on me when I get home, which sends me into a guilty spiral, wanting to cry because I'm filled with such self pity. Woe is me. Last weekend, after having my own breakdown, I realized that I just gotta move on. I just gotta keep doing what I'm doing and I can't feel guilty over it. I'll just waste the precious time I do have with him on tears and guilty thoughts. And I know that's not what he wants. He wants a happy, playful, fun Mama who can laugh heartily, dance like a maniac and chase him around the house merrily.