Seasonal Meltdown

I had a melt-down while cooking dinner last night. A tributary of tears flooded my perfectly fluffed curried rice and over-salted the marinade. The kids in the other room decrecendoed their wails and squeals to quiet whispers of, what's wrong with mommy?
The on-set of the school year is fast approaching; the life as I've known it for two months is gradually drying up. Soon, the hurried schedules, frenzied routine and overall exhaustion will drain the creative juices from my being. A drought will weasel itself into a once prolific, carefree state of mind. All will turn to dust.

“Oh nothing, kids. Mom’s just fine.”

When my husband rushed to the scene, I not only soiled the shoulder of his new tee-shirt, but unleashed a dramatic fury of philosophical debate on the state of labor in the capitalistic system. “We’re going to be hamsters on the wheel again, Billy. There won’t even be time to dream,” I said between hysterical gasps for air. “Our passions will never manifest; we’ll be too tired to even have them. No sex, no art, just work and passing out on the couch at 8:30. Life of the proletariat, I didn’t want this…”

Then he started to cry.

For most, summer ends sometime in late September, but to the teacher, summer ends promptly on the first day of school, actually, on the hectic week prior filled with meetings, planning, and setting up shop. Weather is no factor. I suppose a bit of mourning is appropriate to this season--look what Demeter does to the Earth every year when her child is taken from her, when her summer frolicking ceases. Every year I enter an equally irrational lament. It’s just that life is so damn full of all the right stuff in the summer: authentic family time, pleasure, leisure, creativity, time for a hang-over…that it saddens me to the core when it must end. Two months isn’t enough for me to cram in all of the wonderful things about being a living, breathing human being. Even my son, a first grader, is ambivalent about starting the process all over again, “There’s so much work, mom. I want to play and have alone time.” Me too, little man.

But am I alone as a teacher? At my professional developments, my colleagues seem so geared up, eager, freakishly in to it. When we start the year, they always say they are “excited” and “ready.” I’m never ready, just submissive. Don’t get me wrong, there are days that I leave work with a permanent smile plastered to my face, satisfied that I’ve made a difference. Days that I can’t stop talking about work at the dinner table. Days where I feel smart (but those are limited). Days I’m grateful to have a job amidst the rising unemployment numbers. It’s just the inequality of the longevity of the school year and the infrequency of those days…and the lack of bathroom breaks or time to write or groom or think or be the wife and mother and artist I want to be. There are just so many sacrifices.

The school year will begin and my son will succeed, my students will learn, and I will survive. Somewhere in this season of change, the tears will evaporate and creative juices will rain down from above whetting the spirit, pulse through arid veins, causing a run-off of joy and make green all that withered or fell, brown and lifeless, to the ground. Hopefully, I won’t have to wait until next May. Hopefully, I’ll find a neat balance and function with vigor and efficiency, able to wear all hats proudly. Hopefully, I haven’t ruined my rice, sent my husband into a mild-depression, or terrified my kids in yet another season meltdown.

Ode to the Family Vacation

Evidence of it litters the house. First-aid kits, cans of bug spray, and sleeping bags all eager to come out of hibernation scurry out of high cabinets and dark basements to greet each other in unsightly piles in the living room. It broadcasts itself daily from a dry-erase calendar precariously hanging on the fridge with a showy proclamation of its power: "VACATION" accentuated with a long black arrow spanning seven vacant date boxes. The family vacation is among us, the countdown is ticking.

Like the Griswolds, this is an annual sojourn from the hurried pace of our daily lives. Months of saving and planning ensure fodder for photo albums and stories for decades (picture those last lines accompanied with flutes and birds in the background). This is where memories are made, god dammit, and you are going to enjoy this trip because I said so or I'll turn this car around right now. Stop whining, mom and dad are having a margarita and look at the sunset, NOW!

Like I was saying, family vacations are where memories are made, like the time my son ate a contaminated piece of cantaloupe off the Shoney's Big Boy buffet somewhere in the middle of Mississippi and developed explosive diarrhea day one of New Orleans' Jazz Fest. Trying to convince the cocaine snorting man in the bathroom we truly had more of an emergency, my son was developing a severe scrotum rash as we speak, I will never be able to forget. Or when I threw-up an entire fruit plate then covered it with my beach towel in the beautiful marble lobby of my parents'Cozumel time-share after attempting to consume all the duty-free tequila on the island the night before (I was 15 and ambitious). Or when my sister left the rest of the family in Ireland to chase the only (that I could see) six-foot-seven-east-African across the country on a bus. Yes, people these are memories.

So what if the expedition that drains your yearly savings or puts you back in debt after working all year to clear it ends in so called disaster. So what if it takes years to repair the delicate family dynamics a weeks worth of good vacationing can unravel--it makes us strong. Does anyone ever really say, "We shouldn't have spent that money on a vacation?" No, well maybe if your husband was killed in a tsunami or something, but as long as no real physical harm is done, even the bad vacations are absolutely worth it. Even when a Mexican business owner follows you home trying to convince you to have his love-child (Jesus Christo, merely hypothetical, por supuesto--but that's what I call immersing yourself in the culture). Load up the van, or validate the passport, it's vacation season!