Okay.  Here is what 18+ years of being a mother and over 20 years of being a teacher and years of being a friend and a daughter and business owner, throw in two months in quarantine and 6 months living in a pandemic, and 46 years of being a human being on this Earth and the one thing I know now more than ever is that I DO NOT want to be Super Woman.  Or Super Mom. Or Super Career Woman.  Or Super Anything.  Could I?  Probably. Are other women?  Absolutely.  Did I think I was supposed to?  Yes.  Did I try?  Yes.  Did it make me happy?  Not so much.  So I’m taking a stand.  Being honest.  Saying what I think at least some women out there also want to say.  I don’t want to conquer the world.  It’s not that I don’t want to do anything.  I just don’t think I want to do it all.

Let me share with you my proud “mother” moments of recent.  Two of my children called me Hitler.  One because I was too controlling as I taught him to drive.  Never mind we were headed for the ditch when I dared correct his driving.  The other because I wouldn’t let me do what he wanted.  Most people never have to say, “Mom, I’m sorry I called your Hitler.”  But not my children.  Two of them get to wear that badge of Honor.  Determined to show my kids you can fix anything if you try, I went to war with our upstairs toilet.  Spending hours watching YouTube videos, using my first auger, and going elbow up in Sh** water after telling my children not to use the toilet.  Can they seriously not follow a simple direction?  No.  No, it appears they cannot.  Can they not walk down one flight of stairs to use the toilet?  No.  No, it appears they cannot.  Elbow up in Sh** water while the guilty party stood gagging in the corner.  Again seriously, at what age will I have taught them to “man up.”  Not yet.  It appears the answer is not yet.  Only then, after all this, to have the guilty party confess to flushing an object down the toilet.  Maybe a crime excused by a toddler, but a teenager…seriously?  No worries he had a logical explanation.  He felt that was the better option because he didn’t want me to see said object and so he didn’t throw it in the trash because he knew I liked to dig through the trash.  Yes son that is what I like to do.  When I have free time I like to dig through the trash.  Not because someone can’t find something (probably you) and in desperate measures I go through the trash to try to find it.  Because I like digging through trash.  Good choice!

And now teaching in a pandemic.  Remote learning.  Oh lord I feel for these kids because I gotta tell you it’s hard. I literally got to the point today where I told my students I felt like my head was going to explode from trying to figure everything out and that I may just need a few moments to crawl under my desk and sit quietly in the dark.  Okay, better than my first thought of banging my head against the side!  I have said things in the past 2 weeks that I have never said in my previous 20 years in education.  Things like “No, you cannot come to class without clothes.  Return when you are fully dressed.” Or “I need you to take the hamster off your face.  It is distracting.”  Or “While it does make you sound like a robot, I can barely understand you when you talk through your fan.” I spent 80 minutes trying to figure out how to distribute a worksheet to my students.  Not even good teaching.  A worksheet. “That didn’t work” and “That didn’t work again” and “Are you sure you know what you are doing?” have become common place.  And to answer that question.  No, not so much.  Most of the time.  Not so much.

And then everyone says self-care.  Take care of yourself first.  Make you matter.  Again seriously.  I am quite sure I can feel my body growing larger moment by moment.  I DO NOT MOVE.  I sit all day.  Sometimes I treat myself and stand in place and sometimes, if I can squeeze it in, I do the brisk walk to the bathroom on the other side of the building to hopefully achieve my new goal of 3000 steps a day!  Can’t sleep because I can’t shut my brain off.  Bought new makeup to hide that tired appearance, however, on the second day of wearing it a student told me the left side of my face looked normal but the right side seemed to be kind of big and saggy and a weird color.  So I’m gonna take from that comment that the new makeup might have been a waste of my money.  Spent money on fun shirts and tops to give that fun appearance on “Zoom” and have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do when I have to address the bottom half of my body again.  Especially, back to my initial point, if the rear end that I am sitting on continues to follow its current growth trajectory.

All of this has made me crazy.  I’m pretty much a control freak.  I like to do things right.  I like to do things well. I kind of live by the thought that there is no reason to do something if you aren’t going to be the best at it.  And everything about my right now doesn’t feel anywhere near the best. And that is making me crazy.   Bonkers.  Stressed.  And so last night as I sat at the dinner table with my children, after forcing them to be there and not allowing my son to go get McDonald’s because he didn’t understand why we were eating biscuits and gravy for dinner.  (Because it’s cheap.  It’s easy.  And I’m the mother and just sit down and shut up and eat.)  After drinking the beer even though I knew I didn’t need the calories and still hadn’t meet my step count.  After laying awake thinking about the social studies project I needed to somehow explain over the computer even though I knew I would be exhausted today, I finally just started to laugh.  It’s that moment.  You know the one.  At least the honest ones do.

The moment where all the craziness just tips the scale.  The “Yes, I could do this moment”.  The “Yes, I could be Super Women”.  Followed by the “I just really don’t want to” moment.  I just don’t want to do it all.  I don’t.  The moment when you think my kids aren’t perfect, but they are a good solid okay.  Good enough. Yes, I touched sh** this month and one says the “f” word in front of me and neither did all their chores and all probably did the bare minimum on homework assignments.  But one also sat down and had a real conversation with me this week, one asked me for my advice, and wait for it, appeared to actually take it, all managed to figure out starting school on their own, two played really awesome in their soccer games, and all three told me at least once this week they loved me.  The moment when you think this is not the best teaching I’ve ever done, but I’m trying.  Better than last week may just have to be good enough.   I attempted my first ‘Cha-cha Slide” dance break.  Two kids rocked it.  One turned off his camera, but I think did dance.  Two looked at me frozen like I had lost my mind.  Not one single class went off without a hitch.  There were more failures than successes.  But I did my first breakout room and several students successfully popped in and out for help.  We figured out how to both be typing on the same Google Doc.  They didn’t see perfection, but I do think they saw perseverance.  Maybe determination and maybe some resilience.  The moment you realize you may never wear those yellow jeans ‘cause them puppies are real tight right now.  But hell, why did I ever buy yellow jeans anyway?

Right now I just can’t do it all.  I don’t have the time or the energy. And more importantly, I’m trying to learn that I don’t need to.  I don’t need to be super.  I just need to be okay.  Maybe even really good some days and definitely not so good on others.  Okay is fine.  And so is average.  Getting by works.  Just good enough. So if anyone is looking for a Super Hero, a Super Woman, it ain’t me.  Sorry.  But if you’re looking for a sidekick, the mediocre one with a kind of lame power but still enough to qualify you as a sidekick, then you found your girl.  That’s me.  The Mediocre Sidekick Kind of Woman. The one who just doesn’t want to do it all right now.  The one who may finally might have accepted she just may never want to.