Summer Vacation

"Holidays - Have no pity"

I've often said that our year is punctuated by the transition as I shift from school to summer break. That annual lengthy holiday is something which I love, and also a time during which I accomplish lots of work that is just not all that easy to fit around the schedules that are the norm when we are all working full time.

For me, the biggest shift in emotional and physical energy is that "coming home" part of the year. Much as I look forward to summer (especially in May), there is a sort of whiplash that happens as I drop my teacher persona and become the fulltime "at home" slave. Suddenly, there is nothing at all for me to control, no schedule that I must keep, nothing about what I am doing from day to day that is pressing or terribly important in and of itself. In one 24-hour day, sometime in early June each year, I go from time obsessed, planning and executing, teaching whirl -- to His. The things that He simply does not "get to have" from me while the school day schedule forces me out of the house each day at 6:40 AM, become the commonplace currency of our summer days. He revels in having me around all summer, and I get very used to the patterns of the days that revolve around His schedule rather than "mine."

And then, August arrives, and I begin the gradual but definite process of taking myself back to school. There are stages to doing that. For me, and I suspect for most good teachers, there are a series of dates that catch our attention as the start of school looms. There is, of course, the first day of school. For parents and students, the first day of school is THE DAY. That's the day when all the new clothes need to be ready to go; when the supplies need to be packed in the new back pack; when the nerves and butterflies kick into high gear as they wonder about a new teacher, and a new classroom, and new classmates. What is probably not visible or apparent to those parents and their students is the period of work that most teachers put in AHEAD of that first day. For teachers, there are, inevitably a series of days that are devoted to meetings -- staff meetings, team meetings, departmental meetings, ... The meeting day schedule becomes a sort of "teacher first day" that happens before the student first day. Too, for many of us, there is some more nebulous August date that demarks the beginning of the "getting ready" season. A classroom does not simply put itself together. All the things that are packed away in the spring must be unpacked in the fall. Rooms need to be set up and decorated to create the welcome that we all hope students will feel when they arrive. Textbooks need to be set out. Papers need to be printed and sorted and organized. Plans need to be made. So there is that "in the school" getting ready date that leads the way into the preparation season.

Master has terrible trouble with August. It makes Him very crabby. He sees and shares my growing excitement over a new year and new kids and new plans, but feels the impending loss of my daily presence in His life, and it is a struggle. Usually, the beginning mentions that I make about starting to head back and begin working in my classroom, generate push back -- it is too soon; it is too hot; wouldn't later in the week be better; aren't there still three weeks of summer? Even more difficult is the shift that I always want to try and make to a more "regular and reasonable" (my words) bedtime that resembles the schedule we keep during the school year. As surely as He senses that an earlier bedtime is about getting onto a school schedule, He begins pushing to stay up later. I know that part of that is about delaying the inevitable, but I honestly believe part of it is an artifact of His youth, when I imagine His parents insisted on earlier bedtimes as the start of school approached. Mostly though, I know He dreads the diminishment in unstructured time for the two of us, and I love Him for feeling the way He does. After all, He could just not give a damn!

So, here we are, in the early part of August beginning the shift to my more outside part of the year. It isn't easy. We always seem to manage it. It is simply part of making this all "real."

swan