What there’s time for in summer

It’s August. All my family has gone home, and my work has more or less dried up. Most of the people I want to spend time with are not in Warsaw. Whole vistas of time open up around me in this month, and since I know I will have regular work again in September, it doesn’t bother me at all. This differently- textured time  is to be used in different ways to time during the semester- this time is for reading novels, feeling sad, swimming, cooking, throwing things away, running, writing, feeling guilty, running errands, reading glib and useless advice on how to discipline 2 year olds, and even- for the first time in a long time- getting bored.  Lots of this time is spent sitting in the sandpit with my Kindle, counting children in my peripheral vision to make sure there are still two of them. I gape into the chestnut trees in the park, pass absent-minded judgment on other parents, realise what I am doing and unjudge them, wonder if I can get away with giving my kids another ice-cream.

I have been waiting to have time like this for a while. During term time, I work like a dog, and generally feel like I am just barely in control of my days. I collapse (literally ) into bed in the evening, in a sort of cocktail of exhaustion, over-excitement and panic that I have to get up again in a few hours.  When I wake up I sit bolt upright with an urgent list of things to do reeling through my head, careen through the day, and fall down dead again at the end of it. I know now why people take holidays based on lying around on the beach. I am also coming round to the idea that having a season with minimal obligations is therapeutic, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Mad July

I have been slacking on the blog front. For the whole of July I have been teaching 5 hours a day, and I am stretched in so many ways that I can hardly believe I am still standing at the end of the week. I spend all day (beginning at around 4:30 in the morning) in a ferment of lesson planning and teaching, and come home to the whirl of dinner-bathtime-bedtime. After which I fall into bed myself and the whole cycle begins again.

I’m happy and relieved to find the teaching exciting instead of terrifying. I have a class of 11 young Belarusians who amaze me and amuse me (“Rose, your tights remind me of a rabbit”) every day. Their neurons are also firing madly,  so we are in it together. They do not realise the extent to which I am experimenting on them-I feel like I need to try out any new trick I can think of while I have such an energetic and responsive audience.

So much of this is new. For the first time I am developing warm and constructive relationships with my colleagues. For the first time I am farming out my children all week long, so that I hardly see them. Sometimes I hear their sleepy early morning jabbering building as I exit the flat in the morning- more often, everyone is still sleeping when I leave.  I know that my parents (who have the kids 3 days a week and often do overtime on weekends) are stretched as well, and I barely see them either. I call in the afternoon to remind them I’ll be late and hear the sounds of their secret life together-we’re just in the kitchen having our nana, says my father, and then, he’s escaping too! We’ve got two Trobriand Islanders, and they’re not wearing their leg ropes!

I don’t plan to live like this on a permanent basis, though I know that many people do and somehow manage. But I don’t feel guilty either. For this month, I can wallow in work and see how it feels.

Love your work

If I have made any resolution this year, this is it. It is made partly in the spirit of resignation-there are certain things I have no choice about- but it is also recognition of the fact that the things I have to do bring a measure of enjoyment which isn’t marred by the sense of obligation.  It doesn’t prevent me from facing some days with the feeling that I am trudging off to my own execution, as I wonder where I will find the energy and enthusiasm to make it to nightfall.

There are two things which I consider to be my work. One is taking care of the kids, and the other is teaching. I have to confess that I am more inclined to find the childcare draining and the teaching energising. Maybe it’s a matter of the sheer number of hours I spend at each task, or maybe I am an attention junkie who needs to perform for others, and I don’t treat Maja and Janek seriously as an audience. Maybe it’s just exhausting to perform repetitive tasks all day- in particular, I am not a fan of cleaning high chairs.

Anyway, the point is that, though I often wake up with an internal groan,  I generally feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. I don’t mean a I-am-clearly-raising–two-children-who-will-cure-cancer-and-teaching-all-the-Poles-perfect-English kind of way.  More like an I’m- not- dead- and- haven’t– killed- anybody,- now let’s- sit- down- and -watch- Game- of- Thrones  kind of way.  It makes me realise that there is something to be said for compulsion- doing things which I don’t necessarily feel like doing  makes me paradoxically content.

Time-poor

Sunday morning. Two grumpy babies have just gone down for their nap, and nobody knows how long it might last. I am obliging myself to write something  but there is just too much choice. And it occurs to me that for the first time in my life, I really do not have enough time.

There is a list of at least 15 things to do in this precious period of silence, which I can no longer rely on the last for more that 30 minutes. I have to take care of my living space, my body, my intellectual life, my work, my friendships. The margin for not feeling like it is now nonexistent. I can’t rely on waiting until I feel more inspired or physically strong. There is just not enough time to do everything I want and need to do. It’s a terrifying feeling- I can’t afford to make any mistakes, to miscalculate my timetable for a second. I can’t always afford to prepare for work as well as I would like to. I have to count it as a triumph that I just turn up, even if I have been awake since 2 am and have been shat on by a pigeon.

This hollow-eyed state of constantly being on the brink of emergency forces me to accept that I will not always be able do do things as beautifully as I would like. This is how it’s going to look- my children will not be getting organic quinoa with a side of life-giving algae to eat, and my students will not be getting a perfect lesson plan which I have worked on for 3 hours. Time to start feeling liberated instead of hounded by this truth.