Long, long days

Wet. Again. A second week of having the Preps inside every lunch time will send me completely crazy!

The weekend was also crazy. Actually, our whole life feels like madness at the moment... Too much work and not nearly enough sleep or time to talk. Hollie's hours are even more long and ridiculous than usual and in addition to the usual truly insane work hours, she had a paper reappear from the job she had two years ago that needed one final edit before publication. She is one of the toughest people I know, when it comes to just knuckling down and doing it, but her life is looking pretty crazy from the outside. I don't really know how she is feeling on the inside... That would require seeing her for more than the hour before bed when we try to eat dinner and catch up and do the dishes and iron and work out what to do about the fact that we have no milk and it is raining... again!

I have also been working stupidly hard. I came apart at the seams a week ago though (my threshold is lower than Hollie's but it is still only the second time I've ever cried at school), and since then I've sorted out some things that should help, with the ever wonderful Harriet and a little bit of footstamping in the Principal's office. The school stuff is all looking significantly more do-able now, with a few new strategies and resources and the holidays also coming very soon. More than anything, I was struggling with the emotional task of managing all those kids, parents and co-teachers. I know that I couldn't possibly teach any other way, but when people tell me that teaching must be some much more emotionally easy than counselling was (my previous job) I feel like running down the list of emotional work that I do each day and explaining just how much this job requires all the same involvement of heart and mind... only unlike counselling it's not all over in discrete hour long blocks, you never have any idea what is coming up next, you get all of them all at once, all day long, not one-at-a-time with a reasonably certain lunch break. And in counselling, my job wasn't kids. Wild, wonderful kids who bend towards you like plants if you water them with love, making it double, triple as important to do it right, treat them well, love them back. Oh well.

The problem is, even with school on the up and up, a brand new dishwasher and Julia the German exchange student - who  we've employed her to come and clean the house (and named the dishwasher after) - insemination #1 is approaching and we haven't really got much time for last minute getting ready. Emotionally, I mean. I remembered the other day that I have to find a needle-less syringe somewhere, but it's the emotional preparation I am wondering how we'll find the time for in the next couple of weeks, Actually, I feel prepared. Surprisingly, I feel calm - happy and quietly excited. But I think Hollie has a few last worries to work out. Obviously, it's not like we have ALL the emotional preparation to do in the next two weeks or I would be REALLY worried, but still. On the weekend, we should have talked about it, but we were so tired, emotions ran high, it was hard, there was arguing.

Anyway. Like school, the answer is always love, finding more time for love. I know this about Hollie: it never takes much. A head scratch and dinner. Flowers. Clean pyjamas. In the Complete Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth they say that before you have kids you should do this:

The Love Map (Truly! That's what they called it!)
- make a list of all the things that make you feel loved.
- from this list, prioritise and mark the top four ways of being loved that you absolutely must have or you start to feel stressed, insecure or alone.
- make sure something on the list happens every day.

I think Hol and I do a particularly good job at love in general, but the thoughtfulness that is behind this way of approaching each day is worth remembering in these days of 8pm finishing times. So, to dinner.

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