New Normal, 2023 Edition

Greetings and Salutations, my friends.

I am feeling thoughtful today on this, the 11th anniversary of my third baby being born. She is currently downstairs having a sleepover with four of her 5th-grade friends and I am in bed looking at my blog post about her birth story, wondering how time could have passed so quickly.

(C planned many things for her sleepover, and they have been working their way through a list of games and activities-- the first of which was to come to her birthday "restaurant" and have their orders taken by M, the waiter :)

Reading C’s birth story led to some blog hopping around to other posts throughout our family history, and thus began the thoughtfulness. Our life as a family, including M’s and my identity as parents, has been rapidly changing these past few years— but some things have remained the same. It seemed that a blog post about where things are at right now was in order. You know, to preserve the memory.

But where to begin?

Maybe let's begin with my own identity as a parent-- or even just as a person-- and how that has shifted.

I think you can see by my lack of blogging that I am more busy than I ever have been before.  I've certainly been very busy most of my life, and I have talked about it a lot here on the blog... any of you who are long-time readers can attest to that.  But something about my latest job is different.  I don't know if it's the teaching full time, or the nature of my job being at four different schools, or the sheer number of students I see every week (about 150!), or the age group I work with (middle school is tough!) or my current age (I'm not as energetic as I was in my 20's and 30's!), but I come home every day with very little brain power left.  When I was younger and my professional work was slightly less demanding, I would find myself composing blog posts in my head while I was doing the dishes, or coming up with ideas to talk about in this space while I was listening to a student play at a lesson.  Nowadays I just have zero creative energy outside of my teaching day.  Plus most days find me working all day, leading an after-school rehearsal and then teaching a few lessons, then taxi-ing girls to their various after school activities.  It is non-stop.  There isn't any time for my own creative things, let alone energy.

I do, however, find myself missing my girls and M a lot, because we're away from each other, all day every day (during the week anyway, and sometimes on the weekends!).  I crave time with them intensely, and so it seems I'm increasingly aware of the speed at which time is passing us by, and when I do have free time I want nothing else but to be with them.

The girls' needs are shifting, however, as they grow older.  And the world in which we live is vastly different then it was even ten years ago when they were little.  We now have so many electronic devices in our house that are both tools and toys.  Some of them were given to the girls by us, and some by their school.  Most days I come home to find the girls in their separate rooms, either doing homework or playing on a device.  Very different from the togetherness and play-based life of our family five years ago.  Of course we have limits for them on technology, and expectations of tasks they need to complete before using it, and they're all actually pretty wonderful about sticking with our family rules without complaining.  (Being in the presence of middle schoolers on a daily basis, I can attest to the fact that our girls do an amazing job balancing their screen time and being responsible, compared with some other kids their age.).  I could write a whole other "how we did it" post about how M and I are navigating the world of devices and social media, but suffice to to say (for now) that it has been a huge parenting focus for us and has taken a lot of thought to figure out in these last two years.

And so the time I spend with my babies is less play and more conversations-- less helping them physically, more helping them emotionally.  Less preparing their clothes or food or baths, more preparing them to be organized, capable, responsible, healthy adults.  It's no less exhausting, in some ways, but just as rewarding (if not more so) than the tasks with which I helped them in early childhood.

Of course J and C are a little bit less in this place than N and L right now, but being the younger two makes it vastly different for them than it was for N and L when they were 7 (J's current age) and 11 (C's current age).  Having younger siblings, N and L were more drawn into the world of childhood, where J and C are naturally drawn into the world of the teenager, because they're surrounded by it every day.  Where L still might have been watching Thomas the Tank Engine at age 7, J is now choosing to watch Barbie YouTubers in her free time.  It's just the product of being the younger sibling of teenagers, and not something I can always control.  I can also tell you that J knows WAY more about feminine products than the other girls did at her age!

And so with my younger two I hang on fiercely to the things of childhood and treasure them even more... things like picture books before bed, snuggles on the couch on a Saturday, sledding down the hill and snowball fights.

But watching my older kiddos do the things they love, whether it's violin or viola, dance, gymnastics, a science project, helping a friend, tutoring a younger student, or taking on a challenging audition-- these things are wonderful, too.

I think that a really great example I can give of where our lives are right now is the trip to NH that we took over the holiday weekend back in October.  If you're a reader, you'll remember many years when we have upheld the tradition of traveling to the White Mountains as a combined birthday present for me and M, and then J too after she was born.  We decided to plan such a trip this past fall (2022).  We were all looking forward to it, but then when the weekend came it just didn't seem quite the same.  First of all, we were all exhausted from a busy week-- the girls because of school and their activities and homework, and M and I because of the rigors of fall startup at both our jobs while simultaneously managing the girls' return to school.  We arrived at Friday night of the holiday weekend and we hadn't packed a thing-- so we all had to drag ourselves through getting packed and then get in the car and drive for two hours.

We went and did all of our desired things, and we did have fun, but I think in all of the pictures you can see a bit of a tired look in all of our eyes.

There were a few other things that contributed to the tiredness and somewhat disappointed feelings surrounding this trip-- one was sleeping in the same hotel room all together (not something we do as easily now as when they were babies!) and the second was massive crowds wherever we went-- we were swimming through a sea of people everywhere (I guess leaf peeping has become even more of a thing since the pandemic!).  By the end of two days, we were all ready to cut the trip short by a day and just come home and rest.  So we did.  And it was good.  But it just impressed upon me how much the girls needs are different these days, and M's and my energy is different as well.

Another big contributing factor to my personal life changes is experiencing symptoms of what I believe to be peri-menopause in the last 6 months to a year.  Sorry if that's TMI, but the symptoms go beyond anything to do with my cycle-- there is insomnia, increased anxiety, brain fog, differences in exercise recovery, changes to metabolism, and more.  I am reading a really great book called Next Level and trying to combat some of these symptoms, but because I don't have tons of time for reading, it's a slow process of learning, and as my book says, this is a topic on which not a lot of research has been done and many medical health professionals sweep it under the rug due to stigma.  So there aren't always easy answers, but I'm trying to prioritize finding them, and keep myself healthy.

In the last year, M and I have been watching episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation together almost every night.  It has been one of the most comforting rituals of my year!  We completed the last episode of the final season together last night, and it makes me a bit sad to think that we're done (although of course there's plenty more Star Trek material that we could make our way through if we wanted).  Thinking back on it, I think that show has been a good companion to all the changes in our lives in the last year.  There are plenty of ridiculous, funny or just plain bad episodes, and we always seem to laugh together at those and forget them quickly (or sometimes remember them fondly for their ridiculousness!).  But there is an equal share of thought-provoking, challenging, and even life-changing material in that show.  It often hits on themes that are of real importance... and in other areas of my life, too, I find myself doing just that... trying to focus on the things that are really important.  Love, family, health, happiness, kindness, peace.  And thankfully, I do have a lot of those things, in good measure.

I think that's all I will say for today; as always, there are things to do.  Thanks for letting me reflect a little bit.  I'm sure that life will change in many fascinating ways before we meet again!