Down.

I’m down, you guys. My heart is fine, but my head feels sad.

Some of it is the end of summer and the inevitable weird feelings as I notice the passage of time—I’ve been teaching the same group of kids for five years, and some of them have aged out of my class (I teach kids ages 4 to 9). Kids get older…it’s what they do. But it’s hard, because it’s hard to see Andrew getting older.

I worry that I’m a bad mom because he goes to daycare. I worry that he is mad at me, or that he doesn’t love me. I worry that he loves me now and won’t love me later. I worry that his days of loving me are slipping away. 

I worry that my own life is slipping away. I’m thirty years old, about to be thirty-one. I worry that I’ve lost something, just by getting older. Women, as they get older, get treated very differently. I never wanted to be someone who moaned about their lost youth but here we are.

I worry that I’ll miss opportunities—that they’ll just sort of drive by while I’m looking the other way. Like trying to take a picture of a sunset—you never get the right second. And it fades as soon as you realize how beautiful it is.

Summer is over—though it’s still hot as a skillet—and with that, I get depressed because the days are getting shorter and shorter, second by second. In The Great Gatsby, Jordan tells Daisy not to let summer’s heat and sameness make her morbid. And Daisy always got on my nerves anyway.

A young man in my town passed away last week, and he was quite well-known and his picture was all over Facebook. Some of my friends and coworkers were close to him and his family, and so it’s been a somber week all round.

Why am I saying all this and bringing you down? Because I haven’t written in a while and this is my explanation why.

I don’t want to sugarcoat things, team, and I don’t want to go on and on. So this post is short. Nothing is wrong with me and I have no reason to be down, but I am. People are kind to me and Drew is as he always is—we’ve been on play dates and outings and had living-room snuggle sessions in the past couple weeks; it isn’t him. Thom got me McDonalds for dinner…it isn’t his fault I’m down.

I’ll get back on it soon. I’ve got stories…super-couponing and Andrew making me ride the bus and the fun and challenge of teaching. It’s just taking awhile to get motivated. It doesn’t help that the keyboard is broken and typing takes forever. Thomas has been holed up in the kitchen with his computer and books, writing a few papers at once and I didn’t want to bother him, so I spent a lot of time alone the past couple of weeks, and it turns out I’m not as charming as I think I am. It’s hard to make myself laugh.

I find myself praying a lot—short prayers concerning the daily bread and the bereaved family who I didn’t know. But I’ve also been stepping into these quiet minutes…in the hallway at school, or after Drew is asleep…and trying to listen to God.

Most of the time He doesn’t talk. He seems to sit and listen, saying nothing. But it’s like He’s just looking at me quietly.

It’s too hot to Scoot. I can’t think of any jokes. God is good and everything He does is good. But I’m tired and it’s difficult to write my feelings with two fingers. This short post took forever.

Thanks for listening, team.