The Enjoyment

My mom was born 87 years ago.  She's not feeling as spry as in her heyday, but she gets up every morning, exercises, writes letters to friends, and watches our president's antics on the news with appropriate scorn and disdain. She looks after all of us and makes sure we're doing okay.  When I called her on Sunday from school, she said, "Lee, I thought you were going to try not to go to school on the weekends anymore."
I gave my usual excuses about Open House coming up blah blah blah but then I stopped and said, "Who am I kidding, Mom?"
"Only yourself," she answered.
She's right.  I'm kidding myself that x y or z will happen and then teaching will be all sewn up by 4pm and I can go off on my merry way.  I'm not doing anything wrong.  My job's not a mystery to be solved. Teaching requires lots of teacher time outside of the school day and that's how it is. It's a good job and I enjoy it. That's someone else's mantra, but I may need to borrow it. No one can tell me what's enough though. Only I can do that.  We got all the stories done and a Thirdlander said, "Is this the only thing that's going to be on display at Open House?"
"Yes, these excellent Best Year Ever pieces are the only pieces on display."
Of course then I got the great idea to take photos of the writers, so I have those too to put up during lunch.
And there's a slim chance that we might do our wild thing monster heads today if there's time.
Who am I kidding? It's time to embrace the workload. And it's also time to roll out the new mantra of the school year:  Enough's enough.