It's Wednesday, which means I'm halfway done with my fourth week of student teaching. On one hand - the part of me that drops my baby off at daycare every single morning with tears in her eyes - four weeks have felt like a lifetime, dragging on and on in an exhausting, never-ending ritual. The days are long, the sleeps are short, and I miss my kid every minute of every day and I never stop thinking about all the little parts of his life I'm missing out on. But on the other hand - the part of me that loves teaching and loves learning even more - four weeks flown by, and I'm finding my days in that classroom, in front of those kids, to be more beneficial than any class I've ever taken. If I have to work, if I have to provide for Mase and myself, I know without question that there's no other job in the world I'd rather have.
Fall is fast approaching and as the weather starts to change, so is seemingly everything else in my life. In twelve short weeks I'll be done with school and ready to finally take on the career I know I'm going to love. Mason and I are in our new house - "lellow house", as he calls it - and although we've only been here about a month, it already feels more like home than any other place I've lived in my adult life. I love being near my family and Mason does, too. He's grown so close to my dad and Kim and Nichole and Liz and my mom and Dan and my brother and Krissy, and Haylie in these past few months and it's amazing, seeing that baby so happy and that tiny heart so swelled with love. Speaking of love, I found it too, and at the most perfect time, when everything else is coming together and everything fits and all the trouble and worries of my past are... well... being left in the past.
I never was perfect. I'm still not, but there were times when I wasn't even trying or caring. I was coasting through, faking smiles, messing everything up. And sometimes, I still worry that Mason will look at me poorly for all those mess ups. For the longest time, I was terrified I'd never be able to get a job and now I'm realizing that I'm more qualified than most because I've been there. All those experiences came together and taught me more about life than any number of years of college education could. So really... go ahead, ask me about my DUIs. Ask me about quitting school and waiting tables instead. And in fifteen years, ask my kid if he's proud of his mom because - somewhere in between school and work and grocery shopping and the park and laundry and lesson plans and reading bedtime stories - I'm going to do everything I can to teach him that, at any moment, you can turn it all around.
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