Changes-the Sequel

Changes: The Sequel Forgive me if I seem to be dwelling on this topic lately but like unwelcome company, change seems to have moved in and refuses to move on. And though I understand the whole, “only a rock never changes” concept (which my daughter the newly minted geologist would certainly have a problem with—listening to her wax eloquent about a rock’s life history is akin to listening to a soap opera) there is such a thing as too much change too fast. I hate myself for feeling that a rut seems a comfy place to settle into, but the older I get, a rut is the only thing I have energy for. My kids have been major, abrupt change-meisters lately. Usually kids leave in stages as evidenced by some moms that I’ve been talking to whose kids have just left for college. When they tell me that they feel like they’ll never see their kids again, I assure them that their offspring are only in stage-one leaving—they still come home for holidays and vacations. They’re gone long enough for you to miss them but they return for extended stays. Mariel left for college but came home for the holidays. Even when she moved to Arizona it was for graduate school so she came home for holidays and summer vacation. But now she’s gotten a job that will take her to Houston and so the party’s over. Now she has a full time job and a separate, full time life. There will be no more long, leisurely vacations at home with mom and dad (and Snoopy). Lisa stayed in Boston for school and jobs so that even when she and Matt moved into their own apartment it felt like she never really left. But now that they’ve moved across the country, I’m feeling a bit lost and bereft. I wake up on Friday mornings wondering excitedly if we’ll be seeing the kids during the week-end, but then I realize that we won’t be seeing them at all for a while. But we do SKYPE every week and we will see them on Thanksgiving and then hopefully we’ll travel out west this spring and, and ……..So why am I still sighing? Thank goodness my job keeps me so busy that I don’t have time for a proper mope. And ironically it’s change that’s keeping me busy. I’m at a new site with new people doing new things—very un-rutlike. It’s taken me a couple of weeks just to find my way to the bathroom. I turn left when I should go right, go up when I should be down. Almost a metaphor for my life. I used to complain about the lack of room at my old school but now I would give anything for that space. We had our own classroom and office space whereas here we use the school’s class rooms for our evening classes. That means that there’s no place to leave papers, or books, or hang maps and word lists and everything has to be in its exact place when we leave. We even have our own clumsy rolling white boards to use which we cart in and out when we come and go. The only spot that we can truly call our own is the office. At first I was worried that I wouldn’t even have a desk to work at, but thankfully I found one. A girl’s got to have somewhere to put her coffee cup. I’ve done battle with a new copy machine and some strange printers that I’m about ready to strangle and toss on the junk heap. I’m constantly looking for simple things like staplers and markers and paper. It’s amazing how much we take for granted the ease of finding our stuff and knowing how to work the machines we live with. But the hardest change is my new schedule. My hours are now 1:00-9:00 pm. Our classes run from 6:00-9:00 and so by the time 8:00 rolls around I’m ready to fall asleep on my feet—and that’s a bit difficult to do when I’m teaching. Our students all come to school from full time jobs and families without complaint, so I feel ungratefully guilty to be kvetching about my lack of energy. Then there are the times when I’ve psyched myself up too much and I become the Energizer bunny. But at least it combats my students’ yawns and occasionally my own. There’s just so much you can do to make a reading class scintillating at nine o’clock at night. I knew I was finally adjusting when I managed to fit the last piece of change into my life—the gym. I had been sleeping late every morning, ignoring the alarms that I had set, falling blissfully back into my pillow. But last week when I changed my closet over to winter wear, all it needed was one pair of snug jeans to get me moving. So this week I’m back to morning classes and people I haven’t seen for four years, who assumed that I had died. And I almost did. I’d forgotten how challenging the daytime aerobics instructor, Kathleen is. She worked me over and spit me out. And as I lay there trying desperately to find the energy to peel myself off my mat, I felt nostalgic for the trusty old rut that I had left behind.