The New Normal

Life right now is so vastly unlike anything it has ever been before, that I hardly know myself these days. I don't recognize a single aspect of my life as my own; it's like I'm walking around in a Salvador Dali painting. Life right now can be pretty much summed up in two words: unsettling and unfair.

It is unsettling to wake up in a house I didn't plan to live in, drive to work in a car I never planned to buy, and then go to work in a classroom that I've never taught in, teaching curriculum I've never seen before.

It feels unfair that because I didn't plant anything, I cannot harvest anything, can or preserve anything, and instead I must drive to the grocery store more often than any human really should.

Unsettling, that I have children who are growing faster than the rate at which I can purchase new shoes, who alternately love each other AND want to permanently maim each other, and for whom merely a change in the weather can sway their mood in either direction.

Unfair, that I spent the last nine years writing a beautifully well-planned curriculum on the American West, the Holocaust and Media Literacy, and I had to scrap it all for a Pearson-aligned curriculum that is probably amazing but I can't tell yet because I can barely stay a day ahead of all THREE of the new classes I have been assigned to teach.

It's unsettling, that I can't predict whether a request to pick up the shoes on the steps will result in cheerful complicity or a Scarlett O'Hara meltdown.

Unfair, that somebody in the country over by Sherburn is walking on new wood floors while I'm steam-cleaning shag carpeting from 1954. (Yes, yes, the view is amazing and the floors are the next project, I KNOW, I just feel like wallowing for a little while, so let me do it please.)

Unsettling, when your nine year old is talking about maybe wearing the football jersey of a certain adorable boy in her class to the Homecoming football game.

And unfair, that when a person discovers that a bag of potatoes in the back of the cupboard has gone bad and the smell is more than a grown person can handle, there is no mother to call and complain to who will show up and clean the kitchen and make fun of how pathetically weak I still am when it comes to gross things and domesticity.

Throw into the mix a husband who has emerged as launderer of the year, (seriously, he does a load of laundry a DAY, every day...what??) and I don't know what the heck to make of this new life. When is it going to feel normal? When is that going to happen, exactly? I'm craving something solid I can stand on. Something that makes me feel like myself.

I wonder if it ever will feel like that again? Will I ever wake up again and say to myself, 'You got this'? I used to say that to myself in the mirror before walking out the door every morning. I used to walk around with this confidence of self, like I had the answers to life in my back pocket guiding me through my day.

Will it ever feel like that again? I suspect that it probably won't. I think that in the middle of all this change, I am changing too. I find myself thinking brand new thoughts, like "I wonder if Aaron will remember that the new towels need to be washed in cold water?" and "I wonder if I let Emma babysit again, will she be able to keep my other two kids from killing each other?" I also wonder if my dad is too lonely, if my kids are as sad as I am and just better at hiding it and if my mom is watching me stumble through my days saying, "Get it together, for heaven's sake, Sara Jane."

I hope it's just a passing season. I find myself fumbling when people ask, "How are you doing?"

Truly? I have no idea. I have no frame of reference for how I am doing. Still walking around, bewildered, I guess, is my best answer. Looking for the new normal.