Wednesday, July 3, 2013

I am not good at...

...unknowns. I seem to give off a very chill attitude. And to be honest, the things that other people stress over are not the things I stress over. I am unapologetic about choosing reading over cleaning. I freely admit that I will not remember a person's name for probably the first three times I meet them.  In general I keep very calm about things. I don't like upheaval and drama that go with overreacting to stress.

HOWEVER,

I LOVE a schedule.  Schedules make me happy. They are the skeleton around which the rest of my life can jiggle and sway.  I have schedules for my activities, my kids activities, when to do chores, when to teach what in home school, when to teach piano, when to go to concerts, dates, etc.. I have schedules for what I want to accomplish in a given day/week/month/year.

My road trips have a schedule. Not an "every minute of the day is planned" schedule, but an "If I'm driving 4 young kids across the country by myself, I want to at the very least know where I'll be sleeping each night!" type of schedule. This makes Todd giggle. He isn't the one driving kids across country, though.

I mention this because I like to have my fall schedule reasonably well in place before I leave for a long summer vacation. The kids and I will be gone for nearly 4 weeks door to door. In fact, we'll miss the first day of school, a thing that I can't be bothered to get myself worked up over. My soon to be 8th grader certainly isn't sad about it. [And more uncertainty: I still don't have plane tickets for Todd and our oldest son to join us on vacation (I started trying weeks ago to buy tickets, but all price indicators say to wait. Still, I check every day.)  I don't even know what day we can actually leave for our road trip or where we'll be starting from because the Boy Scout son has a mini high adventure that I'll be picking him up from so we can head west. Wherever it might be. Maybe West Virginia. Maybe Kentucky.  (They are KILLING ME with the unknowns!!)]

There is currently uncertainty in what studio my kids will dance at for the next year LET ALONE what the schedule will be. There is uncertainty about whether one of my children will be home schooled or will attend school part time or full time, and in fact what grade he'll be in. There is uncertainty about when he'll be tested so we'll even know the answers to those questions. (And this affects my ordering curriculum for him if he is going to be home schooled.)

This lack of scheduling and increase in uncertainty is no problem of epic proportions, I realize, but I can feel it fraying at my mind. I'm not sleeping well. I'm clenching my jaw a lot. This is not to say we're not having a lovely and relaxing, yet productive summer in the mean time, it's just always there niggling in the background.

That's all. No moral to this story. I just needed to throw it out there and see if any clarity came with typeface.




3 comments:

Beth said...

That all makes perfect sense to me. I feel the same way about schedules. A schedule brings peace, hence allowing you to feel chill. No schedule = uneasiness and unrest. May all of your schedules fall into place quickly.

Susan said...

I, too, take comfort in schedules. Though I've become more flexible about them than I used to be, the level of uncertainty you describe sounds like torture to me. I hope things begin to resolve themselves soon.

Mom24 said...

I understand completely. I wrote a similar post about stressors and a friend of mine commented that when she's feeling like this she tries to just 'be still' and remember it's all in God's hands. Hey, sometimes it even works for 2 or 3 minutes. Hoping the pieces start falling into place soon.