Because my life is ridiculous complicated
And because I shovel my thoughts out in massive word-dumps,
This topic is probably going to be way more than I’m going to feel like finishing in one go.

So I am currently unemployed.
I do love the not working part,
but I am finding the not getting paid part a bit worrisome.

I am trying hard to not worry.
I’ve been through enough ridiculousness in my life to realize that worry
does less than no good.

I never did talk about why I resigned.
Well, here’s a bit of the background leading up to
the straw that finally broke this camel’s back.

One of the big problems was how exceedingly overbooked I was.
I barely had time to breathe.

Weekdays followed a pattern.
On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I spent 6:30 AM to 3 PM at school.
After school, I’d head to Dad‘s to fix his dinner and take care of him for the evenings,
I usually got Dad to bed by 10  before I could head off to home.
I also spent most of Saturday at Dad‘s house.

On Tuesdays i don’t have Dad so I’d I head straight from work
across the river to the far away land of University.
There I was taking yet another grad level course,
working towards my add-on special ed certification.
After class ended, I joined my study group where we worked on weekly class projects
and practiced for our Praxis (special education professional test).
On Tuesdays, I’d be lucky to cross my threshold and fall into bed by 11 P.m.
So that blocked out most of my weekly schedule
with only Thursday after work and Sunday to do absolutely everything else
– lesson planning, producing the amazing amount of paperwork involved in special education,
including IEP’s and progress reports and 100 other extremely “important“ mandatory reports
for my assigned special ed students on my caseload, the ones I didn’t actually teach
-Not to mention absolutely everything else that day-to-day life demands.

Many special ed teachers can get their paperwork and planning done during school day.
With good paraprofessionals to help manage the students,
an organized special ed teacher can get a large part of her work done
during the school day.
Have I mentioned that I did not have a very good paraprofessional working with me?
I’ll tell you more on that later, but suffice it to say she spent more time on her cell phone
than interacting with the kids
and I, being a generally nice and non-assertive person,
was unable to politely get her to do her job.
This meant that I spent the entire day hands-on working with the kids
and no time working on acquired reports
all the while silently seething at the woman I was trapped in my classroom with.

So, between work and my graduate class and taking care of dad-time and all my take home work
And study and, and and…
it got to the point that I, unable to stay up any later,
was cutting sleep short in order to get up earlier
and get things done to meet meet the constant deadlines.
I’m talking to bed by 11 or 12 and getting up by three or four.

It wasn’t sustainable.
I was constantly exhausted and constantly feeling guilty and overwhelmed
because the deadlines just kept coming,
and I was rolling from crisis to crisis with no end in sight.

But I kept going because –
what else could I do ?
Until I had to just make it stop.