baLANCE

When you tell someone that you are going to do something it makes it real. Well, I haven't told anyone that I am going to write a blog and this is my first post to my blog, so is it real? It feels real and a little scary and exciting.

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What do I want to write my first blog post about? I think what I need to do is write about why I am writing a blog. My hope is that over the last four decades or even more I have learned a thing or two that others might want to know. I am a former public school educator. I taught one third of my career as an intervention specialist, focusing my efforts on students with disabilities and two-thirds of my career as a second grade teacher, teaching all students. I loved what I did and my identity quickly became a teacher. It wasn't what I did, it was who I was for the first 10 years of my career. Then I got married and had two beautiful daughters. I quickly became a wife and mother. For the next 20 years I struggled with balancing these roles and my identity. I often made brownies for my class and wondered if my daughters ever felt slighted because those brownies weren't for them. I never asked and they seemed to turn out just fine (or so I think).

 

Our daughters grew up. I retired, but I wasn't done being an educator. I spent the next eight years working at a public university. There I reestablished my identity as an educator in the role of professor and continued to be a mother of adult children and a wife. And then I retired again.

 

So who am I now? Am I still an educator? I am no longer teaching. Am I a mother? My daughters are grown and do not really need much "mothering." Maybe I'm just a wife? That is a scary thought. I am not sure what my role is quite yet, but what I do know is that for the past 40 years I struggled with baLANCE. My hope is in the very near future, I can find that baLANCE, hence the name of this website and what I hope to do. I intend to use this platform to share what I have learned about being an educator, mother, daughter, and wife so that others can learn and try to find that baLANCE.