*crawls out from under her rock, brushes off dust, and stares up, blinking at the sunlight*
I’m back.
First up, a confession. I LOVE September. I love the crispness in the air that comes at the end of the month, and the long, languid, golden twilights that come before in the Indian summer. I love the first blush of bronze and russet on the trees. I love that it is the start of a new year for me. Logically, I know that the calendar turns over in January. But my life is tied to the waxing and waning of the school year. Case in point: since I first started kindergarten, there has been exactly ONE September where I wasn’t in school, either as a student, as a teacher, or both. (And since that September I was in a country where the school year didn’t start for several months, and when said school year did start, I was back at school as a teacher and uni as a student, I guess you could say that I’ve never missed a school year since I was five.)
I am a third generation teacher on one side of my family. I’m back at school now because I’ve decided to take the plunge and try to teach at university rather than high school (which I did for several years). You get called something different then: lecturer, professor, course director.
If you’re doing your job right, says I, you’re still a teacher. And our universities would better serve their undergraduates if more profs would remember (or understand) that.
I still get excited about school supplies, even if the only supplies I can now rationalize buying are notebooks and overpriced language textbooks, rather than the giant 60-pack of coloured pencils that was always the ultimate score when I was a kid. (I really like stationery. When I finish a big task, I tend to reward myself by buying journals and pens and paper.)
I got a back to school hair cut this week. And, if I do say so myself, it is rocking. I even walked on the wild side (for me, anyway) and had my eyebrows waxed. A couple of days ago I dressed up for something with Q., and styled my new rocking hair and checked myself out in the mirror and thought, “Damn, I’m hot!” (more later as to why thinking I’m hot is so important to me right now).
I am just bubbling over with excitement and anticipation about this year. I’ve shifted programs; in the grand scheme of things it won’t make that much of a difference, but it’s enough to make it feel like a truly fresh start. I’m teaching in a new course. I’m starting German.
I have realized in the last couple of days or so that I am completely, utterly, overwhelmingly happy with my life. Not just content- happy. To the point that I walk around with a grin on my face, just because.
Can we all tell that the break we took this summer was good for me?
Q. and I took a vacation earlier this month. A real vacation- two weeks, him and me and a cottage on a river. It was the first vacation we’ve had since we got married two years ago that didn’t involve familial obligations. We sat around and talked. We swam. We canoed. We cooked spectacular dinners. We read and read and read (I think I burned through about twelve books in the two week period). We played Scrabble as the dusk fell around us on the screened in porch and watched the stars come out. We noticed each other, in a way that we were starting to put aside in our daily life. I remembered again why I adore him, and realized that my love for him could grow, in the face of complacency and comfort and the status quo. We are a great team.
And then I came back and people started commenting on how relaxed I looked. How good the vacation had been for me. How refreshed I must feel.
The comments kept coming. And that started to make me think about how I must have looked before we went away. Because I knew how I had felt: exhausted; drained; stressed; drawn; wound up; irritable; anxious. Q. and I were both having trouble sleeping. I felt like my thyroid meds were out, like I couldn’t quite escape the feeling that there was something really important that I was supposed to be doing RIGHT NOW. I felt coiled, like a spring, or a jack-in-the-box. (On vacation? We slept like babies. I felt the anxiety, the tension, the unease drain out of me. I felt purged of poison, new again.)
And so I draw a line this September, as I stare down the barrel of another academic year that will no doubt be hectic and stressful, that will send me careening from one task to the next until I’m spat out, dazed and disoriented in April, when I can mark exams, write my two comprehensive exams, and then stumble into summer.
I choose otherwise.
This year, I choose NOT to take on the mindless, endless anxiety that I pack on my shoulders. I will only worry about things that MATTER, and things that I can change. I will stop fretting about the future. I will try to calm the madness.
I don’t think it will be easy. I am a perfectionist and a control freak. I seem to have become a wired individual. I’m sure I didn’t used to be this anxious. I know a lot of it stems from my lack of control over my fertility- I keep reaching out and grabbing harder and harder onto the other aspects of my life. I try to make everything else perfect. I try to plan for the rest of my life to be perfect to avoid dealing with that one big failure.
I’ve known that this isn’t healthy for ages. I’m sure I’ve written about it already on here. But until I came back from the cottage, and I looked, really looked at myself in the mirror and saw the difference in the face that looked back at me, I was blind to the physical toll my obsession with perfection was causing.
It won’t be easy, but I’m determined to try. I have a good life, a great life even. And I need to start recognizing that, rather than constantly stressing about ways that I can make it better. I need to stop second guessing my decisions (I read The Paradox of Choice on vacation, and boy was it an eye-opener in places). I didn’t used to be like this. I didn’t used to live like this.
The big city that I live in has to shoulder some of the blame. Everyone is in a rush here. Everyone has that harried, ever so slightly frantic expression etched into their faces. You can’t see the stars. When we turn off the major highway and onto the smaller roads, and the landscape suddenly opens up into rolling pastures and stands of deciduous trees, or the rocky outcrops and pine forests of the north, Q. looks at me and says, “Welcome to Canada”. My sister spent the summer elsewhere, in a different place, with a different rhythm. She feels the tension embedded in this city too.
Q. and I won’t stay here forever. I can’t live here forever. But we’re here for now, and I need to find a way to protect myself, my inner heart, which is a child of open fields and dark forests, from the concrete and anger that spews through the city. The city has some of the blame. But I’ve had to take a hard look at myself as well.
There was another catalyst. The two weeks gave me the time to percolate through my ideas, and to gravitate towards change. They reminded me of how I can feel, how I used to feel. But the thing that really spurred me into all this introspection (which, frankly, might have felt more excessive if I hadn’t been able to do most of it while lounging in a hammock listening to red squirrels argue over their territorial limes) was something that I’d been dreading (and worrying about) for months.
I turned 30 while we were away.
This entire year has felt like a slow march towards inevitable doom. 30 was always my date. The date by which I wanted to have started having my kids. Even before I wanted kids, I knew that if I had them, I was starting early. No ticking of the biological clock for me. One kid at 29, one kid at 31, bang. Done and dusted.
Well, we all know how that turned out. But a funny thing happened over the summer. Once we made the decision to take a break, and it became clear that not only was I not going to have had a baby by the time I turned 30, but I was not even going to be pregnant, my agonies over the arrival of this day slowly faded. It ceased to frighten me. I gave up the dreams and expectations I’d harbored for years.
On the day itself, Q. and I went for an early swim. We made breakfast and read in our usual chairs on the porch. We drove into the nearby small town for a picnic lunch near the lake while we watched boats travel through the lock. We walked around the town and bought frozen yoghurt. We came home, had another swim, sat on the dock and watched the world go by while drinking the champagne that Q. had sneakily spirited up in his backpack. He cooked me dinner: wild salmon and wild rice and greens wrapped in foil and steamed on the barbecue. We ate brownies and blueberries and vanilla ice cream.
It was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had. And I realized that getting older didn’t have the fear it had begun to hold for me anymore. Because I knew that getting older meant I’d experienced more. That I’d done more, seen more, loved more. I wasn’t afraid of aging if I got to do it with him, and if life held more moments of peace, just the two of us on the dock with our glasses of bubbly.
So I let it go. And I think that absence, that loss of the fear of the future, of the physical changes that I can see in myself, that’s what people could see in my face when I came back. And even though I can feel the pull of the city now, I let it wash over me. I seek out the green spaces. And I style my new hair and smile at myself in the mirror and believe, no matter how utterly cheesy it is, no matter how wonderful my twenties were, that the best is yet to come.
And when we go back to the clinic in October, when I start the birth control pills next week that will lead us back down a path that I have found so dark and so frightening over the last two years, I will hold on to the memory of the hammock, and the river, and the quiet joy that I can find in eating yoghurt with fresh fruit in the sunlight.
