Therapy

These...

Are my therapy. They have got me through some tough times, some dark times and times I still can't talk about without it hurting.

They've got me through L's numerous deployments.
They've got me through the stress of moving house. More than once.  With another to come within 6 months.
They've got me through anxiety (and continue to do so).
They've got me through depression.
They've got me through a number of disagreements with loved ones.
They've got me through finding a lump in my breast and getting the all clear.
They've got me through my Masters in English Literature.
They've got me through my PGCE, my first year supply teaching, my NQT year and my second year supply teaching.
They've got me through a Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome diagnosis.
They've got me (and again, continue to get me) through the frustration of managing my psoriasis.
They've got me through the death of a friend.

I find it hard to talk, to open up to people and to let them in.  I can't deal with being vulnerable.  Yet, those items that I so often take for granted, that I pick up, sling in a bag and carry with me have been my therapy, been the way I have got, and continue to get through, so many of the trials life slings my way. 

The mileage on them is more than geographical.

I Couldn't Make This Stuff Up....

L was away on a stag weekend this weekend. As I've really been getting into reading again, have devoured two books in under a month, I'd planned on a really chilled weekend featuring nothing more strenuous than the third book in the series and the gym.

Friday night went just as planned, I shopped, came home, had a nice soak in the bath and read my book in bed. I was so rock and roll I passed out before 22:30. Yup, I know how to live it up!

Saturday I hit the gym and enjoyed the solitude of having it to myself, I sung and danced badly in between weight reps with no fear I'd be caught getting down with my bad self.

Saturday night...well that's another adventure. I stayed up late watching the first series of Mistresses, I know I know, what can I say, Nashville is taking an age to be released over here and I don't watch any other mindless programs (Grimm, We Bare Bears, The Big Bang and my current addiction to Snapped notwithstanding)

At midnight I dragged my sorry butt off the sofa and went upstairs to bed, I read for a while and that's when the excitement started.

The bedroom door was open and at first I thought I was seeing things when something black swooped passed, but then it came into my room and started flying in mad circles. A bat! I'm ashamed to say I screamed, flung back the duvet and crawled out the room. Naked. Obviously I messaged L and at first he didn't believe me, I might do have an overactive imagination and a tendency to convince myself things are a great deal more exciting than they are. Think Chicken Licken.

When I worked up the courage to go back in there I put a towel over my head so it wouldn't get stuck in my Helene Bonham Carter-esq hair, am still naked, obviously, I mean why wouldn't be?! I ran in opened both windows, threw back the curtains, still naked with a towel on my head at this point and looking nothing like the erotic dance of the seven veils.  Anyway, I snatched the duvet and my kindle up (because that kindle is a must when you're being attacked by a bat whilst naked with a towel on your head), my pjs (bit of an after thought at this point, I've already stood at the window with the towel over my head and the light on for all the neighbours to witness my dramatics), turned the light off and ran from the room slamming the door behind me.  Courage has nothing on me.

Convinced another bat would come looking for his friend, now you get the Chicken Licken bit, I refused to sleep upstairs where the windows were open. I spent a cramped night trying to get some rest on our leather sofa. I have heat rash on my right foot and nice dark circles under my eyes for my stubbornness and overactive imagination.

Brilliant! I swear I couldn't make this stuff up!

DeMOCKracy

I don't usually wade in on politics, or anything for that matter, as I think everyone is entitled to their opinion and it's not in my nature to attempt to persuade others to my way of thinking.  That said, I do have an opinion on what's unfolding on social media about our EU referendum and so in my own quiet way I'm going to take it apart so I can process it.

I cannot believe the hateful, bullying and belittling things that are being said about voters who chose to leave or remain.  The whole point of democracy is that EVERYONE is permitted a voice and the freedom to choose, anything less than that is tyranny and a dictatorship.  Everyone has the right to an opinion but no one has the right to bully, insult, shame, or name call because some one else has a different opinion.  And that goes for everyone whether you voted to leave or remain.  Voting to leave no more makes you a racist or insane or a bigot than voting to remain makes you a tree hugging hipster or a working class free-loader or a delusional twat.  Such horrible vitriol saddens me.  I am staggered by the amount of intelligent adults who have taken to mocking, deriding and insulting others.  When was it decided that it was okay to put the mock in democracy in capital letters and to focus on that?

Do they do this out of fear? Fear of the unknown and uncertainty? Possibly, I couldn't say and wouldn't presume to say it was so.  As a person who openly admits to suffering with anxiety about these things I can say I've learnt one very important lesson about coping with it: it all comes down to choice.  Moving forward we all have a choice to make about our behaviour and how we cope, we can choose to give into our fears, to allow the voice of uncertainty to stoke our worries and watch the fallout.  Or we could choose to move forward in a positive fashion, to look at our options and have confidence in our ability to cope with whatever comes.

I honestly don't know where we go from here or how this decision is going to impact me and the ones I love, what I do know for certainty in the face of this uncertainty is that I am not going to stop loving my family, friends and neighbours, nor will I stop embracing change and diversity.

You can't take it with you

I finished my last supply booking nearly two weeks ago and haven't worked since. There's nothing out there the agency said and I can see that. Most schools will have already been hit by Ofsted for an inspection, so supply teachers aren't a necessary cost.

Needless to say I've panicked about money since. Being of the independent disposition I'm used to earning my own money and contributing toward taking care of household bills, I'm still doing that but the money I've put aside for when I'm not working is dwindling. I'd planned on being out of work for 6 weeks not 12.

When my sister L's birthday came I deliberated over what to get her, she's ...particular. In the end I bought her a book of postcards to colour herself, a YSL nail varnish that I knew she'd adore and put some money in a card for her.

I put more in that I usually would because I reasoned...it's just money and what am I working for if not to treat my loved ones?

Besides, you can't take it with you.

The Madness in Me

A number of contributing factors conspired to bring on a clear out frenzy in me today...first I did battle with our garden, cutting the grass, weeding areas, and using the hoe to clear the grass verges from the paving slabs. Boy was that an exhausting task, like many people I want a spectularly beautiful and groomed garden but am a bit of a weekend monthly warrior and always underestimate how much hard work keeping a neat and tidy garden is.

Then, not content with that battle I went to war on various boxes of academic files. Boxes I might add that still haven't been unpacked from when we moved over two years ago. What can I say, it seemed like a good idea and I reasoned there was no time like the present. Apparently. I ruthlessly gutted lever arch folder and file after file, setting aside nostalgia and telling myself if you haven't used this stuff in the last three months and don't envision using it in the next three, it goes in the bin. Yes, including that card little A gave you on one of your placements during teacher training.

Why oh why am I torturing myself with a spring clean on the last day of a half term holiday?...I anticipate us moving anytime between now and January. Plus, I'm restless, pensive, sorting through things that refuse to reconcile themselves, and like I said, apparently this is as good a time as any to roll my sleeves up and waste a perfectly beautiful sunny day, which is probably going to be of the few hot days we're going to get, in the spare room with dust and the dead bodies of spiders. Brilliant!

Oh, the joy of having things on your mind that you can't process and deal with.

10 Things I've Learnt About Supply Teaching

I've been working as a supply teacher for almost a year now, this isn't my first academic year supply teaching but it is my most recent and I've learnt so much.

1. You will always feel like the new girl
No matter how long your booking is for and how much you are included in meetings, training sessions, nights out...there is a part of you that will always feel like the new girl.  It's not really about your psychology or insecurities, it's more about the nature of being the last through the door and semi permanence of your position.

2. Everyone wants something for nothing
The school, certainly on longer bookings, will try to take advantage of your professionalism and get you to do work that isn't part of your supply role and that you should be paid extra for.  Every school will do this because every school is struggling budget wise, it's up to you how far you let them do this.

3. You will fall in love with the class
This is especially so for the longer bookings and it will sneak up on you unexpected. One moment you will be pulling your hair out with frustration as you ask yourself for the millionth time why they can't remember their capital letters at the start of their sentences, then suddenly looking around the class you'll remember a little quirk for each of them. Yes, even the nose picker with one hand perpetually down his trousers and your heart will swell and melt.

4.  You will receive offerings of acceptance
They will bring you flowers from the field, draw you pictures, make you cards and hug you, all a sign  that they have accepted you as part of their life.

5. Marking their work will be the best and worst task
You'll be sat hunched over a mountain of books, straining your eyes to read their spidery handwriting and trying to decipher their phonetic spelling, your head will ache with the effort and you'd much rather be reading a book or working in the garden, or even cleaning your oven for that matter.  Then suddenly you'll burst out laughing at some part of their story, you'll be incredibly touched by the evocative imagery in their poetry and you save that moment as a buoy to use in your darker moments in which you question your calling.

6. You are always a teacher
You will wake in the middle of the night with the sudden realisation that you haven't finished your planning/have had a fantastic activity idea/having pieced together separate observations and incidents you have to raise a safeguarding issue. Everything you see whilst out shopping/on holiday/on a family trip could and would be fantastic in a lesson.  One part of your brain and self, no matter where you are, what you are doing or who you are with, is always caught up in the web of being an educator.  You will even go to the gym and correct people's incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe on the whiteboard where they've written their exercises. Might have done that just yesterday.

7.  You're absolutely exhausted
You experience levels of exhaustion that you've never felt before. I don't mean the kind of exhaustion from sleep deprivation, I mean the kind that leaves you antisocial with the immune system of a butterfly and needing a month of solitude before you can even string a coherent sentence together.  You will sit at the traffic lights in your car trying to remember what day of the week it is in which month and where you are meant to be going.  Even when the driver behind you honks because the light has been green for a while you will move off hoping that the answers to those questions will come to you before you're officially late for wherever it is that you're meant to be.

8. Your immune system will be virtually nonexistent
If there is something going around -you'll catch it.

9. You will have favourites
No matter how much you remind yourself that they aren't your class and you shouldn't get attached - you will.  You will love them all, worry about them all and think about them all..but you'll have favourites. Mine is the cheeky H who has a beautiful smile, smartness that's endearing and the worst penmanship ever. It's also Z, who comes to school in the filthiest of clothes, has no parent input at home and is very quiet, and finally N who is the sweetest girl I know with impeccable manners and always gives 100% in everything.

10. Moving on will feel impossible but you will do it
The thought of moving on will feel heart wrenchingly impossible and it will break your heart to know the children are psychologically healthy enough to have fond memories of you but to also move on. Yet as the end of your booking approaches you will start to distance yourself, to turn toward the next one and make room in your heart for your next borrowed class.

Is There an Echo in the Room

It's an endless source of amusement to my sisters and me to purposely tease each other about turning into our mother, but obviously only when it's a humourously perceived negative trait. We never actually compliment each other, unless it's an awkward compliment that borders on an insult, in which case a weighty silence always follows and one of us then changes the subject quickly or leaves the room on some pretence. Yes, we're incredibly normal like that.

Working at the same school with the same class of maddening cherubs I've begun to notice a disturbing increase in my sympathy for my teachers and also for children on the receiving end of an exhausted and frustrated teacher. It's an entirely thought proving paradox to be ensnared in at the best of philosophical moments and heart breaking in the colder darker parts of my inner machinations.

What unsettles me most is just how much I open my mouth and my mother comes out! I never saw it happening. I never heard her voice whispering in my ear before the words tripped off my tongue. I never took note of many of her turn of phrases I absorbed like a sponge. It's hilarious and refreshing, and if I'm half the teacher my mother was, the children I teach are in good hands.